Quick Sand

For my internship this summer I am doing a study for the BLM on the St. Anthony Tiger Beetles out at the sand dunes. Yesterday me, Haley and Matt went out to do some collecting and plotting. The school lets us use there vans and we have a Ranger to drive around the dunes in. Well within my little group I'm the only one with a permit to drive the school vans... So i'm driving this 12 passenger van, hauling a trailor with a ranger on it, everything is going fine, we get out to the dunes and turn off on this road that finds its way back to some smaller dunes where we know there are some tiger beetles. Since we know we can find them there we decide that it would be a good place to start... well all is going well until we have to turn off the road onto a smaller less traveled road, on this smaller less traveled road we hit a patch of very soft sand! Needless to say that is as far as we went. Lets see.... I took the road less traveled by and it really did make all the difference. We were stuck as stuck can be, so we did all we could do... we started digging! After a while we gave up and did what we went there to do and came back to the van for round two. We eventually gave up again and headed for the main road to flag someone down to help pull us out. And just our luck we caught someone from the BLM who knew exactly what we were out there to do. Luckily he laughed about it and pulled us out with his big rig pretty quickly. Now we are headed back out tuesday..... hope things go smoother this time!