I’m tired…but happy!

Today was an exhausting day.

As I sit here writing on my hammock-bed, very nearly falling asleep while typing, only kept awake by the ceaseless itching brought on by mosquitoes being greedy little buggers, I can’t help but think that the sun literally eats people for lunch. How is it that the thing that arguably powers the entire world, from the food chain to the hydrologic cycle, be so incredibly efficient at draining the energy from people. I’m beginning to think that it’s not nuclear fission, but people’s energy that is powering the sun.

The reason I was in the sun all day is because today was our first full field day! After a morning perfecting data dictionaries, we took off for the valley, covered in chemicals and lugging around massively heavy waterbottles and gigantic GPS’s (called Trimbles). A 30 minute training session spent baking in the sun learning how to use those oversized monster GPS’s headed off another several hours of roasting while recording GPS points to set up reference points for our data. The nice thing about being told to pick out noticeable objects in this particular valley is that the majority of those distinct objects just happen to be parts of movie sets from very famous movies (and some not so famous ones, as well). It was quite a process of trial-and-error for us to get our system moving efficiently, because we were working with the UAV guys as well and had to stop and calibrate among ourselves to make sure everyone was on the same page. While Greg and Scott handles flying the Quadcopters to take data from overhead, Cole stood with the GPS to allow it to measure multiple times and entered data about the points. While he did that, I took a picture (mostly of him with the background) as a means of better identifying the area for others looking to find the points later, and took field notes in my notebook of anything significant to the area. That, as well, took some practice because at first I had to keep adding information around the edges of the page to include things I forgot. In the end, though, it was good practice because I usually hate keeping a field notebook. I’m going to have to learn to tolerate it eventually, so might as well start now.

The most significant event of the day was our experience with vigilante justice. As we tried to record a point in the center of the valley, we noticed a car decorated with Roxy logos driving around just as a helicopter came into the valley. It was flying extremely low and creating wind that sent our little helicopter nearly flying out of control (out of our control, that is. It was doing quite well for itself as far as stability goes). After getting repeatedly frustrated in our attempts to fly with the superhelicopter around (it began to film the car for some sort of commercial), we abruptly heard over the walkie-talkie a declaration that the car and helicopter were not to be on the property and that we should get the license plates/serial numbers from them and report them. Upon hearing this, Cole immediately took off on foot after the car, the inhabitants of which appeared to realize that something was happening and promptly ran away. Meanwhile, the helicopter noticed the car’s escape and also fled (which was a sight to see) towards the end of the valley, where it landed in what appeared to be dense forest.

We needed to get a point down there anyway, so we headed in that direction to see what we could see, coming upon a Stargate Atlantis set to use as our point. I climbed a hill and, behind yet another movie prop from Lost, saw the helicopter in the distance where it had landed. Cole then played the part of the vigilante and went over to pretend he worked for the park and write down the helicopter’s information. That’s about where the story ends, because after getting their numbers and watching them later take off, we found out that they actually had had permission to be there and it was just some sort of miscommunication within the ranch. So so much for that. Unfortunately, the endeavor also resulted in us arriving late (and having to report our location, ignoring the fact that we had at least 4 different GPS enabled technologies on us, by movie set – ie. “We’re by where 50 First Dates was filmed. Now we’re by the Jurassic Park log. Now we’re by the Lost field” and so on).

We finished off the day with the beach and sloppy joes, both of which contributed to this feeling a lot like a summer camp. No complaints here! Except now we need some s’mores.

Now I’m gonna go eat some gummy worms that I forgot I still had in my backpack.

Goodnight!

Little snippet of our planning PDF, of which I am unnaturally proud.

Lost tower that held some sort of bomb thing in the show...