Sixty Nine

Just your average warning sign...

Get your mind out of the gutter. That's the number of sites we have now visited. Not bad considering the various setbacks we've had. Works out at just under 14 a week. And we have another 12 on the list to visit which, all being well, takes us to 83. And if we get permission to go on the Stoney-Nakoda reserve, we can even add to that. So probably 83 then... 83 is a good number. I have to admit to putting a greater emphasis on quantity rather than quality recently. A bit of catch up and a bit of reality biting. In the office looking at the aerial photos, walking a few km through solid forest seems not too troublesome. After bushwhacking a few hundred metres a few times, you have to readjust your expectations! It's been a matter of trying to balance objectives. Objective one basically requires me to visit as many wetlands as possible to get a good sample of the 500 or so I identified in the office. Objective 3 requires me to visit as many beaver inhabited ones as possible so we can find good sites to walk Gipper on. Unfortunately a lot of the beaver inhabited ones are quite remote, so trade offs have had to be made.

Hmmm, pretty flat...

Of course, what doesn't help is when you forget your working thesis title has the word "mountain" in it, until after a 3 hour return drive and 6 site visits! Yes, I was quite pleased with our days work, until I realised that maybe we got on quickly because there were very few hills to go over. In fact, almost prairie flat. So that was monday. Which made tuesday an unplanned office day to have a closer look at my GIS and work out how much of my study area needs cut, and how many sites I need to remove since they are not, in fact, particularly near any mountains. A minor issue.

Wednesday was a lesson in preparation. Always pack the sunscreen. It was pretty dry this week,

Ummmm, flat again...

and very warm. Getting up to 30 degrees most days. So wednesday we took the orange monstrosity out to the site I messed up last time (site 4 - GPRed a bit that didn't have peat...). We had all the equipment this time. Gipper, the GPS (gips?), soil corer. We did 4 lines of about 30m, then cored as far down as possible every 5m to cross reference with radar images. Good to know that that takes about 7 hours. 7 hours is a lot when it's hot and you didn't pack the sunscreen. Two red faced people there. Just embarrassment of course. Honestly, not a single cloud passed the sun that day. Apart from that, everything went pretty well. Until I got back and looked at the radar images. Now, I was careful to set up the equipment in two different ways, and

Still can't see any hills.

save those settings. Then I ran each line using both settings. For some reason on two of the lines, the machine has recorded the full length, but decided the distance was 10m, and not 30. So those are quite compressed. Then, using the same settings on the other two lines, it has decided that those lines were 60m, and has stretched the radar images. Otherwise the images were pretty good. I have no idea what went wrong there. If it was the same on all 4, I would have said distance calibration error. So we'll have to do that again. Grrrrrr. At least we don't need to core again. That was the biggest pain in the arms.

Ahhhh, that's better.

Thursday we had more sites near the flat area planned. A bit of reconnaissance too, to make sure these were hilly enough.Thankfully they were. Not thankfully, however, some of them were on private property. We ended up with 4 though, so that was alright. It also allowed us to get back to the field centre by 2.30 and get all the weeks paperwork done. The plan was to go out of friday to redo the Gipper lines. But there was a heavy thunderstorm overnight, so I decided not to risk it being wet. That meant working out what to do with our day. All paperwork done meant nothing much to do around the field centre. So we worked out 10 more sites up north to visit, and would just see how many we got to. A few of these were pretty remote, along a trail

What the hell was that?!

suspiciously similar to the one we buried the mid sized SUV in. It also has a sign at the start saying that it was a private road and that "authorisation is required for commercial access". Well, our access wasn't for commercial purposes, and it didn't say no trespassing, so we went for it. Luckily it was a much better road than where we got sunk. This is probably the most remote we have gone, so nice that there was a decent track all the way out! It looks like there are some sort of large animals out there by the strange tracks on the path. The less time out of the SUV the better! We got two sites here, followed by another 7. So a new record and a good days work. None of these sites had beaver in them, which is where quantity over quality

Maybe it ate this...

is coming in...

There was a quick stop we had to make on the way home. We were passing Hidden Trails Adventures again, so in thanks for their help and hospitality we dropped by to say hello, and give them a bottle of 12 year old Auchentoshan, and 2 cans of Irn-Bru from my personal emergency stash.




That about wrapped up the week. I feel that we must be getting better at this, since there seems to be fewer funny stories to share. Well, maybe we'll have more disasters next week. That is the joy of this sort of thing. Pretty unpredictable!

These trivia huts are dotted around the area. For those who like quizzing in the wild!