Elk, Objects, and Laughter: A Day in Yellowstone

Once I am out of my elk jam, I get to plot my own project itinerary. I am one of three people in the museum office for the summer; the other two are my co-supervisors and one of them is usually absent at any given time. Therefore I am almost completely autonomous in what I choose to do for the day. As the museum intern, I am responsible for cataloging, housing, and maintaining new accessions into the collection, completing the annual accession and collection inventory, creating the fall showcase exhibit, cleaning our vehicle storage center, and rehousing our wolf skulls. Though it sounds like I might talk to objects all day (…no comment), I also engage with researchers and local artists and give public and private tours of our facility. As I say on our weekly public tour, the Yellowstone National Park Heritage and Research Center (HRC) was completed in 2004 with the purpose of housing and maintaining museum, library, and archival materials. However, saying the HRC is just a storage facility is a bit simplistic. The building also houses the Herbarium, the Archeology lab, the Wildlife Health lab, the Geology lab, and quarantine/processing/analytics areas for all of the listed disciplines. Even though I am technically the museum intern, I have engaged with most departments in the HRC in one way or another. I spent my entire first week working on an archeological field site a few hours away digging test sites and collecting artifacts with the park archeologist.