So, it’s occurred to me that in all my excitement to muse about the Sierra Nevadas and LA’s water supply, I have utterly neglected to describe a typical day on Semester in the West. I thought about this and realized that it’s probably impossible to describe “typical” on a program like this. This week, we’re doing ecological research in the forests of Utah, so I’ll settle for a typical day of ecology. We’re working with Mary O’Brien, a botanist/activist who works with the Grand Canyon Trust. She’s largely focused on documenting the problems with cattle grazing on public lands and trying to get the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to change some policies. I’ll probably talk about grazing a lot more in future posts. But anyway, here’s what our days look like.
0630—wake up, notice time, contemplate getting up, notice frost on sleeping bag, go back to sleep
0700—cook crew starts making breakfast (we have five cook crews of four people, so everyone cooks every five days)
0715—alarm goes off. get up, put on fleece booties, fleece pants and down jacket. hang out and read Cadillac Desert or check email.
0800—breakfast is supposed to be ready
0810—breakfast is actually ready, cook crew rings breakfast bell
0830—finish eating. Mary explains our work for the day, which sometimes takes up to an hour because it turns into a discussion about grazing and work she’s done with the Grand Canyon Trust.
0930—cook crew finishes dishes/cleanup. everyone packs sack lunches and reconvenes. By this time, people are starting to shed layers and look less like obese snowmen.
0940—a more specific explanation of our work, including dividing into teams, explaining for the fourth time that we should be nice to the GPSs, issuing data sheets, mass confusion about sampling methodology, lots of questions, more clarification and making sure teams are divided in such a way that each Suburban has a driver in it
1030—pile in the Suburbans (we have 3, each with 7 people) and head out
1031—Suburban 3 fails to make contact on radio check. Lots of gesturing out the window finally gets them to turn their radio on.
1032—sing-along to Dynamite by Taio Cruz, which we have unanimously voted to re-name “Galileo”
1035—recounting of traumatic childhood experiences and general bonding
1045—arrive at field work site. break up into groups and work, which could include counting cows, taking pictures of aspen, recording types of vegetation along a 200’ transect line or recording prevalence and height of aspen and willow plants along a stream with beaver dams
1500—finish field work and return to camp
1505—discover that returning to camp involves executing a 20-point turn on a Forest Service road. panic briefly.
1520—return to camp safely. enter data, have beers, hang out, read
1700—dinner cook crew starts
1800—dinner is supposed to be ready
1830—the smell of burning bacon wafts into the trailer
1930—dinner is ready after some improvisation. the dinner bell is rung. everyone gathers and dinner crew read a “humble”, which could be a poem about cows, Ed Abbey ranting about tourism, a description of regional geology or a lyrical description of land by Terry Tempest Williams, depending on who’s doing the humble. people eat, talk about shared cultural experiences (homestarrunner.com, Harry Potter, adventures in the TKE basement back at Whitman…)
2030—everyone crowds into the trailer to finish data entry, GPS photo linking and to study for our test on Sunday, which involves deciphering two journal articles about grasses in the West
2130—get into sleeping bag
2132—realize I have to pee, get up, pee, get back in, shiver briefly, read
2200—turn headlamp off and realize the full moon might as well be a spotlight. burrow into sleeping bag.
0200—wake up, realize I’m wearing a) not enough, b) too many or c) a good amount of clothes and a) put on an extra fleece and socks, b) lament the fact that my layers are going to be sweaty and gross in the morning or c) smile and go back to sleep
No comments:
Post a Comment