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.