University of Denver Autumn 2024

The highest commute in North America On a sunny but chilly 54-degree August day, Velotta and his team set out at 7 a.m. for the summit of Mount Blue Sky. It’s the first day of their week-long stay at the base of the mountain near the Echo Lake Campground, where they sleep in dark wooden cabins reminiscent of summer camp. Their research began the day before at dusk, when the group hopped into a white pickup displaying a DU logo and slowly wound their way along the highest paved roadway in North America. As the sun faded, temperatures dropped and the day’s final tourists and cyclists began to descend, the team got to work setting out hundreds of shiny metal traps. Ten inches long, the rectangular boxes lured the mice as a place to shelter, with a rewarding treat and polyfill—like you’d find inside a stuffed animal—to keep them warm. The next morning, after making the windy trek back to the weathered A-frame cabin at the summit just a stone’s throw from DU’s historic Meyer Womble Observatory, the team scrambles across boulders and investigates each of the 320 traps. “We give it a little shake and take a peek inside to see if [a mouse] is in there,” says Sarah Senese, a first-year PhD student, gently shaking

a trap to demonstrate. “And then they get to hang out in there all day while we process them and do all the things that we do to get their data and their blood and take their measurements.” The trapping and processing of the mice is humane, Senese says. “We give them all of the carbohydrates and fats that they'll need to stay nice and healthy and fed and happy in the box,” she says. “We feed them apples while we're waiting on experiments because we want them to be in tip-top shape.” Velotta demonstrates the snap sound the traps make when the mice wander in. It’s not the tasty bird seed inside that the mice are enticed by, he says—it’s the traps themselves. “[The seed] is bait, technically, but it doesn't really attract them,” Velotta says. “They're attracted to structures, and they'll go in and explore things for food.” Once the mice are collected, the team heads inside the A-frame and examines them to see if they’ve been caught before. Sometimes it’s valuable to recapture those mice, to fill in gaps in data, and sometimes the team just lets them go. Velotta and his researchers take DNA and blood samples and weigh the mice, too. “We release them exactly where we

found them. We maybe come back down the mountain for a bite to eat, and then we drive all the way back up at dusk, set the traps again, and we do the whole thing over the next day,” Senese says. While working at 14,000 feet isn’t always easy—“There’s not a lot of oxygen, and sometimes you feel like you didn’t drink enough water,” Senese says—experiencing life at such a high altitude never gets old. “A sunrise on Mount Blue Sky,

you really can't beat,” she says. “It's just the coolest work in the world, in the coolest place.”

The team visits Mount Blue Sky about twice a year, but the work continues back

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