MT. HOOD NATIONAL FOREST, Ore. — "Rope!" the biologist shouts, before the morning's divebombing begins. In the weak sunlight, Joel E. "Jeep" Pagel, 38, unfurls his faded rope down the 425-foot cliff, along with a backup rope. The sheer cliff is junk, a flaky volcanic rock with the bad habit of sloughing off and firing stones like projectiles.
Atop the cliff, Pagel had secured his climbing ropes to a Douglas fir. He stands out only as a speck of sky blue, the color of his climbing helmet, against a behemoth of rock in shades of mud and rust. He had yelled the rope warning out of habit, behind locked forest gates in the wild. No other climber would try to rappel down such unstable rock. (Once, when Pagel was making his way back up a similar slope, his foot tapped and broke off a chunk of rock the size of a riding lawn mower.)
But if you have a job at hand, the way Pagel does, you don't get to pick the rocks you climb. With a 60-pound backpack, the U.S. Forest Service's peregrine falcon expert ferrets out nest sites in Oregon, Washington and California. Pagel reaches the sites via mountain biking, bushwhacking, ocean kayaking, river kayaking and other means. One site calls for 25 miles of off-trail hiking and two river swims--not even a full day's work for the "extreme scientist."
Coined from "extreme sports," the term refers to field researchers whose athletic gifts propel them to unexplored places or lead them to data that otherwise would be lost. They pursue what technology cannot--hand-extracted samples and observations made by a practiced eye at sites ripe for discovery. Such scientists are beginning to spin off into a sub-orbit, away from colleagues who face extreme environments, researchers such as storm chasers working out of vans or those based at Antarctic field stations.
Scientist-athlete hybrids, in fact, are finding themselves in a coterie of elite athletes and adventure jocks. Last December, for instance, Outside magazine named "geologist/caver" Louise Hose, 49, on its list of 25 international superheroes. Hose, an assistant professor at Chapman University in Orange, was recognized alongside sports stars including a 25-year-old big-mountain snowboarder who zooms off cliffs.
These days, scientist-athletes are being folded into the context of an evolving adventure age. "Extreme sports is one venue for that, and extreme science is another one," said scientist and triathlete Peter Lane Taylor, author of "Science at the Extreme." His book, which was published by McGraw-Hill last year, led to a two-part series on the Learning Channel in May and other multimedia projects.
