Work day 1
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 geared up.
Once we were geared up we walked to the creek and crept into the water as to not disturb the fish. We worked our way upstream crawling over the bottom, it felt kind of like horizontal rock climbing. Since fish face upstream into the current we were able to get quite close without disturbing them. The two main varieties in Quartz creek where we were working (and what our residence is named after) are Cutthroat and Rainbow trout, both of which we saw. There were also tons of macro-invertebrates including snails and caddisflies. After lunch we went down stream to a 10-12 ft deep pool below a waterfall where we got some practice swimming in the suits and observing places where we couldn't reach the bottom. It was really cool drifting that high above the stream bed, it felt kind of like flying. After returning from the field this evening had our weekly math lecture by Jorge the resident mathematician. Today's topic was mainly Markov processes which I'd seen before but Jorge's lecture was still entertaining. We rounded out the evening with some beachball volleyball. Tomorrow the more technical work starts as we get to figure out the Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler the expensive device designed to give us our flow date.
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 geared up.
Once we were geared up we walked to the creek and crept into the water as to not disturb the fish. We worked our way upstream crawling over the bottom, it felt kind of like horizontal rock climbing. Since fish face upstream into the current we were able to get quite close without disturbing them. The two main varieties in Quartz creek where we were working (and what our residence is named after) are Cutthroat and Rainbow trout, both of which we saw. There were also tons of macro-invertebrates including snails and caddisflies. After lunch we went down stream to a 10-12 ft deep pool below a waterfall where we got some practice swimming in the suits and observing places where we couldn't reach the bottom. It was really cool drifting that high above the stream bed, it felt kind of like flying. After returning from the field this evening had our weekly math lecture by Jorge the resident mathematician. Today's topic was mainly Markov processes which I'd seen before but Jorge's lecture was still entertaining. We rounded out the evening with some beachball volleyball. Tomorrow the more technical work starts as we get to figure out the Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler the expensive device designed to give us our flow date.
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