What They Don’t Tell You About Research

Over the last six weeks if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that nothing goes as planned.  If there is one law that research follows, it would be Murphy’s Law.  Even from the very beginning, nothing was on track.  First was the snow.  If you don’t remember what I’m talking about, scroll back and take a look back at the May Lake post from the first couple weeks.  The snowfall was enormous and that easily set things back by two weeks.  But by the third week the snow was mostly gone and I was rearing to get started.  That was when I learned that my mentor’s research permit hadn’t been approved.  Her contact in the permitting committee kept telling her it would be done soon, but for several weeks in a row, nothing arrived.  Finally, just about two weeks ago now, after several pointed emails from both my professor and the director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Wilderness Manager signed off on the permit we got to work.  The real challenge now is to fit seven weeks of field work into four weeks.  When we arrived here, it seemed like the summer was endless and we could do everything, but recently I was shocked when I looked at the calendar and realized just how few weeks remain.

But anyway, this past week was my first full week of field work.  On Monday, Kaitlin and I drove up to Tenaya Lake and hiked up past the Sunrise Lakes (for those of you with your Yosemite maps :-) ) to reach meadow 910.  We packed in both our regular equipment and the pressure bomb, so what would normally be a rigorous uphill hike from the road became a grueling five mile trek.  ...Oh, and we were hiking above 9000 feet too, which didn’t make things any easier.  


For those who don’t spend much time near 10,000 feet elevation, when they say the air is much thinner, they aren’t kidding.  Basically, a walk feels like a jog, a jog like a run, a run like a sprint, and sprinting isn’t really a good idea.  I also discovered that if I stand up too quickly - i.e. after moving to another spot to look for trees - all the blood rushes from my head and I have a moment of intense lightheadedness.  The first time took me by surprise, but after the full week at elevation, I started to acclimate.

A new Lodgepole Pine seedling, maybe only a month old.

Over the three days we were in the meadow, we resurveyed all three transects that Kaitlin looked at last year, totalling about 140 meters, looking both for baby trees and doing detailed vegetation surveys.  Speaking of baby trees, one thing about this project that I find captivating is that something so small can grow to be so large.  I know there’s the old expression about the acorn growing into an oak tree, but there is something a little bit magical about sifting through meadow plants to reveal a new pine seedling.  If that little seedling is lucky and survives its first few years, it will outgrow all the other plants around it and dominate the area.


So as I’m writing it is Sunday night and I should be packing because I’m heading out into the field again tomorrow.  We are leaving bright and early in the morning back up to the Tuolomne area to hike in to a different meadow.  This week will mostly be the same as last (except in a different place), but this week on Thursday, Kaitlin and I will part ways.  I will be hiking back out to the car while she continues on to some hard-to-reach meadows.  We’ll then meet up again on Monday.  It should be a productive week of data collecting.  So until next weekend, good night and good luck.

The PPT Presentation

I hate Powerpoint presentations.  Invariably PPT presentations are dull.  When a teacher plugs his laptop in while standing at the front of the room, that is the first clue that the class isn’t going to be very interesting.  I’ve never been able to find it in the help section, but it must say somewhere that slides are really just virtual notecards because everyone does it.  Whether it’s a teacher or a student presenter or a boss at a meeting, there is an almost unbroken tendency to read right off of the screen.  As if it wasn’t bad enough to have to sit through a class I already knew was going to be boring, but to know exactly what the teacher is going to say before he says it, that is a recipe for a nap.

Now I realize I am not being fair to all Powerpoint users.  Some people don’t read from their slides, but instead try to cram every word possible onto each screen.  These kinds of presentations aren’t much better because at some point you have to make a choice: either you listen to the speaker or you read the slides.  You can’t do both and by choosing one you lose the other, thereby reducing the overall effectiveness of the presentation.  But the question remains: is Powerpoint an inherently dull creation or is it just that few people are actually trained to use PPT properly?

Up until this Friday I would have answered that powerpoint is tool that can only produce two kinds of slides: boring or overly animated and cheesy.  Then something extraordinary happened.  Eric Berlow, the director of the SNRI, was invited to go to the TED conference in Britain as one of the short presenters about his work and how it relates to the world.  For those who don’t know (and I didn’t until just recently), the TED conference is a place where innovative people come to share and exchange their ideas.  It also happens to be a place where people give, for lack of a better word, awesome presentations.  Instead of inviting speakers with no strings attached, each presenter must submit his presentation a couple of months ahead of time and then the organizers work with each speaker to fine-tune their speech.  This leads to some pretty awesome presentations.  I totally recommend checking out the website (www.ted.com) whenever work becomes too dull or you don’t feel like studying.  Some of those guys will knock your socks off.

But back to the topic, this past Friday we did a speaking workshop to help us prepare for our research presentations at the end of the summer.  During the workshop, Eric came in and gave us his powerpoint that he used when he was in London just a few weeks ago, and it was amazing.  In three minutes, he went through 38 slides and absolutely blew everything I thought I knew about Powerpoint out of the water.  His slides we simple and free of clutter, they changed at exactly the right time to emphasize his words, and no slide stayed on the screen for more then 15-20 seconds.  But the most amazing thing of all was that, rather than distracting from his speaking, Eric’s slides enhanced his speech through pictures and single words to emphasize his points.  I wish I had recorded it because there is no way to describe in words the effect that a well-executed use of powerpoint can have.  I have been inspired.  I have truly been inspired to break out of the default templates and create a presentation that people will walk away from awake and enthusiastic about my research.

Sorry It Took So Long...

So yeah... Somehow I got sidetracked every time I intended to write more these past two weeks and so instead of writing several posts, I wrote none.  But anyway, two weeks ago I intended to write a second weekend update about our trip to Hetch Hetchy, but I never actually did.

Everyone has heard of Yosemite Valley, but before coming here I had never heard of Hetch Hetchy.  Hetch Hetchy is much less crowded than the Valley, but it is still incredibly beautiful.  The naturalist John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club) described Hetch Hetchy as a smaller copy of Yosemite Valley and he was right.  The two valleys are both very similar (and magnificent), but Hetch Hetch is only half as wide and half as long.  Unfortunately in the 1920's the Hetch Hetchy dam was built, submerging the valley floor under 350 feet of water.  But despite the reservoir, which provides San Francisco with water, Hetch Hetchy is still beautiful.

My second weekend update (from 2 weeks ago) was supposed to tell how we hiked up through a place called Smith Meadows and up to the top of Smith Peak that overlooked the whole area.  Originally we were going to camp near the meadow and hike up to the top in the morning, but we decided to push on up the night before and we ended up camping on the very top of Smith Peak at 7800 feet.  Smith Peak is the highest point in Hetch Hetchy and the 360 degree views are well worth the intense hike.  The picture above was from the top of the peak over looking Hetch Hetchy on the left and looking down the Grand Canyon of the Tuolomne on the right.

After we got back from Hetch Hetchy I spent the next week around Wawona, mostly writing up how exactly my experiment was going to go in addition to running, swimming and helping the group of high school kids up here for the summer write their essays.  Honestly, the week after the 4th of July was a pretty relaxing week for me, but somehow I still never wrote another post.

Things got more exciting last week because I finally got to go out into the field!  Our permit came through (about time!) and we headed up to the Tuolomne Meadows area to survey two meadows that were nearby.  They were meadows number 1830 and 1776.  The park was surveyed about ten years ago and all areas were classified by vegetation type.  This has been great for researchers because it has allowed them to very easily find, for example, meadows that meet certain constraints.  In my case, my mentor specifically chose meadows above 9000 feet of a medium size that are hard to get to.  As a consequence, we had to hike pretty substantial distances off-trail both days to reach the meadows.

After we arrive in a meadow, we lay down a transect (measuring tape) across the meadow in the same spot Kaitlin used last year and then we get down to business.  Business consists of sitting on the ground looking for little tiny pine trees growing in the meadow.  It's slow work, but the beauty of the area mostly makes up for it.

The only bad things last weeks were the bugs.  You can't see it from the picture (of meadow 1776), but the mosquitos were vicious.  Every time I stopped moving they swarmed, and I mean absolutely covered me.  I was sitting in the meadow in long pants, my rain coat and a head net just so I could keep my sanity.  But as soon as we moved out of the meadow the bugs dropped off almost to nothing.  Overall, my first experience with real data collecting was a mixed bag.  It was good to get out and work, but I wish there were fewer mosquitos.

Double Weekend Update Part I

Once again it's been way too long since I last posted, so I will be posting twice in pretty short succession.  This is Weekend Update I: Glacier Point.


Have you ever had one of those times where collectively you have an idea, and initially everyone is on board but then, as the day draws nearer, everyone bails?  That was last weekend.  Initially I thought we had at least six people to go hiking for a couple of days, but the final count ended up being only myself and two others.  But on the bright side, three people hike much faster than eight, which allowed us to cover almost fourteen miles on Sunday.

Our hike started out from Mono Meadows on the road to Glacier Point.  We dropped off a car at Glacier Point and then drove back to the start so we could hike one-way.  I'd never done a one way hike before and it was really a great experience.  We started out hiking from the side of the road down into Mono Meadow, where we immediately ran across not one but two black bears foraging in the meadow.  They briefly looked up at us as we quietly walked past, but from that point on the first day was pretty uneventful.  As the sun set behind the hills we rolled into camp along Illilouette Creek and pitched our tents in a sandy area.

Really, they need a sign to tell people not to swim in this?  Keep in mind its only about a hundred feet upstream from a thundering waterfall.

The real scenery started the next day when we got on the Panorama Trail to Nevada Falls.  We got an early start and hiked for the entire morning down into canyons then back up over the other sides until we reached Nevada and Vernal Falls.  These falls are formed when the Merced River plunges from the highlands over the edge of the cliffs not once, but twice, each time throwing off huge clouds of mist.  In fact, the trail from the Valley floor that runs next to the falls is named the Mist Trail.

View from the Panorama Trail just down from Glacier Point.  On the left is the back of Half Dome, while on the right are the falls.  The upper is Nevada Falls and the lower is Vernal Falls.

From Vernal Falls we backtracked up the hill again back on the Panorama trail and then began the climb up to Glacier Point.  For those who haven't been to Yosemite before, Glacier Point is one of the iconic lookouts over they Valley.  From the point, you can see both directions down the valley and among other things, the view of Half Dome is awe inspiring.  I wish words could do it justice, but there is really no way to describe the breathtaking beauty of the view.  Unfortunately the point is pretty crowded, but after a long hike up to the point, the view is well worth the people (and so was the ice cream I bought).

I wish had a better way to describe the majesty of the falls and the views and the grandeur of Yosemite Valley, but there is really no substitute for seeing it in person.  Yosemite Valley should be on everyone's list of places to visit.  It is really one of the natural wonders of the world that will not disappoint.