Why I Needed An Adventure

I wrote part of this before I ran out the door to have an adventure, part of it while I was hunkered down in a tent hoping not to be struck by lightning, and part nursing my poor tired muscles at home while going through the 800 pictures I took on my adventure.  Hopefully there is some logic to it all.

I needed a vacation so much.  A solitary vacation.  It's been a long time since I had a solitary vacation, more than 2.5 years, and I first justified it by claiming that no one else could take Tuesday through Thursday off like I could.  But the truth was I just needed to turn OFF.  After a long Spring semester at USU, scientific conferences, another intense field season, and my grandpa dying I just needed to stop thinking and start doing.  I love my vacations with Brent, in fact the 2.5 years since my last solitary vacations and the 2.5 years I've been dating Brent line up almost exactly.  But we usually go on climbing trips, and climbing is a necessarily ON task because of the need to maintain safety and communicate between climber and belayer.  I felt a strange need to make sure that everyone knew I wasn't leaving Brent behind, I'm not mad at him or anything, but then I realized that Brent didn't question any of this and felt really great about my dating choices because he seems to totally get it.  Yeah me!

In addition to the needs for vacation listed above, I was just feeling crappy.  I hadn't been sleeping well, I had no motivation to do work, and my insides hurt.  It was probably stress, but my insides felt like there wasn't enough space for all my organs, I felt squished and tight.  My legs were screaming at me all the time to get out and stretch them.  I needed to do something so active my legs would scream at me to stop and I would sleep soundly because I was physically exhausted.  So I came up with the idea for the Great Salt Lake Spectacular.  I've been eyeing a few mountain peaks all summer long, Frary Peak on Antelope Island, where I've been before; Box Elder Peak, which is the highest point in the Wellsville Mountains; and Deseret Peak in the Stansbury Mountains, which stares me in the face everytime I find myself south of Farmington, Utah.  What greater way to justify a vacation than to spend a few days viewing my area of study (Great Salt Lake wetlands) from high points?

It was pretty magical when I started hiking.  My legs and back loosened up.  Eventually my hips released all their tension.  I fell asleep my first night within minutes of putting my notepad down.  I always leave on such trips intending to attain a Zen-like mastery of my emotions, but they're really just an emotional roller coaster.  Just ask my mom, I cried at her for no good reason on Wednesday morning, but it wasn't alarming to me, it's just the emotions that come with an adventure.  My final day I was finally able to articulate my need for solitary adventure and here it is:

Why do this?  Why live through the fear and pain of an arduous solo vacation?  Because I have four limbs, 20 digits and more than 300 pairs of muscles, and they all work!  Because when those muscles stop working, I want stories to remember so I don't have to relive the same handful of events over and over.  I want stories to tell!  Because there are amazing things in this world and interesting people to meet and you only find them out in the wild.  Because I don't want to bust my ass building a career all the time, I WANT A LIFE!  I just want to live!  Because I think those moments when you have to stop and say "Oh my gosh, how amazing is it that I'm right here, right now, experiencing this great thing?" are critical to living a happy life.  A vacation guarantees I have those moments that make me stop and babble about how great things are right in this moment, just ask Brent about our climbing/mountain bike trips, I can't stop grinning and enjoying the great things we're privileged to because we decided to go up to wherever we are.  And because the most delicious pain in the work is the self-inflicted pain I feel after throwing myself against rocks, through running or biking or climbing, and I've missed it in all the mud-racking and desk-slaving I've done as a student.

So that's why I need vacations.  My mom called this my Neener-neener vacation, because I was essentially saying "Neener-neener, I'm going on vacation while you all start school and go to work."  But there were some philosophical underpinnings too.

I've got big plans for some science-laden blogs about my Great Salt Lake Spectacular(!), but before that I'll just throw out some pictures of the highlights of said Spectacular:

1. I tried to figure out my new tripod and camera on Box Elder Peak (bad idea), but also got to see my home (Logan) and my study area (Great Salt Lake wetlands) from one place (great idea).  I also met a man in his 50's (at least, maybe even 60's) going up and down and up and down the Wellsvilles via unconventional routes, he told me I was doing great.  I'm inspired.

2.  I got to sit on the Spiral Jetty all by myself for an hour.  That's never happened to me before.  I got to think about how the rocks must have changed being flooded and dried and flooded and dried over the last 40 years.  I got to think a lot of about salt.  I got to sit and just ponder, and that's nice.

 3.  I stood atop Frary Peak on Antelope Island and howled at the top of my lungs (literally).  I was timid at first, but found that the only way to really howl is to through your head back and use the full force of your voice.  It was invigorating.

4.  I got to float with a flock of Red-necked Phalaropes on the Great Salt Lake.  When the entire flock flew away it sounded like the wind rushing out of no where.  It was amazing.

I got to see a neon Great Salt Lake sunset and then run and hide from a thunderstorm in a tent I hadn't liked until that night.  I spent my entire kayak trip thinking "There's no way in hell I'm going to be caught by a Great Salt Lake microburst storm in a Duckie" then I got caught in such a storm in my silly little backpacking tent.  But the sunset was great and the storm passed, and I talked to my dad and mom that day, so the love of my family was fresh on my mind.  

I hiked Deseret Peak in the Stansbury Mountains.  I'd never been to these mountains, but I've been oogling this peak from my field sites for months now.  At 11,031 feet it was the highest point of this vacation and the highest point of the entire year.  This hike produced the most suffering (because it was Peak #3 on Day #3) and the most exclamations of "Holy sh*t, this is my life and it's amazing!"  These mountains are beautiful and rugged and there were only 3 other people in the entire wilderness area (as far as I knew).

I saw the remains of the Patch Springs fire that came through two weeks ago.  I thought I was actually seeing the fire itself, but it was just ash that got caught in the wind.  I also thought I was going to see another fire start due to impending thunderstorms, but that didn't happen either.  It was so cool to see first hand how fire moved across these mountains, the weird little patches of burnt trees uphill from entire mountain sides that burned.  I also came across years-old burns where smaller things like wildflowers and grasses had already come back.  And I rubbed some soot on my face, because that felt right.  

All in all it looked like this:

And you, my dear reader, have lots to look forward to on this blog because I'll be writing about pluvial Lake Bonneville and how the Wellsvilles looked during the age of the dinosaurs, the ecosystem of our mightly Great Salt Lake, and fire ecology.  There will probably also be extensive talk about how cool wetland plants are.

Farewell to an Amazing Grandpa

My Grandpa Fisher passed away and it's gotten my thinking in the way that the passing of amazing people should.  Really, it's been a long time since I really felt the need to use the term "passed away" instead of "died", but I remember now why "passing away" is such a comforting term.  My grandpa died peacefully in his home, and while it was unexpected, I am so happy he was with his wife in a place he could call home.  There is a big piece of me that feels regret for not taking more advantage of the time I had with him, but the largest part of me is grateful for the time I had.  After I got off the phone with my mom I was a little weepy, but immediately went in search of this picture, because it embodies pretty much every memory I have of my grandpa:

My grandpa was a story teller.  Every time I saw him he had a different story to tell.  It made it so every time I saw my grandpa I learned something new about him. Really.  The last time I saw Grandpa Fisher was his 90th birthday celebration, where I learned he dabbled in geology.  Seriously.  In 29 years of chatting, Grandpa's interest in mining hadn't come up because there was so many other interesting things he had done that we could talk about.  I can't be too sad about the things I didn't get to hear, because Grandpa had 6 kids and I don't even know how many grandkids.  I'm really looking forward to hearing what they remember.  I'm looking forward to talking to my dad, who used to go watch basketball games with Grandpa and chat about computers and who knows what.  I'm looking forward to talking to Aunt LM, who visited my grandparents on their mission (where she met her husband).  My sister, Liz, also has some great insights because she spent her summers chilling with Grandpa and Grandma while they were enjoying their retirement in the middle of nowhere.  And I'm dying to chat with my mom, who experienced so many terrifying vacations in a Motor-Home with Grandpa behind the wheel, learning about the country at 90 miles per hour.
Until then, I'll be reliving my happy memories of Grandpa.  Here are the highlights:

1.  Singing, especially The Piggy Song.  Grandpa lived a few blocks away from us for a few months of my teenage years, when Courtney and my cousin Sabrina were quite small.  I remember him sitting down with them and singing his version of "This little piggy when to market.  This little piggy staying home.  This little piggy was an boogy woogy piggy and boogy woogy piggled all the way the home."  If any one can supplement the lyrics that I've forgotten, I would love it.
My mom has also told us about thinking that Grandpa had written a song about her, MaryAnn.  It might have been childhood trust, but I think it was the convincing nature of his singing that made my Mom think the his MaryAnn song was about her.

2.  A flare for education.  It's been said that Grandpa doesn't like having a boss, but he loves working, and I definitely agree with that.  I chatted with Grandpa while I was getting a degree in wildlife and he talked about his experience travelling the globe with the Air Force and seeing the different biological communities around the Mediterranean Sea, the Philippines, Illinois...  He'd seen and really SEEN a lot of things.  When I got a Master's degree in water policy I found he had served on a county Water Board and still enjoyed talking about Prior Appropriation water law.  When he heard I was getting a PhD in Ecology he told me "I wish I had gotten more education.  I started studying geology, but the mine boss could pay me more to work rather than go to school, so I learned as much about geology as I could looking over the mine."  And I can only imagine what he learned about geology overlooking mines, because he had such a sharp mind.  My dad almost always spent time working on computers with Grandpa when we went to visit, and from what I could overhear, it was just as much learning and troubleshooting.  (And on a very selfish note, it is so great to have people supporting your education goals, at very dark times in this PhD journey, knowing Grandpa thought I was doing something worthwhile meant so much it actually produced a physical response, I had to hug him.)

3.  A Life Long Love. Grandpa was married to my Grandma until she passed, which was more than 10 years ago (maybe even 15, I can't quite figure it out right now). He's been married to Grandma Elaine since 2000 (?).  He knows how to commit and make it work.  Up until today, thinking about older couples living alone was the saddest thing I could imagine (really, just ask Brent about how much I cry in sad movies with old people, I cry a lot) because I always thought about Grandpa Fisher and Grandma Elaine and the Loves they have lost.  While I am very sad for Grandma Elaine, who has seen the death of 3 husbands, I am so happy that Grandpa may be reunited with Grandma in whatever afterlife exists.  Beyond this distance and sadness, the love I got to witness between my grandma and grandpa while they were both alive will stay with me forever.  My grandma had rheumatoid arthritis for much of her life, and it looked like Grandpa rolled with it really well, learning how to dress her, and what part of her appearance really mattered to her. Listening to their back-and-forth as they negotiated their way up my parent's home stairs was one of my favorite things, because they had it down packed if they were going to make it up they made it up, if they were going to stay in the car, we met them at the car.  And his sorrow when she died has been breaking my heart for 15 years now (she died when I was 14 or 15).  I remember the way he wouldn't follow her casket out of the church, and I don't know his reasoning, but I like to think it was because he preferred to remember her alive rather than in a casket.  What I remember the most is his distress while Grandma was in the hospital, feeling terrible because she was in pain and he couldn't stop it.  I could see his love evident in his pain, he would rather let his wife go than see her attached to ventilators and IV tubes struggling for breathe.

That there is really the most comforting portion of the death of my grandparents.  They are no longer alone.  They are with the people they married in the 1940s looking down on their progeny and laughing at our hilarity (that's what heaven is for me, lots of laughter).

So, if any of you have memories of Grandpa Fisher you would like to share, please tell me.  I'm so ready to hear about all the awesome things Grandpa or Grandma did that I haven't heard about yet.

And Grandpa, Grandma, if you're intercepting the Interwebs from your place, know that I love you.  So much.  I love the memories I have of you and I love the family you've raised that will keep those memories alive.

Update #1  - an amazing picture my sister Alex drew of Grandpa

Update #2 - an amazing picture my sister Courtney had of Grandpa with her and our cousin Sabrina

Lost Again

In my previous post I mentioned that we have a lot of GPS units out in the field, four to be exact.  Teaching my technicians how to use the GPS units has been tricky, to say the least.  Especially our cheap Garmin GPS units that belong to the lab.  The navigation system on those units is odd, they'll put you on track for your destination up until you get about 30 feet away, at which point they lead you in a circle around your point.  Really, a full circle.  This isn't a problem if you're walking around a playa or in short vegetation.  But in tall vegetation like Phragmites or hard stem bulrush, where each step is a battle, that extra circle is incredibly frustrating.  Add to this frustration, the fact that those units often need to have their compass recalibrated, but it's difficult to tell if it's leading you in a circle because it's wacky or because the compass is on the fritz, and you find yourself wasting a lot of time walking in circles (add to this the fact that they're trying to get within 1 foot of their goal when the accuracy of the GPS unit is about 3 meters).  I found myself getting a little annoyed at how long it was taking to learn how to use the Garmin's when I remembered the time I got lost following a similar unit and set my team back at least an hour.  

A GPS is a global position system that uses satellites to tell you your position on the globe.  They're a god-send for people like me who rarely know where they are.  Unfortunately, it's easy to become overly dependent on a GPS unit and stop paying attention to where you're going.  Such a thing happened in 2011 while I was going field work with the state.  I had a great time doing field work that summer, the crew I was working with was pretty rad and the mountain wetlands we were working in were also really sweet (except for the one's the weren't, those were heinous).  The job was to assess a random selection of wetlands from across the state, and they were disproportionately in the Ashley and Fishlake forests, which was great for me, I love those places.  My job on the crew was to assess the buffers around each site, defined as 100 meters from the boundary, then help describe the soils in four soil pits.  The way I had to assess the buffer was to walk 100 meters away from the site along a line to the north, west, south, and east.  A feat that was only possible with a GPS unit that not only gave me my bearing, but also told me how far away I was.  One of our final assessment sites that summer was not actually a wetland, but we had to assess it like it was. It was actually a conifer forest, which is cool, but I'm a wetland person, so I had no idea what to do.  The wetlands I work in are flat, you can see all the way across them and use pin flags to mark things like your center point or boundary.  Not do-able in forests, and there are no natural landmarks, just trees.  Trees everywhere.

Things were tense this day, maybe we got up too early, maybe it was a feeling like we were wasting time assessing a forest like it was a wetland.  Either way, it led me to make some poor decisions.  So here is a story of terrible decisions

1.  Not stocking up on batteries.  I looked at the GPS unit before I started and saw that it would die soon.  Ben had extra batteries, but I just wanted to get started and thought I could make it at least part way through so I set out toward the west.  Every 30 meters I stopped and looked at the cover of different types of vegetation (i.e., trees, shrubs, grasses), presence of invasive species, and influence of stressors like grazing and erosion.  But I only looked for these things in a 10 meter circle around me.

2.  Not looking back to see where I had come from.  I got tunnel vision, I only looked ahead of me to make sure I wouldn't step on a snake or something.  I never looked back to see if there were any landmarks that would get me safely back to my team.  I didn't even look to see if I was going uphill or downhill.  I got 100 meters away from my site, noted the coordinates of the end point and started following the GPS unit back to the center.

3.  Pushing on despite signals I was lost.  As I started my return journey to the center point I wandered off into the woods.  The GPS was changing it's mind an awful lot about where the center point was.  And for about 10 minutes I just kept following it.  It felt wrong.  A 100 meters is not a long distance, I should have stumbled upon my crew mates pretty quickly, but I didn't.  I couldn't even hear them.  I started looking around and trying to remember what I had wandered through.  Well, it was all trees.  Just stupid straight trees.

4.  Yelling and continuing to wander, rather than calibrating the GPS.  My family and I have a call that works like a charm when we get separated in the grocery store:  I yell "Ca coo!  Ca coo!"  and they yell "Ca ca! Ca ca!"  and through these calls we work our way together.  It works like a charm for Downards, but no one else seems to understand.  So I kept on my journey to nothing through the forest yelling "Ca coo!  Ca coo!" and listening for nothing.  Eventually I wised up and started calling for my co-workers.  "Ben!  Toby!  Alex!" and for the first time all summer they were silent!  At this point my resolve melted and I started getting cranky.  I kept thinking "Why are they being so quiet when I need them?"  and "Why is this GPS so stupid?"  and "Why am I so stupid?  There were fresh batteries in the backpack I was carrying."  It was a dark time.  Then I made a good decision.  

Finally calibrating the compass.  I finally stopped yelling and wandering I calibrated the compass.  To be clear, I hadn't calibrated the compass up to this point because I thought it would drain the remaining battery and I would be left holding a calibrated, useless electronic item (instead of the uncalibrated, lying electronic item I was carrying).  Once I finished turning two times in a circle (which is actually how you calibrate a compass), I found out that I was now to the east of the center point and headed back to the center.  Once there I started making bad decisions again.  

5.  Forgetting about jokes.  I got some batteries from Ben and he thought he'd be hilarious and do a bit from the cartoon Family Guy, but I was a little bit irrational and hadn't seen Family Guy, so it did not go over well.  It went like this:  

• Becka approaches quite composed,  relieved that I had finally found my position on the globe again; I told Ben why I was so late and had only complete 1/4 of the job I was supposed to do.  
• Ben says "It's not your fault."  
• Becka thinks, "Oh, I know what he's trying to make a joke about, but it is my fault." and walks away
• Ben says "It's not your fault."  
• Becka thinks "Calm down, he's being funny.  But it is your fault!  There were batteries there.  And now you've held the whole team up."   
• Ben says "It's not your fault."  
• Becka tears up and thinks "Quit being so sensitive.  It's your fault but he's trying to be funny."  
• Ben might have kept on yelling that after I was out of hearing distance, but turns out hearing distance isn't very far away.  

All of this seems kind of funny now, and is very humbling when I watch my technicians following the GPS in circles.  They're not holding me back at all, but I definitely held my crew back that day.  Best of all, my track was logged in the GPS so we could see that I just kept on moving and got very lost.  We could also see that I was never more than 100 meters away, even though I felt like I was on the other side of the mountain.  There are some good lessons out there for people who are often lost (you people who have a superior sense of direction can go somewhere else and celebrate your superiority):

1.  Always take the batteries with you.  

2.  When you're lost, quit wandering for a minute and get your head on straight.  

3.  Remember how to laugh, the Family Guy is not supposed to make your cry.  

 

Field Work Favorites

Sorry for the blogging hiatus.  I've been "in the field."  This means that I spend 12-15 hours a day travelling, working, and cleaning up after work.  The rest of my day is usually spent in search of food and trying to relax so I don't have dreams about being the field.  I'm three weeks into my field season, with one to go, and up until last night I hadn't had any field dreams.  I was pretty sad when I woke up this morning and remembered two points during the night where I had to sit up and remind myself that I was not out in the field, there was so no work that needed to be done, and that I needed to go back to sleep.  If it seems like I pack a whole lot of work into just a few weeks of the summer, it's true, but that's the way plant-based field work goes.  I need to survey the vegetation of my 50 sites within as short a period of time as possible, so that I'm surveying each site at a point where they are all comparable.  It's tough work, but not as hard as the work my technicians are doing.  That's right, technicians in the plural.  I thought this was going to be a wicked easy year, but because there's a critical mapping component that needed to happen, I've got a crew of 3-4 (and sometime 6) that I take out four days a week.  And they've been awesome.

Really, this season has gone far more smoothly than last year, but I still have a few complaints -
1.  I hate wading through cow poop.  There's too much cow poop in my wetlands!  There are too many cows in my way.  They're inconvenient and I hate them.
2.  It's hot.  Too hot.  It's drying up all my wetlands.
3.  I'm taking too much expensive equipment out into the wetlands, between the tablet, 2 lab gps units, an Archer gps unit, and the rtk GPS, there's a lot of stuff I could break/drown.

But all of these complaints have a bit of an upside
1.  Only one of my piezometers has been disrupted by a cow.  And by eating all day long, the cows might be opening up the canopy of some of the more invaded wetlands to allow shorter native species to come in (the juries still out on that one though).
2.  When wetlands are dry the cow poop dries and I don't have to wade through it.  And drought is a natural part of wetland hydroperiods (unfortunately, this might be too much drought).
3.  That expensive stuff is providing some really cool data.  And using my tablet makes it so I don't have to spend weeks entering all of this data (but I did really enjoy the 3 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I watched while entering my data last year).

I know it's a little early to pack it in and say Mission Accomplished, but I'm ready to post some of my favorite field work images, so here goes.

Those grey things in the water there are carp, they're a pretty big problem.   They grow huge and spend their days uprooting aquatic vegetation and terrorizing me (no joke, I kicked one on Friday and screamed like a little girl).  

I hope Chaco appreciates all the foot prints I've left in the mud. I sure enjoy them.  

This is Bull thistle, but growing up we called it a Man Eating Plant, and that's what it's doing there, eating my arm, obviously.  

Here you can see a lady bug, old Phragmites that has been sprayed with herbicide, and smoke from Phragmites fires in the back ground.  

One of my favorite grasses: Hordeum jubatum or foxtail barely.  I think it's pretty.  

Storms over the Promontory Mountains.  I've become a little obsessed with these mountains in the past few years.  Tragically, they're mostly privately owned, so you have to obtain special permission to hike to those peaks.  

Super awesome field technician, David, and his spirit animal - The Praying Mantis.  

Look closely, there's lots of damselflies hanging off the Kochia.  It's the only thing Kochia is good for.  

We were out in the field during that period of the summer they were measuring precipitable water - the amount of water that could be evaporated and come down in thunderstorms.  There were a lot of thunder clouds that missed us, but these one at least shaded us for some of the day.  

My cattail spear.  And Frog Togg.  

Wet lands?  

I really can't complain about days like this, we got a boat ride out to our awesome sites, and there were clouds.  And we never once had to push the boat out of the mud.  Luck was on our side that day.  

Double crested cormorants like to hang out of rocks and trees.  It's kind of an odd site, but also awesome.  

The most common marsh mammal around the Great Salt Lake.  This one completely justified my fear of cows, as it still has horns and was pawing at the dirt and snorting just like aggressive cows do in the movies.  

The field vehicle was having some problems, perhaps in part due to the air filter full of grass, seeds, and entire bugs.  

The rare Great Salt Lake Flamingo.  A mighty fine site for sore eyes.  

Evidence to suggest that this was once a wet wetland.  

Pelicans are pretty great, and in the mornings we get to see whole flocks of them flying overhead.  

I am very fond of mud, pickleweed, and adventures.  

Our very first rain and thunder storm!  Only downside was that we were in the middle of a pond with a 5 foot long steel auger and an rtk GPS on a 6 foot pole.  Don't worry, no one was hurt.  

My Wetland Warriors.  And the rtk.  

Marsh Mammal #2, the noble Phragmites deer, prancing gallantly through the marsh.  

Long billed curlew, one of my favorites.  They nest later in the season (around June) out of the playas, so they spent a lot of time harassing us while we installed piezometers.  

Wetland soils are the coolest.