After everyone said their goodbyes, the training week was done, and my latest field season with the Bird Conservancy had finally started. I was a horse with the bit in my teeth, a sighthound let off the leash, a falcon launching myself off the wrist. It had been 6 years since I last worked as a field technician on the bird monitoring crew. I had worked on reforestation projects in Panama, chased seabirds around the Scottish coast, and worked as an environmental consultant in a metropolitan area. During those years away, I had often found my mind drifting to those halcyon days of adventure, when I was paid to look for birds and climb mountains. It set the standard for every job I had since then, and none had met the bar it set. Being back in the wilderness on my own was a salve for the soul that I didn’t even realize I needed. I was finally, truly, the most whole version of myself.
On the seat next to me was a binder with a list of GPS coordinates and places I had to survey that summer. Most of them were completely new to me. About a quarter of them were new to the Bird Conservancy as well, blank pages with no information aside from the coordinates. The modern equivalent of “Here be dragons” scrawled on the margins of a medieval map.
The survey I was going to now was just one of those, perched on a ridge of the Book Cliffs near the Colorado-Utah border. I soon left behind the paved road and the farmhouses became fewer and further in between. A dust plume in the distance announced an oncoming car and I slowed down so that I wouldn’t create my own cloud for the oncoming driver to come through. The driver in his pickup truck did not return the courtesy and blasted by at 80 kilometers per hour. With a crack like a gunshot, a pebble shot out from their rear wheel and collided with my windscreen.
As fast as it had appeared, the truck was gone. I sat behind the wheel, blinking, as I tried to process what had happened and waiting for the literal and metaphorical dust to settle. There was now a dent in the glass directly in front of my face, a good 10 centimeters in diameter. I was really hoping that I would avoid damaging the work car this early in the season. Chips, scratches, and flat tires were inevitable during the field season, but I had hoped I would wait until I had been out a bit longer to start collecting them. Having to call my supervisor to tell him I damaged the car when I had only said goodbye to him half an hour earlier was humiliating. Luckily, I had already driven past the range of cell service, so I put it off until tomorrow. Or the day after. Whenever I was close enough to civilization again. I was in no rush.
I turned the car onto a gravel road that started off gently but soon became narrower as it wound its way up a canyon. To my left was a creek, running bright and fast with spring snowmelt. To my right was a long ridge of alternating cliff bands and loose slopes where weaker rock had eroded away. The effect was a bit like a layer cake, albeit one decorated with pinyon pines.
My supervisor’s comment that I had a bit of a reputation for being able to reach difficult places and that he had purposely assigned me the more remote surveys was still ringing in my ears. Regardless of how he intended it, I was taking it as a compliment. With that in mind, I drew a straight line on the map from the nearest road and made for the transect. A coworker had tried to access it from that direction the day before and had warned me that access was near impossible. I wanted to see it for myself. This was a mistake.
The gully that looked like it avoided the worst of the cliff bands was a trap. The bottom was flooded with silt and clay that had formed a nice quicksand. I sank in up over my ankles on my first step. The sides of the gully were overgrown with such thick shrubs that they formed a wall that I needed either a machete or a flamethrower to get through. The Bird Conservancy had provided neither. I pushed my way through as the mud made ominous slurping noises and sucked me in deeper with every step. I finally admitted defeat when the mud got to my knees and I had a sudden mental image of getting trapped like a mastodon in a tar pit.
Back at the car, I dunked my boots and trousers in the creek to get the worst of the mud off. Much like damaging the car, I had hoped to wait a bit longer than the first day to irreversibly stain my gear. I drove the rest of the way to the trailhead in my shorts and sandals.
The road became rougher and rougher. Twice it crossed the creek and the water splashed up from the tires and cleared the dust off the car. The turns became tighter and narrower and I hoped there would be no oncoming traffic. After another 4 kilometers, the road climbed steeply over loose rocks that slipped and rolled underneath my tires. At the top was my campsite for the night, a trailhead at a saddle along the ridge. From here it would only be a 5-kilometer hike over a relatively level trail, about an hour and a half worth of hiking.
I set off for a run on the trails. The trail system had been built for and by mountain bikers, but the flowing corners and gentle climbs would do just as well for a run. The trails were sandy and led me down into the canyon on the other side of the ridge from where I had driven up. Here on the south side of the slope where the sun battered the earth and dried the soil, there was far less vegetation. The trail took me down to the canyon bottom and along the dry riverbed before climbing up the other side through an area burned by the Pine Gulch Fire in 2020. The skeletons of trees still stood there, black trunks stretching to the sky while their feet were already surrounded by a kaleidoscope of wildflowers and recolonizing aspen. It must have looked completely different 4 years ago, before the fire. In another 4 years, it would look completely different again. The aspen might be taller than my head, some of the burned trees would have fallen, and there might be more species diversity.
The birds loved the landscape. Mountain bluebirds inspected the dead standing trees for empty cavities to nest in, their blue plumage stark against the black. There were western tanagers and lazuli buntings back from their winter in the neotropics and singing proudly to stake a territory. My heart pounded with a combination of exertion and adrenaline. Each twist and turn in the trail held a new kind of treasure.
A loud braying stopped me in my tracks. It sounded like a donkey having an existential crisis. I put my hands up to my ears to triangulate the source of the noise. There were horses and burros that roamed the adjacent valleys and my first thought was that one of them had gotten stuck somewhere. I followed the sound off the trail and into a side canyon so that I could rescue the stuck donkey, be the hero, and make a life long friendship that would ultimately be turned into a charming picture book. There was no donkey. Instead, there was a raven nest. An adult had landed on a cliff band next to a pile of sticks and its offspring were making horrible noises as they prostrated themselves for a snack. I watched them for a while, until I remembered I was supposed to be on a run and made my way back to the trail.
Back at camp, there was still enough light to photograph some cooperative lizards before I made dinner and settled into my sleeping bag. My body was tired, but my mind was still buzzing with excitement at my first survey of the year.