ENHS Nature Trails September 2002 Article 2

Natural History and You - The President's Forum
by Dave Wagner

The value of natural history: a case history

It is not hard to tell folks that I like natural history because I simply enjoy being outdoors and I find nature fascinating. There are also some practical benefits that come from the study of natural history. It can be very useful to know some general natural history. For instance, knowing even a few of the constellations can get you out of a serious situation or maybe keep you from getting into one. I am hardly an amateur astronomer. I can identify only a handful of celestial bodies with confidence, only four or five constellations. However, what I do know has been extremely useful many times.

My best testimonial story comes from my first summer of teaching. I was working in Seattle, at the University of Washington, teaching their summer plant taxonomy class. This was a very big class with several dozen students. Gathering material for their labs had me spending entire weekends exploring the Cascade Mountains for good specimens. I would camp out in a state van filled with ice chests for storing flower specimens.

One weekend I was in the high, rounded, hill country near Lake Chelan. As evening drew near, I parked on the top of a ridge. It was a beautiful spot with a view for miles all around. I had my dinner of a few sandwiches and sat in the cab enjoying the sight and waiting for darkness to fall before getting into my sleeping bag. I noticed a rock outcrop about fifty yards along the ridge and wondered if there were any interesting ferns growing on it. There was still plenty of light left, so I decided to check it out. I strolled up to the outcrop and looked it over. There was nothing of note, but I saw there was another rock outcrop less than a hundred yards further along the ridge. "Aha," I said to myself, "there's plenty of time to get up there and back to the van before it gets too dark to see my way." So I took off up the ridge to this second rocky knoll. As I walked along, I didn't notice that the cloud layer had started dropping.

The weather had been reasonably good throughout the day, not sunny but pleasant enough below a layer of high clouds. My eyes were on the rock and the crevices that might have ferns in them. I had barely gotten to the outcrop when wisps of fog started blowing around me."OOPS," I said to myself, "I'd better get back to the van. I have no flashlight and not even a jacket. The mist is going to make it hard to see where I'm going. All I have to do is stay right on the crest of the ridge." And I took off at a brisk pace, headed back to the van. Before taking fifty steps, I came to a fence. "Hmmm," I said to myself, "I didn't go through any fences when I came up here. I must be headed in a slightly incorrect bearing. I'd better head that way and get back on the top of the ridge where the van is." And I corrected my direction and took off again, as briskly as I could in the thickening mist. And it was getting dark fast. And then I came to another fence. "Rats!" I said to myself. This meant that I was quite unsure of the correct direction to walk to get to the cozy shelter of the van.

To keep experimenting with different directions could be very dangerous. The roundness of the top of the ridge meant it would be all to easy to go on a spur ridge without knowing I wasn't on the main ridge top. The only sensible thing to do was stay right where I was until I could determine the right way back to the van. And staying right there until I knew which way to go, as long as it was dark and foggy, meant having to get ready to spend a night in the unprotected cold. It started to drizzle. This was not going to be fun. I went back a few steps to a small rock cliff I'd passed and crept under an overhanging section of cliff. It was a small cliff and the overhang didn't offer much protection. I tried to build a fire, scavenging the smallest, driest twigs I could find. They were still rather damp so I needed a fire starter. I pulled out my wallet and searched through it for pieces of paper I thought were expendable. Only a couple of scraps were available and they quickly burned away without getting the twigs ignited. So I just huddled up against the rock cliff, trying to get as comfortable as possible while keeping my back to the wind and rain. I was right; it was not fun. I shivered and maybe even dozed for an hour or two.

Suddenly I looked up and rejoiced. The clouds were getting thin as the wind blew them apart. I jumped to my feet and searched the sky. I found what I was looking for: the big dipper. Right off the end of the dipper is the north star, which means my van is right down the ridge THAT WAY. In less than five minutes I was safely back in the van, nestled in my sleeping bag, soundly and happily asleep.

Now the lessons of this story are many. Most revolve around how stupid it is to leave your camp late in the evening without a jacket, without a compass or any kind of emergency gear. It demonstrates how quickly an experienced outdoorsman can get turned around, not really lost but forced to spend a night in the open because of inattention. The happy lesson is how valuable it was for me to know how to recognize the constellation that gave me my bearings. If I hadn't known how to find the north star, I would have spent the whole night in a state of misery.

[ Back ]

Page last modified: 17 November 2002
Location: http://biology.uoregon.edu/enhs/archive/sep02/sep022.html
E-mail the WebSpinner: cpapke@gmail.com