First Fieldwork Adventure

This weekend I was recruited to go with a Grad Student in the Soils Department at Utah State to do fieldwork near Vernal, UT. I've never been out to the field before so I was looking forward to a fun adventure and some good experience. Our purpose in being out there was to collect soil and plant samples from some of the retired oil drills that the oil companies had done reclamation on. Using the research completed from these samples will help determine better and easier practices that oil companies can use in the future.

The four of us (Shannon, Trevor, Kendall and myself) started off early Friday morning. They weren't going to let me sleep in on this trip so I was up and going at 6am. Yay! Trevor was the driver and with Shannon navigating us, using GPS coordinates that the BLM provided, we drove around rough dirt roads searching for our first spot. At 9:30 we finally found it! The only problem was that it was such an old drill spot that there were no longer any roads to get there. That required us to hike about a mile in to collect the 16 gallon sized samples of soil, some smaller core samples, and some plant samples, and then trek them back the mile to the truck while carrying all our equipment and going up a pretty serious hill. I think by the end of this site all of us were ready to call it a day and go home but we persevered and finished two more complete sites before heading back to Vernal. We clocked in with 13 hours for the day, making for four very tired and dirty individuals!

Our second day was a bit more eventful. We drove into an old wash in search of one of the sites and after going as far as we could and then hiking for almost a mile we decided that there was possibly an easier way to get to the site so we went back to the truck and drove out of the wash. About halfway out, we had a fight with a rock. Oh No!
The truck lost the fight and oil quickly started to drain from the front axel. Trevor drove like a mad man to get us out of the wash and on to the road before the oil ran out. We made it all the way to the main, paved road when we pulled over as to avoid ruining any of the bearings since we were about out of oil at that point.

We ended up getting a tow back to Roosevelt and one of the dealerships had the part we needed to fix it. By 4:00 we were back to Vernal without any samples to show for a long day of frustration.

And that technically concluded my weekend of fieldwork.

The fun wasn't quite over though! That night I got to see the best of Vernal. I went out with Tory on a fourwheeler ride up on the hills just north of the city. The views were great and the company wasn't too bad either :)

The cooler had a bit of an accident and one of the Rootbeers exploded all over everything. Made for quite the sticky mess!

Overall, it was a fantastic week in Vernal and hopefully I can go out there again sometime soon!