Is it summer already?!?!?

Wow!  A lot has happened since my last blog post--lots of business travel and some annual leave...and a combination of both!  That was the case behind the picture above--I had a business meeting scheduled for late May in northern Minnesota.  With the younger two kids being basically done with their school year, I took the opportunity to drive them up to Wisconsin, where I dropped them off at my sister Lisa's home in western Wisconsin, and their grandparents picked them up:

My parents took them to their house in Rhinelander, and I drove on to Minnesota.  My forestry meeting included a field trip to an active logging operation; the picture below shows the red pine poles set aside for further transport and processing:

After several days in Minnesota, my meeting concluded and I joined my parents and the kids in Rhinelander.  Below, Stephen helps his grandfather find camping gear which my brother John would use later in the summer:

We visited my folks over Memorial Day weekend, and got a surprise bonus on Friday--a visit from my brother Bill!  Below, Bill joined us for a Friday night fish fry at a local restaurant:

As you may be able to tell from the picture below, the spring was cool and snowy in northern Wisconsin, so that even by late May their leaves had only just started to emerge!  We still had some decent weather, so Dad and I had a chance to enjoy a campfire one evening:

In the picture above, I'm actually audio recording Dad reminiscing about some of his "wild" "environmental" days in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was objecting to the way a dam on the Flambeau River near his property in western Wisconsin was being removed.

We left Rhinelander on Memorial Day and drove down to Whitmore Lake, Michigan, to spend the rest of that week with Hope's dad.  Below, Hope demonstrates one of her favorite activities--making more work for others!

Actually, Rick's mower had been having an ongoing starting problem, and this trip spurred him into fixing it properly.

Our visit with Rick wasn't just about work--below, we all enjoyed a Toledo Mudhen minor league baseball game after a dinner visit to Tony Packo's.  We also went to the Michigan State Museum in Lansing, and saw a number of really cool exhibits, including these near-life size models of eastern white pines in part of the building:

We had a number of other adventures, but all too soon we had to head back to Arkansas.  Kenny and I actually left a day earlier than Hope and the other kids (we had driven two vehicles to Michigan).  Kenny needed to get back early so he could start his first summer job.  Below, he is pictured about to drive off to a regional Boy Scout camp, where he worked as a counselor and pool manager:

I've also spent a fair amount of the last couple of weeks participating in the Arkansas Archeological Society's annual training program.  This year we were looking at a Caddo Indian mound group in southwestern Arkansas that had been damaged badly by some looting in the 1980s.  Below, we are prepping for excavating some test units alongside a looter trench on a large mound:

I ended up working in the top unit of this trench on the crest of the mound; it is probably 20 feet or so above the lowest test unit we opened. 

I had to leave the excavations early in the dig so I could go to North Carolina for most of a week to attend a business meeting.  When I returned, a lot had been accomplished.  The pictures below are of a later stage of the excavation, where you can see how we've dug into the slope:

We were hoping to find evidence for how the mound was constructed by the Caddo centuries ago, and how the looter damage had impacted the mound.  We didn't find many artifacts here, but I believe the archeologists running this program learned a number of things about this site.

We also had some stormy days, so our time wasn't just in the field--I also helped analyze some pottery sherds from a different site in the general area:

The weather was generally cooperative during this week, although we did have some storms on occasion.  Most of the time, all they left behind was damp soil and some fog along the lake that were camping next to:

I had to step away from the summer dig one other time to help give a field tour at one of my experimental forests to this group of largely German foresters and forest landowners:

 
Once I returned, we were just wrapping up the last of the field work on this Caddo mound site.  Of course, we always fill behind our efforts, so that after nearly two weeks of digging, we spent most of the last couple of days filling this trench back in...Sounds simple, but proved challenging--hauling a lot of wet dirt back up a steep, slippery slope is always a challenge:

Some of the more engineering-oriented volunteers rigged up a wooden ramp and several pulleys to help drag wheelbarrows full of heavy, wet dirt back to the holes we dug.  It took us the better part of two hot, muggy days to get the trench filled back in, but we did it!

Not all archeology is glamorous!!