Saturday 29 July 2017, week 11: Buldir Island
When I was traveling in Hawaii a few years ago, I spent some time in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Knowing that Mauna Loa is the largest mountain in the world – by combined landmass above and below the ocean – I wanted to climb it. In order to do so, I needed to obtain a backpacking permit from the backcountry office.
The permit form required my basic information, hiking plans, and car license plate number. Those were easy enough to fill out, but the last item was tricky for me.
Emergency contact.
As I stood there trying to figure out whose name to fill in, the ranger said, “It can’t be that hard to come up with someone who cares if you go missing.”
Usually I’d just list my parents and their phone numbers, but they were traveling internationally at the time. I didn’t want to go grab my phone to pull up any other relatives’ numbers, not to mention my brother still had no phone. I was stuck. Fortunately I realized I had Teri’s number memorized, so I listed her and gave her a call to let her know my plan. (Unfortunately she failed to listen to her voicemail until after I’d returned a few days later, so she wouldn’t have known to worry about me anyway. That’s not the point of the story, though.)
When backpacking alone or living remotely, it’s good to have someone back in civilization who cares about your safety and well-being. Mid-month provided us with a hiccup in our day that reminded me how nice it is to have a safety plan and people in offices who care to know we’re fine.
The 17th of July was a day of surveying our beaches for COASST surveys (dead birds). We’d made our low pass of beach A, looked at the waves around the corner from NW Point, and covered ~ ¼ of the way back when we were interrupted by the obnoxious beeping of the pager as we worked up the skull of what was going to be bird #84 for the year. Knowing it could be a pager test or a real alert, we pulled out the little messenger to see the message “Call Jeff. Tsunami threat from Commander Is earthquake.” (Jeff is basically the guy who keeps an eye and ear out for all the AK Maritime field camps.)
That was a new message! We stopped our COASST work and hurriedly walked back to camp; Kevin’s legs gave him a commanding leader pace that McKenzie and I couldn’t match. It brought back the Full House line that I’d used on my friend Alesha in Mexico. “Wait for me; I have little legs!”
When McKenzie and I gained the cabin, we found Kevin seated with satellite phone in hand, phone directory in front of him. Naturally the satellites had chosen this time to refuse to provide a signal. Kevin had managed to start calls that immediately dropped, but that was it.
We fired up the radio to see if we could get through to Lisa in Adak but called her on multiple channels without getting a response. Maybe she was also heading to higher ground?
Not knowing where things stood, it was time to leave camp. We loaded a couple backpacks with the bare minimum – databooks, cameras, water, snacks, TP, and the satellite phone – before climbing the muddy chute up to the storm petrel plots on the hillside behind camp.
Naturally it was just as we sat down at the top that we got another pager message, this one saying “If there WAS tsunami, supposedly past you by now (ETA Adak 15 min). Please still call Jeff so he can reassure the bigwigs. Thanks!”
From Jeff we learned that a 7.8 magnitude earthquake 6 miles deep near Komandorski Island had been the trigger. The concern for a tsunami was small enough that there had only been an advisory – not even a warning or threat. We were cleared to head back downhill to camp and carry on with our day. After all, Shemya had recorded a dangerous 4 inch wave. How cute.
Having our contacts in Adak and Homer keeping a distant eye on us was nice. As much as a number of us field techs take remote field jobs to get away from civilization, we do appreciate knowing someone back home cares about us.