A Guest Journal Entry from Bre MacInnes, University of Washington Geology Graduate Student
Bre MacInnes poses for a photo with some of the native plant life on Matua Island. Photo courtesy of Beth Martin
27 July 2008 - Onekotan Field Camp
There are 12 of us right now living on a beautiful meadow full of purple flowers on Onekotan Island - 4 American, 4 Russian, and 4 Japanese geologists. As I'm writing this, the rain is pouring down and we are all huddled either under the tarp over the campfire, working in our tents, or, like me, working on the computer in our large green supply tent. Sergei just turned the generator on, and Slava and Douglas seem to be making sure there is a constant supply of hot tea, so I'm good to go for a long time. Nobody likes doing fieldwork in the rain and getting really soaked, so the plan to have a morning working in camp was well received by all. We'll re-evaluate after lunch about possibly going out to work. My hope is that it will stop raining by lunch and we can have a partial field day. But for now, the morning break from hard fieldwork is SO nice.
It started raining last night not 5 minutes after we returned to camp. After the day Jody, Andy and I had, we felt incredibly lucky - at times during the day yesterday we thought we would be sleeping out in the field with our emergency blankets. We were even rationing food a little bit. The three of us started the day by hitching a ride with the archaeology survey team and their zodiac going north. They dropped us off at 9:30 in the cove just north of Blakiston Bay (a really wide and large bay that was our destination for the day). We just had to hike over a small headland, then we were going to work southward and measure the height of the 2006 tsunami and look for paleo-tsunamis at big rivers we crossed, and eventually make it home to our camp.
In all, it was a 12 km hike, mostly on sand. It sounded somewhat difficult when we left, but little did we know...
I was the first one to set off from the boat to go across the headland. I was supposed to climb to the top of the headland and pick a good route for the three of us to take. When I reached the top, I knew we were in trouble. There was shrub alder EVERYWHERE. Bushwhacking through alder is like trying to swim through a tangle of branches.
Andy Ritchie works his way through waist-high shrub alder on the terrace above Blakiston Bay, Onekotan Island, Russia. Photo courtesy of Bre MacInnes.
If the alder came up only to our knees, we could basically force our way slowly through. When it came up to our waist, it looked like we were doing a dance, as we tried to find the edges between individual plants, or as we tried to encourage the plant we'd just forced our way past, to let go of our backpack or the lifejackets tied to our packs. When the alder came up just above our heads, we would push up the braches of one plant at a time and try to duck under them. Jody liked to crawl like a bear through alder this high so as to try to avoid all the braches. We also encountered scrub pine, which is even more difficult to bushwhack through (the key is to walk on top of the branches, like you're floating over the bush, without falling through).
By the time we made it to Blakiston Bay, 3.5 hours and only 1 km later, our hands were covered with pine sap and scratches, our clothes were coated in pollen and torn in a few places, and many nooks and crannies of our packs filled with torn leaves and broken branches. I, myself, had an entire forest-worth of pine needles, leaves and sticks inside my boots. We figure that if we hadn't found a couple of meadows in our hike, it would have taken us a lot longer to make it.
So after that bushwhack, and after measuring the tsunami and looking at tephra near the river, we headed out on our remaining 11km hike home at 2 pm. We stopped two more times to measure the tsunami and describe soil stratigraphy on our hike home, but when it was 5 pm and we still had 7 km to go, we just started walking.
How to describe Blakiston Bay...
Volodya Golubtsov and Dima Chvigian head towards camp on a foggy day at Blakiston Bay Beach, Onekotan Island
The first word that comes to mind is- ominous. The beach is narrow and ends in a sheer cliff of eroding pyroclastic or block and ash flows that are maybe 100 m high. The rivers and streams made V-shaped notches in the cliff. The day was very foggy, and for most of the walk, all we could see were steep cliffs fading into the distance in front and behind us. The beach was so narrow that during storms, it looks like waves would reach the cliffs. In fact, at one river crossing, waves were coming very close to doing just that (it was high tide), and we were beginning to get nervous about what lay ahead and whether or not we could even make it home on the beach. But beyond having to hike up one river valley to find a place shallow enough for us to cross, the rest of the walk on the beach was uneventful.
We eventually made it to the south end of Blakiston Bay at 7:30pm (30 minutes after we said we would be home), but we still had one more headland to cross before we would be in the cove with our camp. At this point, we were saved by the Japanese volcanologists. They had come to the south end of Blakiston Bay earlier in the day and, whether on purpose or not, had made a good trail for us to make it over the headland. We had to do almost no bushwhacking AND their trail led to the only safe place for us to descend from the headland to the beach.
We felt so lucky that they had come before us to point the way, and we were able to make it to the camp and a warm dinner at 8:30, 12 hours after we started out, and not 5 minutes before it started raining. What a day!
It sounds like the rain may have stopped for good, and lunch time is almost here. I'm going to go investigate. So long for now.
--Bre