Melting Snow and Frying Brain

Spring is starting to poke its pretty face around the Peninsula! Work is getting easier with the snow courses because, what, they are gone! Shea and I were living the High Life last week when we drove to the trailhead, packed our snowshoes all the way to Deer Ridge and found no snow. Our one north aspect snow course had snow, but not even on all 5 points. The bummer about the trip is that we went up there to replace a weather station that was on the fritz. It turns out that it was on the fritz because someone cut the wire for the precip gauge, or maybe we did somehow.

The rivers are running pretty high right now, it is interesting to see them so full and for it to be sunny at the same time. That’s not the only thing that is full right now. I wish that I could coast to graduation like I had planned, enjoy my one class, make some bucks…but it is more like an uphill sprint with a yeti on my ass. Soon it will all be over, or at least the stuff with strict time requirements will be.

I am looking forwardish to this weekend. It is kind of stressful, to lose that kind of time to work on other things, but for natural history we are traveling to Mt Rainier for two and a half days. What we will do there in the snow, I don’t know, but I hope it’s fun.

No snow work last week, but to back track a bittle (that’s not a typo, it’s a combo of bit and little). We did kick the Dungeness’s ass a few weeks ago. Dwight said “we will make it if we have to hike from Slab Camp!” and guess what we did. We did just that. We drove until we were scraping in more than one place, then rolled down onto a clear spot…little did we expect getting stuck on bare ground, but we did. The come along got its first work out and it makes me wish we had more tow straps for events like that, it was way easier than pushing and digging to get it out.

We did a momentous hike up the trail from slab camp with some nice views. When we made it up to the top of Deer Ridge it started to snow, it was very wet nasty snow. Because of the warming we have had recently, snowshoes were a must after the set of benches on the ridge. It was more like walking in frozen yogurt, but we got to the top and did our work. For some reason it felt really cold up there, but the met station said it was just below freezing. Well the met station might be wrong, apparently sometime in April it went kablooey on us, the RH sensor read a consistent -200%. So we were met with a boisterous error light flashing in our faces. We reset the met station and how our RH sensor doesn’t even show up. Of course, the expensive piece of technology fails on the most remote location. We did dig a snow pit and collect some samples for bacteria analysis...as boring as that sounds, it is pretty interesting. Just a side note for all of you who go up to Deer Ridge. It is faster to take the trail down than the road...by far.

Not all technology is worth bitching about. Dwight and I finally got to go to the WAURISA (GIS) conference in Seattle. After a little planning fiasco, I was able to sneak in and spend my birthday in a workshop about project management for GIS, skills I probably won’t need until I am about 35. Hopefully I can use what I learned to appeal to someone who is 35+ and has something I want. Above all, the food was the best part of the conference, while we were there we had Mexican, Thai, and sushi…as well as realizing the beauty behind top shelf tequila, and not in a “get crunk” kind of way.

At the conference there were some interesting ideas presented, met some pretty good contacts and presented the wildfire work. I took second in the student presentation…once again the UW grad students took top honors. I kind of look forward to going into a masters program so I can beat undergrads. All in all I learned quite a bit and had a good time…next conference, San Diego...maybe?

It's raining, it's snowing.

Well, all is quiet on the REU front. We have been working on the google mash up to present at the GIS conference, well Dwight has been working on it and I have been gathering some info. It looks like we can make it as robust as we want or as simple as we want.

In the mean time I have been working on my student presentation for the GIS conference. After presenting to the Clallam County Sheriff’s Department, I got some ideas for some changes to make and a little strike of confidence that I actually know what I am talking about.

The weather is starting to get nice, emphasis on the start portion. Cabin fever hasn’t quite set in because I can get out once in a while, but I would like to go out and see something new. Speaking of getting out, following the previous snow storm we had a few weeks ago in April, we have been unable to get up to our snow courses because 20 inches of new fell in a weekend! Tomorrow we will kick the Dungeness’s ass and get up to Deer Ridge, and hopefully make it back before dark.

We will see how next week’s conference goes. If nothing else it is going to be a nice trip to Seattle, celebrate Cinco de Mayo, take in a Mariner’s game and enjoy some more free food, probably no free beer this time.

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.

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.

Stuck in the snow, not behind a computer.

Snow sampling continues as the winter moves on…Storms come and go in the mountains and down in town, but the cold isn’t always coming with it. Not a big deal to drive in the rain, but it makes pretty unfavorable driving conditions up in the snow. Last week, Dwight, Shea and I spent over an hour getting the Jeep unstuck, turned around pointed downhill. After that we got a nice hike in the sun up the hill to BoJo. Once we got there we had a quick lunch and took our samples. On the way back we got dumped on by some driving fluffy snow. After sampling at The Lounge about two inches accumulated.

Our sampling structure has been changed as we have made the Deer Ridge transect permanent, we will go on a three day sampling cycle hitting the mid, high, and transect sites…which now all have maps to accompany them…check out the study area map.

Finally I was able to get the aerial photo adjusted to fit onto a GPS, but getting it to appear in the program is another story. Still working on that one.

It’s a bummer to miss the trip to Newport with the nearshore group (but I do get to make some maps for them to use in presentations). The snow crew gets to go to Hood River, OR for the Western Snow Conference to present a little bit of the NASA work as well as our analysis of the Deer Park snow course and the affect of the 1988 fire and snow interception…we started to look at that, but normalizing it for climate data might be a challenge.

Also we are looking into attending and presenting at the Washington GIS Conference in Seattle.