It may not be the most rigorous environmental study ever, but it’s certainly among the more entertaining. A group of graduate students at the University of Virginia has established the Mount Chipotle National Research Observatory.
The tongue-in-cheek observatory was created to perpetuate the study of that big pile of snow near the Chipotle restaurant in the Barracks Road Shopping Center parking lot.
“It’s just an inside joke that apparently has gotten out of hand,” said Luke Cole, a graduate student and one of the Mount Chipotle NRO ringleaders.
The effort has included summit ascents, monitoring and its own blog (mountchipotle.blogspot.com), which chronicles the observatory’s “science” and “scandal.”
Another of the research observatory’s primary purposes is to fuel the informal betting pool that has morphed into a fundraiser for the environmental science department’s graduate student association.
For $10, a case of beer or a bottle wine, students can pick the day that they think the pile will be gone. Get it right and win $30, plus some gift certificates that Chipotle Mexican Grill kicked in, said David Seekell, another of the students involved.
The collected loot goes to bring in speakers from related departments at other universities and to host receptions afterward. Cole said he hopes to get between $350 and $400 in all.
“We like to make dumb little side bets,” Cole said. “This seemed like the perfect opportunity to combine the two.”
But from those humble roots, it’s grown to a hot topic of conversation, propelled by people who spend most of their time studying things such as lake collapses, sea grass and environmental modeling.
“We’ll keep monitoring for a little while. Funding was tight for about eight years …” Seekell said.
Cole said any papers the group might “publish” would have a long list of authors. But many participants, including Cole, are content mostly to monitor from the mountain’s base.
“We have a very small number of folks that have summitted it,” he said. “The altitude gets to a lot of people, so it’s only the more experienced climbers.”
Also, the mountain has recently sprouted a host of no-trespassing signs, he said, putting a damper on future mountaineering endeavors.
Professor Todd Scanlon is a big fan of the project.
He had even considered starting a model of the melting mountain, but is worried he couldn’t adequately account for all the factors involved.
“It’s tough, though, to model the societal factors, like are people going to get fed up with looking at it, or is liability going to become an issue,” he said.
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