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.
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.
