Forty
Four Days & Forty Four Nights:
Fire Ecology in the Nevada Desert
I
spent the summer of 2016 in the Nevada desert doing research for the geography
department. It was hot.
I was miserable. The desert just
sucked the energy completely out of me.
It hardly ever rained. I was
lucky to get a shower once a week. The
work was extremely mundane and repetitive. You might ask, “Was it worth it?” I myself was not sure until a few weeks after
returning from the final research trip. I
then started to uncover the deeper parts of the experience beyond being miserable,
and beyond science. As time passed, I
discovered that I now look at the world through a different lens. After spending forty four days in Nevada over
two and half months, I realized that I could now live less superfluously. I began to look and think about people less
advantaged than me with empathy and understanding. My experiences in the desert changed me. I could hear others’ stories and really
listen.
The entire adventure began sometime in February 2016. I started thinking about where I might want to
work for the summer. One day, after my
Earth Analytics course a graduate student named Adam came up to me and asked if
I was interested in being his research assistant for the summer. I asked him a little about it, and learned
the details over a beer. We were going
to be traveling to north central Nevada to conduct fire ecology research. We would take three to four two week trips
over the course of the summer. We would
be camping for a few weeks at time and then traveling 1,000 miles back to
Boulder for a week off between each trip.
I told him that I was interested, and the next week I applied for a
summer Undergraduate Research Opportunity Grant. I wanted to do this, because I ended up
getting the grant, extra work study, and pay from the Geography department on
top of it all.
Around April, as the semester reached its’ climax, I started
to prepare for the summer. The research
required Adam and I to build equipment for the summer. On a Saturday in April, Adam and I got
together to work on building a monopod to measure percent vegetation
cover. After four hours, we had pieced together
a semi-workable design. It was mostly
constructed from PVC pipe. The monopod
broke down so that we could carry it along in our backpacks. We tried it a few times, in clear weather,
out front of Adam’s apartment. It seemed
to work well for the intended purpose. However,
we failed to test it in true desert conditions.
This would come back to haunt us early on.
The spring semester was coming to a close in Boulder, CO
and I was beginning to think about the first upcoming research trip. This was the same period that I started to
move out of my apartment. Except I was
not moving in to a new apartment. My
plan was to store my belongings for the summer, and couch surf when I was back
in Boulder in between trips. I stored
some belongings at a farm near Berthoud, CO and the rest in six other locations
around Boulder county and Denver. It was
quite a hectic process, and it made me very nervous. I also left some things in my car, which I
parked on the street near the place I would eventually move into in August. It was at this point at which I started think
that this experience could be a tough one.
I thought, “How am I going to survive?”
The first day of the trip was May 10th. We packed the car up to the roof with ninety
percent field gear, and ten percent personal belongings. All I had was a sleeping bag, a change of
clothes, a tent, and a small daypack.
Adam had about the same amount, other than some cooking equipment which
we shared. The rest of the white
all-wheel drive Chevy Sport Utility Vehicle was full of boxes of field
gear. These included a dozen volumes of
plant identification books, a break down table for soil extractions, an
enormous tent for processing our samples from the field, and two enormous
coolers to hold the samples in, among various other pieces of field work
equipment. Now we were set to go. We spent the first day driving a thousand
miles, and “boy was it a long day.”
We
left Boulder around 7 am and finally arrived at the campsite around
midnight. We rolled out our sleeping
bags in the road right in front of the truck.
It was in the 30’s, and the sky was completely clear, not a cloud in the
sky. I wore long pants, and my puffy
jacket to bed. I was unable to sleep
much at all. Immediately I began having
mixed feelings about the entire trip. I
thought to myself, “This is amazing to be out here sleeping under the stars
without a home.” At the same time I
thought, “What am I thinking!? I am
going to be living mostly in the desert for the next three months, melting
under the hot sun in the middle of nowhere.
Thirty miles from anywhere.”
We
woke up the next day and drove for an hour and half out to Bloody Run Hills,
east of our basecamp. We called CNIDC,
Central Nevada Agency Dispatch Center, and let them know the general area of
where we would working for the day. We
would do this every day when left for the field, and again when we
returned. Many of the areas that we were
traveling to would have no phone service.
We also had a SPOT satellite messenger to send signals back to the
Geography Department in Boulder and let them know we had survived each
day. In the truck we listened to a mix
of science podcasts, indie folk music, and the Dirt bag Diaries. We drove on the perfectly straight highways
into the rising sun. When we neared our
destination, we took off on a dirt road headed north flying along at fifty
miles an hour, churning up a football field long dust cloud behind us. The Chevy SUV was no longer white when we
finally arrived at our first plot, and the suspension of the rental vehicle was
no longer brand new.
We
both jumped out of the car with our field gear, and hiked a mile up a nearby
hill. We set up our fifty by fifty meter
plot, and hammered in our plastic stake.
Next we assembled the PVC tripod and attached the camera to the end. Right about then the wind started picking up,
and blasting dirt and sand in our faces.
We tried to take photos for our science, to no avail. The two meter high monopod was too shaky to
give us the high quality imagery that we needed. “Just great!” I thought, “The first day
requires a major redesign of our data collection process.” Little did I know that things would go wrong
on a regular basis.
Later
in July, after three of our four fieldwork excursions were complete, we were
ready to head out for our final trip. When
we arrived in Nevada, we found out that six of our plots from earlier in the
summer had been burned by an enormous 122,000 acre wildfire. It burned an entire thirty mile wide valley. Before the fire, that valley was covered by
sagebrush and invasive cheat grass. Now
it was completely black as far as the eye could see. There were dust devils which churned up ash
and it smelled like a fire had just happened.
I was awestruck. I realized how
fragile life is, and how much humanity has really messed up our planet. It happened right there, right then. I had plenty of time to process this feeling
over the final two week trip. I thought
back on my experiences from the summer, beyond the misery, and beyond the
science. It began to change me as the
next few weeks went along.
Adam
decided to do yet another redesign of his study to incorporate new samples from
after the fire. We would then have
before and after soil samples, and biomass and remaining biomass samples to
analyze. We drove out to the field for
the next five days and examined the remains of sagebrush and cheat grass
fields. Sometimes there would be about a
half inch of material left standing because the grass fire moved so fast. Other times there would be nothing left, even
the sagebrush were piles of ash blowing away in the wind.
As the
summer came to a close, on the final day of fieldwork, we were camped near
Battle Mountain, NV. We were the only
two campers in the campground. There was
a stream running behind us, where we took bucket showers after returning from
ten hour days in the field. Our work
shirts were black and brown. Mine was
originally a light green, and Adam’s was white.
Our legs and feet were black with ash halfway up our calves even though
we wore long pants. We sat there cooking
beans and vegetables on small wood burning backpacking stove with bottles of
beer in our hands. I thought to myself, “I
could actually get used to this!” I had
adjusted to the unbearable heat, the scarcity of water and food, and not being
able to clean up very often. I had
realized that I could survive in the middle of the Nevada desert, with little
more than a tent, sleeping bag, hat and bandana, a spare change of clothes, a
decent all-wheel drive vehicle, and someone to share the experience. And a few bottles of beer always helped.
When I
finally moved into my new apartment, in early August, I began to realize that I
do not need ninety percent of what I own.
I remember the simplicity of life in Nevada, and yes I actually miss
that part. I miss waking up at 5 am and
finishing work at 3 pm if everything goes according to plan. I miss the open nothingness of northern Nevada. I’ve noticed that when I talk to people, I
tend to listen more and talk less. I’ve
chatted with a few homeless people on the street. I love hearing other peoples’ stories and I
realize how fragile, but resilient life can be.
Recently I walked into a Starbucks in Boulder and a man said hello to
me. I ordered my drink and sat down at
the only available table next to him. He
started mumbling and going on about how he had this trike and solar panels that
he owned. He said that he had ridden his
trike all the way through Nebraska and eventually had ended up in Boulder. I was not sure if I should believe him. I thought maybe he had just seen the movie
the Martian and was recounting some of the main characters’ drives through the
Martian desert. Still I sat there and
listened, and I wondered whether he might really have ridden his trike all that
way. Who knows? Everyone has his or her own story to tell in
life, and each one is as unique and important as the next person’s. The difference was, that I could hear those
stories from the perspective of having had some experiences and hardships of my
own. I could actually relate to this
homeless man’s life just a little. Whether
or not that story happened was irrelevant, it was his own unique perspective on
life. That story belonged to him and was
his to tell, and it turned out that he might not be much different than I
am. We all have our experiences in the
desert, at some point in our lives.
~ Nick Whittemore
(11th September, 2016)
