Planning. Safety. Back-up planning. This episode continues our conversation on museum fieldwork, where host Roger Topp sat down with a half-dozen of the museum’s curators to talk about getting out of the lab and into the world, into adventure, if that’s the right word. How do we plan and how do we learn when things don’t go according to plan? Fieldwork can be hard, and if it’s not hard, are we doing it right?
The More You Look is a production of the UA Museum of the North, on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the ancestral lands of the Dena people of the lower Tanana River. UAMN illuminates the natural history and cultural heritage of Alaska and the North through collections, research, education, and partnerships, and by creating a singular museum experience that honors diverse knowledge and respect for the land and its peoples.
Planning. Safety. Back-up planning. This episode continues our conversation on museum fieldwork, where host Roger Topp sat down with a half-dozen of the museum’s curators to talk about getting out of the lab and into the world, into adventure, if that’s the right word. How do we plan and how do we learn when things don’t go according to plan? Fieldwork can be hard, and if it’s not hard, are we doing it right?
The More You Look is a production of the UA Museum of the North, on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the ancestral lands of the Dena people of the lower Tanana River. UAMN illuminates the natural history and cultural heritage of Alaska and the North through collections, research, education, and partnerships, and by creating a singular museum experience that honors diverse knowledge and respect for the land and its peoples.
The Search and Rescue Helicopter is about to leave our camp in a remote area of the North Slope of Alaska. This is not a museum expedition, but I was invited to join and document the hunting and preparation of Bearded Seal skins for an umiak or skin boat. It is July 2004. The sea ice is close to shore and the weather cold enough one of the camp's crew left his stove alight in a tent at night, and the base of his sleeping bag caught fire. He escaped with severe burns to his feet, a disaster that could have been, should have been avoided. Later in the expedition, myself and several others were stranded for a short while on an ice floe the size of a three car garage. That was less avoidable. And we all returned safe. Hello, and welcome to The More You Look, your behind the scenes journey into museum collections, research, exhibition, and public programming from Fairbanks, Alaska. I'm Roger Topp, Director of exhibits, design, and digital media at the UA Museum at the North and host for today's episode. Planning. Safety. Backup planning. This episode continues our conversation on fieldwork, where I sat down with several museum creators to talk about getting out of the lab and into the world, into adventure, if that's the right word. How we plan and how we learn when things don't go according to plan. Fieldwork can be hard. This is Derek Sikes, curator of insects.
Derek Sikes:Field work has been--has a long history as a key component to taxonomy and biodiversity documentation. Being able to burn the candle at both ends in the field, this is something my master's advisor really drove into me--is that if you've got particularly--if you've got taxpayer dollars to go to some remote location, maybe it's even exotic, like a tropical location that people would be envious to go to. If you're not burning the candle at both ends, and working your butt off to make the most of the opportunity, then you are wasting taxpayer dollars and shame on you. So, it is it is a tough standard to meet. Getting out there and and pushing yourself to collect as much as you possibly can. And sometimes I--I don't want to disparage any students, but I'm like, you know, I'm the old guy, I shouldn't be more motivated and have more energy than you, you know, like-- It should be something that the students can keep up with. And there are, you know, I recently was involved in a big project in Denali, where we had to hike up to the top of five mountains in two days, and sample all along the way. And it was just like as much, I was just so exhausted after these two days. And some of the young people who worked on that project were, I mean, very physically fit. I mean, they people could run up these mountains, like, "Ah, wait for me." So you get all types, you know, and occasionally you get someone who's like, just can't keep up. I mean, so some of this is a matter of physical fitness, and drive, right? You have to have that mental desire and, and your--your body has to be able to keep up.
Roger Topp:Pat Druckenmiller, Museum Director and curator of the Earth Sciences Collection.
Pat Druckenmiller:You know, we this, this whole, all this work isn't. It's not all macho work. It's just, it's just hard work. And being physically--being physically fit is really important. And this work can just as easily be done by a man as by a woman. And but--but at the end of the day, you still need to be physically fit to do this stuff. And a lot of people these days are not physically fit. And you know, I hope it doesn't, you know, I don't want it to come across as discriminatory. It's like, Well, you want to go do that fine, you know, but unfortunately, if you can't hike five miles with a 50 pound pack, I'm sorry, we can't, we can't. That's essential for the work to be done. And I suspect that might be frustrating to some people, but it's also realistic. You'd have to--you have to keep yourself physically fit, and that is becoming an increasingly difficult thing to find now. What you got going?
Julie Rousseau:Maybe a humerus. Maybe something, something long, Not very distinct looking yet.
Pat Druckenmiller:This one looks interesting. In paleontology, it's definitely, it's definitely a critical part of the job. Most people do some field work of some extent. But very few people do field work that's, that's really, really out there. And really, you know, the kinds of thing that if somebody, forget the fossils, you just wanted to go and visit certain places that we that we go to do our work in. Just doing that as a recreational thing would be a really big job, getting there, going, floating down a river and coming back out. But then we have to go there. Get there, do all that, do our work when we're there and come back with some results and then go home. And if you know, there's there's definitely other fields--we're collecting- other distinct scientific disciplines where you collect your data in a very, very different way.
Roger Topp:Steffi Ickert-Bond, curator of the Herbarium.
Steffi Ickert Bond:On the North Fork of the Koyakuk, we were in these collapsible canoes, and we were kind of floating for nearly two days, and it was the rain was coming down and sheets. So everything was soaked, every single piece of clothing, all the food, everything was soaked. So we were really in very real danger of hypothermia. This was in the summer time, but the temperatures were around 50 degrees or so. So we had to stop on one of these gravel bars and make this massive fire and then create some kind of drying device out of sticks to dry all of our clothes, because everything was really soaked. And we managed to do that. And we continued to float for another two days where it continued to rain. And then we finally arrived at our destination and got some food from some locals there. And then we were flown out because there's no road access to the end of the North Fork of the Koyakuk. So again, on these four days on the river, we didn't see a single person, we didn't see a single plane or anything. So you can imagine that if you get stranded there, and if hyperthermia hits, it's very, very dangerous.
Derek Sikes:I haven't had anything too horrible happened in Alaska, which is kind of weird. I've had some more horrible things happen when I was younger and working in the tropics, but the most awful Alaskan thing that I can think of was an Alpine project. We were getting helicoptered up to mountain tops in southeast Alaska. And this is the beginning of the project. And this was a small team. We had a botanist, an ornithologist, a mammalogists, myself, and an organizing leader. Small team of five people. And so the first mountain we went to is in Juneau. And it was July and I thought I had brought enough cold weather gear. But I hadn't. And it was like misty and kind of wet and snowy. And basically, you need to be ready for any kind of weather. Even when, you know, really hard winter weather when you're dealing with with these kinds of environments, and I just wasn't prepared and i--after the first day, exhausted, got back, I was like I need to warm up and I got into my sleeping bag. And nothing I did was warming me up. I was like, this is a bad situation. And I had eventually--I got some hot tea in me and and you know but once we got off that mountain, my wife FedExed me some winter gear that I could use for the next trip. But you know, hypothermia is no joke. And, but you just don't expect it in July right?
Pat Druckenmiller:Yeah, so for the trips that really don't work out--is there you know, Roald Amundsen, has this saying that adventure is just bad planning. And I use that adage quite a lot because I have the advantage of you know, working with with Kevin, Kevin May and that--between the two of us, but especially him, he's such a, he's a, he's a real genius when it comes to logistical stuff and he's very experienced, and has a lot of good perspectives on like, you know, that's probably not going to be a good idea for this reason or that reason. So between the two of us, we usually come up with a pretty good, a pretty good plan, and we have a lot of, we plan out a lot of contingencies, and we're prepared for them. And if we, if we go out, and even if we need those contingencies, we've already we come back and we're still in a good position where we weren't, we weren't nothing was dangerous or unsafe. So you know, more of more often than not a typical kind of trip is we go out, we have some challenges we have, but we have, we have all of our backup plans, and we use we have the extra dry clothes, we have the extra belt for the engine, we've got the extra batteries for the SAT phone that suddenly you know, we have two sat phones, we we have all these things covered that you go out and you have like, you have some wins and some losses, but you come away with having a successful trip, dealing with a mix of say, say--and bad weather a mix of not so good bugs, bears, whatever. But I'd say we've been lucky because in all these trips, we haven't really gotten ourselves into a really messed up, bad situation. I mean, honestly, I'm happy to say we don't have a--really kind of--story of like, wow, that thing, you know, things just totally got jacked up, and we had to get out of there. And it was, it was bad news. You know, the closest I'd say I came to that was this summer when I went to Katmai and I wasn't fully involved in all the planning. And, and that was my mistake, because I should have inserted myself. We got there and the conditions on the ground were not what I expected. And so I kind of I kind of trusted that some things that were going to happen were had sort of been thought out and planned out and and but we got there and we had to readjust. And I use like every little bit of the little tricks and experiences. I've had to make sure we got through it. Okay, and we came out just fine. But it was It wasn't really what I had planned. So it was an adventure and I don't like adventures. Link Olson, curator of mammals.
Link Olson:We had someone join us in the field, and a pretty long trip. better part of three weeks--was very remote. We were dropped off by helicopters. And over the course of those three weeks, we had exactly one supplies drop. And one particular member of the expedition was someone none of us had met before, but had come highly recommended by a trusted colleague, and I guess just chalked it up to miscommunication. The experience base that I had expected was not there. And this particular person ended up not being terribly comfortable in that setting. We did get stuck in the tents for multiple days because of cold, rainy weather. This person also smoked, and I don't draw a hard and fast line preventing people who smoke from coming into the lab coming into the field. But you run the risk of running out. And as a former smoker, I remember what that feels like to run out when you can't be resupplied, and no one wants to be around you. And that it ended up working out fine, but there was serious consideration given to having this person picked up by helicopter on on their nickel, which is something you obviously want to avoid. But everything comes back to safety. Nothing else even comes close to safety. I mean, that is always first and foremost on my mind as an expedition leader. First and foremost, most of these people are my students, my employees, my friends, my colleagues. So, we are not just randomly thrown together. And I don't want to get hurt. And I don't want any of them to get hurt. And so safety is it. And that runs through all of our lists all of our preparations, all of our mantras, its safety. And if that means taking more supplies than we might ideally want to, and even paying for an extra charter than so be it, it's insurance. And we don't want to be in a field situation, uninsured. In terms of things coming close to going disastrously awry, but being saved at the last minute, there are probably more examples than I could remember if I thought about it for a week, because we're never more than one or two bad decisions away from potential disaster. And that can--that can be as straightforward as not paying attention to where you're going to put your next step. Because so much of our fieldwork is done in the alpine. By definition, in Alaska, it means working in some pretty unstable places with unpredictable, uneven substrates. So we're walking on boulder fields. We're walking up very steep or down very steep inclines, often wet. We will wear crampons, even if it's not snowing sometimes, because it can be so slick. And all of this, of course, means more gear we're schlepping. We, we joke that as field biologists, we are professional shleppers. And a lot of what we schlep doesn't end up getting used. But when we do need it, we're--we're awfully glad we have it.
Roger Topp:September 7 2014. We're sitting at top five miles of Caribbean water on the Puerto Rico trench, testing the ships brand new and state of the art deep-sea winches. It's a bright blue day, sky and water, which is also dead calm. And despite the season, there's not a hurricane anywhere in the Atlantic. I'm aboard with my assistant documenting the ship's shakedown before it heads through the Panama Canal. A few seconds from now, the winch cable is going to snap as a result of operator error and learning new hardware and software on a new ship. No one will be hurt. Everyone is standing where they should be. Equipment will be lost the depths the trench, and the science techs will spend the next two days readying a backup cage so we can continue testing. Josh Reuther, curator of the Archaeology Collection.
Josh Reuther:You know, there are instances where we--there's times when somebody got hurt, and you needed to pull them out, or you needed to do sort of, you know, first--sort of first responder type things, you know, and you get through it. You know, there's there's times when we've had like, vehicle crashes, and we're, you know, shocked and getting people to medical facilities or Alyeska sort of facilities on the Haul Road. But those are you know, those are instances that you just get through and you know, you have the personnel issues here and there, but you know, the, you can always plan as much as you can plan. But there's always something that's going to come up, whether it's the smallest thing or the biggest thing, and I can tell you that there's been projects-- Probably the worst thing I've had to deal with is, is having somebody who put themselves above the team and leave and go off and wander in sleet, snow in the Arctic, because they felt that they should go on a hike. You know, and they broke the rules that we set up and that's probably one of the worst situations I've been in because I was planning on basically sleeping--out at night in the Brooks Range, looking for somebody in a In a blizzard, and crossing, you know, multiple drainages to look for them. And they put themselves at risk for no need, and others at risk. And so I think that those are things that, you know, are horror stories-- But there are things that, you know, as a, as a person who runs these projects, you can't always, always plan for those things. You can only plan for being prepared, and sort of as first responder.
Link Olson:And I make it clear that it's all of our job to maintain positive, upbeat mood. And again, part of it is just the self-selective nature of field biologists. Miserable, people don't seek out opportunities to become more miserable, in my experience. It can be a little things like a secret stash of chocolate. A little sugar goes a long way, and a lot of sugar goes even longer. And so that's, that's one little tip. We went on a remote expedition, it was the one I talked about earlier, where we had a food drop, and it was Kendall, actually, and her then fiance, now husband, unbeknownst to Kendall or me, had slipped in a care package. And this is after we've been stuck in our tents huddled in a circle with the emergency space blankets spread out reading just to stay warm, and to keep from going crazy. And we got a food drop. And here's a care package that had trashy magazines and silly games and candy. There was so much sugar in that, but boy it hit the spot. You know, most of us are highly caffeinated. And we will, we will do what it takes to keep people properly caffeinated. I know I have my own very specific wants and needs when it comes to caffeine. And we make sure we take those. We don't bring alcohol into the field. We used to, but it's--it's just an easy thing to say, you know, that's for when we get back. Jokes, games, just going out of your way to help each other out. And you know, those small gestures have an amplified effect when the conditions are adverse.
Pat Druckenmiller:That's good, all loose. So, go ahead and take that troweland just go as long as you feel like you're well free of the bottom and once it feels like it's safe. As you flip it, just get your hand under there, to grab anything that falls. It should be pretty good. A lot of people-- Yeah, you know how it is when you see footage of like people out, you know, doing field work. And they're always going to show us some fun scene at some particularly fun moment on a sunny day when everything's going right, which is generally not most of the time. And what they don't realize is how much logistics went into getting there in the first place. Both in terms of gear and permitting, and then what has to happen once we get back to make sure that all that gear and equipment gets taken care of and put away and stored properly. And this is where you know, each time I go into the field, I've always got permitting work to do. And on places like the North Slope, that permitting may include three or four different agencies, all of which have a whole separate requirement of paperwork for this, this and that. And the other thing, that permitting has to start months in advance. And it's generally that always falls on my shoulders and I spent so much time getting those permit applications submitted. I get them when I come back. I then have to write a permit report every you know, an annual permit report and then sometimes like a final final report after five years of work on so that is a never ending process. It's 20--it's year round. Takes a lot of time and it's it's absolutely critical, essential part of it that you never really hear anything about. And likewise, you know, logistically, making sure working with air charter companies you know, like say we use boats and so many different situations. So making sure that you--the boats are up and running and the outboard motors are up, you know, tuned up, and that we have all the right parts. For those, figuring out how to move from one place to another, being out in the bush. Again, Kevin has been really important here and helping come up with some creative solutions and doing a lot of the actual phone calls and arrangements. That takes up a tremendous amount of time, we have, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars of field gear that we store off site that needs to be taken care of, you know, we've got like 3000 Watt generators alone, you know, and, and you got to take care of those things properly. We've got two, two boats and like four outboard motors, and we've got you know, $3,000 group tents and and we come back, you know, just like we did this last week, we come back and then you know, all the tents have to be taken out properly dried, stored. Okay, it turned out somebody left a bag of stakes on the beach. Well, okay, now we got to make sure that you don't put that tent away without those stakes. And so you go and buy those and you have to buy this and you're that and you fix this and you're waterseal--water, seen that and fix the zippers on that tons of time and I try to get the students to help out. And again, many times students are unfamiliar with these tools or equipment or supplies and so you have to train them before you can do it and then I don't take there's so many things I just don't take chances with and I have redundancy for so that primarily communication for example, all of our communication devices have to be working really well and I always have backups because that's that's coming that important a few times you know when you need to you need to be in touch in case of emergencies.
Roger Topp:Andres Lopez, curator of fishes.
Andres Lopez:Remember one year, the younger people on the--on the expedition wanted to just camp instead of having to make their way back to the boat and then the next day come back up. But the Russians were very anti staying on shore. They told us it was because of bears, the possibility of bear attacks. There's also the possibility that Russians really don't like foreigners out loose in the countryside together. Exactly. Yeah, there was one. It was one day where things got so foggy that the boat couldn't find us. They know--they were supposed to come pick us up. They had no idea where we were. We had to launch a flare and the whole thing because phones--yeah, no cell phones. We know--no cell phones at all. We had this really primitive, very early generation GPS units. It took forever for them to find the satellites. We had these really clunky radio that they, really have any kind of range. I remember, that was one of the big items we purchased for the expedition. And there was somebody in charge of carrying this huge backpack with a huge battery. The radio could get in touch with the boat and 80% of the time, no response--a waste of time. The computers where we kept all the data were this super clunky laptop, so...
Link Olson:Extreme example for me it would be the field work I've been doing in Madagascar for the last 25 years where we will drive for multiple days on pretty primitive roads to get to a site and pay local assistance to hand carry a month's worth of field gear miles and miles into the forest. Some of whom, we would then pay to be on site and help cutting firewood, cutting trails, just helping maintain camp. And you really need to be careful about who comes out in situations like that because unlike here, you can't call a helicopter and say hey, we need to pick this person up. So I turn the dial on the compound microscope to a much higher magnification when I'm evaluating people to join me in the field, and even cultural differences. If I'm going to a country where I've never done field work, as was the case when we first started doing fieldwork in Cambodia many years ago, I learned an awful lot from talking to my colleagues in Cambodia, both Cambodian and expats. But until you're on the ground, you really can't anticipate what it's going to be like. And a lot of the people that I take into the field have never been abroad, or if they have, not to a developing country, in the case of Madagascar. And I remember what it was like the first time I would visit some of these places. And it's, I mean, it's literally culture shock. And on top of that, you're jetlaged, you're travel weary, you're expected to kind of hit the ground running. You invariably get some sort of intestinal issue at some point. And that tends not to elevate your spirits.
Derek Sikes:When I was out on the Seward Peninsula, with these two young students and my my graduate student, we are walking across the tundra. And luckily my grad student brought binoculars to scan the tundra for bears, because a rock in the distance, you know, is it a big rock or is it a bear? So we were--we were worried about bears because there wasn't any place to hide. And all we had was bear spray. But I was walking thankfully not very close to anyone else when my arm brushed up against my bear spray and somehow the safety had come off. So when my arm hit the bear spray it fired and created a cloud of bear spray in front of me which got onto my clothing, onto my face. I couldn't see for a little while. I was you know tears and and luckily we were able to rinse it out with the help of my grad student Kath. She rinsed out my eyes, and I was able to at least be functional fairly soon thereafter. But the really annoying thing is that my field gear for the next few days--had in your--anytime I moved or was near it, you would get this little you know, bits of pepper spray would just appear in the air around you and get into your eyes or get into your mouth or--it's just the most annoying thing in the world. Couldn't--I've heard of people accidentally firing them in their tents, which--that just sounds horrific. But so that's probably the worst thing that has happened to me personally, besides nearly dying of hypothermia.
Link Olson:You know, if we're camped in place for more than a couple of days then we're going to start to attract bears and that means we're bringing electric fences, bear gun, having to be more attentive, and knock on wood, I've--I've never had a bear encounter that resulted in anything more than a cautious relocation of a camp--and one face to face encounter where everyone's blood pressure and heart rate skyrocketed for a few minutes and ended in a peaceful resolution. Some nerves frazzled briefly. Yeah. And you know actually, what--what good came out of that is that we did have our bear canisters out with the safety blocks out and I somehow didn't get my safety wedge back inserted. Put my bear spray back in my little side pocket where I keep it so I can do the quick draw. We're walking back to camp really rattled. I mean, this this bear was probably less than 10 feet from us and upright and just staring us down and they were--it was a colleague of mine, longtime colleague good friend. And yeah, we had to have the stare down. We were heading back to camp and I just jumped across a small stream and heard this hiss and without thinking about it, turn around look and it--and it was my bear spray canister. They'd gotten caught on a branch and was spraying and I got a faceful of it and it was excruciatingly painful. I had to stick my head underwater in a freezing cold stream and then literally be led by the hand back to camp--and of course we knew what to do when we got back to camp to alleviate the pain of burning, but it gave me a very powerful respect for bear spray that I did not have before then. It's easy to take two extreme examples and look at field work that say, Pat does, and paleontology, where they know, they're gonna be bringing a lot of stuff into the field. And in some cases, just enormously heavy specimens back, material that has to be jacketed and slung out on helicopters. And, of course, that's--that is literally a big lift. And you can contrast that with scientists who do purely observational fieldwork, which may sound easy, but having been involved in some of that, I mean that, you compensate, you cover more ground. You're on the go more often. And I wouldn't necessarily say that it's, it's easier fieldwork. It's very different. And sometimes it can be a relief to, to take lighter packs and less stuff into the field and cover more ground and see more. But sometimes, it's also nice to just sort of focus intently on a much smaller area. And if we are collecting, then yeah, we need to, we need to hit it pretty hard. But I've also been on some field trips with colleagues where they're not bringing back museum specimens, but there's still a ton of gear depending on what you're trying to do. So I guess there are lots of ways to sort of circumscribe different types of field work--and it's all hard. If it's not hard, you're not getting enough done.
Roger Topp:Thank you to UA Museum of the North curators Derek Sikes, Patrick Druckenmiller, Steffi Ickert-Bond, Link Olson, Josh Reuther, and Andres Lopez, for sharing their stories and thoughts on museum fieldwork. And thank you to the 2014 crews out of San Juan and on the Colville River in Alaska, who made these field recordings
possible:Kelsey Gobroski, Jacob Van Veldhusen, and Julie Rousseau.
Jacob Van Veldhusen:Which do you think is worse: absolute silence on his recording device, or our normal level of conversation?
Julie Rousseau:I think the normal level. There's seconds he can use at a time. Of like picking sounds? Yeah. So, silence probably good for a little bit too.
Roger Topp:The museum could not conduct this work without public and private sector partnerships, and without state and national funding through agencies such as the Park Service and the National Science Foundation. Explore the museum's website for more information about recent and forthcoming projects and ways to get involved. It's not all heights, hypothermia, and huge rocks.
Pat Druckenmiller:I really feel like I will try to be nice for a while. Okay, Roger?
Julie Rousseau:We should use"thing" as--I know but his word his thing is still the thing and saying instead of "shit." That would help a lot.
Pat Druckenmiller:Obviously you said it though. Another 10 minutes of dubbing...
Roger Topp:The More You Look is a production of the UA Museum of the North on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the ancestral lands of the Dene people of the Lower Tanana River. UAMN illuminates the natural history and cultural heritage of Alaska and the North through collections, research, education, and partnerships, and by creating a singular museum experience that honors diverse knowledge and respect for the land and its peoples. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, share, and rate the program. This helps other listeners discover more about not only the work of this museum, but quite possibly other museums in their neighborhoods. The more you look, the more you find.