Day 1 - Preparations, setting up monitoring environment

GOALS:

• establish a safe camp

• make all necessary amendments for sustainable energy to charge devices

• find and label landmarks

• make a prelimilary estimation of possible species of interest based on the immediate vicinity

Notes:

I have tried to convince myself to keep this field-note-journal-thing as scientific as it is possible, but at the end of the day, I might as well make it a diary, and filter the necessary contents later. It is possibly (no, absolutely surely) double effort this way, but I just can’t contain my excitement, and since I’m all alone out here, I need to tell everything to someone - and the only ‘someone’ I can talk to right now, is either myself (and quite frankly, during the Birmingham botanist years I’ve enjoyed my own company just enough, thank you very much), or this super fancy, gilded, magnetically sealed notebook - and the 3 identical copies - I’ve brought with myself.

Now that I have succesfully wasted half page and about 2 millilitres of ink on my childish rambling, it is time to reveal The Purpose for my newfound best friend - I’ll just call you D, if that’s alright, since you know, Diary. I’m definitely no threat to anyone in the fantasy industry.
What I am, however is stunned that I, of all people, have been granted this opportunity. If it wasn’t obvious, I was born to Russian parents - although in Newcastle, much more years ago than what I’m comfortable with admitting to myself. I have always felt a very strong call from Mother Nature, and it has led me to become a biologist - a botanist, to be exact, and an environmental botanist PhD student at that, if we insist on full titles. And this trip, the one I’m very mysteriously setting up for an entire page right now, is the pinnacle of my lifetime on this planet.
I have travelled to Yekaterinburg two days ago, and I have arrived at the foot of the Southern Urals today, just a little bit after dawn. I was granted the opportunity and the funding to study the changes in the populations of Adenophora lilifolia! This might sound very, very insignificant, but this is one of the rarest plants in the Urals, and the recent changes in the climate has made it questionable whether they can survive the increasing heat and the weather extremities. I feel like a last minute saviour to these tiny guys, and I’m very touched that I could finally see my motherland in it’s raw, natural shape. Not the old Soviet concrete jungles, but this untamed, untouched region. A childhood dream is coming true right here, right now.
Now that I feel like I finally grounded all the excitement in my fingertips, the hard facts are as follows:

• camp succesfully established, solar panels are up and running

• food is in safe packaging, clean water and purifier are at my disposal

• everything is just... so breathtakingly gorgeous. I’ll need a day to just take it all in. I’m supposed to do high impact research here, but a little self indulgent hiking never hurt nobody, right?

TO DO:

I feel like I was very optimistic this morning when I broke the first three pages to strict sections, it won’t happen again.

Actual TO DO:

• indicate landmarks on my map

• set up first monitoring perimeter, look for A. lilifolia, and possible other indicator species, which might hint at the damage done by climate change

• prepare food and safety equipment for day 2.