in the rhythm of measuring

we’ve made some serious improvements to the system. butter served by the spoonful into morning oats, cheese consumed in bread like slices. neoprene arm cuffs keep cold water from penetrating wool within seconds every morning. and then the big “I” for improvement is the groove we have found together. we have a rhythm to our days now, to the tasks ahead, to the decisions and unknowns we face along the way. we often load the kayaks in silence, knowing intuitively where each item goes and how it’s secured. we accept a plot to measure, and we know who does what. I have started to love the moment when odin leaps in front as we approach the last 25 meters before a possible plot center. we pull the tape together, and with this excitement in his eyes, he asks “can I run it?!” he bushwacks his way up the last stretch, pushing aside the thick understory and crushing the downfall on his way to our spot. I come trailing behind, scrambling my way up and over, never able to see him just 25 meters away until I’m there at his feet, reaching for a log or limb to get back to my own feet. then there I am, sizing up the trees again and our day’s dance amidst trunks and ferns begins.

we are two out of four trips down, and I am starting to think it is going to fly by too fast. 17 plots down, 23 to go. we actually have to buy return tickets to the “lower 48” this weekend. I’m not sure when I’ll go for a lot of reasons. somehow three days of work and life seems to pack into one for us out there and yet the clock still races. it takes so much energy to do what we do all day, I can’t let myself think too much of another world until I crawl in the nest at night. I’m sure that soon we’ll have 40 sites, I’ll be sleeping in a bed, and the thick clouds of mysterious history in slocum arm will feel like a distant memory I will also miss. so I am making sure to savor these moments. oddly sometimes that competes with the only way to survive the really cold ones - thinking of the warmth of a home, food, missed friends on the other end. it is a strange irony.

everyone rallied for a 15 hour day, nailing two sites, two lunches (could have used a third), proving to ourselves that we could do it. our big "two" day took three valiant attempts, stymied by big waves, poor sites, or climbs too demanding to make it a “double.” we are going to have a lot of those on tap for this next trip. paul, odin, kate, chant “TWO TWO TWO” to get us in the mindset. our hands keep taking their abuse. I went on antibiotics for an infection in one from a series of splinters. paul might be up for a dose (see his frightening crack lower left, below).


the sun came through for our day off in the wilderness before flying back to Sitka. kate and I paddled the whale together to this site from old homesteaders and spent the day basking in the sun, photographing, walking amidst human history with the dead cedars lining the backdrop. i heard about the broken down cabin from an ecologist in the area and came across a tattered copy of a book written there in the 50’s when I was in California. for the past 6 months I have been waiting for the day, curious what it would be like to stand there. I felt a similar sense of wonder to what I feel amidst the cedar forests. There was a life there we could only imagine. I ran my fingers over a pair of old leather boots, soles worn out and peeling back. i thought of what paths they might have carved, what challenges and beauties they once encountered on the outer coast.

other highlights – humpbacks coming into the arm for refuge from the outer coast storms, partnered sand hill cranes flirting amidst cedars, sitka spruce some 7 feet in diameter, bear’s den, and salmon returning with the tide. some lows – we are now making a list of all the things that were supposed to be bomber but failed us. the list gets longer every day. Brunton compass can’t declinate anymore (too much condensation). The toughest rubber fisherman pants we could find are tattered and torn. Sharpee pens ain’t that sharp anymore and duct tape really has met its limits. though we’d like to thank Ibex for the prodeal, we should also tell them their longunderwear woolies were the first to tear. the list of things we can’t live without has Arc Teryx at the top of it along with neoprene and chocolate, chased by the thoughtful notes of support and love from friends and family when we dry out in Sitka.

we leave again monday for our biggest trip yet. i’ll be celebrating my “dirty 30” birthday in the woods -- surely being the dirtiest I have ever been. -lauren

snapleaf and the whale

My eyes slowly open as the pattering of raindrops on the roof of the tent moves from a dream to a conscious reality. I lift up my left hand, look at my watch. It’s 7AM. I hear Lauren stir beside me and after one big sigh I know that she means business. It’s time to get up. We both sit up stretch for a moment ramble to each other “warm…slept so well….could sleep forever….rain…need coffee…” We soon hear the boys wake up in the tent beside us. I unzip the tent flap, my body tenses up as the cool moist air infiltrates our dry warm sleep nest. Before I change my mind I swiftly unfold my cold, damp rain pants and slide them over my long underwear one leg at a time quickly followed by foot after foot into two equally cold XTRA TUFFS. One layer, two layer, three layer, four and I’m standing outside the tent reaching for my bear spray with one hand, the other rubbing my eyes, clinging to the last bit of warmth evaporating from my face.

I head over to the other side of the cove where we have set up our food and kitchen, consisting of a tarp and some flat rocks that Odin found to cook on. I heat up some water, pour heaping mounds of coffee grounds into everyone’s cups and rummage through the bear box for the trash bag that holds our breakfast food. Granola, powdered milk and dates. One after one the others arrive. Odin comes first, a tall figure moving along the edge of the declining tide outfitted in a large orange rain jacket, a wool hat, a soaking wet backpack, and a rifle slung over his shoulder. Odin starts to get lunch packed as Paul arrives smiling and feeling good, thoughts of GPS points, maps, and tree coring running through his brain. Next comes Lauren, radio in hand doing our morning check-in with dispatch and relaying a weather report to those people not fortunate enough to be in Waterfall Cove. We all sit and sip our coffee, scarf down our granola a little too quickly and proceed to get the camp squared away before we begin packing our gear into the kayaks. DBH tapes…check, quadrat poles…check, compasses…check, yardsticks…check, prisms…check, tree corers…check, tree tags…check, and so on.

All of the gear is loaded into the kayaks and we are ready to make our morning commute (as Lauren calls it) to the location of our plot for the day. Lauren and I climb into “The Whale,” our beautiful blue steed of a kayak. The boys push us off because we always manage to get stuck and away we go, soaring through the glassy water. The wind is hardly blowing and the water acts as a mirror creating the illusion that we are smack dab in the middle of two worlds. The mountains, the sky, and even the eagles soaring above are reflected one atop another and we are no longer paddling in the ocean water as we dip our paddles into the clouds and watch as the image of the sky ripples behind us. We are speechless for a while and then I utter from the front of “The Whale,” a distinct and increasingly louder “wooaaAHHHH.” We soon reach our desired location on the coastline so we come onto shore, unload the kayaks, and drag them above the high tide line. Packs on, we venture into the woods to tackle our plot. The forest turns into a relentless and aggressive jungle-jim almost instantly and before we realize what we are getting ourselves into we are crawling on hands and knees underneath fallen trees. Lauren has a close call as she falls through a root hole, now endearingly referred to as “child-eaters.” Odin bounds over an embankment that’s taller than him, only to pop up and yell back to the rest of us “don’t come this way!” Paul, our navigator tells us how far we have gone and much to our dismay, after an hour of intense climbing, falling, and hardcore bush-whacking he informs us that we have gone a measly 30 meters. 30 meters…in one hour…30 meters! After a lot of perseverance we reach our plot center and begin to flag it out. Odin and Paul begin to flag and take control of counting and measuring all of the saplings while Lauren and I go to the South and to the North to take notes on the less intensive satellite plots. When we return we eat a meal consisting mostly of tortillas. I then set out to measure tree heights with a laser rangefinder (so cool) while Paul takes DBH’s and hugs a few trees, and Lauren records and makes important decisions. Meanwhile Odin is hunched over, intently studying the under story plants, kneeling down every so often to count out all of the tiny tree seedlings.

Hands are sore, cold and pruny, bellies are hungry, and legs are tired but we finally finish. We have conquered the plot and everyone feels good. Pack up and head down the mountain back to our kayaks calling out to bears as we move. The kayak home is more tiring after a day of hard work and when we pull up back at camp everyone is tired and hungry. Two people work on dinner and one cleans the guns. When dinner is ready everyone gathers around and swears that this dinner is the best meal yet. The truth is that as each day goes by the meals taste better and better regardless of what they are. We then divide up a bar of chocolate, read some Tlingit stories from Odin’s book and head off to bed. Wet, cold clothes off and warm, dry clothes on. I have never felt so comfortable. I lie in my sleeping bag and as my eyes close I enter into the double world I witnessed earlier in the kayaks and enjoy the warmth of the tent until 7AM strikes again.
- kate

standing still in the cold

over the past two weeks we have been moving constantly. working hard to stay warm, measuring trees, paddling to sites, scrambling up/over/around every which way through downfall and regeneration, hanging bear bags, fetching water, cooking under tarps, dancing and singing loud to keep spirits up & the grizzlies away, and battling the steady chill of wind and rain on the outer coast. we are moving so much during the day, i have been waking with hunger pangs at night despite whatever we try to pack in during the day. some of the older mortality forests are so dense it takes us an hour to move a distance less than a city block.

after completing 86 kilometers of a coastal survey by boat to map the spread of mortality (big thanks to SCS and scott harris), we randomly selected 40 plots to measure this summer. so each day is like a treasure hunt – we have a point on a map, we have an idea about what we might see there, and then we try to find it by GPS, map and compass. i’ve built in safety clauses that come first before science. i think i am on the only one in the crew with a fear of heights. so around 60% slope when my heart starts to patter and i start hugging more trees for comfort, we reroute. we do the same sometimes for science. at times little spot X leads us to we boggy musqegs with few scattered trees on the edges of the productive stands, and then we have to reroute by our protocol again to find our plot for the day. it can be frustrating, working so hard to get to the place where we actually start our work.

there is a sense of anticipation amidst us all for that moment when we drop the stake in the ground, look up and the trees, and call out our plot number. R_03_31! Recent mortality, 3rd site, from coastal survey observation number 31. i am so focused on being present in my movement through the forest --- watching for patterns of plants and big trees as we move, finding my best route to avoid any injury, and listening for birds and wildlife. when i stand at plot center for that first time, it feels like meeting a new friend. I look up and start to think about the structure of the dead forest above and the new growing below. there are first impressions. i make those judgements, sizing everybody up, and know then that for the next 8 hours and then the years to come, that place will teach me a lot more on its own. if only I look hard and listen. there is an aurah of history in the white skeletons of cedar. then this curiosity about what booms below. a curiousity about the future.

my favorite task is the last of the day – when paul and I get to coring. his positive energy is relentless as he jumps from tree to tree and kate nails the heights. we have made all our measurements. i have my thoughts on what’s happening here. we have a roster of everybody in our plot “Yellow Cedar, Dead, Class 4… broken at the top…” “Sitka Spruce, big fatty DBH 40.3 centemeters…” when I pull out the core the years of each trees life unfold before us. it’s also a moment when I laugh at myself thinking, “how the heck did become one of those people geeking out over something like a splinter of wood?” and then I realize it is all about standing still.

something about our generation today especially has led to a lot of wandering. I’ve been a wanderer myself. scattering here or there, savoring each place and person in my life for the time, that smaller window. the tendency, the draw is to wander. I think people find it easier to hop from one job to the next, one place to the next, than to stand still, really commit to one, and accept all the challenges and then wonders that come with that. there are times I question what I am doing. especially in the harder moments... but the questioning doesn’t last long. despite all the moving day after day, i am standing still, getting to know a place deeper that I ever have with quite a group of committed, adventurous souls. it's not just any place -- but a carefully chosen one. we are out there on the edges of the outer coast, "frolicking" on the far margins of Wilderness. these lands are farther from “civilization” by any standard in the lower 48. they are intact and “pristine” – what those Hudson River School romantics would have painted if they had only been able to get here. landscapes that seem like remnants of the wilderness Thoreau pondered and what people once encountered in the old growth stands of the pacific northwest.

but here too, amidst the fog and vast open waters of slocum arm, these forests too are changing. we’re doing our best to learn how and why it’s important. i believe standing still has something to teach us. so tomorrow we go back. i need to eat another pound of cheese and spinach before then, but tomorrow we go back.

we’ll be out for another 12 day stint, back on the 22nd. thank you for the carepackages of fatty cookies and sweet smellin love. b & s at the roble ridge farm take the cake for the best homemade hippy granola ever. and thanks to a little california sun, i'm adding a "new" tshirt to the one sacred set of tent clothes that must stay dry at all costs.
-lauren

heading out

It's been less than three weeks since I arrived in Southeast Alaska, but it feels like it could have been four times that long. I suppose it's because there have been so many changes and developments while I've been here. My surroundings have changed incrementally as I've traveled from Fairbanks to Haines to Juneau to Sitka. Juneau, the town I grew up in, felt oddly alien now that my family have all moved away and I was visiting for work. A day or two before I left, I went out and visited "the glacier." It was so scrawny and anemic--hardly the valley-filling outwash of serrated ice that had been a backdrop to my childhood. Maybe some older Southeasterners have similar impressions of today's yellow cedar forests as ghosts of what they once were. Low snowpack has taken its toll on both glaciers and cedars.

This project is changing and evolving daily, as is my understanding of the subject matter and methodology. Lauren, Kate, Paul and Caitlin, one by one, have "evolved" from folks I knew only abstractly to real-life colleagues; to fun, interesting, and exciting people. Even the way I look at the Southeast rainforest has changed a lot since I arrived in Haines on June 5th. There are quite a few plants around here that are extremely common, yet just weren't charismatic enough to pry their way into my head. There's one called goatsbeard (Aruncus dioicus) that probably lines every single roadside in Southeast. Till recently, I had only a vague consciousness of it as a leafy, weed-like thing growing all over the place. Now, when I walk around town, I find myself paying as much attention to plants and trees as to streets, buildings, and mountains. There's goatsbeard and cow-parsnip next to that buttercup species we can't identify...and is that western hemlock or mountain hemlock growing above those plants? Occasionally, me and Kate (she's also focusing on understory plants) have been waylaid for many minutes trying to ID some roadside herb...or worse, stumping ourselves on a non-native plant in someone's yard, which wouldn't be in our plant guides and which neither of us would have much chance of knowing. We're probably in the early stages of understory neurosis...

I'm thinking about my experiences, and about the changes so far this summer, because I know these first few weeks have been only the tip of the iceberg, the "crown of the cedar," compared to what we're about to learn and experience. Slocum Arm is still pretty abstract to me. I've never been there. I know what it looks like on a map, and I've filled in that map with general impressions of the Tongass, Chichagof Island, the Gulf of Alaska, forests full of dead cedars. But I don't have any idea of what it actually feels like to be in Slocum Arm. I don't know what it will be like to stand on the beaches (are they rocky? gravelly?) and look across the fjord at rounded, glacier-scoured mountains reflected in the rippling ocean water. I don't know how I'll feel when I'm in the middle of a stand of dead cedar, clawing my way through six-foot-high blueberry bushes just like our friend the brown bear. I don't know how I'll feel after ten straight days of counting and measuring those six-foot-high blueberries. And, I don't know how the four (sometimes six) of us out there will relate to each other after two weeks of working and living together in the woods, in the brush, on the beach, on the ocean.

By the time we come back from this first trip, I'm sure my understanding of everything about this project will be totally different than it is now. It even seems likely that my entire understanding of the Southeast Alaska rainforest will have thorougly changed--if not right away, then at least by the end of the summer. I'm looking forward to it! ...I'm writing, of course, with the assumption that the brown bears and all the capricious spirits out there accept us as their guests, and let us live with them for a little while.

- Odin

preparation, action

Juneau seems like forever ago and Sitka is about to feel the same way. We take a boat to Slocum Arm tomorrow morning and somehow we managed some down time this afternoon. The past week has been a hustle of food and equipment prep, revising the research surveys plans, developing data sheets, working on digital data management, and a hundred other tasks. Lauren’s brain is a tornado of schedules, contacts, to-do lists, and action plans. She especially is doing a remarkable job of keeping her cool despite the manic schedule.

Juneau was great for me, typified by beautiful mountains, great trail runs, and GPS units. Lauren was mostly busy meeting with Forest Service ecologists and statisticians to hammer out the kinks in her in-field research design. I ran around town checking tasks off of to-do lists: color copies of topographic maps, dropping the car we were using at the ferry for the owners, picking up .44 ammo and mechanical pencils at Walmart, etc. It was a good way to see the city outside of the tourist zone near the enormous our boat terminals.

While in Juneau we took time for some recreation each day. Lauren pointed me towards trail runs up Perseverance trail along the first mining road in Juneau, along a fabulously challenging trail at the end of our driveway terminating at a secluded beach on Gastineau Channel, and up Mount Roberts to where the gondola stops and great views of the Chilkat Mountains, Juneau, and the channel. We swung past the Mendenhall Glacier, blue and over-run with tourists but isolated and beautiful in the winter. One afternoon in the Forest Service office someone stopped by trying to unload one of nine salmon she had caught but couldn’t keep for herself, which motivated an impromptu salmon bake at our house/base with some of Lauren’s friends from the area.

Juneau down town is a surprisingly cute city, if you can ignore the bizarre mechanical behemoths mounting the waterfront, filled with tourists. Most of the 30,000 people seem to live scattered elsewhere in the glacial valley, creating a car-dependant way of life for an area that isn’t accessible by road. I read the forests around Juneau offer 250 miles of recreational trails close at hand. While that sounds fantastic, there are no other options unless you leave the by plane or boat. I suspect this sort of isolation, particularly in previous decades, created the self-reliant attitude I am beginning to sense in Alaskans.

I learned a lot from my three days with Lauren. She has involved me (and Odin and Kate too) quite a bit in her tribulations developing the field research component, for which I am grateful – the alternative is to be a field grunt. Watching her go through this phase of her PhD reveals quite a bit about the level of commitment I would need to go into a PhD program – more than I have now. Her yellow cedar research has been years in the making, if only a year or so in academia. For her, having a sense of connection to a community and ecosystem is the foundation for her research. Southeast Alaska forest is the only place she would be willing to work this hard. I think about my own thesis work in forest carbon and more generally about how I relate to where I live and the ecosystems around me, how my connection seems weak compared to Lauren’s, and how I wonder where I am and to what kind of work I dedicate myself.

The froth of activity continued into Sitka. After the gorgeous and productive four-hour ferry ride, including a humpback whale sighting, Kate and Caitlin met as at the ferry terminal and we loaded up our big duffel bags, bear boxes, backpacks, and Pelican cases for the final bout of preparation. Caitlin is our handler in Sitka. A Stanford student, Caitlin is from Sitka and provides invaluable support in town for transportation, knowing who to talk to and where to get what we need, moral support, and (with her mother Stacey) baker of fabulous cookies. Lodging at the Forest Service bunks is a notable step down in quality from the wood-and-window house overlooking the channel in Juneau, but it will get the job done. Many of the same activities continued in Sitka – wrestling with GPS equipment, developing data collection details, and data management for me, research design and myriad other details for Lauren, and food, equipment, and camp logistics for Odin and Kate. Plus some training and meetings for us all.

Odin and I, bunkhouse buddies, have spent a lot of time together over the past few days. He is about to start a Master’s degree in Siberian cultural studies, having traveled to Siberia a couple of times on research projects. Raised in Juneau, Odin provides the team with Alaska street cred. I particularly enjoy his colloquialisms – a garbage bag is the Southeast Samsonite (after the luggage company), and he regularly calls garbage bags Samonsites. XtraTuffs, rubber boots that are the footwear of any reputable Southeast Alaskan and incredibly functional in the perpetual rain and drizzle of this part of the world, are the Juneau Tennies. I now own a pair, and they are function and style sublime.

I got to spend some time at the shooting range with the .44 magnum handgun and .338-caliber rifle we will be taking into the field with us as a last resort for grizzly bear protection. Nearly all of our bear-prep efforts are going into bear avoidance and conflict mitigation – keeping a meticulously clean campsite, making noise wherever we go, and interpreting bear actions to know how to act to alleviate difficult encounters. It sounds like there will be a lot of bears where we are headed, a density of around one per square mile, and encounters are inevitable if not common. I will consider my work complete when I see a big grizzly bear scratching his back on a tree.

Tomorrow morning we begin. It was easy to lose sight of the field experience when we have all been so focused on completing preparation tasks. I think we are all excited – we are well prepared, we have a solid research plan, and we will have a breathtaking backdrop in the Chichagof Wilderness. Wish us luck!

walking through time

after thinking about this project for about a year now, i traipsed amidst my first dead yellow-cedars. i couldn’t help but close my eyes and remember what i saw in the healthy forests in Glacier Bay National Park just a week ago. it felt like walking through time. i want to know what happens when the yellow-cedars die. we're not trying to predict where they’ll decline in this study. but, there, standing amidst the dead, i couldn’t help wonder – will i witness these changes further North in my lifetime? i looked up at the canopy and remembered the first fish eye photos i shot of the dense canopy cover in the healthy forests. there, in the dead, the canopy opened. the sun penetrated through. the sound, the silence, the way the wind moved through the forest, was distinctly different. yellow-cedars stood starkly above. below, the green boomed.

we are going to have one heck of a summer measuring trees and counting stems to figure out what happens next.

kate and odin took off to sitka to get our food together, piece together some equipment, and get down to some plants on the ground. paul and i spent the week in Juneau finalizing maps, troubleshooting GPS units, getting data sheets printed. he is a problem-solver and a determined soul. one of those always-positive-i-have-endless-energy people. i feel grateful for the team that has come together.

still haven’t figured how to get a photo album on this blog (no time or maybe it’s not possible)… so feel free to take a tour of facebook.

we leave at the crack of dawn tomorrow to boat out to west chichagof for our first two week stint. we begin at waterfall cove. we’ll soon be setting up base camp and marking the perimeter with flagging (and pee) so we all know “our territory.” really, it’s what the bear biologist recommends. with the temperature sensors prorgrammed, DBH tape, plant books, and tree borers packed (along with enough cous cous to feed a small army), and a new revised sampling plan thanks to stats captain steele, we are ready at last. more upon return July 8th…

first impressions

From above, the clouds are white and pewter, with small but steep ravines like rolling prairie hills cut by a stream. Descending through the clouds, tufts of blue flash above. Forested peaks take shape, scattered and emerging from the clear blue Pacific Ocean, and I see Alaska for the first time.

Riding the light rail to the airport felt like any other rushed trip around Seattle. I was sad to say goodbye to Marie for the summer, but not as sad as she seemed to be. I was amazed at how fast my stress and preoccupation with obligations of a few hours earlier dissipated after the plane took off. Waiting in Ketchican for my transfer, I enjoyed the last swigs of Seattle tap water from my bottle.

Lauren met me at the airport in Juneau. We’d Skyped for the interview and emailed plenty but it is still exciting to meet in person for the first time. Lauren had previewed the other teammates accurately: Odin is tall, competent, reserved, Alaskan; Kate is enthusiastic, industrious, and motivating. We met up with them at the easternmost house in Juneau, where miles and miles of national forest extend north and east, and the Gastineau Channel, long ago carved by the now-receding glacier, passes to the south. Lauren secured the house from her out-of-town friends, and it is beautiful and simple, with thick wood and abundant windows. The house is my first indication of Lauren’s knack for getting people excited about her work. After a team meeting we go to bed; Odin and Kate leave early in the morning to catch the ferry to Sitka. I will stay with Lauren in Juneau. I am surprisingly doubtless that this will be a fantastic project.