After a week at work in Alaska and a wonderful week back home in Chicago at the CLM intern training I am back in Fairbanks, AK and officially settled in to my new home for the next 8 months. The first few weeks of my job have consisted of mostly office work and trainings, and so I was quite excited when I finally got the opportunity to go out into the field the other week. I shall recount that story here.
Twenty minutes before some fellow interns were to go out in the field to fix a water catchment system at a cabin and survey trails, I found out that I would be able to go with them. Even though the weather was less than ideal, I jumped at the opportunity to get out to the field for a few days. Despite the rush I was ecstatic to finally be getting out to the field—might have even leaped for joy at one point…
We ended up leaving Fairbanks around 5 for the foggy and damp 1 hour drive to the White Mountains. Upon arrival, however, we discovered that one of the interns had forgotten some essential items—namely water for himself and the garbage can lid that we were to use to replace the water catchment system. So we ended up driving back to Fairbanks, buying a garbage can lid, then driving back to the White Mountains, arriving back at the trailhead and beginning a ~8 mile, ~4 hour hike at 8:30 PM. Good thing about Alaska in the summer is you don’t have to worry about the sun setting on you.
At this point the rain had picked up and the weather was generally pretty miserable. The trail was in poor shape—the majority of it was flooded and areas that had boardwalks or wooden planks were mostly rotted away or broken. We began the hike, often sloshing through standing water, climbing up and down mountain ridges, over fields, through spruce forest, never able to see much more than 30 feet from us due to the fog and rain. We forged onward and ended up at the cabin at around midnight, cold and drenched to the bone. We used the dregs of a few small propane bottles to heat up the cabin a bit, changed out of our wet clothes, read by the Alaska midnight sun for a bit, then fell asleep.
In the morning that beautiful wizard Mother Nature sent bright rays of sunshine through the tiny window of our cabin. We awoke to an absolutely gorgeous day and even more gorgeous view of the surrounding mountain side and foothills that had previously been entirely shrouded in clouds and fog. Our spirits much higher, we fixed the water catchment system and enjoyed the views. I took a trip around the cabin area to check for invasive species (none found, yay!) and we started the long walk back.
No invasives, just lots of spruce.
The morning/early afternoon was absolutely gorgeous and afforded us some beautiful views that overcast conditions had hidden from sight the day before.
What previously looked like Mordor is now a pleasant hike.
Shortly, however, that evil sorceress Mother Nature sent from the other side of the ridge an ominous dark cloud that promptly settled above our head, let loose an enormous thunderclap and began to quite violently spit hail at us. We plodded on. On our way back along the trail, we stopped to take GPS points and denote the condition of the trail, boardwalks, and wooden planks. One of these stops occurred when the rain had briefly subsided. I counted 57 mosquitoes on just my fellow intern’s legs at one point in time during this stop.
In time we finished the hike, again sopping wet and chilled to the bone once we arrived at our destination, but content on having accomplished something.
Since this adventure I have been back in the office. Currently I am working on getting up to speed on NISIMS (National Invasive Species Information Management System), and loading data onto Trimbles for an upcoming trip to Chicken, AK to inventory for invasives. In addition, I am using GIS and some good ol’ fashioned maps to locate rare plant populations that are accessible by trail and/or river float for future monitoring trips.