By Sonia Fernandez, UC Santa Barbara. Videos by Jessie Ward O’Sullivan. Images by Matt Perko.
On a sunny, windy morning 10 UC Santa Barbara undergraduate students peer over the edge of the Long Valley Caldera, the remnant of a supervolcano that erupted 760,000 years ago. From their vantage point, on the side of Mammoth Mountain in California’s Eastern Sierra, they take selfies with the 20-mile-long, 11-mile-wide crater — ephemeral humans against a landscape forged by magma and sculpted by glaciers.
Only a few steps away is one of the world’s premiere snow labs, the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, also known as CUES. From the partially buried bunker and surrounded by supplies and equipment, climate scientist Ned Bair talks about a life spent studying snow: the cold, the rigor, the danger.
“It’s hard,” he said. “It’s hard on your body.” Indeed, even at this 9,600-foot altitude the air is thinner, forcing the unacclimated to breathe faster and deeper, and to be more deliberate about their movements. At an elevation this much closer to the sky, the sun also shines brighter, with less of the atmospheric cover that shields the lower elevations from the brunt of its rays.
None of these challenges faze UCSB environmental studies major Liv Valinsky, because she has just gotten a precious glimpse of her possible future and it is bright. A lifelong outdoors person with a newfound interest in atmospheric science, Valinsky’s brief contact with Bair was enough to stoke her passion for the subject and sharpen her focus on a life in environmental science.
“It was really cool to talk to him,” she said. “Just to see someone that’s in a career that’s so similar to what I want to pursue and the instruments he’s using and where he ended up in life, it’s so exciting.”
Valinsky’s experience is just one of many doors that UCSB opens for its undergrads into the world of conservation and environmental science. As a participant in the FUERTE (Field-based Undergraduate Engagement through Research, Teaching and Education) program, she and the rest of her cohort are getting a firsthand taste of what it’s like to be a field scientist while developing the fundamental skills necessary to get their future careers off to a good start. Funded by a National Science Foundation program to enhance STEM education for underserved communities, the FUERTE students are taught and taken into the field by world-class UCSB scientists and mentored by a cadre of graduate students in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology (EEMB). They grow their skillsets over three summers, building an impressive resume of projects, fieldwork and internships before they graduate.
For each participant, the adventure begins with a two-week intensive summer course that exposes them to a variety of ecosystems located in the rain shadow of the “granite curtain” that is the East Sierra Nevada mountain range. In this region of California, UCSB administers, as part of the University of California UC Nature, the Valentine Eastern Sierra Reserves (VESR). VESR is the collective name for two separate protected spaces: Valentine Camp in the town of Mammoth Lakes, and the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory (SNARL), a former US Fish and Wildlife research station just a short drive away.
“The Eastern Sierra provides an amazing opportunity for training for environmental sciences with a wide array of ecosystems and habitats, ranging from the High Sierra alpine ecosystems to Great Basin sagebrush and including montane forests, high desert habitats and unique aquatic ecosystems from alpine lakes to saline lakes, and rivers, streams and high desert pools,” said VESR director Carol Blanchette. The reserves provide easy access to most of these habitats, she continued, and both of them offer opportunities to study stream ecology in a place where water is most precious.
Because of their locations and facilities, Valentine and SNARL are hubs for environmental scientists who study the area, making them ideal places for students contemplating a life in the environmental sciences, Blanchette added. Here, the students have access to decades of field science in this remote part of California, and also to its relatively untouched beauty. It’s a beauty that once led noted 19th century environmentalist John Muir to call the Eastern Sierra “a country of wonderful contrasts,” while early 20th century writer Mary Austin praised the area’s “luminous radiance” and its “lotus charm.” It’s a beauty that landscape photographer Ansel Adams never tired of as he aimed his camera again and again at the Sierra Nevada and where it touches the sky.
Nature as Classroom
Have no doubt about it: The scientists who run the FUERTE program — Blanchette, biologist Gretchen Hofmann and ecologists Hillary Young and Douglas McCauley — are on a mission of love.
“The science is important, but really, we want (the students) to fall in love with these ecosystems,” said McCauley, who can recall with fondness when he fell for these natural places as a UC undergraduate — the forests and the babbling streams that run through them; the herbal, pungent smell of sagebrush after a good rain. “We want to get these places into their bloodstreams, the same way they got into ours.”
There’s no lack of opportunity for this romance at Valentine Camp. Here, at roughly 8,250 feet above sea level (give or take a couple hundred feet), the ground is covered with ferns and other lush understory plants, and shaded by trees. A meadow sits at the heart of the reserve, one that changes colors with the seasons. In the summer, iridescent dragonflies hover above the little streams that wind their way downslope, while in the winter, the camp falls silent under a three- to six-foot blanket of snow.
It’s a great place to perfect the art of noticing, as the students are encouraged to connect with their surroundings and engage creativity in a nature journaling class with VESR outdoor educator Anne Barrett. More than a feel-good class, it motivates the students to reflect on their relationship with nature and their place in it. The training comes just in time for McCauley’s camera trapping/animal tracking class the next day, when he teaches them how to detect the presence of various animals by what they leave behind. Nibbled leaves? Deer. A rust-colored feather? Maybe a Northern flicker or a Spotted towhee. Scars on the trees? Definitely a black bear.
For some, if not all of the students, it’s their first time truly immersed in nature — a departure from the lecture halls and computer screens that dominate undergraduate education. Field work is different — researchers in the field are subject to forces beyond their control.
“It’s amazing and inspiring to have your office include clear mountain lakes in early summer,” Young said. “It’s also exhausting and hard when you realize you need to hike 40 miles in three days to get to enough lakes to get replicate samples of aquatic invertebrates at the same time. And then you get there and find that the snow didn’t melt and you have to snowshoe all those miles, or that a winter rockslide has wiped out all the vegetation you meant to study, or that a hurricane is coming your way, or that mosquito populations are going crazy this year and you are being eaten alive.”
But she wouldn’t trade any of the inconveniences of fieldwork if it meant not experiencing nature as it is — sometimes chaotic, sometimes harsh, often stunningly beautiful. “While many types of science can be done in the lab, natural systems are so large and complex that the questions can’t typically be taken out of the field and studied in sterile petri dishes or test-tubes,” Young said. Turns out, the noise and complexity in the field from which raw data must be collected are essential to understanding ecosystems and making informed predictions and management decisions for their — and our — future.
But field scientists are also witness to — and agents of — astonishing feats of resilience. To wit: state fisheries biologist Phil Pister, who in 1969 saved a rare species of local Owens Valley pupfish from extinction by carrying the entire population across the desert in two buckets. More recently, UCSB biologist Roland Knapp and his collaborators reported the success of their 17-year effort to revive the populations of the Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, an amphibian that had only a decade ago disappeared from 90% of its historical range high in the mountains thanks to a deadly chytrid virus.
The hands-on experience with nature and the contact with enthusiastic mentors and professors is in fact what caused Jannine Chamorro to shift from her original major to environmental science.
“I wanted to be out there looking at animals and understanding how the environment affects animals,” said the newly minted marine ecophysiologist, who serves as FUERTE’s academic coordinator. “But I never really knew how to get that job. I’d never met a scientist, ever.” To her mind, veterinary school was the closest she could get to working with animals, until she was introduced to ecology — physiological ecology, in particular — as an undergraduate researcher at UC Davis.
“That transformed everything for me,” said Chamorro, who received her Ph.D. from EEMB. “It incorporated all the things I was so interested in.”
But where Chamorro had to navigate the uncertainty and the occasionally difficult conversations with family that first-generation college students sometimes have going into STEM fields, the FUERTE program aims to create a bridge. While open to any undergrad applicant, FUERTE was established primarily to reach students from ethnic or gender minorities, as well as those who come from low-income households or are the first in their families to go to college — people who traditionally are less represented in environmental science. And it’s a self-sustaining cycle: Lack of representation in the environmental sciences leads to the perception that minorities and other underserved communities aren’t as interested — or worse, not as capable — of doing environmental science, which, in turn, leads right back to lack of representation.
But it takes only one look at the FUERTE cohort to know that that perception is just a myth. Bright, capable, passionate, curious, the students soak up every bit of knowledge their teachers send their way. They ask tons of questions and throw themselves into their tasks with enthusiasm, whether they’re setting up field experiments, translating the data, pushing through the backcountry, or cooking for and cleaning up after one another.
“It’s a completely different experience actually being in the field,” said Maritza Ramos Leon, who plans to focus on aquatic biology. As with the rest of her cohort, who have had very little or no exposure to field science, she felt its siren call but didn’t know where to start, what would be expected of her or how she could carve out a career in such a rigorous discipline. In learning the basics through FUERTE, students acquire the confidence to follow their scientific curiosity, ask interesting questions and design ways to answer them. “It’s super important to have a program like this where we do have the opportunity to be in the field,” she said, “without the pressure that you already have to have lab experience, or had to have been in an internship before.
It’s just a 20-minute drive from Valentine Camp to Convict Lake, the lowest of a 10-lake system that funnels water away from the Sierra snowpack throughout the year. Here at 7,850 feet, the riparian woodland of higher elevations gives way to sagebrush scrub, the Jeffrey pines and aspens ceding very gradually to gray-green, drought tolerant shrubs.
The people of this earth, involving several distinct groups under the label “Paiute,” called this place Wit-sa-nap, and it is the site of a miracle that saved fish infused with the spirits of children. That was long before early settlers called it Monte Diablo, and later settlers renamed it Convict Lake, after an ambush and shootout that occurred in 1871.
It is a gem of a lake, its clear, turquoise waters reflecting the dramatic slopes of mounts Laurel and Wilson. The ancient forces of uplift and volcanism conspired here hundreds of millions of years ago, with molten granite raising, pushing, twisting, tilting and folding the upper, older layer of metamorphic sediment, resulting in swirls and waves in a variety of colors including rust, yellow, brown and green, in addition to the light gray of the Eastern Sierra’s granite core.
But the beauty and majesty of the lake will have to wait, as the students are focused on the ground before them. Armed with little flags, they are busy monitoring the conditions on the ground and in the foliage. Their target? Trash — plastic debris, food wrappers and other detritus — that gets deposited around the lake, which is now part of a resort, and attracts fishers to its stocks of trout. They pick up the litter and drop a little flag in its place in a field research practice called deplete sampling, with each student passing over the transect area, looking for trash then dropping flags where they find it.
“In this adventure, we’re looking at the gradient of human activity,” explained FUERTE principal investigator and director Gretchen Hofmann, their instructor for the morning. An analysis of the study area will reveal the trash’s abundance, type and distribution, which in turn reveals patterns of human activity in the area. “In past analysis, what we’ve found has been more fishing-related,” she said, and indeed, some of the trees and bushes at the water’s edge glint with fishing line and the occasional miscast hook, which the students carefully tuck away in safety containers.
This practice is giving environmental studies major Everett Mathiason some of the fundamental skills he’ll need for a future career he’s hoping for in the forests and along the rivers of the Pacific Northwest. It’s also opening his eyes to the impact that humans can have even just visiting a place. We’re often conditioned to ignore our waste, its persistence in the environment becoming unique evidence of our presence.
“It made me and the rest of the people I was picking up trash with a lot more mindful of our own waste,” Mathiason said. “I’d want to continue the efforts that we did here back home on campus or in Isla Vista, where I live.”
It’s a fieldwork training exercise, but the added benefit for the community, Hofmann said, is that the trash — and there can be a lot of it — gets picked up.
“In some ways we’re cleaning up Wit-sa-nap,” she said. “So that’s cool.”
Follow Convict Creek as it winds downstream from the lake for a few miles, and eventually you reach the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory, home base for the FUERTE group. At 7,200 feet — approaching the floor of the Long Valley Caldera — the landscape flattens out. The trees disappear in favor of lower-growing, gray-green sagebrush scrub, a group of plants evolved to thrive in this thirsty environment.
Here, like generations of scientists before them, the students organize their research and sort their data. Throughout the two-week excursion, they conduct research and prepare presentations, learning the rhythms of life as a field scientist.
“We’re secluded from everyone. We’re off our phones,” said biology major Victor Rodriguez. “This is something I would never experience back home.” And yet he and the others take to it so naturally, devoting days to fieldwork and research and evenings to communal dinners and catching up with each other. During the day, the treeless landscape opens up a vast vista bordered by mountains, while at night these same mountains frame stunning views of the night sky, reminding us of our place in nature — or as Rodriguez puts it, that “you’re just such a small thing, living in this world.”
Building community
The mountains, the valleys, the trees, the stars — they all have a way of convincing you that nature in the Eastern Sierras is timeless, eternal. Visitors can trace the paths worn by earlier settlers; the same Milky Way that has shone upon the Indigenous people of this land for millennia continues to amaze the new hiker, the seasoned researcher, and the nature student.
But the truth is that things are changing. A warming world brings the threat of more frequent, more intense wildfires, as well as worsening droughts in an already parched landscape. The imbalance threatens biodiversity, which weakens food webs, which will ultimately affect how animals, including humans, sustain themselves in this environment.
“Now, a lot of these impacts that are coming at us from climate change are not going to be evenly spread across the state, but the burden is going to fall on communities that are underserved, that are already shouldering a lot — these are some of our most diverse communities,” McCauley explained. “So we need smart scientists, we need environmental leaders that are there taking on all of those challenges and finding a way through these challenges for California.”
In ecology, a healthy community — all of its interacting species — do things that support each other: The sagebrush hosts hundreds of species and in particular the greater sage grouse. The Clark’s nutcracker, a high-flying relative of crows and ravens, builds stashes of pine nuts for the winter and inadvertently plants new trees. Similarly, building future environmental leaders means building up their community, teaching individuals how to come together and blend their skills and strengths.
“We literally talk about community building,” Hofmann said. “How do we want to behave as a field team? How do we express that we’re responsible for one another? We teach kindness and compassion, and very quickly they start to automatically support one another.”
And it’s not just within the group. Support comes from the wider circle of scientists who conduct research in the Eastern Sierras, and from the high desert and mountain communities. Mammoth Mountain ski resort donates tickets to their gondola and provides access to their in-house naturalist, giving the students perhaps their first glimpse of the high-altitude life. Members of the Bishop Paiute tribe talk to them about their water struggles, and demonstrate their hard-won expertise at managing such a precious resource. In return, the students pick up trash while studying how to do fieldwork and fold cultural knowledge into their repertoire. And this is just the start; future field trips in this three-year program will hone the participants’ interests and people skills, giving them the best chances of finding their research niche.
Building community means building resilience, and serves as an antidote for the eco-anxiety that comes with watching the environment change for the worse. It’s become a difficult topic to teach, McCauley said, telling your undergrads how bad the biodiversity crisis could get according to the modeling, which predicts that the world will exceed the 2° C tipping point by 2050.
But perhaps all won’t be lost. There’s great solace to be found in the energy and enthusiasm of young, bright, curious and exceptionally driven future ecologists, problem solvers and environmental leaders, McCauley said. You protect what you love.
“Being out with these students, talking about these same issues in a place that’s already changing, gives me a huge amount of inspiration because they’re not going to tolerate seeing the worst-case scenarios that we can see in our models come to fruition,” he said. “They’re going to have the motivation to come through, to use the tools of science that we’re teaching them to make 2050 a better future.”
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