As I prepare for my eighth foray to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, I’m taking part in my own personal tradition of telling anyone who will listen that this might be my last summer at RMBL. It started quite earnestly in the first year of my PhD. I didn’t know what I should expect coming out to this abandoned mining town and found some comfort in the idea that if I couldn’t handle the outhouses and the mice, I could pivot to doing my dissertation research somewhere less rustic. Then it was a convenient fiction that my husband and I told each other––these summers apart are just a strange little fluke of my PhD, but I’ll be done with it soon.  

Unlike many field ecologists, I’m an indoor cat who doesn’t look wistfully at my photos from the peaks of mountains while I’m stuck at my computer all year. And yet, here we are at summer number eight. 

There’s a lot of instability in the life of an early-career academic, and RMBL has turned out to be a surprising point of stability. I’ve lived in four different states since my first summer at RMBL (Georgia, Washington, Texas, and California, for those keeping score) and returning to Gothic each summer has gone from being a huge unknown to a familiar tradition. I’ve made friends at RMBL that I’ve kept up with in some truly unexpected contexts (a college football game and a Montréal dive bar come to mind). I’ve had friends and family visit me in Gothic, and experiencing this weird summer home of mine — let’s see these marmots I’ve heard so much about — has strengthened relationships that don’t seem like they should have any connection to RMBL. I’ve even met people through RMBL without ever crossing paths in Gothic. In my most recent move, to San Diego, I found myself searching for an ecological community. It didn’t take long for me to stumble across a name that sounded familiar — Wilnelia Recart González, a former graduate student in Diane Campbell’s lab who helped to found the Community Engagement Committee that I now co-chair along with my dear friend, Laurent Duverglas. 

I like to tell my students at RMBL about my not-always-enthusiastic relationship with Gothic because I think that it illustrates something important. You don’t have to be climbing a mountain every weekend for RMBL to be a part of your identity. Indoor cats can be great field ecologists! So can people who have never seen snow before, or never lived somewhere without cell reception. I also like to tell my students about the things that make my time in Gothic every summer quite lovely, even if they haven’t changed my mind about the outhouses and the mice. In fact, the dualities may be the whole point. It can be true that the mountains provide wonderful peace even while it’s hard to uproot your life every summer and leave community behind in the chaos of life in 2026. Reading a book next to the East River is just as good a way to appreciate nature as hiking the Four Pass Loop and it’s okay if the most beautiful thing you’ve seen all week is a wildflower latte from the Coffee Lab.  

Back in 2019, during my first maybe-last-summer at RMBL, I would never have believed that I would cross-country ski out to visit the winter caretakers one year. I haven’t climbed any fourteeners, but I’ve peaked a few mountains. And I actually want to hike to Aspen someday! I’d better get on that soon…after all, this might be my last summer at RMBL. 

 — Kaysee Arrowsmith, PhD

Kaysee is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas, studying niche dynamics in plant-pollinator systems. At RMBL, she teaches the Rocky Mountain Ecosystems short course and steals pollen from unsuspecting bumble bees.