Wengen Field Trip

I had been planning to post this days ago, but my life for the last four has been: Math IA, Geo IA, Extended Essay, German revision-y type stuff. So I apologize.

I had a request last week for a post about the field trip that some of us took to Wengen in the first week of school. It was the IB Year 2 Biology, Environmental Systems and Societies, and Geography classes that took two days off school and retreated up into the mountains. It was three days of fieldwork, so that we could do some independent lab reports in the science classes, and to gather data for the Geo IA.

We left after school on the Wednesday, and took a bus and four trains to get to Wengen. For those who've never made that trip, it takes about 4 hours, sometimes longer if you don't get good connections with your trains. We arrived in Wengen at about 7:00, where we had a short walk up a hill to get to the school's chalet (it sounds really fancy, I know).

Thursday was spent primarily in some grassland areas further up in the mountains above the chalet. We practiced our fieldwork techniques by doing some random quadrat sampling to determine the diversity of the species in that area. And we had to collect samples of bryophytes, coniferophytes, angiospermophytes, and filicinophytes. We then got to pretend that we were doing something highly illegal, and one teacher jokingly treated it like a covert operation - smuggling plants off the mountain. In reality, it was really only something that would be frowned upon. We continued our rule-breaking spree by having a race to see which group could collect the most bryophytes & filicinophytes or angiospermophytes in a wooded area in only five minutes. Always good to add a bit of competition.

Friday was the big day, because this was the day where the Geo class (which I'm in) basically took over the trip and made people help us with our work. For our IA, we're looking at how the distribution and diversity of alpine plants can indicate the rate of glacial retreat. So that meant taking a train higher into the mountains, and then hiking even further up, until we were almost directly under the Eigergletscher. This time, our field technique was an interrupted belt transect - doing random quadrat sampling was really impractical over a 500m area. So we did our data collection in this scree ravine, which took about 2.5 hours. Then the fun stuff started.

I kicked off the party by dropping my camera, which then took a spectacular tumble over a cliff and straight down 100m into a stream. Needless to say, I didn't get that back. Then we had to hike up the face of a hill, which had a lot of loose scree on it. Not much stable footing, every time someone moved, they sent a rockfall down the slope we were on, which was considerably steep, and ended in a cliff. A lot of people freaked out, which was understandable, as the dominant demographic in the group was teenage girls who weren't experienced hikers. Having said that, girls who were experienced hikers and some guys were a bit shaken too. I think that a decision was made that the trip needed more excitement. Well, we got it.

Safe back at the chalet, we had to turn around and plan the next day's work, which was the independent investigation - so come up with your own research question, identify the variables, plan your procedure, etc - basically a lab report.

A bunch of the boys left at the crack of dawn the next day to hike up a mountain to do their investigation - theirs involved the effect of altitude on something. Most other people just went back to the same places we'd been on Thursday, as they had a pretty good idea of what they'd find there, making the design process a little bit easier.

After everyone had collected their data, we packed up, got back on the train, and had another 4 hour trip home. An exhausting, but fun weekend, really.