Ice Storm

Friday, a big ice storm knocked down power lines all over the area, and word is some areas won't get power back for another week. Hopefully not us. Today is the third day we've been without power, and living in my house is starting to feel like living in Badger or Quartz cabins. The perishable food is sitting in a cooler on the deck so it won't spoil, and candles and headlamps have been dug out of the closets. It's funny how not having power isn't a big deal when in a cabin where its expected, but can really mess things up elsewhere. Besides the food in danger of spoiling in the fridge, the tropical fish in our fishtank are in danger of dying from cold, and the tank is now wrapped in foam and duct tape in an attempt to keep them warm.

It's just like badger cabin! Except that the food in the cooler actually stays cold...

I see why most early settlements were near lakes and rivers... we can't pump water from the well anymore and are melting ice on the woodstove to get water.

Extreme Fisheries Biology

This week fall weather set in up at Quartz Lake. The wind started blowing, whipping up canoe capsizing waves on the lake. So for several days we huddled in the cabin around Bruce (our woodstove). Finally, we had a day we were able to get out. The wind had (sort-of not really) died down but we needed to get out of the cabin and get our gear out of the stream. So we started paddling, and got sketched out by the waves about a third of the way up the lake. We beached the canoe and started bushwhacking along shore, which proved to be quite slow and ineffective. So we got back in the canoe, ignoring the possibility of worsening weather, and made it to the head of the lake and Quartz Creek. The creek was 5 degrees Celsius and all the overhanging branches were covered with icicles. And it snowed on us too. On October 11th.


So we completed our redd surveys, pulled gear, and didn't see any fish in the creek. Unlike us, the fish were smart enough to get out of that creek once the it got so cold...
We made it up to Cerulean Lake, where all the waterfalls were lovely and frozen, and bushwhacked down the game trail one last time.


The next day we packed out our gear, and my pack was stuffed to the gills (see, it's taller than me!) and had all sorts of stuff that wouldn't fit inside strapped to the sides. Normal people carry tents and sleeping bags when they go hiking... field studies always seem to involve carrying absurd things like rebar, plastic pants, car batteries, metal stakes...

And now we are done with the bull trout. I'll be travelling a bit, to Oregon and then New Hampshire, and hopefully finding another job at some point.

Baby Bull Trout!

The bull trout are moving up the creek and spawning (there are two trout in each picture). Pairs use their tails to push around gravel and make redds, small pits that they lay their eggs in. In the pictures, you can see the cleaner gravel that the fish have just moved. And next spring small baby bull trout fry will come out of the gravel.

Backpack Trip

I had a chance to backpack in glacier finally (not counting packing food into Quartz Lake each week). The trip started out with me not getting on the trail till 6pm, on account of needing to bike 20 miles on dirt roads to drop my car at one trailhead and my bike at another. So by the time I hiked the 7 miles to my first campground, it was dark, and raining. Starting hikes at 6 is clearly a bad idea. Then, my stove didn't work, and I had to (sort of) cook my dinner on the coals of another camper's dying fire.

The next day, I was hiking alone when I see a party below me at Brown Pass waving. So I waved back. And then realized that they weren't getting my attention to say "hello", but to say "can you see the big grizzly bear on the trail ahead of you?"
But these interesting situations aside, it was a lovely trip, I got to camp in an amazing hanging glacial valley with views of this mountain, thunderbird peak, and met some nice hikers with a backpacking oven that made blueberry muffins on trail.

And I carried my sweater vest almost 30 miles so that I could wear it on sweater vest friday, while crossing Boulder Pass.

And of course, on the way out I stopped at Polebridge to get cookies. Just look at this sign they have... "slow down, people breathing?" it might as well say "notice: hippie commune ahead"

Polebridge has many stray dogs running around that try to steal your sandwiches. This sad one has three legs.

Ancient Seas

The rock in Glacier is old. Over a billion years old. It was laid down on the floor of oceans far before life existed on land and later lifted up into mountains. Along the trails you can still see signs of the former ocean. Wave created ripples on rocks, cracks in rock that was once mud drying in the sun. And, above, stromatolites, mats left by blue-green algae, some of the oldest evidence of life on earth.

Touching thousands? millions? of years of sediment laid down on an ocean bottom.

Butterfly on top of stromatolites.

Don't fall off the logjams!

We work in the creeks draining into Quartz Lake, mapping habitat and electroshocking to catch study juvenile bull trout. The streams are swift and forested, which makes them very beautiful and also very difficult to bushwhack through carry nets and electrofishers and depth sticks. Crawling over slippery logjams is the most treacherous part. I managed to fall off a log onto a pointy stick and puncture my waders, my long underwear, and my leg, and Lora got stuck in a hole when a logjam she was crossing crumbled into the creek.

Our endpoint is Cerulean Lake, 5 kilometers or so up rainbow creek. The waterfalls on the cliff come down from two glaciers above the ridge. There are no (human) trails in the upper drainage. To get back to our canoe from here, we follow a game trail created by elk who have a poor sense of routefinding and often lead us into massive tree blowdowns that we have to crawl over. Back at our cabin, we often get visits from campers who have seen Cerulean Lake on their maps and ask if you can get up there. We tell them you can... if you're willing to bushwhack for miles, have a good pair of waders, and a canoe. Most of them haven't packed a canoe in so they lose interest.

After we pulled our flagging marking electrofishing sites Lora pulled all this out of her waders, stating "It's like a party in my pants - a party with flagging and pine needles!"


Our field truck is an enormous '89 suburban named Betsy. It has three gears, and frequently pops out of gear on bumpy roads.

Underwater in Quartz Lake

For the first time since purchasing my underwater camera, I live near a body of water that holds more than two cubic feet of water (about how big our spring in Sheldon was). Quartz Lake , where I live now, is 200some feet deep and has plenty of room for swimming. It is also cold, so I donned a drysuit, mask and snorkel before heading in. There is a logjam at the outlet of the lake, and all the logs are good fish habitat. At first, I scared all the fish thrashing about and unable to swim properly due to a large bubble of air in my drysuit which made it impossible to put my feet down. But when I stopped moving, the fish seemed to mistake me for a floating log and swim right up to me.

Small westslope cutthroat trout. Had a few bigger ones for dinner last week.Redside shiner (different than the red shiners I eradicated in Utah). You may notice that its side is not red at all. Apparently the name does make sense though, they are redsided when in breeding colors.

Lake whitefish.

Across the Rockies

Several weeks ago I left Sheldon to drive to my next job in Montana. I did not have a single road map of any of the states I was driving through, but thanks to my sheldon coworkers I did know the location of many of the hot springs and taco trucks in Idaho. So I packed my car... and a house wren flew into it and got stuck. After extracting the bird, I started heading through the vast expanse of sagebrush in southeast Oregon. There was a scary moment when I drove my car off the road in a really remote area of Oregon (60 mile dirt road, no cars seen for hours) but I managed to get back on the road. Below - what passes for a state highway in northern Nevada.


In Idaho the sagebrush steppe was replaced by forest, and lovely as the sagebrush is, going into the trees felt like going home. I camped under the ponderosas by rivers, found natural hotsprings to swim in, and hiked some in the Sawtooth Range.


I made it to Montana, crossed the continental divide several times, and am now in Glacier National Park, working on a fisheries project. I live in a little cabin on Quartz Lake, a six mile hike in.

One more week at Sheldon

The birds are silent, the vegetation analysis and data entry are almost done, and I will be leaving Sheldon in a week. Next I am headed to Glacier, Montana, to live in another cabin without electricity and work on a bull trout study. Here are a few more sheldon pictures. My nighthawk eggs hatched, and the baby nighthawks look absurd, just little balls of fluff with no discernable heads or wings.
Last day off, Michelle and I hiked up to a backcountry lake in the Warner Mountains. The Warners are beautiful, but their distance from major cities and lack of excessively craggy peaks makes them virtually unknown, and we had the trail to ourselves.


The Mule's Ears that grow in the mountains have enormous leaves.

Evening on Badger Mountain, with Great Basin wild rye (ELCI) in the foreground.

Trees and rivers?! Climbing!

For our two days off, Michelle and I headed up to Bend, Oregon, for some climbing. As we got closer, the sagebrush steppe turned to ponderosa pine forest, and we started to see lakes and rivers. Although I have loved living in the desert, I do miss trees. The first night we camped off a forest service road in the ponderosas, and could see the sillouettes of tall pines against the darkening sky and smell the soil and trees and growing things. The desert smells like dust and sagebrush.
We met up with a few local climbers, who showed us volcanic cliffs to toprope along the Deschutes River. They also showed me how to set nuts and hexes in the rock and I practiced setting trad protection on a climb (but while still on a toprope). The friendliness of complete strangers is one of the excellent things about the climbing community. We had called random gear shops the night before asking about where to climb, and found someone who offered to take us climbing.

The next day we bouldered down by the river - here is Michelle on a traverse.

After climbing on the sun-baked basalt, we jumped in some bouldery pools along a rapid on the river, and had fun with the waterproof feature of my camera. It was tricky to swim against the current - below are my arms frantically grabbing onto a rock so I don't get swept away.


Upper Klamath Lake, seen on the way up.





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For our two day break, Michelle and I headed to Bend, O

coolest birds ever

Loggerhead shrikes are predatory passerines, which have a habit of stashing their kills on thorns or barbed wire fences for later (like a jaguar would). For such a small bird, they are pretty vicious and awesome.

Shrike nestlings. When I climb their tree to check the nest, the parents flap around the tree screeching at me.


Common nighthawks are odd looking birds. And very well camoflaged. Once, when checking this nest I thought the bird had abandoned the nest because I couldn't see it. Then I realized that I was staring right at it. They are also lazy birds. Why build a nest when you can just lay eggs on the ground?

Life at Badger Cabin

Our home while working on Sheldon is Badger Cabin, on Badger Mountain (and I saw a Badger yesterday while nest-seaching. It was funny and waddled around). Here at Badger we lack things such as electricity and running water, but have views of the sagebrush, a washers court, and other excellent things. This is our horsealope skull, which guards the cabin. The house wren perching on the antler is nesting in the brain cavity.


Though we are in the middle of the sagebrush, we have quite a few amenities. Here is our lovely outdoor shower - just hang your towel on the deer antler, divert the spring, hook up the pump to the 12V car battery, and crank up the propane heater.

We can only get AM radio out here...FM won't come in. Most of what we do get on the field truck radios is conservative talk radio. So, after a day of work, we can hear excessively patriotic music, opinions such as "wind power will never work cause windmills were invented in the dark ages," and overuse of the phrase "You're a great American."

Our water comes from a small spring near the cabin, and the little pool below it doubles excellently as a beer cooler. Although, being in the spring the labels get rather sun-bleached and it is sometimes necessary to scrape algae of your bottle before opening it up.

A Badger Cabin sunrise (we see a lot, starting work at dawn when the birds awake).