Bushwhacking through a stand of stunted aspens above 10,000 feet in Utah's Tushar mountain range, the mountain guide Trevor Katz held his Garmin to the sky and pointed it south. 'We should just look for an opening,' he said, glancing over at his colleague, Bailey Pugh, from under a ball cap he'd cut into a visor. Wading through walls of branches, he and Pugh circled, eyes trained on the ground. Then, there it was. Stuck in the dirt, the hexagonal silver node looked like a device an alien could have planted. Its small antenna and carrying strap sat above the earth. A sharp spike below anchored it into the slope. It would be a strange thing to stumble upon this so high in the mountains, surrounded only by what can survive at such an elevation. This is just one of 200 nodes planted across the range in a tidy grid, each tracked with a GPS waypoint. Earlier, they had placed the nodes in the ground; now it was time to extract them. Pugh hoisted this one out of the ground and into her...
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