(RM) Lost in the jungle, part 1: Trails

Lost in the Jungle

or

How to use a compass to find the way


Part 1: Trails


Sunday, 22 April, 2007

DON'T FREAK OUT!

First of all, before anyone freaks out, I was only really 'lost' in the jungle for about three hours, and I was never really worried about not finding my way because I had everything that I needed - compass, GPS, headlamp, garden snips, and an understanding of the local trail system. So while (Part two of) this entry is indeed about my first experience being really 'lost' in the jungle, I don't want anyone to think I was particularly foolish for having set out in such circumstances in the first place. Hence the alternative title to this entry: "How to use a compass to find the way," because that, along with an understanding of one's surroundings, is how it's ok to not be worried about really getting lost around here.

Before going into this, I've got to give a bit of the context of the forest and trail system that we deal with here, as well as a basic primer on how we use it. So the majority of this entry would have been simply entitled "Trails", but that just isn't as dramatic, is it? The whole thing is also really long, so I've split it into two Parts. You get the background in this first Part, and my 'Lost' story in Part two.

THE TRAIL SYSTEM

We use the forest primarily for the study of bonobos. The bonobos use the forest to live in and feed in and travel in. So in addition to strictly observing the actual bonobos, we also conduct studies on the components of the forest that the bonobos use - namely their feeding trees and their nest sites. Our standard routine here sees researchers visiting a long roster of feeding trees and nest sites on a regular basis, all throughout the study site. Researchers also try to visit the bonobo group on a daily basis. Over a given period, the bonobo group has a relatively localised range compared to the rest of the forest that we study. Since they travel though, we're always following them off the trail network, whereas for the trees we stick to known routes.

Our camp is situated near the northern limit of the study site, and the bonobos' current range basically defines our southern boundary. The Bompusa river flows northward a bit east of our camp, and a bit east of the current bonobo range. It's really swampy on either side of the Bompusa for quite a ways, there are large swampy areas in the south, and there's plenty of swamp elsewhere, too. There are no bridges or boardwalks; to cross rivers or swamps, we just schlep through and get really wet and muddy.

To get to the bonobos every day, we take a main trail called simply 'B-Trail', which goes approximately SSW from camp. After 6km (3.75mi), it meets the 'Nkuma' trail, which goes ESE. That trail eventually crosses the Bompusa, and meets up with the 'Bompusa' trail after almost 7km (4.3mi). Alternatively, from camp, we can head straight east along the first kilometre or so of the Bompusa trail before it takes a turn to the SSE for 7km or so to finally meet up with the end of the Nkuma trail. So basically, the backbone of the trail network is a big triangle: B going SSW from camp, Bompusa going SSE, and Nkuma going west to east between the southern ends of B and Bompusa. We call the entire 20km triangular hike the 'Grande Tour'.

Lately, the bonobos have been keeping south of the Nkuma trail, so we generally use the 'Meike-5' trail that heads due south starting at the 1100m mark of the Nkuma trail. And at the 1200m point of Meike-5, we've recently cut a new E-W trail that we've named 'Tim' after the so-named researcher who left around the time it was created.

From the main triangular train network then, there are a few spur trails such as Meike-5, although they're not used as much these days because the bonobos aren't in those areas. They are, however, used for the nest control and the bonobo feeding tree (BFT) studies, which are conducted regularly by specific people who do those studies. In general though, since the bonobos have been in the vicinity of Meike-5, the most well-traveled trails right now are 'B', Nkuma for its first few thousand metres, Meike-5, and now Tim. The rest are in various states of overgrown-ness, which is usually fine for the people using them to do their regular studies, but not always sufficient for people (like me!) relying on recognising them for their entire lengths.

In addition to being clearly demarcated by being heavily worn, the trails we use a lot are also marked with flags at 50m intervals. This allows us to describe locations relatively precisely, along the lines of "the bonobos nested in two groups tonight: a big group about 200m west of Meike-5 950, and a smaller group about 50m west of Meike-5 600." The flags are also useful for describing where we observed other things, or even just for keeping track of how much farther we have to walk to get to where we're going.

HOW TO DESCRIBE A LOCATION

With the bonobo tracking, the standard practise is to follow the group during the day, and to keep track, generally, of where you are with respect to the various known trails. In the evening, the bonobos build their nests and go to sleep for the night, and whoever is with them then picks a compass bearing that will lead to the nearest trail and leaves bent branches along that bearing in order to be able to find the nest again in the morning.

So if you know you've been following the bonobos somewhere west of the N-S-bearing Meike-5 trail, and they nest for the night, you pick a bearing due east until you hit the Meike-5 trail, then mark the trail with a branch and a scuff mark across the path, and go north to the first trail tag. You know approximately how far west from the trail the nest is, you know which trail it is, and you know at which distance along that trail to head into the forest. You go back to camp, and your colleagues will understand where to go, for example, when you tell them the bonobos are nested 200m west of Meike-5 950, as well as about how long it will take to get there in the morning (that particular spot would take about two hours, depending how well the 200m nest trail is marked).

STANDARD TIMING

Ok, so now that you understand the context of the trail system and how we use it, I need to mention a bit about the timing we need to work with for our bonobo work.

The bonobos go to bed by building their nests somewhere around 5:30pm, give or take about 15 or 20 minutes. They get up in the morning at around 5:30am, again give or take about 15 minutes. This corresponds, roughly, with dusk and dawn. We try to have someone with the bonobos all day long (although following them during the day is often difficult to impossible), but at the very least we try to nest them and then we greet them again in the morning.

Since the bonobos are nesting in the vicinity of Meike-5 these days, which is already about 1100m down Nkuma, which in turn starts 6km down 'B', this makes for a commute of around 8km each way, not including the off-trail distances. We basically budget about 1.5 hours to make the trek between camp and the start of Meike-5, and add additional time accordingly, depending on how much farther the bonobos are. So on an easy morning, when the bonobos aren't too far down Meike-5, and they've nested within 50m of the trail, departure from camp is 4am. That's about the latest to expect; lately it's often been more like 3:30, and the last few days saw the bonobos nest about 700m off-trail starting at Meike-5 700, so it's been an even longer commute.

Likewise, in the evening, if the bonobos start making their nests around 5:30 or 5:45, it takes a while to get back to camp. The off-trail portion takes much longer in the evening than in the morning because it needs to be marked. This is done by bending branches along its length in order to make it evident in the morning, and by using garden snips to cut vines or other branches that otherwise block the way. The off-trail path is therefore much easier in the morning, as dawn breaks.

A 700m off-trail distance can easily take an hour, followed by the regular commute of 1.5+ hours back to camp, though 700m to a known trail is pretty extreme. Usually it's more like 50 to 200m; it's these longer distances which incite us to create new trails like 'Tim'. A normal time to return to camp, therefore, is usually about 7:30pm. For evenings when the bonobos nest farthest, it's possible that whoever nests them gets back after 8; it can be as late as about 8:30. Beyond 8:30pm, something is probably up.

HOW LATE IS TOO LATE?

The first time this happened since I've been here was a little over a week ago, when Andrew left camp around 6am to go look for bonobos. They hadn't been nested the night before, and actually hadn't even been seen for a couple of days.

When we don't know where the bonobos are, the only way to find them is to just go out there and listen for them. If they vocalize, you take a compass bearing in the direction of the calls, and start heading in that direction. Bonobo vocalizations can be heard from a few hundred metres through the forest; any further than that and, unfortunately, you're not listening from a close enough spot.

So last week Andrew had left early in the morning to pick potential listening spots in the hopes of hearing the bonobos and finding them. Others left later in the day to do the same thing. They were back at around 7:30pm, and had seen neither the bonobos nor Andrew, although they had found a sign Andrew had left on the trail - two large leaves pointing to the direction in which he'd left the trail - on which he had written, "bonobos, 8:30am".

But if it was after 8:30pm, why wasn't Andrew back yet? Surely, even if he had nested them, he would have had time to hack through the jungle for an hour, even to get to Meike-5 2000 or so, and still had time to hike back to camp. So the assumption was made that his flashlight batteries had died, and that he was therefore sitting on the trail awaiting assistance. It's really dark in the forest, and once the sun starts to set it's pretty impossible to see. Plus, it had been pouring rain for most of the afternoon and evening (which is very normal here), so he'd be not only stuck but also cold.

It was decided that two people would go out with some basic provisions and walk the trail to find Andrew. If anything had happened, the least he would have had to do would be to get back to a trail - preferably one of our regular ones. A bag was packed with a thermos of hot chocolate, some biscuits, some water, an ace bandage, some dry socks, a raincoat, two spare flashlights, and a large antelope horn that we blow through like a trumpet that can be heard from about a kilometre away.

Of course Andrew got back just as the rescue mission was about to depart, shortly before 9pm. He scoffed at the preposterousness of it all: "it's not even nine o'clock!", he said. But the experience, or perhaps mostly just the discussions the rest of us were having during the hour or so leading up to his return, somehow got the possibilty into each of our heads that if someone's out in the jungle on their own, it could be that they actually need assistance, and of course it follows that whoever's left in camp will come to their aid. We didn't really discuss it further, and instead just got to the planning of who would be leaving at 3am to go wake up with the bonobos in their distant nest spot. (I also resolved to never head out in the afternoon without a spare flashlight, realising that being stuck in the dark would really immobilise me out there.)

LA GRANDE TOUR

As I mentioned earlier, one of the ongoing studies we conduct here is the bonobo feeding tree (BFT) survey. Throughout our trail system, we've got hundreds of individual trees that are tagged, each with their own record of measurements that have been taken for over five years now. The majority of these trees were the object of a phenological study that lasted five full years, with twice-monthly observations to see which were fruiting, flowering, growing new leaves, losing leaves, being fed on, and so on. That study concluded about a month ago, and now we focus solely on the BFTs, amounting to around 100 individuals of a dozen or so species. Each BFT now gets visited on a monthly basis to have each of the measurements noted.

Last Sunday, I went out on one such BFT excursion. We started out as a group of four: Brigham, who has been at LuiKotal for a while and had done various transects of the study a few times; Andrew, who hadn't done the study here before but had done a similar one for years in Nigeria; Papa Endu, who has lived his whole life in this forest and can spot a particular species from a distance; and me - I had gone out on one BFT excursion already, though not on this particular route. The BFTs on this transect were all located along the Bompusa trail to the east of the Bompusa River, from about 1000m to 4300m along the trail. We left shortly after 8am, schlepped through knee-deep mud and waist-deep water for the first half-hour or so, and spent the next five hours or so doing the BFT survey. Andrew left early to continue down the Bompusa trail to the Nkuma trail and on to Meike-5 in order to do the afternoon habituation shift with the bonobos, and the rest of us finished at Bompusa 4300 sometime around 1:30pm.

At that point, Brigham and Papa Endu sat down to rest and eat biscuits before turning back to hike back to camp on Bompusa, whereas I just continued on. I hadn't walked the Grande Tour for about a month, and wanted to mark the trail on the GPS. I had marked the BFTs' coordinates all morning, and had done several of the other trails already. I told Brigham that I'd aim to be back at camp by around 6pm, which was somewhat realistic for the 16km or so I had ahead of me, especially since I knew the latter 8km very well and knew it would take about 1.5 hours for that stretch.

Since the first 4300m of the Bompusa trail has been walked fairly regularly for the BFT and phenology studies, it was in much better condition than the continuation of the trail that only gets walked when people, for some reason or other, do the Grande Tour. A monkey census had been conducted on a monthly basis for a while, over the entire length of the Grande Tour, and that was the last time (when I went) that the trail had been walked. But as I set out on my own, it was clear that I would need to be fairly careful to not lose the trail.

I decided it would be a good idea to better demarcate the trail wherever it was becoming too overgrown, or where branches had fallen across it. This is a standard habit on all of our trails, but is particularly important on the less-used ones. I used my snips a lot, and I frequently hauled large branches out of the path. For a while, I took the GPS coordinates of every 50m trail marker I came across, which was most of them (some were missing).

I reached the end of the Bompusa trail without incident, confident that I had improved it to a state that could allow anyone to follow it in either direction without risk of getting lost. When I started down the Nkuma trail at its 7000m end, I was confident that the trail was pretty well-defined, and not too worried about losing it. The time was getting late, but I also knew that Andrew and at least one other bonobo researcher would be passing by the Nkuma 1100 and Meike-5 intersection sometime after about 5:45pm, so I figured I just ought to make it there to meet them in order to avoid anyone worrying about my late return to camp. I continued down the Nkuma trail.

I took my first break of the day sometime after 3pm, when I crossed the Wongwei river. It's a very pretty spot, where I sat and ate biscuits looking at the stream and keeping very quiet lest I alert the elephants to my presence. Elephant footprints are all over the place through the mud on either side of the Wongwei: it's a known thoroughfare of theirs. Very little is known about the forest elephants, except that they are very agitated when they see humans, and are known to charge anyone they see. I would love to get to see an elephant, but it would still freak me out knowing that I'd either have to be so silent that it didn't see me, or I'd have to run like hell or climb up a big tree or something to escape it's rampage!

Anyway, I didn't hang out for too long at the Wongwei. I continued trekking through the muck, following what appeared to be the continuation of the Nkuma trail. There were indeed trail markers along this length of swamp, and I saw Andrew's footprints in the knee-deep mud that formed the trail (we call this type of trail 'potto-potto').

By around 3:45, I was out of swamp and back into dense rainforest, and the last trail marker I could find was Nkuma 4150. This meant that I had done the 6km of the Bompusa trail, followed by almost 3km of the Nkuma trail, and that I had another 3km of the Nkuma trail to go before I hit the intersection with Meike-5. From that point, I know the trail very well, as I have done it many times both day and night.

But from Nkuma-4150 the trail just went 50m or so and then disappeared! It was clear for a bit, twisting through an archway cut into a thick tangle of 'harmania' vines, and then just sort of ceased to exist. I tried just going straight from the harmania, but that just led down a steep slope across fallen logs and dense undergrowth - no trail. I tried bearing somewhat southwest, which was the general direction that the trail had been following for a while. This seemed more promising, because it followed the contour of the slope, but it, too, just sort of petered out among fallen trees and undergrowth. A more-southerly bearing had the same result; a more northerly one went down the slope again.

I had lost the trail.

So here I was, less than two hours before sunset, about 10km from camp down a trail that had numerous stretches of swamp to muck through, and about 3km from a point on the trail system that I knew well and that would lead me briskly back to camp (an easy 1.5 hours from Nkuma-1100 x Meike5-0). If I were to head due west, I didn't know if I would be traveling north or south of the remainder of the Nkuma trail, but I did know that I would eventually hit a point that I knew. And I had Nkuma-1500 waypointed in my GPS, and it said that point was only 2.1km to the west.

So I had (1) the option of returning via the trail I had just come on, or (2) bushwhacknig west to the trail I knew. It was conceivable that I would hit Meike-5 in two hours, and be able to meet Andrew there before he trekked back to camp. And if I were to be really late back to camp (which, at this point, was inevitable), I figured the search party would first be sent in the direction that I would likely be - to that side of the Grande Tour.

LOST

So at about 4pm, I consciously left the known trail behind me, armed with a pair of garden snips and a compass bearing of due West. Down the slope I went.

To be continued...