(RM) Lost in the jungle, part 2: Lost

Lost in the Jungle

or

How to use a compass to find the way


Part two: Lost


Sunday, 22 April, 2007

...

LOST

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.


(This is a continuation of the last entry, entitled "Lost in the jungle, Part one: Trails". That entry gives the context of the trail system, the forest environment, and the day's events that led me to the point where this entry begins: leaving the trail. So although this entry may be an interesting read on its own, I recommend first reading Part one, in order to better understand the situation.)


It's amazing, really, how easily it is to stray from a given direction. In the rainforest, there are trees everywhere, as well as fallen logs, hanging vines, dense thickets of harmania, holes, mud, and a bit of slope. This initial foray into the unmarked jungle, which was fortunately still during daylight hours, was on one of the steepest stretches I know of in our study site. It seemed like I was headed straight downhill for a while (okay, I wasn't always going straight, but that's what the compass was for). Of course I also got something in my eye right away, I tripped over plenty of vines, and I walked through most of the spider webs of the forest.

At the bottom of the slope was swamp. Yup, that means more knee-deep muck to schlep through, but without the added benefit of a marked trail to facilitate unobstructed forward movement. I fell forward plenty of times, catching myself on my hands and knees in the mud, and using the garden snips to cut random vines that engtangled me. Some stretches had standing water in them, some had running water, and some were just mud. Elephant footprints appeared prominently in numerous spots. There were also stretches of solid ground between the potto-potto (the local name for this muck), but it wasn't as plentiful as I'd have preferred.

In the meantime, of course, the sun was setting. Even when the sun is shining at its brightest, very little sunlight actually reaches the forest floor through the dense canopy, and of course the potto-potto valleys are even darker. So when the sun approaches the horizon, there's practically no ambient light in the forest at all. I haven't seen the horizon in a month and a half.

I had my headlamp on by 5pm, and my GPS batteries were nearly dead. The compass was fine though! After about an hour following a straight West bearing, I reached the Bompusa River. It was deep up to my belly and actually had some flow to it, so I had to hold my backpack over my head and watch my step, but I honestly found it very refreshing to be standing in the cool water for a few moments. I tried looking upstream and downstream from my crossing point to see if that's where the actual Nkuma trail crossed, but the river was too overgrown with vines to make any travel up or down it really feasible. I almost fell in trying to go upstream, so I abandoned that plan and just continued west. The western bank didn't really have any place to clamber up to, but I forced my way up, and started up the slope. At least it wasn't potto-potto (yet) on that side!

Checking my GPS again, it told me that Nkuma-1500 was now at a NW bearing, another kilometre from where I was currently. Then I watched the screen fade out as the batteries finally died. I changed my bearing and headed up the slope. The relative clearing on the Bompusa gave me the last glimpses of sunlight for the day; I continued my bushwhack as night fell hard.

Going northwest was similar to going west, but this time it was in the dark. I did encounter more potto-potto, which was even suckier in the dark than it had been in the twighlight on the other side of the Bompusa. But in general, bushwhacking through muck or dry ground in dense rainforest is just sucky all around, because you can really only see a couple of metres ahead at any given moment. The headlamp illuminates the branches and trees and vines that it points at, and the pupils adjust to that bright light at close range so that everything else is pure darkness. No matter though, because I just needed to follow my NW bearing, so it didn't really matter what was beyond a few steps - that's all I really needed to focus on anyway.

A few times I did need to make some detours, when I hit really dense harmania patches or really big fallen trees, but even those I often just ploughed through or over. Garden snips and determination are great tools in such circumstances.

Around 6 I knew my colleagues would be at about Nkuma-1100, so I did our standard whistle to see if they could hear: a really loud catcall. I was far though, so I didn't really expect a response. I continued my trek northwest.

After an hour or so of following my bearing due northwest, I decided to turn on the GPS again to see where Nkuma-1500 was relative to me: only 600m to go, due west! The batteries died again, and I switched my bearing. It's too bad the GPS only gives bearings in 45-degree increments; it would have been feasible for me to have just followed something between west and northwest, and made the bushwhack that much more direct.

This method worked out though, and I crossed a well-worn trail at about 7pm. I saw the trail marker that said "Nk1400" just a few metres from where I emerged - I was less than 100m from the point I had been targeting for the past three hours! Not bad, eh?

NOT LOST ANY MORE

So I walked a few hundred metres to the Meike-5 intersection, and took my second break of the day. I sat on the big log just west of Meike-5, took off my wet boots, ate the last of my biscuits, and drank some more water. I had packed a dry pair of socks, which I put on once my feet were as dry as they were going to get. Then I put my feet back in my wet boots, put my backpack back on, and started the easy 7km back to camp. If I walked fast, I could be there by about 8:30pm - about the latest I could expect my colleagues to stick around waiting before they mounted a search party. I was tired, but I maintained a quick pace. The trail was so easy after all that off-trail mess I'd had to hack through!

As I walked the familiar trail, the sky flickered brightly and thunder clapped. I was actually relieved to get rained on at that point, since my body was so hot. My boots had been wet since 8:30 or so in the morning, and the rest of my body was pretty wet with sweat already anyway. So the last 45 minutes or so of my walkabout were in a downpour, with my headlamp illuminating the falling droplets. I saw two small antelopes along the way (blue duikers).

I got to camp at about 8:35, and one of the cooks immediately started calling the other cook's name: "Djoli!". Djoli had left with Brigham a few minutes before to start the trek down Bompusa trail to see if I was coming back that way. They hadn't even hit the muddy bit yet by the time I got back.

Martin and Andrew had a bag packed with some of the same essentials that had been packed a few days earlier when Andrew was late getting home. They were planning on waiting until Brigham and Djoli had checked for me through the Bompusa swamp, and then walking the Grande Tour in the other direction until they found me.

Once it was determined that I was fine, Andrew gave me his news: he had been successful in following the Grande Tour back to Meike-5, and he had seen a leopard where Nkuma crossed the Bompusa! Apparently he was only a few metres away from it when the leopard saw him, and it just bolted in shock from where it was drinking. He had also seen fresh elephant footprints, but no elephants. They hadn't succeeded in finding the bonobos though, which meant that everyone could sleep in to 6am if they wanted to:)

LESSONS LEARNED

I think the initial reaction of my colleagues, when I didn't return from my solo trek on the Grande Tour for a few hours past dark, was that we probably shouldn't be heading out alone to destinations outside of our normal stomping grounds. This sentiment was particularly strong given the stress we had all put ourselves through a few days before in worrying about Andrew in a similar situation. It's true, that going out into the forest in pairs obviously adds a safety factor in case anything happens, and it provides the opportunity for two pairs of trailfinders in situations where seldom-used trails just seem to disappear. Andrew hadn't lost Nkuma after 4150, so if we had been together I wouldn't have had to bushwhack.

On the other hand, the experience demonstrates how we are able to wayfind around here, and how even the furthest reaches of the forest are still just a few hours of hiking back to camp. We all use our compasses to follow bearings back to known trails - I just did so for over two kilometres straight through the forest.

The next day Andrew and Brigham used the same method for about a kilometre to reach a savannah, Momentaoule, that we see on our satellite photo but that nobody from camp had ever been to. They determined that by following a bearing from one of the known trails, they would eventually hit it. Getting to that savannah was the first time either of them had seen the horizon for a long time. They marked the waypoint for the centre of the savannah on my GPS, so now it will be even easier for any of us to bushwhack our way there.

The GPS has also gained in stature among my colleagues. I had been marking waypoints for weeks, as I walked the trails, surveyed the BFTs, and nested the bonobos. Having Nkuma 1500 waypointed allowed me to choose to bushwhack 2.1km west to a known trail for my walk home that night, rather than oblige me to hike the 10km back through the wet trail I had just come on - that would not have been a very viable option without it. My GPS unit has been out with everyone since then, and we have marked a lot of bonobo nesting sites and feeding trees on it. Hopefully we can get a similar GPS for the project in on the next plane.

Walkie-talkies have also been discussed. The dense forest precludes their use for much distance, such as from camp to Meike-5, but they may be useful for closer distances. I think I would have been able to communicate with Andrew at 6pm when he was around the Meike-5 x Nkuma intersection and I was a kilometre away in the bush, to let him know what was up. I also could have contacted camp as I approached, allowing them to stop worrying, and to cancel their search party before Brigham and Djoli left. This is a harder sell to our boss in Germany, since he somehow already has it in his head that the range of any walkie-talkie makes them useless in such dense forest, but we'll be requesting a set on the next plane anyway.

Overall though, I think my 3-hour adventure through the jungle was't a bad experience. I did leave the trail, but I was never really that far from points that I knew. The terrain around here is not that abrupt, so it's not like I was going to come to an impassable cliff or anything (there are actually no rocks here at all), and my boots were already wet and muddy since morning. The worst that could have happened would have been a sprained ankle, which would indeed have been an issue, but I still would have been able to hobble to a trail and be met by the search party when they finally came around. And I definitely got good practice following a bearing!

So don't worry about me getting 'lost in the jungle' around our bonobo study site. It's a good forest to be in, and fun to get to know. Instead, picture me primarily on the trail network, with periodic forays into the bush to follow bonobos, to find a lost trail, or perhaps, eventually, to visit Momentaoule.