Once out there, we then camp on a chenier and we spend the next few days hiking out to other cheniers as I showed you on that aerial photo, to collect the shells. Most of the hiking takes us across the mud flats. This is as close as you'll come to finding anything alive out there. I thought I saw some brine flies walking and that was it. And the mud, it's kilometers of hiking through this sort of stuff. Occasionally, as we head a bit further north, we cross these salt flats. The first time I did this I was not prepared for this at all. You can see my camera was definitely not prepared and it colored everything this nice, rosy color. But when you're out there, the only clues that you have that you're not standing in Antarctica somewhere is the fact that it's about 95 degrees and there's salt on everything. These are very extensive salt flats because there's a slow evaporation taking place in that environment. However, it's not hard. It's about an inch of salt and then mud underneath. Here's one of my favorite photos.

We then collect the shells and then we hike it back to camp. It's amazing to see some of the graduate and undergraduate students handle this stuff. It's pretty neat. And at least once every trip, we try to hike to the limits that we think we can push everybody to, because we have to. These trips are very expensive and difficult to organize and we try to get to the farthest chenier and then hike it back to camp. We refer to this fondly as a death march. Here are a few people on one of these breaks and this one, this was a horrible, horrible march. It really was. This was the time when--this is Miguel--and the fact that he would just, as soon as everybody else was recovered, he and his graduate students here would just hop up and take off was the only thing that kept me going. We were all out of water and it was not a fun experience.

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