Not a whole lot has happened lately. A few weeks ago we got to go out and check out a few of the potential sample sites for the hydro project. The day was pretty fun. It entailed mapping the coordinates for the locations and (attempting) to pay them each a visit. All of the sites were in the Dungeness watershed, which was interesting because the vegetation there was different than what I am used to on the west side of the Cascades.

The sites needed to be relatively flat and have 0-20% canopy cover, away from avalanche danger zones, and at the elevation bands that are needed to fill the gaps in the model…yeah, that was a joke. The sites that were picked by the engineers were done by remote sensing. What was not on the ground is not what we saw, some locations had thick canopy cover, others could barely be accessed by foot (and repelling equipment) on a dry autumn afternoon, let alone with snowshoes and field gear. Needless to say we need new sites.

We are getting started on the sediment sampling with the near shore group. Tomorrow is the first day of sampling with the camera, so we will be going out and getting some sand, getting down a system for taking the photos to capture grain size and will do two afternoons of work before Thanksgiving. Today’s task is rigging a tripod with an arm to take a picture of the ground.

Will see how things go.