Snow, sand, and spending time in the lab

Things have been swell since my last blog update. I shoved my arm farther up the beast that is the REU program, but it is a good thing. I am trying this blog directly from Picasa, my new discovery through Google, their photo uploading/sharing program.

The hydro project is in full swing. We got approval to do our Deer Ridge Transect, which Shaylee so endearingly called "Walking uphill, in the snow, eating sticks." We (along with Gus and Dwight) hiked a few miles up the Deer Ridge trail on a beautiful winter day, after spending an hour or so getting the Jeep unstuck, and after I lost my keys in the snow.

Our jaunt up the hill was pretty decent, a few good outcrops to catch some rays and get a GPS fix, had lunch at a few benches planted in the snow and snow shoed the way to the spine of the ridge to start surveying. We got three courses on the way down and one at the road, where we recorded our low temp for the day, in the middle upper 20's (27 or something). A brisk day none the less because there were no clouds, but because there were no clouds we could see the Cascades which Gus enjoys to insult. In the photo above, they are behind our heads, and was probably the most cloudy part of the day until we drove off into the sunset.

Since my last blog, we also discovered that some of the sample sites we thought were useful were more or less usampleable, "Salal Hell" for obvious reasons and another unnamed site because there was too much veg to get a good snow course in. Instead we setup one on a quarry so aptly named "Rocky Squirrel," another one in the redneck camping area called "Foxworthy"...the quarry could have gotten the same namesake because of the rusted out BBQ we found there. Dwight also got to name one of our other sites "Vampire" because a branch over the trail attacked the poor old man and made him bleed.

After last week's Elwha Nearshore Consortium meeting Melanie and I were finally able to meet with the elusive Jon Warrick of USGS, the geologist behind the sediment project. Her and I did some math that morning and figured out that it would take about 750 hours to process all of the sediment photos we had, plus data analysis time...not a chance. So we explained the predicament to Jon and he cut our work way down, instead of taking 216 measures per photo we went down to 20 and decided not to analyze half of the photos because substrate photo analysis hasn't been perfected...but that just means that the sieving will be giving us that data...have fun Ben & Tiff!

Mel and I were able to get a new spreadsheet made to fit our needs and get a few photos analyzed. We checked one to make sure her and I measured consistently, we compared our mean grain sizes and were only off by a pixel, which amounts to 0.3 mm go us!

Now that we are getting some snow data, we are able to process that using GIS...well at least we are still working on that. We are about to the point of having our sites picked out but the GPS data collection process has yet to be streamlined, let alone finalized. Every time we go out we are bringing an updated data dictionary. We should have things figured out by the time the snow melts, hopefully. In the mean time I am getting pretty close to our GIS and GPS software. I have yet to have them visit me in my dreams, but after a few breakthroughs this week that are comparable to finding a cure for cancer after the frustration I have had, we are close to putting our background photos into the GPS units...easier said than done.