Coyote Bluff - this morning!


Listen close to the sound on this video -- during the first few seconds you'll hear coyotes yipping.

Mid-Sept Catch UP

I haven't posted anything for a couple of weeks..............but don't think that "noth'ens" been going on. The harvest moon has grown fat and the sun continues to warm our days.

I have spent a lot of time working up the data that we collected over the summer on the Middle Fork John Day River. I'll be heading out that way one more time next week to close up the field season before classes at the University of Oregon start back up on the 28th of September.

Beyond boring data organizing and field work report writing ........ a few notable occasions have come and gone.

Steve's mom Sue had her birthday. She and Brenda (Steve's sister) came to Eugene for the day and we enjoyed each others company with what developed into a tastee fantastic "food" theme. Restaurants and the amazing Eugene Farmer's Market provided us with beautiful looking and tasting food all day.

Also Brenda, me and Sue all got our birthday shoes for the year...........Keen style. What a pleasure to spend the day with such great folks.




And Steve had his girls with him all day.



Then came Esther's 50th Birthday at the Hill.


Becky L. and her crew put the theme together into a lovely fabulous & fifty event of well deserved praise and gratitude and....... yes ...... more good food.... for the fabulous birthday girl.


In the mix of it all was the annual Eugene Celebration where the city closes its downtown streets to traffic for three days and opens them to music, parades, booths, entertainers, etc.
I had the opportunity to fire dance on the streets Friday and Saturday nights of the E-Bration with a group called EarthDescendance. What a treat that was!

Fluvial Geomorphology

What's NOT sexy about fluvial geomorphology??????

(daily garb -- of course)

US!!!!!!!!! We're BURRRRRRRRLY!!!!!!

teeee hee teeeee heeee ahhhaahhhhaahhah!

Just returned from our last stint of field work out in the Middle Fork John Day. Besides some major equipment failure, we had a nice trip. Due to the Total Station survey equipment shutting down on us we only surveyed about 2/3 of the area we had planned and we had to do it with an auto-level. This is a much cruder instrument but we got what we got!

Worked with a great fellow (John Ward) from the Idaho office of the US Bureau of Reclamation for a couple of days. Our project was to get detailed survey data from the constructed log structures on the upper reach of the Middle Fork that they put in this summer for enhanced fish habitat.

I have been washing the high lands dirt of the Middle Fork John Day off of the equipment and myself for the last couple of days. Trying to catch up on the world that I slipped away from early in the summer. Counted up -- I spent about 50 nights under the stars this summer thus far. Feels a bit strange to be sleeping/eating/working/playing inside.....but it feels good to be home with Steve.


Huge thanks and kudos to Jessica and Stephanie (members of the MFJD field crew this summer) for pushing a few 12 hour days so that I could make it home for an old dear friend's going away party.



















My friend for the past 22 years, Scott Frietas, is moving to Hawaii in a couple of weeks for his dream job -- brew master on Maui. The rest of his amazingly wonderful family will join him later in the winter. The sense of community amongst the friends and family that gathered for Scotty out at the Oregon Country Fair site filled my soul. I laughed a lot and fire danced with new/old friends. It was magical. It was good. Thanks Scotty!!!

Parties and Wilderness!!!!

No time No time No time -- to post on my blog..........it's been a full week of family with a few days of adventure.

Family --- Birthday party at The Hill for Griffin Lind (4) and Micheal Murphy (51) on Saturday/Sunday (Aug 16-17).


Along with loads of yummy food, kid play, fire dancing, and camping over,,,,,,,,we also had a visit from some old friends.

Including Lew Barkley -- a resident of The Hill when I was just a little girl -- stopped by on a road trip up the west coast. Along way from his farm in Michigan but also a bit like coming home. Quite a treat!

Lew Barkley and Pollyanna Lind -- The HILL

Adventure -- Monday-Wednesday (Aug 18-20) my younger bro (Gabby), our friend Aaron, and I loaded up our backpacks and headed into the Bull of the Woods Wilderness for a few days. Hiked in on the trail from Elk Lake for a few miles then did our usual -- hopped off trail to find a camp site and then spent our days using the creek beds that cut through the steep forested mountains as our pathways to explore. Old growth Cathedral forests, Bedrock pools of aqua blue and an 80 foot waterfall in the middle of it all were our rewards.

It rained like crazy our last night and day. Got home soaked and happy.

Aaron Varela, Gabby Lind, Pollyanna Lind --
soaked in the rainforest of Bull of the Woods Wilderness

Yesterday and Today are all about getting ready to head back out to the Middle Fork John Day for our last 12 day stint of field work for the season. No guarantee that I'll have internet access this time around in the MFJD..........if yes, you'll hear from me........if no, the blog will be updated upon my return.

Eugene -- Bro Gab in town - BDays!

Back in Eugene ........ the west side of the Cascades. Green is the color even in the driest month of summer, the big rivers flow, and the nights are warm. As much as I appreciate and enjoy the beauty of eastern Oregon I am reminded once again that the west side is home. I am soothed by the lush understory of the forests and moist warm night air.

Lots of data organizing to do from the Middle Fork John Day field work stint but also trying to soak up some family/friend time while I am back in the "hood." My time here in Eugene is short before I head back out to the MFJD and it seems as though I have packed it full.

Monday I washed and organized myself, my gear, and all the field gear. A serious time consuming job.

Gabby, Missy and Griffin arrived on Tuesday afternoon via the Portland airport and gramma and grampa's door to door delivery taxi.
It feels so good to be around these folks! I am a bit bummed that I have to do some work time during the day while they are here because I would like to spend every minute them.
I feel more comfortable around my brother Gabby than most people in the world. It's a sort of familiarity that some close siblings get to know. I appreciate it beyond words.
THE GOOD NEWS: Gabby and family will be moving back to Eugene from Virginia within the year!!!!!!!!!! Yeh.

Monday (8/11) was my darl'en friend Betty Kim Koeppen's birthday (check the link and hear her music). Words can't express the value of her friendship and the creativity that she brings to the world. She has been counted as one of my best friends for the past 25 years. She is a musician, a writer, a dancer, a mom, a teacher, a good good good friend.

Tuesday (8/12) was also my friend Scott Freitas' birthday. I have been friends with this loopy fantastic fellow for 22 years. Never a dull moment .... always good friends ... even when large and small time and space has passed between us.

Shawn Johnson, Scott Freitas, Pollyanna Lind -- Scotty's b-day.

Where is our Kimmy!!!

Today is my brother Jon's birthday. Enough said. He is basically as cool as it gets!

FOREST FIRES on the MFJD

hey hey Yeh --

Remember the thunderstorms I mentioned on Thursday with lightening, etc. Well, by Friday sunrise there were fire planes buzzing the mountains that flank the Middle Fork John Day valley.

By mid-day the valley where we are was pretty smoky and we saw Forest Service fire rigs and crews of firefighter's going up the road behind the property we are staying at. The ridge on the other side of the valley, Ragged Ridge, had a small visible fire in a steep high canyon section -- helicopters with huge buckets of water were trying to douse it. Then, a big cargo copter with "hot-shots" came in (buzz'en super close to us for some reason while we were working on the river) and they repelled out of the copter directly into the blazing canyon to do ground based fighting. The fire on our side of the valley was super smoky. We didn't have any internet service yesterday (and no phone as usual). So, after a dinner that was dusted with ash back at base camp, we drove up the road the firefighter rigs were headed up to check on the situation. Would hate to find ourselves sipping tea and unwittingly have a raging forest fire come upon us.

We drove up to the road closure (about 2 miles from camp) where we talked to a few fire fighters that gave us the scoop == the fires had been contained (they had a bulldozer fire line dug around the thing) and would be burning itself out. We could see the fire and the dusk-time darkness gave us a good view.

Pollyanna check'en out the fire

Today more firefighter crews came up the road -- to do "mop up" and make sure the main blaze didn't get past the perimeter.
WAY less smoke today...........but my tent was dusted in ash this morning.

As far as work goes: we set our methods for doing fish cover surveys yesterday and went about doing them today as well. A fish cover survey is where percent area covering the surface of a stream or stream bed is estimated (what percent of the stream is available fish cover?). We look at all sorts of variables like aquatic or emergent vegetation, woody debris, boulders, built structures, algae, etc. For this project we are doing these surveys in representative pools and glides across 4 reaches of the river. We also measure maximum and minimum depth of the geomorphic channl unit that we are doing the survey in.

Here's Steph giv'en it her all! for max depth.

We have been out here working since July 27th.........heading back to Eugene tomorrow after a 1/2 day's worth of work. Not looking forward to the 6+ hour drive but looking forward to seeing Steve and my brother Gabby. Gab is coming to visit from Virginia for 9 days with his family..........and I Can't wait to see him! We are going camping for a few days in the mix too. YEH!
I'll be coming back out to the MFJD on August 23rd.

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!

Jess

Polly

Steph!

Big Arse gravels out in these parts. No pansies allowed on these gravel (boulder) counts! (Jess & Steph)

Walk'en the riffle transect line -- pollyanna