A conference and some acronyms

Well it’s a little late, but I wanted something juicy to write about.

We are getting socked with some winter weather right now. Hail, snow, wind. It’s a nice last hoorah, but will it ever end?

I got to attend the Western Snow Conference in Hood River, OR this week with Dwight, Erin and Shea. Needless to say, we learned a lot about snow. The whole climate change idea is a big deal to them (duh) and it looks like there are lots of resources and approaches to dealing with it…or at least describing the impacts and predicting them. One of the more notable presentations was about the impacts of snow depth and density on wildlife in terms of predator/prey interactions. It was presented by a guy who did his first snow survey before most of the people in the room were even born.

We met lots of interesting characters and drank lots of good brews at Full Sail…well the interesting characters were usually in the hot tub. There was a good field trip up and down the gorge on Thursday. We got a tour of Bonneville dam and locks, Crown Vista, ate lunch at the top of Multnomah Falls and got a nice nap on the tour bus…then drove home to PA.

Snow stuff on our end is carrying on…Still getting to go out, go hiking and collect data points and downloading met data. Also, working with the PUD is pretty fun, lots of GIS work and a little bit of inturd data entry, not a bad gig. I am learning a bit about CAD too.

My one class, Natural History of the PNW had our first field trip today. We were a bit snowed in and could not go out to the Soleduc to check out the forest. Instead, we just hit up Heart o the Hills on the way to Hurricane Ridge and froze our feet off (standing around in the snow is not very fun). Then we got some moss and lichen samples and keyed them out back at the lab on campus, not too bad for a snow day.

Well back to work, quite a bit to do revolving around GIS. At least it’s crappy weather this weekend.