Summer of the Dammed.: All Rights Reserved

Well, that felt like a long week. I suppose it was. Sunday dragging the box about a hairy field. Monday visiting some wetlands, tuesday finding out the results from the box dragging were unintelligible then getting some messages (groceries), wednesday starting site visits properly, thursday more of the same. Today was a nice relaxing day doing paperwork. I'm really having to go against my beliefs here, particularly the ones that say "never work on the weekend" and "never work after 5pm"! Terrible hypocrisy.

So, has it been fun so far? Well, parts have. Touring about the countryside is good, and having some extra company in the evenings for beer was great. Bushwhacking, rain and hailstone weather and wading shin deep for hundreds of metres through wetlands not so entertaining. I guess a run down of the more ineteresting points of the week should be in order.

Mountain folk haven't discovered tarmac yet...

Monday was supervisor accompaniment day. Got to check that we are not absolute muppets, and make sure we know how to get water into a bottle and soil in a corer. Harder than you'd think. We picked a couple of sites in Spray Valley to check out. Stunning drive is probably what you would call it. 1800m up so still a fair bit of snow about.

Pretty pretty. Passed a Longhorn sheep a Coyote, and a Deer on the way. Sort of forgot that I was there to work, and that I was leading the convoy. Scrambled for the map and luckily we hadn't passed the turn off. Parked up near a provincial park lodge, realising that I had forgotten to print out and take along the permit giving us permission to carry out research on the Park land. There was no one about, so we just ran on in there anyway. I had some teething troubles with my ability to identify peat; 1 out of three isn't bad! Good thing we're taking the samples for lab confirmation. Should probably have read up on that...

Site visit 1 - Hopefully the views will improve.

After a couple of soil core tries meeting frozen ground, we sent Jeff to a more likely looking area, while water sampling was discussed. Jeff duly found deeper peat as the next time we looked around, he was up to his knees struggling to move. Good start!

Think I found some peat!

So much for Monday. Tuesday was the last day of having Dr Supervisor here. The morning was a fight with the GPR software, and downloading the collected data. It seems what we recorded was pretty useless. Certainly compared to our practice around the field centre.

A good trace.

A less than impressive trace.

The remainder of tuesday was spent getting the shopping at Cochrane. A strange town with a very clean olde west style main street (built circa 2000...), surrounded by more modern standard or ugly stuff. We found a pie shop to stop in for lunch. I'm still not quite getting the change in language. Where I come from have pies meat in them. Or macaroni. Keep forgetting that here it's a pudding. My quiche lunch was very good all the same. That's pretty much all for Tuesday, expect preparing for our first day out on our own. Which was a cracker.

Yikes

Horny

Wednesday. What a day. Thought I'd pick some sites nice and close to base camp. Took some winding back roads and had a few people staring at us funny on the way, including one guy who stopped his car and watched us drive through. Thought it best not to stop and chat. We got to our hike start point with the rain throwing itself down in almost Scottish proportions. First site we could see from the road, but there was a bit of wading and crashing through bushes to get to. Not too much hassle though. Got there and got our samples, then a quick read of the map and off to our next site. The first pile of animal bones wasn't too worrying. Nor were the first couple of piles of bear poo. The next 4 or so piles gradually made it a bit more worrying, but we weren't to encounter any wildlife.

Yeehah!

We ploughed on to the next site thanks to my brilliant navigational skills. Samples duly taken, then we followed the water back to where the car was. Which meant we could tell we had just sampled the same site twice at different locations! Should have gone left when I went right. Well, that wasn't really a big worry, what was more worrying was the police car sitting waiting for us when we got back to the car. Oh oh. So, according to my map, we were not on the Indian Reservation. Map my would appear to be out of date. The guy who stopped and stared at us was apparently the Chief of the Stoney Nakoda First Nations tribe. By law we are not actually allowed to use Reserve roads (I didn't now this) or access reserve lands without permission from the tribe (I did know this. It was on my to do list). Luckily the policeman was very nice, and I'm clearly a foreigner and he explained things and sent us on our way. As we left he seemed to be getting an earbashing from a native lady who was driving by. Whoops. So bit of a rough start there. Had three sites to go to, managed to do one twice, and had to abandon before we could get to the others. Did another couple of sites in the afternoon, which were close together, and thanks to my heroic map reading ability (because the GPS ran out of batteries 5 mins after I turned it on in the morning), we managed to hit the one I wasn't aiming for first. At least it was easier to get back. At which point we learned it's not a good idea to have a skull inside your car when the sun is shining. Pongy. At least it gave us a chance to blend in with the locals. Back to base camp after that.

Thursday. Surely a day to go smoothly. Not quite. Planned a series of visits that required more footwork. So packed the bikes and headed off. More back roads to get there, because they looked quicker. One was a dead end (thanks google maps), but there was a loop around. This was basically a mud track. Part of it the SUV struggled to get past. After that part we came to a sign that said trespassers will be prosecuted. But we didn't really want to turn around. Luckily no one saw us. Took the long way home, which was about an hour quicker!

View from the "carzy man's" camp.

Access to the start point for our hike/ride, was about 4km along a very bumpy road, ideal for the SUV. Jeff babied it along and it took about half an hour to get there. As we parked up a wildman of the woods appeared. He said he camps out there in the backwoods. I think permanently. He might be crazy, but he has a nice view. He warned us that the park rangers were out the night before because someone stole a vehicle and they had to tow it away, and he was nearly fined $450 for being there without permission. I remembered my permit this time though, and stuck it in the window. Trail to the furthest site was about 7km. Conditions were a bit damp. I learnt early on that going straight through the puddles wasn't necessarily a good idea. So it took an interminable 1hr 45 to get to where we were going. And we seemed to be following what looked like fresh bear prints a lot of the way.

Hard to see, but pretty sure these are bear prints.

My bike after a quick clean. Muddy trail.

Excellent map reading skills again, finding our first site. Thought we'd followed the trail long enough so decided to cut of over a rise to the left. Lucky that I was just about right. I'm really feeling that I'm not qualified to be the team leader here. There's always the nagging felling that I actually have no idea where I'm going and I'm getting two people more and more lost! Luckily I had functioning GPS and we managed to hit all our sites. Only mistake was cycling past the turn off to two and hiking back along the trail for 1.5km. I took the wheel for the journey back to the main road. That was very much fun. i had my doubts about the SUV before, but that thing is fun on rough roads! Return to road took 15 mins. Total return trip took about an hour. Trip out took 2. Note for the future; stick to the big roads where possible!

So that's us up to date. Apart from today, which has been boring paperwork. Which has been rather nice to do! Instead of describing that, here's some photos of the flora and fauna that I've managed to take.