Time and Sage

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

            I keep waking up in the realm of 4:00 a.m., which encourages me to think about time. My perception of time has changed so much since arriving at Taylor Ranch, coming from a lifestyle in which efficiency and speed are among the most highly valued characteristics to be found in one person. The first days that I was at Taylor, I found myself fidgeting during long conversations—after all, I need to get stuff done, done, done! Now the days barely feel long enough for classes, schoolwork, chores and cooking, walking in nature, and writing letters. I am curious that my mind was able to meld so quickly into this busy-but-in-a-different-way lifestyle. Time is different in nature and in a lifestyle lived in the wilderness. People are more eager and willing to have meaningful conversations that last as long as necessary, and sometimes even longer than that. Time scales in geology are huge, and it takes thousands of years for certain processes to take place. It’s also interesting to consider the temporal scale and its relation to seasons—how does an animal prepare for hibernation in the face of changing onsets of seasons due to climate change? Animals in the Frank Church-River of No Return have much less contact with humans than the animals residing in suburbia, so I wonder if they feel less or more pressure to gather food and to guard their territory. I wonder if animals sense time, and to what degree they are being affected by climate change in terms of plants growing and dying at different times, different migration patterns, etc.

Big sagebrush

The first snow on the ridges outside our window! September 26, 2013

            I like to spend time an in area east of Taylor Ranch that I have christened the new Sagebrush Flat. This place seems much more deserving of that name than the actual Sagebrush Flat, because several hundred sagebrush bushes cluster together here. The river also widens and calms, flowing slowly by this flat plain surrounded by burned trees, rocky slopes, and grasses. The smell is soothing—simultaneously richly fragrant but also understated. The wind blows continually on this gloomy day, and on particularly strong bursts, it takes the vile of sage out from under my nose and replaces it with cool air laden with the prospect of snow. Once the wind settles again into a steady breeze, I rip off a section of the foliage, crush it with my fingertips, and rub the scent all over my hands. As I wander closer to the river, I spy a Douglas fir tree, and I pick a needle, and inhale its bracing and invigorating scent, such a pleasant deviation from desert aromas to a reminder of the woods. The wind forces fierce raindrops onto me, the strength of the sage fades, and the fragrance of the cool earth wafts up to me.

First Photos from Taylor Ranch

Big Creek

Welcome to Taylor Ranch!

DeVlieg Cabin

The welcome sign on the airstrip

A beautiful morning sunrise from the porch

The Journey to Taylor Ranch

The Semester in the Wild crew has officially arrived at the Taylor Wilderness Research Station (also known as Taylor Ranch), which is located in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. I'm very happy to be here because it was quite a long and confusing journey!
The original plan was to hike into Taylor Ranch from the Big Creek trailhead. This is about 35 miles, and we planned to spend several days camping along the trail while working on our River Ecology curriculum. We spent three nights at the trailhead working on data collection on upper Big Creek, and we also studied salmon ecology. The Forest Service told us about a fire that was about 20 miles down the trail, and asked us to hike in 15 miles so that we could meet two wilderness rangers who would then escort us through the portion of the trail that was closest to the fire. The 15-mile hike followed Big Creek the whole way, and the group did well working together to plan breaks and set a pace that everyone could follow. When we met the wilderness rangers, they told us that they had just heard on the radio from University of Idaho that it was too dangerous to try to be escorted through the burn area, and that we should turn around. This was a bit discouraging, but the. If there is anything I learned this summer, it is the importance of flexibility, especially when working or traveling in the wilderness.
We spent two days hiking back to the trailhead so that we could cover more River Ecology material. Since the Big Creek trip also includes an airstrip (the wilderness area is so vast that many people use their own planes to access various areas), we thought that the mail plane that goes to Taylor every Wednesday might fly us to Cabin Creek, which is six miles from Taylor. Then we would spend a couple of days doing more data collection and hiking to Taylor. However, we actually ended up getting picked up in two huge Suburbans and we headed back to the McCall Outdoor Science School (MOSS), where we had started our program. After two days of doing some River Ecology work, we ended up driving to Cascade, Idaho to fly out to Taylor. I immediately saw the airplane that would take us there, and I got extremely nervous. Standing next to the plane, I was taller than the wing! It held four people including the pilot, and it was not too terribly turbulent, although I did take some motion sickness medicine. Once I got over the fact that we were in such a tiny plane, I started looking out the window and enjoying the views. We could see so much of the wilderness areas, and we were actually able to see a fire burning on the mountain top. In order to land at Taylor Ranch, the pilot flew past it, turned completely around, flew back, turn around again, and landed on a grass airstrip that is adjacent to Big Creek.
We've been at Taylor for four days now, and it's been a flurry of settling in (some of our stuff is still arriving on the mail plane), doing river ecology work, and trying to finish up assignments for other classes. The setting is absolutely spectacular, and I will have to describe it more in another post.
I can feel the cool air moving through the valley that Taylor Ranch is nestled on, and the onset of autumn is approaching. Pete and Meg, the caretakers at Taylor Ranch, said that as it gets cooler, we won't have to worry about rattlesnakes quite as much.
The internet is too spotty for adding photos to the blog, but I will do my best to describe it with words!

Wilderness and Protected Area Management

Today was the first day of classes, and I already had homework! Below is a journal entry I wrote for my Wilderness and Protected Area Management course.

Prompt: What are the primary values you find in wilderness?

            Lately I have been thinking a lot about wilderness for the sake of wilderness, which I think would fall under the existence values category. Humanity as a whole (with some exceptions, of course) is innately anthropocentric; we often prioritize our own needs or desires ahead of what we believe to be important for the conservation of natural resources. However, there are indeed numerous benefits to preserving wild places in terms of ecological values. I find it very difficult to analyze the benefits of wilderness from the biocentric philosophy because it’s hard to completely remove myself from the analysis, but ecologically speaking, having large tracts of untrammeled land available to animals and plants is absolutely critical in slowing edge effect.

There is also something to be said about the strengthening of human relationships through time spent in wilderness. I spent the summer as a wilderness ranger intern in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. This very recent experience allowed me to spend most of the summer in the wilderness, and I gained strength, self-confidence, and true friends. I had never spent more than a day or two in designated wilderness, and then in June, I found myself catapulted into a remote backcountry setting, doing back-breaking trail work. Throughout the summer, I began to realize that I was experiencing the simplest form of happiness available to the human spirit: demanding physical labor with its accompanying satisfying exhaustion and strong foundation of community. I also struggle with how to record and put into words some of the experiences I had this summer. How can I possibly describe the sense of accomplishment I felt after hiking for 14.5 hours with a full pack? Or my newly found talent of falling over with a pack when I laughed too hard, amused by my fellow trail crewmembers? To me, wilderness means community, from discussing what “Wilderness with a capital ‘W’ ” means over a dinner in the backcountry, to comparing hitch stories at the end of the season, to attending fundraisers and seeing how many people from all walks of life support wilderness for one reason or another.

Semester in the Wild group

Hitch 4: Otter Creek/Little Copper Butte structure work

Well, I'm headed off to my fifth and final hitch of the season tomorrow, and before I leave, I wanted to post some photos from the past hitch. This hitch was focused around the same trail as the last hitch, but this time, instead of cut and run (when we are just clearing the trail), we worked on building check steps, which help prevent trail erosion. Building check steps involved felling trees, debarking these trees, sawing them into five foot sections, and then digging trenches in the trail to bury the check steps in. We had a fairly large crew on this hitch, so the conversation was lively, and morale was high, despite overzealous mosquitoes and a few rainy days. We were car camping on this hitch, meaning that we were able to eat more fresh food than on a normal backpacking hitch, which was a real treat!

One of the highlights of the hitch was going up the road from our campsite about one mile to the Indian Hill Fire Lookout. Larry, who staffs the fire lookout, invited us up to visit him. It was his birthday, so we made him a cheesecake (this is a big deal when you're camping) and we got to chat with him about what his duties are as a fire lookout. We really felt like we were witnessing history being able to spend time with a fire lookout. As the fire lookout towers burn down, the Forest Service is not rebuilding them because it is much more efficient these days to use planes to monitor and scout for fires. We heard planes every day, going over the wilderness to report on fires. This brings to mind a few questions: how is this change influencing wilderness character? And isn't there something to be said about preserving the historical ways of doing things, instead of replacing them in the name of efficiency? I've been thinking about the latter question a lot this summer since we use cross cut saws instead of chain saws in the wilderness. I truly believe it is important for us to learn these methods of trail work and remember that the "new" ways of doing things may not always be the best, or the most interesting.

Mara and I try to be serious as we pose next to the first tree that we felled on our own, using only an ax and a cross cut saw!

Indian Hill fire lookout

Packing lots of produce for car camping

Meet Deerhunter, the Montana Conservation Corps (MCC) vehicle that I sometimes drive.

The fire finder in the lookout tower

Larry the fire lookout shows us all of his maps.

Looking at the beautiful layers of mountains.

Mara, Kristina, and I with Chip, one of the lookout dogs

The group listens to Larry tell us about life as a fire lookout

Elevation of the fire lookout

View from our daily hike to the portion of the trail we were working on. It was neat to see clouds below us!

Fireweed

Days Off

I always experience an interesting feeling during the summer, particularly in late July and in August (these are what I think of as the “dog days” of summer). At times, the days seem to stretch on and are full of potential, even in the lull of late afternoon. I love the feeling of having enough daylight to be outdoors for a while, and I’ve barely used my headlamp this summer, although that’s also because I usually fall asleep by 9 pm when I’m in the field! After weeks of the wonderful feeling of having lots of time, the middle of August confronts me with the startling realization that the summer is coming to an end. Between eight day long hitches in the backcountry and many adventures on my days off, this summer has been a whirlwind of unpacking and repacking. It has certainly gone quickly, but I think I have packed a lot into it, and have been able to enjoy my time off.

I’m writing one blog post to encompass all of my days off. My schedule for the summer typically was an eight-day hitch in the backcountry followed by 4-6 days off. These large chunks of time lent themselves well to adventures, and I tried to maintain the difficult balance of exploring new places and also relaxing.

After my first hitch back in June, I had five days off, and I ended up going on a somewhat spontaneous solo trip to Seattle (how’s that for alliteration?). I had been to Seattle once before in middle school, and I was excited to explore the city after spending time in the backcountry. I arrived in Seattle without much of a plan, but after a couple hours, I secured a bed in a beautiful, clean, and affordable hostel only two blocks from downtown. I spent two nights there, and filled my days with visiting the Space Needle, leisurely wandering through the stalls of Pike Place Market, and eating delicious food. Although finding free parking in Seattle was a little stressful, once I left the car, I enjoyed navigating the city by foot. It was fun to see people from all over the world at the hostel, including France, the UK, and Japan.

Several weeks ago, one of the other interns, Kristina, and I decided to spend a few days camping at Tin Cup Lake, which is in the Bitterroot National Forest portion of the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness. We never work in this district, so it was fun to check out a new area. We hiked in 11 miles and set up camp on the shore of the lake. The next two days were a combination of reading an entire book (Indian Creek Chronicles, which I read in preparation for my upcoming semester in Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return wilderness), eating lots of fruits and vegetables, and picking huckleberries. This short trip did me a world of good, because I remembered how much I enjoyed recreational backpacking, rather than just doing it as part of trail work. We had a lot of fun once we realized that we could eat lunch whenever we wanted to, stop for a swim break, and have a completely unstructured schedule. On the last night, we began to see a smoke column from behind the mountains that framed the lake. The smoke gradually turned to be a simultaneously beautiful yet eerie color of orange. I should also mention that we were completely safe, since the fire was far away.

For my most recent days off, I drove to Bozeman, Montana, to visit with a high school friend and her sister and brother-in-law. It was great fun to stay in their beautiful apartment and to wander around downtown Bozeman, and just catch up with a dear friend who I haven’t spent much with during the past two years. As much as I have loved spending the majority of the summer sleeping in a tent and eternally covered in a layer of grime, I equally enjoyed being clean and dressing up when we went out to dinner. I was also fortunate enough to be able to meet up with my high school science teacher who was in town. Reconnecting with people from my past was exactly what I needed to unwind.

            I think that I tend to always look at adventures as being 100% fun, and glossing over the part that is challenging. Coming out west to work in the largest area of wilderness in the lower 48 was certainly an adventure with huge challenges, but also contained the sweetest rewards imaginable, including complete solitude, sunsets, sunrises, swimming holes, laughter, and happiness. Through long days of hiking in sweltering heat, sometimes struggling to find a water source, and fighting off seemingly inevitable blisters, the summer was much more mentally challenging than I thought it would be. But from these challenges, friendships, insight, and a huge amount of self-awareness have arisen. I have gained a ton of backpacking experience, and a type of self-confidence that will transcend my life, even when I’m back in school. In my opinion, the most important part about adventures is that the highlights outweigh the challenges. Hiking for 14.5 hours straight or digging check steps for eight days actually end up making really great stories, and the moments of connection to the landscape and the people around me are the most important things I remember from this experience. I have been so fortunate to see such a remote area of the country, and to have indescribable feelings of peace and pure relaxation.  

Seattle city scene

A mural in Pike Place Market, Seattle

Space Needle

Enjoying the view from the Space Needle

Beautiful flowers at Pike Place Market

Exploring Beaver Ridge and Beaver Lake. This was a great swimming spot!

A wonderful swimming hole on the hike into Tin Cup Lake.

Grouse

View from above Tin Cup Lake

Exploring the area around Tin Cup Lake

Tin Cup Lake

Smoke from a wildfire

Visiting in Bozeman