As the sun glinted off the East River, I sat perched on one of the many rocks strewn across the riverside, patiently awaiting the arrival of a marmot in my scope. Suddenly, one appeared, scurrying over the grassy knolls that made up my field site. She scampered quickly over each hill as I scrambled to keep her in the sight of my scope. It was there, just before I watched her hastily enter a burrow, that I spotted what I had been hoping to see all morning: a marmot pup. With her babies clutched gently in her mouth, the marmot mom dutifully carried her recently born pups from an old burrow to a new one. Something had compelled her to choose a new place to raise her pups for the summer, and I watched, transfixed, as she returned again and again to retrieve pup after pup. After nine trips back and forth, she had successfully settled all her pups into their new home. I reported the exciting news to my field crew and resumed watching the other marmots as they foraged and moved about the field site.

It was late June of 2022, and I was spending my summer at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), just outside Crested Butte, working on a long-term project studying yellow-bellied marmots. Having received a National Science Foundation grant, I joined a cohort of college students at RMBL for a summer of field studies, paper writing, and life in the mountains. Little did I know, this summer stint would inspire a love of the mountains, squirrels, and ecological research that I hadn’t known before. Every day brought something new for my Texas-born self to marvel at — snow on the ground in June, mountains rising impossibly high into the sky, a moose wandering through a patch of willows, and, above all, marmots. Prior to arriving in Colorado, I knew nothing of these large, ground-dwelling squirrels. To me, a squirrel was a wily little creature found lurking around the campus Chick-fil-A hoping to get a french fry handout, not a hardy subalpine mammal. The more I learned about these rotund critters, the more fascinated I became.