Unfettered

Before I start talking about day 1 of work here are a few pictures form the hike I took on Sunday. View Across part of the Andrews basin to lookout mountain As you can see there is still a little snow at the higher elevations. The view east from the top of HJA I think these are 2 of the sisters. A pool in the stream our trail followed. Though today was the first day of real work there was still a lot of learning to be done. Today was primarily for Ginger who will be doing the ecology work for our team. In the case of our project this means snorkel surveys of the pools below our logjams. Snorkel surveys consist mainly of floating in the water then observing and recording the behavior of the fish. Since this involves spending prolonged time in water that is between 10-12 degrees Celsius proper equipment is key. In our case this meant dry suits, plus neoprene hoods, gloves, and felt bottomed shoes for better traction on wet rock. Here is a picture of me after we got back, though still ge

Last night I returned from what was likely the most fun thing I have ever been paid to do, namely go river rafting. As part of our program the entire group goes for a three day geology rafting trip down the Deschutes river in central Oregon. Due to the presence of a significant quantity of water and my lack of water proof equipment this post will be picture free and thus I will try to keep it to the point to risk boring my few loyal readers. On Sunday afternoon we drove a couple hours over the cascades to Madras the nearest town to the put-in point. The next morning we packed our stuff into dry bags and after an hour so of geology lectures we got in the rafts. We proceeded down the river stopping for lunch and geology talks eventually reaching camp. The following two days followed the same pattern with a couple additional incidents. The most memorable of these were a lecture delivered from on top of a composting toilet, and stranding our program director and the math mentor on a rock i

Well it's the weekend again, and what a week it has been. Almost all of the week was spent doing various activities designed to get us familiar with H.J. Andrews Experimental forest, here shortened to just 'the Andrews'. These activities included a number of lectures by various professors, a whole afternoon of safety training, and my personal favorites, a number of field exercises and hikes through the woods. Yesterday we drove into Corvallis to OSU where we watched the professors present powerpoints of the summer projects they are leading. After that we had a BBQ at the house of the program director who also happens to be the professor who I will be working with. We then had to drive back to the Andrews making for quite a long day. Since I've been very lax in my picture taking I've only got a few to put up. This is our bunk house, it is divided into four apartments each with 5 double bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a kitchen, and a large living/dining area. Our program has

Although I have safely returned from Budapest I'll try to maintain this blog, though likely with infrequent posts. This summer I am doing research at HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. I am part of the Eco-Informatics Summer Institute which is very similar to other REU's (research experience for undergrads) in that both are NSF (National Science Foundation) funded research opportunities. In all honesty I'm not really sure the difference, though I'll likely find out. The project I am working on is studying the how artificial wood jams in streams affect the fish populations. These wood jams were put in to aid in stream bank restoration and there are still questions as to how they interact with fish populations. In particular my group is studying the flow and hydraulics of water through the jams and how this in turn interacts with fish. My job will be to model the hydraulics using software developed by one of the project advisers. I've actually already arrive