Humble Pie

My friend, Vanessa, once told me I was the dumbest smart girl she knew.  Around that same time my family coined the term "Poor Dumb  Becka."*  Both memories were running through my brain today while I faced my biggest challenge this month: installing a bike rack on the roof on my car.

I owned a truck for almost 10 years and everything about it was awesome.  But would you have guessed that the most awesome part was being able to throw everything in the back of my truck and secure it with a bungee or two?  Well, believe it, that was the most awesome part.  In October 2011 I admitted to myself that after breaking three Toyota engines three different ways maybe I shouldn't drive Toyota's anymore.  Then I began thinking about how great it would be to get more than 20 miles per gallon on a very good day, and decided that maybe a car was the way to go.  Shortly after this, my heart led me to Phyllis the Forester.  While I love her, we've had some troubles.  Someday I may get over the catalytic converted and radiator troubles that the dealer took care of (and if you're interested in hearing about a Subaru dealer you should definitely avoid, let me know), I've learned from the clutch troubles, and I'm working on fixing the tire problem.  But the thing that just kills me is the fact that I had to buy a roof rack to hold more than one bike on my car, or to hold both a bike and my camping stuff.

Phyllis

Brent started me on the path toward bike rack ownership with his Christmas present, and I had some extra money come my way so I was able to buy two top-of-the-line racks.  Once they arrived the trouble started. Before I could put the rack on, I had to figure out the Mighty Mounts that would get the racks on the factory rack that came with my car.  Last week I spent a really unfortunate half hour sitting on the scorching hot roof of my car putting together the mounts according to the instructions, only to find that I actually need to attach the mounts to the rack, then to the car.  This of course was after I had an I-can't-ever-get-anything-right-ever hissy fit out in my drive way because I couldn't figure out which direction to turn a silly little knob of the mounts (I blame all the sun).

Thumb dials, the source of last week's frustration.  Lefty-loosy, right-tighty is difficult to figure out when the object being turned is upside down and the sun is out.   

I got 2/3 of the way through attaching the rack to the mounts before giving up because a bolt wouldn't fit where it should.  The bike rack wasn't going to be on for a weekend ride and I had bigger fish to fry: apparently I'm also too dumb to properly replace a tube on my bike.  So I gave up for the week and had a truly delightful time biking Blacksmith Fork Canyon and climbing at City of Rocks (which I'll totally blog about later).

Fast forward to today.  I was feeling smug, really smug.  I had finagled myself a whole week of awesome vacation.  Monday I did a little work, but not a lot.  Tuesday I did some field work in the Willard Spur, a new place for me, and I recalled how much I like doing field work when I'm not in charge.  Today the only thing on the agenda was getting the roof rack situation figured out, and maybe making salad dressing.  I spent most of the day going on walks and catching up on my periodicals, it was the perfect summer vacation-at-home day.  Then I decided to conquer the roof rack and my smugness disappeared.

Such a happy, cushy, field day, full of SAV, nutrient experimentation, and shade.  I may start lugging around an umbrella for my field work, because it was sure nice to have.  

After finishing the final third of the rack-to-Mighty-Mount attachment, I spent 30 minutes attaching the rack (via Mighty Mounts) to Phyllis.  I spent this whole episode thinking "I don't have a degree in bike rack mounting."  Then chiding myself because no one would celebrate my degree in bike rack mounting, as such an endevour comes with [conflicting] instructions.  This was followed by despair because I'm pretty sure that I should be able to get good grades in school and be able to assemble things with instructions.  After that I went on to think about all the important life skills I wish they'd teach class about (i.e. gift wrapping, following instructions, programming things like phones).  All the while I was grumbling the following thought (in my dad's voice): Curse this car and name brand bike rack, it costs me just as much to mount my bike as it did to buy the damn bike.  [I have a cheap bike and bike racks are kind of expensive.]

After adjusting everything just right (which really did take 30 minutes), I tried to get my bike up there, just to make sure it worked.  In a fortuitous and overly-humbling moment, I attempted this lift while a neighbor was in the driveway.  It was awesome that she came to help me stabilize the bike, but overly-humbling that I couldn't get the bike up there myself.  After figuring out which of the three adjustments it would take to keep the bike in place, I then had to figure out how to get the kayak up.  45 minutes later, the bike and kayak were up on the roof, I got over the "That's why you can't have nice things" rant in my head, and I was free to go about finding my car keys while loosing my new bike rack key.

The finished product: a car ready for adventure.  

If there are any lessons to be learned through all this they may be that:
1.  Smugness is always followed by a heaping dose of humble pie
2.  You can do hard things, but only after swallowing your humble pie and remembering to breath and follow the instructions you were given.
3.  Owning a truck is one-thousand times better than owning a car, at least when it comes to easily carrying lots of things.

And now I'm off to vacation with Brent's family, where I will use both the bike and kayak I've worked so hard to get up on my car.

*Both Vanessa and my family hold spots close to my heart, that's why they can mock me like that.

My People Wearing Mustaches

Not much to say in this post.  Yesterday was Father's Day, so my family got together for dinner and ice cream, and there were mustaches to wear.  Here's what it looked like:

Oddly enough, there are no pictures of my dad.  More odd, he doesn't have a mustache.  But I think it's obvious, my entire family is pretty remarkable.  I sure love them.

Winging It - The Time It Worked

When I start this post I was in Duluth, Minnesota at the annual meeting of the Society of Wetland Scientists and I'd found a large empty ballroom to sit down and collect my thoughts in, and it was great.  I've spent the last week thinking about how little time I give myself to just sit and plan, how that almost always leaves me frantically winging it, and how often things just end up working out.  And this current adventure is a case of that.  As reckless and scary as "winging-it" style travel might seen, it almost always restores my faith in humanity and boosts my confidence a bit.  I'd been in Duluth all week and in some aspects I am woefully unprepared.  I did have my talk mostly prepared, so that's good.  But I had not taken a look at the weather, or even a map before I left, which meant I was unprepared for travel in a large state that is very far north.  It worked out though.  Here are the things I've learned in this week of travel:

1. Catching a 6:30 am flight in SLC the day after a 50-mile bike ride in Logan makes for an absurdly emotional journey.  I cried a little at the SLC airport, thankfully I was emotionally composed by the time I got to security.  I cried a little more during my layover in the Denver airport, which made for an awkward moment for the people sitting next me.  Then I cried a little at the Minneapolis airport, but then became distracted by the babbling women near me who was confused about the time zone change.

2.  Minneapolis is not close to Duluth.  Minnesota is quite a large state.  It takes 2.5 hours to get from one city to the next because they are 140 miles away.  Observe

I had assumed it was ok to fly into Minneapolis because I knew people who were, and if I couldn't catch a ride with one of my people, I'd be able to find something.  Airport shuttles go everywhere, right?  Right.  But I was also able to catch a ride into Duluth Sunday afternoon anyways.

3.  Duluth is at the latitude  46.785873°.  It's still cold there!  Good thing I was cold while packing and brought a fleece.  Here's what I left in Utah

And here's what I found in Duluth

4.  The Google search results for "What is the best way to get from Duluth to the Minneapolis airport" will return a good option.  I had to catch a 2:30 am shuttle to the airport to make my 6:30 am flight to Denver and an 8:15 flight to Salt Lake City.  I mentioned the emotions involved in 6:30 flights earlier, those same feelings do not apply to 2:30 flights, I was too tired to feel much of anything but tired.

5.  Sometimes people make bad carpet decisions.  I spent the last half hour of the Women in Wetlands breakfast trying to figure out whether my mind was playing tricks on me or if there really was a vagina pattern on the carpet.  I asked a few people later what their thoughts were and they concurred: Carpet Vaginas.  Go ahead, try to get that phrase out of your head.

6.  Minnesotans are as nice as people say.  Really, most people are  nice.   I met people throughout the conference who loved talking about wetlands and research.  I also met a lot of people along the way to the conference who just wanted to chat about the weather or Lake Superior or pizza.  At a student mixer (a thing I would never have attended if my friends hadn't been there) I met a grad student from North Carolina who I talked about birds with, and ended up going along on a birding trip with later, facilitated by a guy from Wisconsin who was at the conference to raise awareness about threats to a turtle species he cared a lot about.  Really, people are great.  And I might have seen Trumpeter swan in Minnesota because I believe in winging it and went along for the ride.  Downtown Duluth also has some creative signage:

My last day in Duluth I got some to enjoy the beach.  It was a little chilly, but being near water is essentially soothing and I had a great time.  Below are some of the pictures I took of Lake Superior, along with some fun facts about the greatest of the Great Lakes.

Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake by area and the third largest by volume.  It accounts for 10% of the worlds freshwater supply.  It's huge!

Lake Superior covers 31,280 square miles, that's large enough to fit all the Great Lakes in plus a few more.  The average depth of the lake is 483 ft, the deepest point is 1,333 feet below the surface.

Should you spread the water of Lake Superior across North America, you could flood the continent with up to 3 feet of water.

Lake Superior is large enough to affect local weather patterns.  For Duluth this means warm winters and cool summers.  

Storms on Lake Superior can create waves as large as those seen in the ocean, but they come at a faster frequency.

Seasonal storms lead to waves over 20 feet high; the weather on the lake is responsible for over 350 shipwrecks.  Many of these shipwrecks are now protected in underwater preserves (which I wish I had known before I left).  This is not a picture of a shipwreck, but some kind of gravel dock that could not withstand Lake Superior weather.  

Lake Superior itself is oligotrophic, supporting fewer species of fish than the other lakes.  Superior is the cleanest of the Great Lakes, with average water visibility of 27 feet, but some places visibility is up to 100 feet.  However, throughout the entire system, over 160 plant and animal species have been introduced, primarily through ballast water.

The retention time for water in the lake is 191 years.  That's a long time (unless you start looking at terminal lakes)

There are about 80 species of fish in the lake, which are stratified by temperature, which generally decreases with depth.  The walleye makes good fish cakes.  I love fish cakes.

The beginnings of Lake Superior were basalt deposits that flowed 1.1 to 1.2 billion years ago at the mid-continent rift.  These flows settled into a small basin and accumulated water and sediments over millenia.

Lake Superior as we know it now was created by glaciers more than 10,000 years ago and is currently supplied by more than 300 streams and rivers.  It would take those rivers almost 200 years to refill the lake, should it drain.

The lake shore is known for agate beaches, basalt intrusions and sedimentary formations.  I was sure excited to find this nice sandy beach.  

Dune grass here is pretty hardy, it stabilizes the sand dunes by binding together sand grains.  It can withstand waves and wind, but is sensitive to compaction from walking.  So watch where you walk.  

Migrating birds of prey are "funneled" through Lake Superior, the area may see as many as 100,000 raptors a year.  I saw an osprey while I was there, but I was really more charmed by these little shorebirds than anything else.  

Lake Superior is actually connected to the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawerence seaway's series of locks and canals.  This bridge is an aerial lift bridge that allows large vessels to pass between the bay and the larger lake.  

Shipping on the Great Lakes moves bulk materials like iron ore, grains, and limestone from the interior of the United States toward the ocean.  

So there you have it.  Lake Superior is awesome. Go visit.  I recommend visiting later in the summer, when things might be warmer.

Winging It - The Time I Failed

All of my thinking about successfully winging it has gotten me thinking about a less successful time I went forth without a plan.  I call it "The Time I Got Lost in Phragmites."  Phragmites australis, or the Common reed, or Phrag, or That Awful Tall Stuff is an invasive, perennial grass.  Around the Great Salt Lake if forms dense stands that are literally swallowing the lake.  It's horrible.  I'm currently the only student in my lab not studying Phrag, but I still find it nearly everywhere because it has been so successful around the lake.  Here are some of the reasons it's so successful:

Prolific seed production, in addition to the ability to expand via rhizomes.  

It grows 10-15 feet tall.  

It expands rapidly, quickly out-competing the native species you see growing in the foreground.  

Through rapid growth and growing so tall, it effectively excludes all other species, form monotypic stands.  

It also grows very dense, making travel through it exceedingly difficult.  

One day, last year, I had a really traumatic field experience in the Phrag.  If you haven't been able to tell, I'm generally a woman without a plan.  This has made an entire summer of field work kind of difficult, because I have 50 sites and last year I needed to visit each site twice.  I really winged it the entire summer.  While I had a well thought out protocol for gathering data once I got there, I was figuring out which site to go to on a daily basis.  This not only made it so I didn't sleep well, as my dreams were haunted by semi-conscious field day planning, and I used more gas than perhaps I needed to.  One day I had a plan to work more efficeintly by visiting a field site along with another errands I had to run.  This story proceeds as a series of bad decisions I made on the fly.

Bad decisions #1: making field work part of a day I wanted to get anything else done in.  Field work needs to be an all-day thing, you start in the morning and end before the hottest part of the afternoon.  One day toward the end of the field season, I was having a really traumatic day and I think that set the stage for all the poor decisions that followed.  It was a Sunday evening early in September and I was taking Brent to the airport, where he would be catching a flight to Houston, Texas for three weeks, or three months.  I was unhappy about that uncertainty and already missing him.  Since I was already going to be at the airport, I thought it would be an effective use of time and gas to jump on over to one of my nearby field sites.  This was not a good time to "just" make a field visit.

The field site I intended to visit is located on the beach near Saltaire, and it's a really cool site where all the saltiness and weird water patterns have lead to some really cool plant communities and soil properties.

Parts of the site are dominated by salt grass, pickleweed and alkali bulrush; three of my favorite species.  

Proximity to the Great Salt Lake itself makes it a super salty site.  

Bad decision #2: Accessing field site from the wrong side of the Phrag.  Unfortunately this area has some really large, vigorous stands of Phrag.  The easiest way to access this site is from the marina, but the gate to the road out there was going to close at sunset and I didn't want to get locked in.  So I parked at the nearby concert venue, on the other side of the beach (read: the other side of the large Phragmites patch).  In the beginning, my walk across the beach was awesome, it was a stroll across sand and short plants, temps were starting to cool and I was feeling productive.

I've heard this smoke stack is taller than the Empire State building.  When visible, it provides a good bearing toward my site.  

I said it before, the sunsets on the GSL are the best ever, and they tend to make the western mountains look a bit like Mordor.  

As I neared a large stand of Phrag, my GPS told me the site I was aiming for was about 550 meters away  due southwest; basically I was almost there.  I made sure all my pockets were zipped and my stuff all safely stowed away from the Phrag's prying grasp, and began to push my way through.  As I mentioned early, Phrag is difficult to walk through because it is very dense.  Its nearly impossible to walk a straight line through, this patch was even more difficult because there was knee deep water and seeds were being released.

The point of no return.  Or the point at which I should have returned.  

After a minute of pushing through I realized that it would be impossible to push my way through while holding onto my GPS/compass, so I took note of the orientation of wind blown stems as a way to orient myself and pushed on with both hands.  This strategy quickly went bad, as the stems weren't all blown in the same direction and I was being pitched back and forth a lot.  Further complicating matters, I am pretty severely allergic to Phrag and could not breath well through all the mucus my body was producing.  Here is what my journey looked like:

Journey overview.  All together I had a 2 mile round-trip walk.  I completed 1.85 miles of it. That bright green area between the beginning and destination is all Phragmites australis.  

My path through the Phrag.  I began in the south and moved clockwise.  

Bad decision #3: Not checking in with anyone.  After 15 minutes of pushing through the Phrag, pulling the GPS out to check my progress, and continuing to push through I came to the following conclusions:

1. I could not maintain my bearings anymore, I was just walking in a circle (literally).  After 15 minutes of dedicated work, I was only 17 meters closer to my site, but still more than 500 meters away.  
2. The sun was setting and I was standing in water that had been shaded all year, it was cold.  
3. No one knew where I was.  

This last one really distressed me.  When going into the field by myself I usually check in with Brent, but he was on a plane.  I could have checked in with my field technician, which I have also done, but I didn't want to bother him on the weekend.  And now I was too scared to pull my phone out of the ziplock bag I stored it in because I would inevitably drop it.  Plus, who was I going to call?  I knew my position on the globe because of my GPS unit, but I didn't know how anyone would get there.

View to the north

View to the east.

The south. 

The west.

Phrag face. 

These are silly excuses for putting myself out in the field without anyone knowing, but that's a result of hindsight.  At that moment, I almost started to hyperventilate, but I was too full of snot and Phrag seeds to breathe regularly. Because I couldn't totally freak out, I calmly decided to bail.  The point I bailed was really, stupidly close to the point I started in, so I could find my way back to the channel, back across the beach, and to my car.

The lost in the Phrag experience was very humbling to me.  I had already known I have a poor sense of direction, but I've felt confidence in my field sites because they're flat and I can see the Wasatch Front to get my bearings.  None of this matters in the Phrag.  I knew I was a crier, prone to tears at a change of the wind, but it seems I also make even poorer decisions when upset.  Finally, it seems I had to learn the always-leave-a-note lesson for myself, despite having read Aron Ralston's book about not leaving a note.

While I will spend the rest of my life generally without a plan, I will not ever go into the Phrag by myself, and I will never start a field excursion after 1:00 pm.  And if you're a field monkey, you too should learn from my lessons and don't put yourself in the Phrag alone.