Svata Louda, PhD, spent 11 consecutive summers at RMBL, 1979 through 1989, arriving each May as the snow melted and staying until mid-September. She went on to become the first woman named George Holmes University Chair of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s School of Biological Sciences and, in 1982, only the second woman to win the Ecological Society of America’s Mercer Award for outstanding research — and the first to win it on her own. Today, retired and living in Salida, Colorado, she runs a citizen science project on alpine thistle-insect interactions, continuing the kind of field research that first brought her to RMBL

Louda found her way to RMBL through a chain of scientific connections. As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale in the late 1970s, she worked with a faculty member studying mustard oils, Jim Rodman, who was collaborating with a Francie Chew, a Harvard butterfly researcher working at RMBL. “I applied to look at the role of plant chemistry in insect herbivory and its impact on plant population dynamics, which was relatively unexplored at the time,” she says. When it came time to choose a field site for her postdoctoral research, the decision was easy. “Why not RMBL?”

At RMBL in the late 1970s and 1980s, research and teaching weren’t separate tracks. Faculty taught the field station’s courses themselves, on a volunteer basis, alongside their own research. “I remember teaching two weeks in the 8-week ecology course,” Louda recalls. “It was kind of a community effort to both educate and discover.”

That blend of research and education shaped how she thinks about training scientists to this day. She believes RMBL’s alumni network is an underused resource for the students, postdocs, and young faculty now, not for teaching them the science itself, but for the parts of career development nobody teaches in a classroom. “The young folks know what they’re doing,” she says. “They don’t need input from me on how to do science, or what the questions are. They know that; they’re good at it. But they don’t have the experience that helps make the most of it.” Things like protecting your own time and learning to say no, she adds, were skills she wishes someone had pointed out to her earlier in her career. Her idea is something informal: “Coffees. Go out to dinner with a group of younger researchers, just socially become a resource.” 

That sense of belonging extended to how she was treated as a young woman scientist, in a field that at the time offered few models for one. Ward Watt, Carol Boggs, and David Inouye, all RMBL researchers at the time, “rolled out the carpet and treated me like a colleague immediately,” she recalls. For a young woman scientist in the late 1970s, that experience was unusual and very special. “That was one of the beauties of RMBL. You were treated as an equal. It was more egalitarian than most home universities.”

Word of her 1982 Mercer Award, still one of ecology’s most prestigious early-career honors, reached her the old-fashioned way. She was walking down the road at RMBL when Paul Ehrlich pulled up in a Jeep. “Congratulations!” he said. “For what?” she asked. She hadn’t received the letter yet. Ehrlich had been notified, using one of the era’s analog phones, that Svata had just won the Mercer Award. “It was fun,” she says simply.

She’s kept doing research and teaching in her own way since retiring. Louda’s most recent project is a citizen science initiative. She recruited volunteers to hike to collect insect and plant samples from an alpine thistle found only above treeline, a system where ecological theory predicts relatively little insect activity because of the cold temperatures and short growing season. Instead, she found that the plants are riddled by tephritid fly feeding damage. Her team has since dissected some 1,800 flower heads. The insect collections are now archived at the University of Colorado Natural History Museum’s Entomology Division, a baseline record of species diversity that Louda expects researchers could consult 50 years from now in the context of climate change research.

She sums up what 11 summers at 9,500 feet left her with in a single sentence: “RMBL lives with you, no matter where you are.” It helps develop a way of looking at the world, she explains — an attentiveness to place — that she carried with her long after she left the mountains for the prairies of Nebraska. “I carried that headset to the prairie and prospered. A lot of people kind of put the prairie down, and yet it’s a beautiful ecosystem in its own way. I think I got that feeling from having spent a decade at RMBL.” 

 — Suzanne Ennis
Communications Manager
Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory

Top: Svata Louda and her rescued terrier, Jack.

A Conversation With Bobbi Peckarsky

For more than 50 years, stream ecologist Bobbi Peckarsky, PhD, has returned to RMBL to study inhabitants of streams in the East River watershed, mentor generations of students, and build a scientific community that spans decades. This August, she’s bringing together more than 60 alumni and their families in Gothic to celebrate 50 years of stream ecology at RMBL at a reunion of the Benthettes, an informal network of stream ecologists whose research has helped shape the field. RMBL Communications Manager Suzanne Ennis spoke with Bobbi about the upcoming event, the launch of Rocky Mountain Rivers, the partnerships that have defined Bobbi’s career, and why some of the best science grows from deep roots in one place. 

Suzanne Ennis: You first came to RMBL more than 50 years ago. What brought you to Gothic? 

Bobbi Peckarsky: I first came to RMBL in the summer of 1974. I was a high school teacher at the time in Madison, Wisconsin… During the summers… I would take field classes just to keep myself busy academically. One of the professors said, “Why stay here? You should go to a field station.” 

 I asked him, “What’s a field station?” 

He told me about RMBL… I applied and got accepted. I took Rocky Mountain Flora from Harriet Barclay… and aquatic ecology from Stan and Ginny Dodson. I became smitten with streams during their class… I did a project, and Stan thought it was so good that he said, “Do you want to go back to graduate school?” 

I ended up teaching high school for one more academic year, applied to the University of Wisconsin to do a PhD with Stan Dodson, and at that point, there was just no way I was ever going to spend a summer anywhere else. 

Suzanne: What has been the advantage of coming back to RMBL, year after year? 

Bobbi: One of the most interesting things about spending that much time in one place … is the idea of “ecology of place.” [My former student] Kara [Cromwell] put it beautifully: “A relationship with the East River watershed has motivated our work for decades and taught us that big ideas about the world can come from a deep understanding of one place.” 

A fascinating thing that happens is that the place tells you the questions. I call it the “follow-your-nose” approach to ecology. You’re turning over rocks looking for eggs, and then you find a mayfly with a worm coming out of it, and you say, “Well, what the heck is that?” You keep going from question to question to question. It’s curiosity-based and rooted in natural history. Each observation leads to another. 

 Suzanne: That seems like a perfect description of long-term science. 

Bobbi: Staying in one place, you’re forced to explain surprising observations. One of the observations we made years ago ran completely counter to accepted theory. … We expected mayflies to be less abundant where trout were eating them. Instead, we found they were more abundant in trout streams than in streams with no trout. 

That led to almost 20 years of research to try to explain why. We started by looking at the behavior and life histories of mayflies … and learned that their responses to the presence of chemical cues from trout partially explained the unexpected observation. …  Eventually another student, Andrea Encalada, discovered that the adult female mayflies were laying many more eggs in trout streams because they preferred a certain kind of rock, which was more common in trout streams. That discovery provided the final piece of the puzzle that explained the surprising pattern of variation in mayfly abundance. That’s one of the most important things about ecology of place. If you’re dedicated to staying in one place, you don’t just say, “Well, that’s probably an anomaly,” and move somewhere else. You stay until you figure it out. 

What I’ve been doing most recently is mentoring students who want to do projects on questions we can answer using [our] long-term data set. It’s a treasure, because it started in 1976. Having 50 years of data, we think it’s the longest ongoing series of stream invertebrate samples in the world. So lots of questions related to our changing environment can be answered using our data set, and we’re just now starting to mine it in collaboration with colleagues and students. 

Suzanne: This month’s newsletter is about the power of partnerships. Looking back, how important have relationships been to your career? 

Bobbi: A lot of my approach to science and life came from Stanley Dodson. He tragically died way too young. … It was a huge loss, but he’s… inside of me. 

And then, over the years, my students became collaborators. For example, Andrea Encalada, Kara Cromwell, Angus McIntosh, Brad Taylor, Maruxa Alvarez…  so many people have contributed ideas that changed the direction of our research.   

That’s really how science works. You can’t just work by yourself as a scientist. Ecology of place is also about people. They look at different things. They bring in different perspectives. … I always tell my students I learn more from them than they learn from me, and that’s really true. 

Suzanne: Speaking of partnerships, you were the founding member of a group called “the Benthettes.” Tell us about them. 

Bobbi: The Benthettes started in 1976, which was my first summer as a grad student at RMBL. … Benthos is the Greek word for “bottom dwelling,” and the Benthettes became the endearing title for people who studied bottom-dwelling organisms, the benthic invertebrates at RMBL. … What started as a research group became something much bigger. We’ve had generations of graduate students, postdocs, collaborators, technicians… People came through the lab, then became faculty members, then mentored their own students, who became part of the community. 

This August we’re organizing a 50-year reunion of the Benthettes at RMBL. It’s really a celebration of 50 years of research… but also of the people who’ve made that research possible.   

We’re excited to welcome Benthettes of all generations and their families to celebrate how our place-based research has contributed to the foundations of stream ecology in general.  And to reconnect across generations to share stories about our time as Benthettes at RMBL. Once a Benthette, always a Benthette.   

Suzanne: You’re introducing Rocky Mountain Rivers at the reunion, too. Can you tell me about that organization?  

Bobbi: Rocky Mountain Rivers [was established] as a 501c3 organization to provide a support system to keep doing what I’ve been doing for 50 years, along with all the amazing people who have made it possible to accomplish what we’ve accomplished, and to keep that going for the next 50 years. 

Our mission is to use science to inspire wonder and inform stewardship of rivers in the Rocky Mountains and beyond. Our activities are going to [include continuing] the long-term sampling, mentoring students and sharing our science stories with the broader community. [Gothic] is where everything happens.  

Rocky Mountain Rivers doesn’t exist without RMBL. All of the money that we raise pretty much goes to the lab to pay for the privilege of working and living here.  

Suzanne: Sounds like a perfect example of the partnership we’re talking about. 

Bobbi: That’s our goal. We hope to be a very productive partner. 

Read more about Bobbi in this 2021 profile. 

Top, left to right: Benthettes Ian Hauver-Radloff, Margot Buckelew, Bobbi, Mairead Brogan, Anaiz Ruiz and Rita Barclay-Hart in 2019 at Lower Rock Creek. Photo by Scott Wissinger

Plant ecologist Margie Mayfield recounts her RMBL journey 

Like many undergraduates who spent time at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), my experience there was largely the result of chance, youthful ambition, and a sense of adventure.

I decided to become an ecologist after visiting Ecuador with my aunt at age 16. I grew up in Ames, Iowa — a college town — but didn’t love the big-university atmosphere, so I chose Reed College, a liberal arts school. I never regretted that decision, but the reality is that small colleges offer fewer options. I wanted to be a tropical ecologist, but that wasn’t a topic anyone studied at Reed, at least in the 1990s. Still, my ambition to become a tropical ecologist is what brought me to RMBL, and my time there helped me achieve that goal.

My supervisor at Reed was Keith Karoly, an alumnus of RMBL. While I’d envisioned myself in rainforest ecology, I never imagined becoming a pollination biologist. Keith convinced me that pollination was a great place to start, and he was right. I took his advice and applied to work with Nick Waser and Mary Price at RMBL.

I went to RMBL expecting hands-on experience in pollination ecology with the bonus of a beautiful environment, but my time there transformed my career and life in far more profound ways. Not only did I get to work with Nick and Mary, but by chance, I also met Stanford professors Gretchen Daily and Paul Ehrlich on a mountain hike. Not realizing who Paul was, I spent a lovely afternoon sitting and chatting with him on a mountainside while others in the group went up to the snowfields to slide down. (One thing I learned at RMBL is that I turn to lead above 10,000 feet; I love the mountains, but they do not love me!) This chance hike and unlikely conversation ultimately led me to a PhD program at Stanford, working with Paul and Gretchen, and right where I wanted to go: into the tropics.

RMBL is a truly special place and a maker of ecologists. Whether your passion is pollination, butterflies, climate change, or ecophysiology, RMBL is an increasingly rare place where ecologists from all career stages — undergraduates to senior professors — can work and live together in an immersive environment. I have worked at many wonderful field stations over the years, but RMBL is special, which I believe is why so many alumni return year after year.

In addition to learning how to be a field ecologist and meeting some of the greatest ecologists of the 1990s, I also made lifelong friends and colleagues at RMBL. One of my roommates left science soon after her time at RMBL, choosing law over ecology, but she remains one of my closest friends, even though we now live on opposite sides of the world. Despite never returning to RMBL — having been there for just one field season nearly 30 years ago — it’s remarkable how many of my professional connections in ecology trace back to that summer. RMBL has played a significant role in my success as an ecologist.

Unlike many ecologists whose first trip to RMBL led to a lifelong association with the field site, my path took me further afield. I moved to Australia to take up my first faculty position at the University of Queensland in 2007, and I am now a professor of ecology and head of the School of BioSciences at the University of Melbourne. However, I have continued to send my students to RMBL, as no place compares when it comes to learning, growth, and the enjoyment of ecology.

Though I went on to study tropical ecology for a while, my interest in pollination biology has persisted, and my interest in the ecology of beautiful wildflowers has only grown. While I no longer get to enjoy those incredible mountain vistas and hikes (which I miss dearly), I have found my wildflowers here in Australia. Though they are different in many ways, every field season I think about how it all began for me at RMBL.

— Margie Mayfield, PhD

Margie Mayfield is a professor of plant ecology at the University of Melbourne and head of the School of BioSciences. Her research now focuses on understanding how plant-plant and plant-insect interactions contribute to maintaining diversity at community scales. 

Top: RMBL alumna Margie Mayfield in 1997. Photo courtesy of Margie Mayfield

How the RMBL experience shapes life beyond research science

Neil Losin arrived at RMBL in 2003 as an undergraduate studying red-naped sapsuckers with Chris Floyd. He returned in 2004, gathered more data, and later published the work. “I fell in love with Gothic in the early mornings before breakfast,” Neil recalls. “Give nature a chance to astound you, and it often will.”

RMBL deepened his commitment to biology, leading to a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2012 on territorial behavior in Anolis lizards in southern Florida. That same year, he and Nate Dappen co- founded Day’s Edge Productions to bring conservation stories to broad audiences through film. Today, Neil is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker whose work has appeared on National Geographic, PBS, Smithsonian Channel, and CBS. “RMBL is one chapter of my scientific training, but that training shapes my filmmaking,” he says. “Our arguments don’t just have to persuade — they have to be airtight.” Though his work spans the globe, he values RMBL’s focus on place. In July 2025, he returned to Gothic to screen films at the billy barr Community Center and explore collaborations. “Adventures are fun,” he reflects, “but community is what matters most.”

Married couple Kevin and Sonda Donovan arrived at RMBL in 1972 and 1987, repectively, as undergraduate researchers. Their work included studying the life cycle of the monument plant and courtship in broad-tailed hummingbirds. They met at RMBL and built a life in the Gunnison Valley.

Sonda has served RMBL as cook, winter caretaker, assistant director, and interim director and is now retired from the Crested Butte Land Trust. Kevin has been a builder in the valley for over 40 years (MB Builders), constructing and restoring many of RMBL’s structures. He’s built 10 new buildings, completed eight restorations through the Colorado Historic Society, worked on every building in South Gothic, and repaired many more. Reflecting on RMBL’s influence, Kevin notes, “It strengthened my reputation as a conscientious builder in Gothic, so when a client up the hill said, ‘Please don’t disturb the Linum lewisii,’ I knew exactly what she meant.”

Not all began their RMBL journey as researchers. Laura Villanueva, a family physician in the Gunnison Valley for more than a decade, attended RMBL camps as a child in Crested Butte. “It was my first exposure to a living biology lab,” she says. RMBL inspired her to major in biology and pursue medicine. Years later, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, she met a canoe guide wearing a RMBL hat – an unexpected reminder of home. Now a mother of two, she enrolls her children in RMBL camps. “That early engagement in science led me to medicine,” she says, “and being a wildflower nerd still energizes me. ” RMBL also shapes community leaders who never attended its camps, including Lauren Kugler and Ella Fahrlander. Lauren is executive director of the Community Foundation of the Gunnison Valley; Ella is assistant vice president of development at Western Colorado University and serves on RMBL’s board. Both say early wanderings around Gothic and RMBL- influenced school programs fostered their respect for science and community interconnection. Ella recalls returning to Gothic on a board tour after years on the Front Range. “It felt imprinted – the crisp air, with a hint of skunk cabbage, brought back Fourth of July parades with scientists in costume,” she says. Now working in philanthropy, she values RMBL’s longevity, multi-decade snow records, long-term studies, and deep commitment to place. Lauren highlights RMBL’s collaborative role as the valley’s oldest nonprofit among more than 100 organizations. “It’s history, staffing, international reach make it a vital partner and mentor, especially for younger groups,” she says.

RMBL’s deepest roots lie in long-term datasets: a 98-year-old herbarium and more than 14 studies spanning 30 to 60 years on snowpack, pollinators, stream invertebrates, and plant phenology. Among them is the 60-plus-year marmot study begun in 1962 by Ken Armitage and continued by Dan Blumstein — a study of individual mammals second only to Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research. Ken’s daughter, Tony Award­-winning Karole Armitage, grew up at RMBL, spending childhood summers here since the marmot project began. Now an iconic choreographer (search “Who is the punk ballerina?” and you’ll find her), she founded Armitage Gone! Dance and has credits including Madonna’s “Vogue” video and collaborations with American Ballet Theatre and the Paris Opera Ballet. Karole recalls backpacking from Gothic to Aspen for ballet in the 1960s.

On a rare snowy night in a historically dry year, Karole joined our RMBL Reads book club in the new RMBL 365 space in downtown Crested Butte to discuss Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man. We joked that she deserved credit for the snow, as she was in town for an informal screening of the “Waltz of the Snowflakes” from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, performed by Crested Butte School of Dance dancers and filmed at Sam Robards’ home in 2025. Perhaps we did have Karole and these local youth dancers to thank for the moisture.

Karole recalls, “I was one of Dad’s research assistants, setting traps and, when a marmot was in the trap, weighing them, watching the blood draw, tagging and painting them with identifying dye marks – all with my father and brothers. He also had me counting marmot leukocytes in the lab and studying hummingbirds at our cabin, the ‘Marmitage.”‘ Asked how RMBL science influenced her career, Karole does not hesitate. “My RMBL childhood summers gave me invaluable cultural information as well as a scientific education,” she says. “To be an artist or a great scientist means embracing creativity, precision, discipline, humility, humor, and comfort with being outside the mainstream of American life. I learned all of that through many extraordinary scientists at RMBL, including my father. Art and science require a deep understanding of the status quo before questioning assumptions to find new perspectives in one’s field.”

What do a filmmaker, physician, nonprofit leader, builder, philanthropist, and choreographer share? Formative RM BL experiences. As Neil puts it,”The ‘secret sauce’ isn’t only the alpine ecosystem. It’s the human ecosystem — drawing people back, year after year.”

— John Hausdoerffer, PhD
RMBL Director of Story and Advancement

Top: Neil Losin near Gothic in 2003. Photo | Courtesy Neil Losin

My RMBL story began in a community college biology classroom in the spring of 2019. My professor at the time, Jimmy Lee, introduced our class to the undergraduate research program at RMBL as one of several opportunities that offered hands-on field experience with full financial support. “Extra experience with pay, why not?” I thought. In addition, the experience would allow me to work with animals, which I’d always dreamed of doing. I applied, even though I had never considered studying ecology.  

I was assigned to Dr. Annika Nelson’s project researching mutualism between ants and aphids. At first, I was not thrilled with the assignment, because in the mind of my 22-year-old self, ants hardly counted as animals. However, the moment I saw Gothic’s beauty, all of my dissatisfaction disappeared. The place welcomed me with the gorgeous scene of a giant green meadow under a blue sky, with snowy mountains in the background. As someone who had immigrated from Vietnam and spent most her life thereafter in Los Angeles, I had never seen snow before, and I did not know it could be that beautiful. Everything was like a painting coming to life. 

Soon I met the community: scientists who are experts in their fields, but also very humble and friendly. Not only was my project manager very helpful and patient with me, but other people at the field station were also willing to share their knowledge. I was a shy, introverted youngster who did not know how to open a conversation, but at RMBL, I learned a trick. If I asked, “What do you study?” people would open up and be willing to talk with me. 

Using that approach, I slowly learned about others’ interests and made friends — things that I never thought I would be able to do in the short time that I was there.  

RMBL is a special place to me. It is where I discovered my love for the mountains; where I learned that knowledge comes not only from textbooks, but also from the conversations we share with one another; where I realized that I could find peace within myself; and where I felt a true sense of belonging. Because of this, I sought every opportunity to return in the years that followed. Now, even when I am away from RMBL, I carry the knowledge and experiences I gained there into my everyday life. At RMBL, I grew not only as a researcher, but also as a person. 

— Nhan Nguyen

Nhan Nguyen earned her M.S. in ecology from the University of California, Davis, and her B.S. in animal science from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. At RMBL, she was part of the Van Vuren-Wells golden-mantled ground squirrel lab. Currently, she is enjoying her time as an instructor at Sierra Outdoor School in Sonora, California, teaching fourth- through sixth-grade students about the wonderful outdoors.

Top: Nhan researching squirrels at RMBL. Photo by Sam Woodward

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. 

In 2012, I spent my first summer at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), and it was often a lonely one. My research project was streamlined enough that I didn’t need a field crew, and no other graduate students from my program at the University of Wisconsin worked in Gothic. I spent early mornings and late nights alone at the microscope examining mayflies for parasitism, focused on a narrow field of view. I didn’t yet anticipate how my world at RMBL would grow, continually stretched wider by the people who shared my fascination with the place, what it teaches us, and how we can give back to it.

Now, almost a decade after completing my dissertation work in Gothic, I keep coming back. I return for the science and the place, but mostly for the people. Some are collaborators and friends I know well. Others I never met, but their legacy continues to shape the culture of RMBL in palpable ways.

Dr. Scottie Willey comes to mind; her first RMBL summer was 54 years before mine, in 1958. In my imagination she’s a figure of mythic proportions, vying against relentless forces — profit-seekers extracting minerals and water from the wild headwaters that were both the subject of her work and, it seems, home to her soul. Her love of the wild forged her into a ferocious defender of wholeness: of landscapes guarded from degradation and fragmentation.

Science was one of the tools she used to protect what mattered to her, but her work at RMBL was never only about data. It was full-hearted, intent on improving the world around her. Like any mythic heroine on a quest, she offered her accomplishments in service to her community.

When a brief window of opportunity opened to legally protect instream flow rights in the East River drainage, Scottie worked alongside her husband, Bob, and water-rights attorney Pete Klingsmith to secure the water right for RMBL, ensuring that these ecologically vital headwaters would continue to flow.

That work did not end with Scottie’s generation. The torch was carried forward by Bobbi Peckarsky, who continued this work after Scottie and introduced it to me, inviting me into a lineage of care for these headwaters. Today, I continue to collect data and work alongside the RMBL community to help sustain the instream flow right and to share why healthy headwaters matter — not only ecologically, but socially and culturally as well. To help ensure this work has stability into the future, Bobbi and I co-founded Rocky Mountain Rivers, building a framework to support watershed science, stewardship, and community engagement over the long term.

Through examples like this — and through the work I continue today — I learned at RMBL that community is the force that alchemizes scientific objectives into a deeply held sense of purpose. Knowledge gains its power when it moves outward to inform stewardship, shape decisions, and strengthen communities.

The lineage of “Benthettes,” of which I’m a part, is one expression of a broader RMBL culture shaped by researchers who pair scientific rigor with care for place and community. It is a way of doing science grounded in relationship and responsibility. At RMBL, I learned that science, in every respect, is better when it is shared.

— Kara Cromwell, PhD
RMBL Alumna

Kara Cromwell holds a PhD in Ecology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her research focused on environmental drivers of disease in high-altitude streams around RMBL. She now lives in Missoula, Montana, where she consults with environmental organizations to make ecology research and education meaningful to community stakeholders. She also continues aquatic parasitology research and teaching as affiliate faculty at the University of Montana. Last year, she and RMBL collaborators co-founded Rocky Mountain Rivers, a nonprofit that uses science to inspire wonder and inform stewardship of rivers in the Rocky Mountains and beyond.

Photo: Dr. Kara Cromwell sampling macroinvertebrates from the East River as part of a long-term project to monitor biodiversity and protect instream flow rights of the East River’s headwaters

My RMBL story begins long before I ever set foot in Gothic. As seniors at Swarthmore College, my classmate Steve Lowe and I were immersed in a yearlong ecological study of Crum Creek, the stream that cuts through campus. With encouragement from Professor Robert Enders, we applied for an NSF grant to compare Crum Creek with a Rocky Mountain stream at a place I had only heard about: the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. 

We drove cross-country in just three days, powered by youthful energy and with zero acclimation time. I spotted Professor Enders the moment we arrived. I jumped out of the Jeep and sprinted uphill—only to nearly black out. My first lesson in fieldwork at altitude: respect the mountains. At RMBL, we joined Professor John Cairns of Virginia Tech, who was pioneering a new method for quantifying species diversity. While Cairns focused on microbes, Steve and I applied his method to aquatic insects on nearby Mt. Avery. 

What struck me immediately was how different the biota were from Crum Creek. Mt. Avery’s stream was fast, cold, and clear, with a clean rocky bottom—worlds apart from the warm, slow, silt-laden waters of suburban Philadelphia. Cairns’ method turned out to be surprisingly effective, even beyond its original purpose, and it opened my eyes to the value of asking creative questions in the field. 

Looking back, those early days at RMBL gave me more than scientific tools—they gave me a new way of seeing the natural world. It was my first time living in a place where science wasn’t confined to a classroom or a lab bench. It happened at breakfast, on the trail, in late-night conversations, and in small moments—like debating whether the infamous “beef noodle casserole” in the dining hall was truly beef. (It wasn’t. We didn’t need the post-meal announcement to confirm it.) 

RMBL also taught me about the unpredictability of field stations. One afternoon a packed bus attempted to come up the hill through the lab. After unloading all the passengers to lighten the load, the driver took a running start. The bouncing bus snagged a wire strung between buildings and ripped loose a wooden board that went flying into the crowd of onlookers. Thankfully the injuries were not more serious, but it remains one of the more dramatic moments of my summer. 

Most importantly, RMBL shaped my career path. Before my summer in Gothic, I knew I loved freshwater biology. But RMBL sharpened that interest into a calling. Being surrounded by passionate field scientists, immersed in hands-on research, and given the freedom to explore ecological questions in a spectacular setting helped crystallize my professional direction. As my graduate advisor later put it on a sign in his office: “Study Nature, Not Books.” RMBL was the first place where I truly lived that philosophy. 

That experience led me to a career in aquatic ecology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, beginning in 1972. I studied the aquatic insects of Walker Branch in East Tennessee and later worked on experimental pond systems to understand how insect communities respond to pollutants. Eventually my path shifted toward global-change science, and I later directed the U.S. Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. But even as my work expanded from insects to global data, the lessons from RMBL stayed with me: ask good questions, observe closely, and let nature guide you. 

Personally, RMBL also broadened my sense of place. Though I returned East after that summer, I learned that the biodiversity and beauty of the Southern Appalachians could be every bit as rich and surprising as the Rockies. RMBL helped me see ecosystems comparatively, appreciating them not for how they differ, but for the unique stories each one tells. 

-Article written by RMBL Alumni, Bob Cushman

Bob Cushman holds a B.S. in Zoology from Swarthmore College and an M.S. in Ecology from the University of Tennessee. He joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a freshwater biologist in 1972. His research focused on aquatic insect ecology before he later directed the Department of Energy’s global-change data center. He retired in 2003 and continues to stay active—playing tennis and banjo, and volunteering with the University of Tennessee Arboretum Society, Museum of Appalachia, and Greenways Oak Ridge. Bob lives in Oak Ridge with his wife, Janet. They have a son, a daughter, and two grandsons. 

Photo courtesy of Bob Cushman