Everyone loves to travel, right?
Well, I have been blessed in the fact my line of work allows me to travel all over the USA for training and conferences: Ithaca, San Diego, Manhattan, etc. And this past Thur/Fri, I was off on another work adventure.
Where to?
Tulelake, CA - Approximately 5 hours from UC Davis. Why there? Because I planted 1440 wheat plants in a field up there to help continue my experiments. You see, in California, due to our climate, we are able to grow spring wheat during the winter, and then during the summer, can grow it up in the mountains. That means, instead of only one harvest a year, we have two! Which can be crucial for speeding up the development of new lines or completing dissertation projects in less than 5 years. And I'm not the only one in my lab with plants up there so my lab mate, Saarah, and I drive up to Tulelake to collect leaf tissue.
Leaf tissue is needed from young plants in order to extract DNA and analyze the genome. If the plant gets too old, the leaves become dry and you can't extract quality DNA. These seeds were planted in early June and it's already late July so we knew we needed to get up there soon before the plants matured too much.
So off we went!
We woke up at 4:30am on Thursday morning, loaded up the lab truck, and drove five hours to Tulelake. Saarah doesn't have her license yet, so I had to drive the entire time but that was fine by me, I've missed driving a truck around! Anyway, the drive was absolutely gorgeous.
Volcanoes, mountains, forests, swamps. All Beautiful. We finally arrive and set to work around 11:30am. We work until Sunset. There are a lot more plants to collect than we realized. The light disappears and so we head off to a campsite nearby in a state park. It had lava beds and caves to explore! Unfortunately, we didn't have time to go off on an adventure but the landscape looked amazing. The lava beds were a black sea with speckles of life!
The next morning, we wake with the sun at 5:15 and head back to the field. But... the irrigation is on! We forgot to tell them we didn't finish everything! We hurry over to the station and the manager turns off the irrigation. Fortunately, it had only been running for an hour so the plants were pretty wet, but it hadn't had time to soak into the ground to make mud. The manager also gives us some white pesticide coats and boots to help keep us clean and dry while we are out in the wet wheat plants. We looked pretty funny!
Finally around noon, we finish. Phew! We quickly clean up, return the gear, clean up our campsite, and start the drive home. I needed to be back by 6pm because my Newman Grad Group was heading out for our own camping trip down south. Five hours later, we make it just in time. And that was my work trip to Tulelake, I'll definitely being using these lava beds and caves in my future writings! (Also, enjoy this video of our "scarecrow")
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