We were lucky enough to spend a week with Dr. David Sands, a microbiologist and geneticist (if those categories are even appropriate for someone so diverse).  Almost every day we went out on nature hikes and never made it more than a few hundred yards from the main lodge.  He would stop at just about any plant, pull it up, and rattle off a million interesting facts about it.  He constantly had Ethan running to and fro to collect different samples and then enter a Socratic mode, helping him to figure out what everything he found meant.

Dr. Sands also brought several suitcases full of petri dishes and a variety of interesting bacteria that have been the subject of some tests in his lab back in Bozeman.  Ethan and Dr. Sands did a number of experiments when they weren’t out in the field exploring and discovering.