Listen to the song.
When 2025 ended, so did my PhD and time in the US. My favorite thing by far and away from my time there is the national parks. Here's my hommage to them.
May these beautiful places where we our reminded that we are a part of nature be protected forever.
That's a wrap.
I became a doctor.
I must thank my wonderful advisor and friend Dr. Jody W. Deming who made it possible and taught me so much. Jody approaches her relationships with so much empathy, patience, and kindness. I could not have imagined being guided by such a person, and yet looking back I cannot fathom graduate school without Jody. Being able to learn from her was an honor.
My cohort who made graduate school fun, interesting, and memorable.
The person who placed that wish on the wishing tree, hope it happened for you too.
For complete acknowledgments see Kanaan, 2025.
I love this shot of my friends.
Many of them are not in any of these shots. I am thankful for every single one of them who made Seattle a special place, and listened to me complain about urbanism for 4.3 years.
Thanks especially for pushing me to discover my favorite activity ever: backpacking. You made all those moments among the trees so fun.
So many adventures wouldn't have happened without @hannahsanders31 . From the peaks of Colorado, to the beaches of Washington, what a special year. Thank you.
Scroll for the good stuff.
A rainbow at red rocks.
Bo and Kona at the cabin. Kona and I have different reasons for protect an extremity, but her fashion sense is better.
The flat irons at boulder. A very nice town from what I could tell. Also CU boulder has a buffalo shaped pool where you can just hang out??
A rock with fossilized dinosaur tracks. Yeah this really cool. Last post mentioned the fact that Colorado hosts very old rocks. Here's one of the benefits. At dinosaur ridge right outside Denver you can go for a short walk and see a variety of dinosaur fossils.
This rock id particularly cool. What we're seeing, as I recall, is a beach where dinosaurs wondered. A layer of sediment covered these tracks and they were preserved. The tracks reveal many interesting characteristics about their makers. For example, I was most surprised to learn that paleontologists can infer social behavior from these tracks. Multiple clustered tracks must indicate travel as a herd. We can determine which species frequented the same areas since there are tracks from many different ones present here.
If you go to Colorado you absolutely MUST get a roadside geology book, and stop by dinosaur ridge if you're anywhere near Denver.
First time over 4000 m.
Colorado has some amazingly interesting geology. Part of the continental divide passes through this state. Driving east to west, your journey will be lined with rocks billions of years old (the earth is ~4 billion years old). Part of what makes Colorado awesome, is the many mountains above 14,000 ft (~4,200 m) of which there are 58.
As an avid user of the metric system, my threshold is 4 000 m. So during our backpacking trip to Rocky Mountain national park we made sure to summit my first mountain above said threshold. From the top of mummy mountain one can see the highest lake in North America.
At these altitudes the thinning atmosphere makes it more difficult to breathe, so every move becomes more tiring. It was interesting to watch my body react to oxygen becoming sparser.
Colorado is beautiful.
We started our trip with an adventure to the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Hiking in at sunset and having dinner below the stars was exceptional.
I learned that there are different types of dunes classified based on their geometry: reversing dunes, star dunes, barchan dunes... The image taken at the blue hour of the dune field was taken from the top of the highest dune in the park. It is a star dune. Star dunes have 3+ ridges which meet at the summit creating a star shape.
Dune geometry is largely dictated by wind patterns. So for a sand dune to form wind must come from multiple directions over time. Wind is influenced by surrounding topography, so different parts of the dune field tend to have more or less of a specific type of dune.
Nothing is simple when you look into it!
In May 2025, I got to spend another birthday in the Arctic.
Aboard the Norwegian icebreaker once again thanks to Dr. Karley Campbell, we ventured into the pack ice of the central Arctic Ocean. The stated goal of the mission this time was to characterize the many micro habitats that exist within and around sea ice: seawater, skeletal layer, brine, ridges, aggregates, leads.
I'm particularly interested in who is present in each environment and what are they doing. To do this we sample each one sometimes using an ice corer (orange barrel I'm holding), or a pump to collect brines (yellow box). Then we filter the samples (see lab setup).
Of course, amid all this work we are sometimes greeted by the dwellers of this ocean. The polar bear. I was honored to see one on my birthday (not the one pictured).
The second picture, is Karley up at ~03:00 leading the ship to an appropriate ice floe. A challenging job as with the help of the captain and co-chief scientist, she must select one which is large enough for our study, and located in an area to minimize it breaking before we're done. She is aided by satellite images of the ice pack, ice radar, and experience.
I enjoy the varied texture, color, geometry, of the different plants I meet during my trips.
@hannahsanders31 was able to name many of them! I still have much to learn to be able to properly greet each of them.
Snow algae and a nice frame.
Yes it looks this red in real life. Yes it's so cool.
Due to their color, snow algae promote melting of the snow they are on. You might be able to see the effect of that melt in the snow. Very much is still unknown about these primary producers. If you're in western Washington you can help out scientists studying it by sampling some for the Living Snow Project! @living_snow_project
How easy it is to take good pictures when your subjects are this cute.
Mountain goats, pika, marmot... I love the surprise of spotting any one of them during my walks. It is important to say hello to them, and to speak to them with respect. I am personally of the opinion that the Pika and I have become rather close friends.
If you've walked along rockfalls in the mountains and have heard short high pitched friendly calls, that was probably the Pika saying hello.
To the olympic and cascade mountains.
I love the color of these alpine meadows. They are particularly fragile and you should not walk beyond your marked trail.
The second picture used to be reservoir flooded by the Elwha dam. You can see the new growth as the ecosystem returns after the area was restored and the dam removed to allow salmon to spawn. Humans have incredibly powers to help destroy, preserve, or restore our natural world.
The last picture is of a group of larches. They are deciduous conifers (deciduous meaning they lose their leaves). They are the most abundant genus of tree on Earth thanks largely to their dominance in boreal forests. They turn a beautiful golden yellow in the fall.
