Last shout out for winter.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Well this has been one of the fastest quarters of my college “career.” Maybe that is because I only took one class.

The last few weeks have been pretty uneventful. All of the weather stations are out (except #7 which might not be launched at Louella); which means we have been adding data collection to our tasks in the woods. Our days in the woods are getting shorter and shorter as the daylight grows longer and longer. The snow level keeps going up, we can drive more so there is less hiking.

Our trip to Deer Ridge last weekend was more like the hike into one of the easy sites. We had done nearly all of our snow courses before lunch, including the three mile uphill hike.

Back in the lab, we are still sending out the data we collect, even though most of it is zeros….but zero is still a data point as Master Dwight says.

The weather has been awesome for us. A little bit of snow or light rain here or there, but the weather is always better than down in PA.

We have been taking lots of photos and video in the past few outings to prepare for our vidcast. She and I have written some scripts, made some drafts and ended up with a badass vidcast. Dwight knows the concept of “work smarter, not harder” and asked us to finish our vidcast in time for the Dungeness River Management Team meeting and used that as part of his presentation. Sounds like it was well accepted.

Next week is the Elwha Research Consortium meeting. Luckily, I get to ditch part of it for work. Then we get to have a dinner with researchers, learn about the projects going on in the Elwha, then I think I will be taking off sometime on the 26^th to go to Tahoe!

A few bruises and a campfire.

So in the past two weeks we have had a few milestones on the hydro project. Well they might not be mile stones, but at least some accomplishments.

Our pseudo spring has brought little precip and warmer temps to the area. Great for being in town and hanging out, but up in the mountains little snow is falling. What is up there partially freezes and makes it difficult to get around. So we have been hiking more and added XC skis to the repertoire. I have never skied before, but the bruises are going away.

This week we launched 6 weather stations. They are tripods with a metal mast, attached to the mast is a temp/RH sensor, a precipitation gauge (tipping bucket) and a HOBO data logger. The sensors are read and stored every 5 minutes. We will be retrieving the data every time we visit the snow course. Also this week, we visited every one of our sample sites, including the deer ridge transect. Yes, we hauled the 60+ lbs of weather station to the top, but we were greeted with an awesome view.

Up there, Dwight wanted to do a little experiment and see how much snow was on the northern aspect of the ridge, about 20 meters away from one of our other snow courses. A tip for everyone out there, take your snow cores uphill from you…I tried to do one downhill, with a 55 inch or so snow core, I pushed it into the ground and buried my knuckles into the snow and my body kept on going and had a little endo action…with a nice recovery while on snow shoes.

I have been spending some time reflecting on our work also. This week I made a draft of my podcast, which I need to figure out how to link up to the blog. Also, Shea and I made a vidcast of our work. We will be showing these in class this week.

An unscheduled treat came along as well. Andy Bach and the geography crew came over from WWU for a water resources trip. I met up with them at the Lyre River Campground for a few beers and a bonfire. We discussed the highlights of Bellingham, being plagued with always having to know where we are, talked about weird places in California, and ate lots of things that we cooked in the fire.

Two more weeks left in the quarter. I want out.