Most injuries happen inside the home
So I still don't feel like going to the mountains is like going home, but I have been spending a lot more time there recently and seem to be collecting more than my usual share of scrapes, bruises, burns, lacerations, hypothermia, and idiotic accidents. At home, I have to worry about broken glass, power tools, kitchen knives, carbon monoxide, fires, and meteorites crashing through the roof. In the Trinity Alps (where I have been doing field work all summer), I have to worry about hypothermia due to the unusually late spring, faulty rain gear, and ice-melt lakes, being mauled by bears (I wasn't making enough noise while hiking because I was concentrating on not dying of hypothermia), burning myself on the cooking pot when cooking over an open fire because I didn't bring enough stove fuel, getting hopelessly lost when the trail becomes obscured in the snow (thank goodness for GPS), loosing an intern to hypothermia (wet cotton clothing), being swept away by high streams (blame the late spring again), falling off precarious log jams, falling off precarious rocks, loosing my car keys, contracting heat stroke from sitting in the only patch of cell phone reception for five hours waiting for AAA, being afrain my car will fall apart driving over bumpy dirt roads, close encounters with deer, close encounters with bobcats, tripping over logs, being scratched by thorn bushes, bitten by mosquitoes, and harassed by flies, ruining my knees while making a 2000 ft decent over one horizontal mile, and getting scurvy from lack of fresh vegetables.
Most of the accidents in the egregiously long sentence above only resulted in minor discomfort or were near misses. However, my luck ran out this week and I made my very first trip to the emergency room. You see, we were trying to get to this lake that was off-trail, and involved climbing 1800ft in about 1/2 mile. I knew many researchers had been there in the past, and I was told by several people who had been there in the past that the "prefered" route to get there was "a little sketchy, but not too bad." So my intrepid interns and I bushwacked through the brush, climbed up a cliff, meandered over the mud, and scrambled over snow to the lake. I should have turned back when I slipped on the mud and nearly ended up between the snow bank and the creek, but I really wanted to get to the lake (bad call on my part). I really shouldn't have led my minions interns up that route. The lake was really nice, and perfect for my study, but then we had to go back down. We made it past the snow fields, down the muddy creek bank, and only had the cliff to traverse before the sketchy bit was over and we just had annoying scree and brush to get through until the trail resumed.
"Let's do this one at a time so we don't kick rocks in each other's faces." I say (famous last words). It was a bit tricky, but so long as you go slow it wasn't dangerous.
"I'm down!" I say, and Charlie starts down after me. I wait at the bottom of the cliff to make sure he is OK with the climb. Right at the bottom of the cliff. Right in the path of the boulders he kicks down as he starts to climb. One the size of my head hit me in the shin and put an inch-long, half-inch deep gash in my leg. Blood immediately started pouring onto my boots .
I didn't want to upset my interns while they were in the middle of the climb, so I hobbled behind a bush to take care of myself. I managed to extract one tiny band-aide from my pack before my pack tipped over and rolled 100 ft down the scree slope I was sitting on, so I had to ask my interns to help me bandage my wound once they were down. Then I had to sit there for 20 minutes until I stopped seeing stars. Then I had to trip my way down the slope to the trail and hike four miles until we found someone to drive us back to our car (very nice people). By that time it was almost dark and I couldn't face the 2-hour drive to the hospital on mountain roads with an injured leg and deer crossing signs everywhere at night. Yeah, neither of my interns drive a stick shift.
Anyway, I went to the hospital when it was light the next day, got stitches, a tetanus shot, and antibiotics, and drove back to Davis. Who knows if I'm ever going to get this summer project done...
At least Davis has hot showers and ice cream.
Most of the accidents in the egregiously long sentence above only resulted in minor discomfort or were near misses. However, my luck ran out this week and I made my very first trip to the emergency room. You see, we were trying to get to this lake that was off-trail, and involved climbing 1800ft in about 1/2 mile. I knew many researchers had been there in the past, and I was told by several people who had been there in the past that the "prefered" route to get there was "a little sketchy, but not too bad." So my intrepid interns and I bushwacked through the brush, climbed up a cliff, meandered over the mud, and scrambled over snow to the lake. I should have turned back when I slipped on the mud and nearly ended up between the snow bank and the creek, but I really wanted to get to the lake (bad call on my part). I really shouldn't have led my minions interns up that route. The lake was really nice, and perfect for my study, but then we had to go back down. We made it past the snow fields, down the muddy creek bank, and only had the cliff to traverse before the sketchy bit was over and we just had annoying scree and brush to get through until the trail resumed.
"Let's do this one at a time so we don't kick rocks in each other's faces." I say (famous last words). It was a bit tricky, but so long as you go slow it wasn't dangerous.
"I'm down!" I say, and Charlie starts down after me. I wait at the bottom of the cliff to make sure he is OK with the climb. Right at the bottom of the cliff. Right in the path of the boulders he kicks down as he starts to climb. One the size of my head hit me in the shin and put an inch-long, half-inch deep gash in my leg. Blood immediately started pouring onto my boots .
I didn't want to upset my interns while they were in the middle of the climb, so I hobbled behind a bush to take care of myself. I managed to extract one tiny band-aide from my pack before my pack tipped over and rolled 100 ft down the scree slope I was sitting on, so I had to ask my interns to help me bandage my wound once they were down. Then I had to sit there for 20 minutes until I stopped seeing stars. Then I had to trip my way down the slope to the trail and hike four miles until we found someone to drive us back to our car (very nice people). By that time it was almost dark and I couldn't face the 2-hour drive to the hospital on mountain roads with an injured leg and deer crossing signs everywhere at night. Yeah, neither of my interns drive a stick shift.
Anyway, I went to the hospital when it was light the next day, got stitches, a tetanus shot, and antibiotics, and drove back to Davis. Who knows if I'm ever going to get this summer project done...
At least Davis has hot showers and ice cream.