the best day i've had at work

About 10 miles north of the Botanic Garden, on the lake, is the city of Lake Forest. This is a very wealthy city, and it has a very wealthy, very active garden club. This garden club recently won some big award at a gardening competition in England for a garden they created with the theme of "Ravines." They chose ravines as their theme because Lake Forest has many of them. Lake Forest is in the middle of the stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline that is riddled with ravines. The ravine-y part stretches about 30 miles, from just north of Evanston to Waukegan. The ravines flow into the lake, and the longest one stretches just over a mile back from the shoreline. These ravines are considered a unique ecosystem, as they create an out-of-place cooler climatic zone, allowing plants whose usual southern extent is somewhere in Wisconsin to hold on here in Illinois, as well as allowing for a greater-than-average diversity in a smaller area because of the extreme topography.
As a result of winning this award in England, the Lake Forest Garden Club decided to 'give back' to the ecosystem that inspired them and take on ravine restoration in their city. they joined forces with OpenLands, a Nature Conservancy-like conservation NGO, and have acquired one ravine (area=77 acres) and somehow gained rights to work on another (187 acres) ravine that the City of Lake Forest owns. These two ravines will eventually become "teaching preserves," where ravine restoration techniques will be tested and showcased for the public, and the unique ravine ecosystem will be preserved and displayed.
This project has just begun, and the Lake Forest Garden Club and OpenLands convened a 'field team' of experts in various fields to look at the ravines, tell them what they have now, and make recommendations on how to proceed. this field team includes geologists, hydrologists, restoration ecologists, etc., and my boss, as the hope is to get Plants of Concern in there monitoring plants from the get-go, so that there is a record of plant populations as restoration efforts proceed. I feel pretty lucky because I get to be involved in this project to help my boss. So far, this has meant sitting in on one meeting and schmoozing afterwards while eating wine and cheese, and going out to visit one of these ravines on Wednesday.
Wednesday was the best day i've had since getting to Chicago - at least for the 6 hours i was in the ravine. This ravine looked almost exactly like the backyard at home, out in the area where the second stream has the fork, and to the east of that, where the slopes are very steep. It was so beautiful out there. we walked down from the upper reaches of the ravine, all along the rim, down to the lake, and then back up in the bottom of the ravine. the whole field team went along on the way down, but we all left the beach at different times and i ended up heading back up the ravine with just my boss, my coworker that i hate, and a very interesting restoration consultant guy who talked like a professor - lots of open-ended questions. i took the job of point, heading out in front on my own to make sure that we had a way forward, as there was no path. we made it all the way up in the ravine, but it was so exciting to be unsure of what was around the corner and if we'd have to turn back. we found a number of cool plants but i realized that i didn't really care about that so much as checking out the ravine and trying to visualize the course of the water as it shaped it and trying to understand the underlying structure of the soil.
it helped that Wednesday was our first real fall day, with a high of about 55 degrees and a stiff breeze all day, ensuring a delicious smell and invigorating feeling all day long. today was the same way. i kept having to come up with excuses to go outside so i could take it all in.
we are going to the other ravine tomorrow. i hope the weather's the same. i hope i get a chance for some alone-time, away from the plant-nerding.