She was precise and methodical and by her own description constitutionally incapable of walking past an interesting rock formation without stopping to look at it.
At 9:17 in the morning, she was descending a shallow drainage channel between two riolyte outcroppings.
Moving off the established trail to reach a monitoring sensor that had been giving erratic temperature readings for three weeks when her left boot caught on something partially buried in the debris [music] at the base of the rock.
She felt resistance where there should not have been resistance, stopped, looked down, and saw the corner of something dark and rectangular protruding from the accumulated pine duff and decomposed leaf matter that had been building up in the drainage channel for decades.
She crouched and began with the careful lateral brush of her gloved hand to clear the debris away from the object.
It took her four minutes, which she measured with the stopwatch on her field watch because she was the kind of person who measured things.
