Field School Day 4 - Katherine V.

 Today is our fourth day of field school, and so far it doesn't come near my expectations.  In fact, it exceeds them in every possible way.  I have never before been blessed to work in such a breathtakingly beautiful place before.  Even when the work gets tiring, all I have to do is look up in any direction and I'm blown away at the sheer beauty of our surroundings.  Which is exactly what happened today.  I woke up at 5am when the snoring from the tent behind me finally let up.  Apparently I'm older than I realized, because while I used to make fun of people who used any kind of sleeping pad while camping, I had one on this trip and still woke up sore and grumpy.  Trying to gather my gear and get dressed in the freezing cold, and being oh-so aware of not having my 5 yr old next to me, I grumbled something along the lines of, why the heck am I here?  But as soon as I opened my tent and took a deep breath of the cold ocean and forest air, I was instantly rejuvenated and ready to start our day.
 For the past two days our crew had been working with Tim and Mo, who were absolutely amazing, doing transects across the northern section of our survey area. Today I was excited to switch it up and work with Annamarie to start mapping.  We began with a site near a seasonal creek, and before we even began one of my crewmates came across a bedrock mortar.  Since this was not included on the original site maps, it threw a little wrench in the day and we had the pleasure of running transects again.  After a decent run through of the area, we ended up splitting up our crew, sending 3 of us to the site that included the bedrock mortar and the rest stayed with Annamarie to finish up the site she had been working on the day before with another crew.  My crewmate who found the BRM worked with a volunteer to do the feature map and I was assigned the mapping of the rest of the site.  It was great feeling like she trusted us to working even semi independently.  We all worked together to pace out the various artifacts and borders of the site, and I attempted to map it all in.  The western border of the site was the ocean cliff, and it made you wonder how much farther out the cliff went when the area was inhabited.  All in all it was a really fun experience, and I eventually got the hang of it, but it never looked anything like the crew chiefs’ maps.  

 As soon as we finished our maps, we met back up with the rest of the crew and broke for lunch.  At first we all sat down on the grass to relax for a few minutes while eating, but it only took 2 minutes for the first tick to crawl on me, so I ended up standing for the rest of the break.  After that we packed up and hiked south to find and map another site that looked in danger of disappearing into the ocean as the cliffs erode. After running transects for the rest of the afternoon, we never found what we were looking for.  This was extremely frustrating at the time, but I think it was still a good experience.  I'm guessing it's a problem that happens a lot in the actual field.
 Heading back to our base camp, I thought over everything we have seen and not seen that day.  I'm absolutely blown away at the idea that these artifacts are out here, right under our feet, in places people hike every day.  Artifacts that were used thousands of years ago, by people that lived and worked in this area.  Artifacts that have survived all these years.  The idea that they could soon drop into the ocean is even more mind boggling. It was an honor to get to see them, and an even bigger honor to help record them, even in my tiny student capacity, before they go.