Counting Gravel

July 29th --

Woke at 5:30am and quietly walked through camp to the storage shed near our camp here on the Middle Fork John Day River. I have my mountain bike locked up inside the shed so, after exchanging my wool hat for a helmet, I hopped on the bike and headed out on the Forest Service roads. The roads leave directly from the camp and head up/around the mountain that we set at the base of (Vinegar Hill). The peak is some 8,000+ ft elevation but the roads don't go all the way to the top......walking up it is for another day. The top of Vinegar Hill hosts the southern portion of the North Fork John Day Wilderness.

Heaps of secondary and closed off old mining roads are my playground for exploration on my bike . I AM SO GLAD THAT I BROUGHT IT OUT WITH ME FOR THIS TRIP!! From camp, everything is a climb..........good to get the morning blood moving (especially when it's in the upper 30'sF in the morning).

Returned to camp after just an hour's ride because I need to get the crew up and breakfast going by 6:45am.

Most of today was spent on the Oxbow reach of the Warm Spring's Tribal lands. We started collecting data on the bed material of the river channel. We introduced Stephanie and Jessica to gravel counts. This is when samples of the bed material (gravels/sands/cobbles/whatever) are sampled in a systematic grid across a section of the channel (usually on a riffle). This data allows us to do hydraulic calculations about the rivers sediment load and it's capacity to move certain sized/weighted sediment. This can be a some-what tedious task, but it's all kinds of fun to be in the river most of the day.

Stephanie, Pollyanna & Jessica busy with a gravel count.

Soft clouds rolled in about 3pm and gifted us with a handful of warm drops. But, they rolled out just as fast and the sky has been clear since.

Back to base camp at 6:30pm to cook up a delicious meal and get a little chill time.
The sand hill cranes were busy this morning. They must have flown up and down the valley about 3 times making their amazing sounds.
It's now dusk and the coyotes are out and noisy again in the west field. It's a treat to hear them.

A brisk chill is in the air and I expect it to get pretty cold tonight.