PannaLind: Thunderstorms!

Hey Hey ---

It's Wednesday night and we have had about 24 hours of off and on thunderstorms here in the Middle Fork John Day.

It all started with a magnificent sunset last night

Then at about 10pm the lightening started. With it came the crash and roll of thunder and rain. Ah, those sounds of nature that make my spirit smile. Just a couple of lite rains during the night and today we have had a few more lite ones and a couple of heavy rains.............all complete with bolt lightening, high winds, and giant warm rain drops. The storms move in fast and leave fast.............settling the dust and smells of summer into a fresh lull of sweetness that currently surrounds me. It's dark and the sky is full of stars. The moon rests in the southern sky,,,,growing by the day. No rain right now but thunderstorms are forecast for the next 24 hours. We have camp all buttoned up just in case.

Today was "easter egg hunt" day -- or perhaps "find a needle in the haystack" day. We went on the search for 18 US Bureau of Reclamation survey control points spread through the Upper Middle Fork valley. We found all of them -- and all but a couple were in good usable shape (one was totally destroyed). It is important to find the control points so we can tie our survey work into theirs. This makes it a whole lot easier to set our survey transects up and correlate our data to theirs and any future survey work. A few times the wooden stakes that had been pounded flush to the floodplain two years ago by USBR survey crews were easy to find. Mostly, it was a hunt through eye-ball tall grass where silty over-bank flood deposits had covered the small nail and the sun-faded flagging tape attached to the top of the stake. We made it fun -- of course -- and ended up having a really good day.
The last 1/3 of the day was spent designing a methodology for fish cover stream surveys based on NAWQA and Forest Service guidelines for stream surveys. We'll give it a try tomorrow and make changes as needed --- more in the future on this one.

SO -- we finished the gravel counts and the embeddedness surveys as well as the channel unit mapping and river reach photo documentations. YEH! The most tedious job of these tasks was recording the data from the gravel count/embeddedness surveys. But, we made it good by rotating out who had to do the recording and by setting up a chair in the river for the data recorder. ODE TO US!