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.  

Slices of Heaven

I admit it, I'm a sucker for things like this article about "Little Slices of Heaven," these are memories or thoughts that provide a nice mental get away no matter the setting.  I'm not always sure about lists and research I find on the HuffPost, but this one makes sense: happy memories can lift your mood, even when you can't get out of your cubicle.  I was only mildly inspired by the 'slices of heaven' presented there, so I made my own list.  Originally I intended to find pictures of my top 25 photographed memories, but that was difficult, and since I was setting my own rules anyways, I decided to go with collages. Admittedly, these are limited to things I have pictures of (turns out I have a lot of pictures), but I like to think they encompass many of the people, activities and experiences that make my life great.  Here, in random order are my 25 slices of heaven, the tastiest little pieces of my life's pie.   [There are links here to other blog posts about these slices of heaven, they're a little excessive, but feel free to click on them if you're curious about why these slices are so heavenly.]

1.  The Great Salt Lake.  Big surprise here, right?  The Great Salt Lake is a hyper-saline, terminal lake located in Northern Utah, and it's awesome.  Being hyper-saline, the lake supports a unique ecosystem based on the brine-shrimp and brine-fly, and the freshwater and brackish wetlands that fringe the lake support millions of migratory birds every year.  And it's where I do my field work.  I love it very much.

2.  Petroglyphs and pictographs.  Petroglyphs, seen on the left, are images carved into rocks, while pictographs, seen on the right, are images painted on rocks.  Both can be found in some great places in Southern Utah and it's pretty great to sit and ponder how old they are and what they might mean.

3.  Sandstone.  Sandstone is formed where sand has accumulated, settled, and become cemented through precipitates that bind grains together and pressure that compacts sand.  Sandstone often forms great topographic features like cliffs, canyons and towers (see #11).  Wingate sandstone is my favorite, because it forms splitter cracks and often has a varnish of minerals that make it extra sticky.  Compared to harder rocks (see #18 - Granite), sandstone is easily eroded, and wind, water and time make really interesting features that are great to hide in (obviously).

4.  Niblings.  Saturday Brent told me "niblings" was the term for nieces and nephews, and I like it (and the Wikipedia dictionary agrees with it).  My sister's kids have made my world a better place just by existing.  I think they're great to hang around with.  And my phone is full of pictures of them, which means I can scroll through memories of them whenever I please.  I brag about them a lot, (see here).

5.  Biking.  I enjoy riding bikes.  I've got some really great memories of the freedom I felt riding my bike as a kid, and I'm finding that more as I get into mountain biking (but this wasn't always the case).  I also enjoy a nice road bike trip every once in a while.  I've got some great friends to go on these rides with me and I think that's what makes biking so awesome.

6.  Friends.  I've been blessed with many great people I can call friends in the last 29 years.  I've recounted some of our adventures here and here and here.  And here's to many more.

7.  The Cactus Spectacular.  In 2011 I cashed in a travel voucher for a trip to Tuscon, Arizona to Saguaro National Park.  It was so great!  I spent 3 days trying to find as many different species of cactus as possible and learned lots of fun facts.  The cactus forest is an amazing ecosystem with a unique suite of plants adapted to an exceptionally dry life (with chances of monsoons).  Cacti are the raddest plants around.  Unfortunately, I was not blogging about it as the time, so there are no links here.

8.  Rock climbing.  It's probably well understood by now, but I really enjoy rock climbing.  I like climbing on sandstone quite a bit, in part because the views are very dramatic.  I like climbing on Logan Canyon limestone, too.  And granite, oh gritty granite, I like that a lot too.  Climbing rocks is lots of fun. In addition to the physical fun of choosing the most challenging route possible to get to the top of things, rock climbing is a good time to bond with my awesome climbing peeps.  

9.  Oceans.  I live in a very dry, landlocked state.  But through the miracle of vacation and airplanes, I've managed to visit the ocean a few times in my life.  I got to see dolphins and ponies in the Atlantic Ocean (upper left - thanks, Eric, for the picture and the chance to go to Maryland), shorebirds on Lake Superior (I've heard that region called the North Coast, and since it's an inland sea I'm counting it here), glaciers and rainforests leading right up to the Pacific (lower left), and snorkel the warm water off the coast of Cancun.  I think the ocean is an essentially soothing place.

10.  Winter sports.  Winter is a key part of the climate in these parts, nothing is growing, but it's when most of our precipitation falls in the form of snow.  Snow makes skiing, snow shoeing and polar plunging possible, and that's pretty great.

11.  Towers.  Climbing a desert tower is probably the coolest thing I've ever done.  On our first trip together Brent and I climbed Castleton Tower (top left), and we've been climbing more on every trip to Moab since then.  The best summit was probably Ancient Art (lower left), its tiny and interesting and people recognize it. My proudest climbing moment may have been leading Independence Monument (center), while one of my silliest moments was forgetting how to chimney climb on the Three Gossips (upper right), and there were definitely some dark moments when we were stuck on Lighthouse Tower. But mostly, tower climbing has been excellent.  

12.  Lonely trees.  I'm a tree hugger, no question about it.  But some trees are asking for it more than others.

13.  Birds.  I think birds are rad.  They can fly and lay eggs and they have feathers and they sing.  Altogether, birds are lots of fun to watch.  Ducks and shorebirds are my favorite, in part because they are large and easier to identify.  Part of the reason I'm studying wetlands is that I enjoy studying places I can get some incidental birding done.  The ruddy duck (the bird with the blue bill picture below) is my all time favorite, no bird is better.

14.  Epic adventures.  In any season there are adventures to have and substrates to write on.  This makes me happy.

15.  Cache Valley.  I live in a great place, occasionally the weather is too extreme for me, but for at least half the year the weather is pleasant.  There are excellent mountain views, some sweet buildings, and many nice cool places to set up a hammock.  Plus I'm 15 minutes from limestone rock climbing and 40 minutes from a ski resort.  What better set up could I ask for?

16.  Flowers.  Most of the worlds plants, the phylum of Angiosperms, reproduce through flowers.  These plant naughty bits are what I'm looking for when I identify plants, and some families are more modest than others (think of finding flower parts on a sedge versus a rose).  The showy parts of plants bring me lots of visual joy, and they're the precursors to the fruits that bring me lots of tasty joy.

17.  Lost World Butte.  The trip Brent and I took to Lost World Butte might have been our best vacation ever.  If you're up for it, it's described in detail here.

18.  Granite.  I know, how many different ways can I say I love climbing?  Many more.  Granite is metamorphic rock, as opposed to the sedimentary rock mentioned in # 3.  Most of the earth's crust is made of granite, which is formed from cooling magma.  Most mountains are composed of granite.  The weathering process produces cracks, ledges, slabs and aretes that present endless climbing challenges.  There are several granite adventures cued to be blogged about.

19.  New Haircut Face.  I don't know if this is a universal slice of heaven, but it should be.  One day, my gorgeous mom and sister got a haircut, and made the face in the top left corner of the picture below.  Yeah, it was because it's hard to take a selfie with an iPad, but we (my family) like to think its because of the haircut and have re-created it whenever possible.  [Of note, the picture on the top right is from 2008, Dad has been making New Haircut Face for decades now.]

20.  My Garden Domain.  I have a garden in my backyard that brings me endless joy and relaxation (and a trap-stamp sunburn I'll talk about sometime).  I've got a well documented love of plants (see #23 - Wetlands and #16 - Flowers), and I really love that I can control most of them in this little space.  Most of the plants that grow are those that I planted, and they grow in nice straight rows.  And they're delicious.  The time I get to spend weeding, planting and harvesting are some of the best in any week.

21.  Naughty Scotty.  My brother is studying to be an engineer.  It seems appropriate that he would engineer a weapon out of a hamper and armor out of a box.  Scott's got skills that keep us all endlessly entertained.

22.  Surviving.  There have been a few times while I was adventuring that I thought, "Oh, this feels dangerous."  Yet, I've survived it all, and that makes me happy.  Wind stranded me on a beach, but I still made it away safely.  I thought I might die by lightning/flash flood, but didn't.  I thought I could climb Mt. Hillier and ran out of water, but that was ok (sorry, no blog post about that yet).  I once spent the night in a rest stop, and that was just fine.  And a moose never kilt me.  Altogether, I've never died, and that's a lot of fun.

23.  Wetlands.  So, I love wetlands very much.  I think they're super cool, being able to persist in both flooded and drought conditions, producing so much excellent habitat (see #13 - Birds), and providing critical ecosystem services.  I get to spend my summer mucky around wetlands and oogling plants, and in no way is that a bad thing.

24.  This guy who is willing to take some many pictures with me.  The other day I put together a slide show of our highlights from the last year and Brent said "There's a lot of couple pictures there."  It's true, the things we do together are definitely highlights of my year, and I'm glad that Brent indulges me in taking pictures together whenever we go somewhere new.  It's pretty great.

25.  Family.  My family is the best family in the world, there's no doubt about it.  There's also no doubt that they are silly people who must take a goofy picture whenever we all get together for a less-goofy picture.  We go on great vacations and generally enjoy all ourselves whenever we get together.  My family made me the way I am and I'm very happy about that.

Well, I don't know about you, but my mood is improved.  All the smiling faces and excellent adventures that I get to be a part of are just pretty dang great.