photography Archives - Page 2 of 3 -

22 Sep

Salmon at Sunset

Earlier this week I suddenly realized there was some beautiful color in the clouds, so I grabbed my camera and went across the street to the beach. (Yeah, I live across the street from the beach.)

The colors were reflected on the water and it was very pretty.

The clouds were pretty fearsome in the gathering dusk.

While my eyes were appreciating the sunset, my other senses were letting me know what else was going on on the beach. There was the noise from the seagulls, and the smell from what they were feeding on – pink salmon making their way up Cascade Creek, which reaches the ocean right there.

Pink at Sunset

Not all of the fish make it. In fact, the high tideline and the area around the stream is littered with dead fish. Sure, it’s no dead whale, but it is a bit a stink.

In the fading light, I walked over to the stream mouth and waded in to try and capture – visually – some of the salmon.

See their tails sticking up?

I tried to take some close up shots, but it was pretty dark and I couldn’t really get anything. I gotta get back next time it is halfway sunny, if that ever happens again….

That dark smudge is a salmon, I swear.

20 Sep

Blowing **** up in the woods, Part 2

The first thing to do after a blast is to make sure you still have all your fingers!

Visiting Canadian blaster counts his fingers.

Or maybe he’s just doing a conversion from metric?

Just kidding! The first thing to do after a blast is to wait a minute for everything that went up in the sky to come back down to earth. Then the Blaster In Charge goes up to the blasting site to do a safety check, looking for unexploded explosives, large rocks and/or logs precariously balanced in trees, deaf bears traveling at high speeds, that sort of thing. The rest of the crew follows when the ‘all clear’ is given over the radio.

Foreground: Blaster. Background: Cautious approach by crew.

Returning to the first blasting sites was definitely a bit shocking. We’re in a (coastal temperate) rainforest, everything is lush and green and there are trees and the whole roadbed is overgrown to the point that if you wanted to bring any sort of heavy equipment in you’d have to rebuild the whole thing, and then…

Oh! Hi, muddy brown trench that we just created.

The parting of the road bed

From green to brown in 60 seconds or less. Actually, it’s probably more like 60 milliseconds or less. And that’s a good thing — one split-second boom, a few seconds of thunder rolling in the hills, and the work is done. It’s quick, it’s cheap, and it’s green.

The alternative to explosives is, actually, to rebuild the road so that excavators (you know, the sort of yellow digging machines that little kids like to play with in the sandbox) can get up the end of the road and then start back, digging out the culverts as it goes. That would take a barge to bring in the equipment, fuel and oil to keep it running. Blasting brings the explosives in by helicopter, drops them where they’re needed, and the crew walks in and sets them off. After the blast, the explosives, and anything right next to them, have vaporized and disperses into the atmosphere. There’s no residue of any sort left in the forest – compare that to the inevitable grease trail left by heavy machinery.

Watershed coordinator contemplating stream bed.

After the blast, the main remnant was hunks of culvert. However, since they’ve been exposed to the explosives, the galvanization which was keeping them intact is gone. The crew made sure to remove the leftover culvert bits from the stream bed, but left them in the forest to rust away.

Removing the end of a culvert from the steam.

While more explosives would probably vaporize all of the culvert, the blaster in charge of the project, Rob Miller (also the Master Blaster for all the Forest Service’s operations in Alaska) has spent a fair of time and calculation to work out what is the minimum amount of explosive needed to get the job done. Many of the culverts are removed with $100-$200 worth of explosives – pretty cheap! More explosives could make a bigger hole, sure, but a big hole isn’t the point – the point is to make sure that instead of a narrow passageway under a road that could get plugged with rocks and dirt or possibly cave in, there is instead a free flowing stream bed that will be able to flow naturally and do its part for ecosystem function, and support the bigger streams downhill where there are salmon.

Run free, little stream, run free!

In the pouring rain, the mud washed away quickly, and the water turned clear. In another month, part of the crew will return to the sites to see how they’re doing. Next summer they’ll be back to take out the second half of the road. It’s probably a long shot, but I hope I’ll be able to go, too!

07 Sep

Blowing **** up in the woods, Part 1

Explosives look like sausages. Sausages that come in fifty pound boxes and convert sections of road into little valleys for streams to run through. Sausages that are not filled with meat, but something that looks a bit like vanilla frosting. Sausages that are used, as one of the blasters said, to kill culverts.

First, you get your explosives a few miles up an overgrown ex-logging road. This involves a helicopter. Then you get yourself up there, too. This involves your legs, but might involve an ATV to carry your backpack partway.

Then, at your site, you lay out your string of sausages, like so.


Mmm, sausages…

Then, you tape them together with detonating cord (the purple stuff you see on the spool above). Each sausage, aka ‘chub,’ needs to have intimate contact with either the det cord or another chub, to make sure it all explodes together.

Taping up chubs

Once that’s set, you move on to the next site. For efficiency, you set up 3-6 shots to go off at the same time.

The blasters keep careful notes on each shot.

Then, you go back and load each string into the culverts. The culverts range from 18 to 48 inches in diameter. For the smaller ones, you can send a rope through and then pull the string. For a 24 inch culvert, you can send in an intern.

Elizabeast! My fearless intern.

For a 48 inch culvert, even a fish and wildlife biologist will fit.

A full grown biologist can be over 6 feet tall!

Then a passle of people wrassle this python like conglomeration of explosives into one end of the culvert while someone at the other end pulls on the rope to coax it through.

Feeding python into the pipe.

When there are a few shots all set up, the blasters string them together with a thin yellow plastic tubing coated inside with an explosive powder. The tubing is called shock cord, and they unspool 1200 feet of it, to make sure they’re setting the explosions off from a safe distance. To be doubly safe, everyone takes cover behind the larger trees.

Just so you know, this is what the road looks like before anything explodes.

Tune in next time for the after view….

29 Aug

Wildlife in the Field

Now, you already saw Cappy the Blasting Bear, but here’s some of the other wildlife from the field.

Of course there were bears. Not too far up the road from the camp was a bridge over a stream, where you are pretty much guaranteed to see bears this time of year. I went out there the first night, and we saw three brown bears, fishing for pink salmon. It was pretty dark for the camera equipment I’ve got, but here’s a picture of one of the bears.

Brown bear fishing for pinks

We also had the awesome experience of watching a group of humpback whales bubble feed. This is a technique (perhaps unique to southeast Alaska?) where the whales blow a string of bubbles underwater, creating the illusion of a wall in the water. The fish think they can’t swim through it, are confused, and thus can be trapped in a net of bubbles. So the whales make a shrinking net of bubbles to get the fish (probably herring in this case) all together, and then — whoosh! — they come reverse diving up through the school of fish, mouth first. It’s like bobbing for apples, except that they’re underneath the surface. After the whales come up, they seem to spend a few minutes catching their breath before diving again. They are down for 4-5 minutes making the bubble net, and then appear without warning at the surface, so I didn’t manage to catch that part, but here’s video of them catching their breath before going down for another round.

Then there were the Sitka pythons. The biologists swore up and down that we needed to watch out for these creatures, which apparently live on the west side of Baranof Island and the east side of Chichagof. Or was it the other way around?

In any case, they told us, Sitka pythons feed once a year on large mammals, and the culverts we were blowing up were just the sort of place that a python might like to den.

So of course we sent my intern into a culvert at the very first blasting site, or ‘shot,’ as they like to call it.

Fearless intern enters culvert!

She survived this test and was renamed Elizabeast.

As the trip continued, we didn’t see any pythons, unless perhaps you count the long snaky lines of explosives we were making up and sticking into the culverts.

Sitka python waits to enter culvert

I’ll explain more about these explosive pythons and the rest of the blasting process next time!

04 Aug

What’s a weir?

In the first photos I posted from our trip to Redoubt Lake, I included this one of Mama Bear, leading her cubs over one of the fish weirs.

redoubt-blog-21
Now, I suppose that not everyone knows what a “weir” is. I didn’t really have much of an idea when I started this job, although I did get excited because I saw a reference to a “vortex weir” which sounds like something totally awesome. I still don’t know what a vortex weir is, but the one you see above is a “picket weir.” Essentially, it is a picket fence in the water.

The back side of the weir is supported by big wooden tripods. The front side is metal poles, or pickets, which are threaded through two or three layers of framing to hold them in place. Since they hold up with bears walking across them, you can see that it’s a pretty sturdy structure.

Weir from the backside.
Orange-pink bits below the weir in the foreground are salmon carcasses discarded by the bears.

The advantage of the pickets, since they slide up and down, is that they can follow the contours of the bottom of the stream. The bottom of the pickets are covered with sandbags, which hold them down and cover any gaps, making it “fish-tight.”

Since all the returning salmon want to go upstream, or, at Redoubt Lake, up the falls and into the lake, they get backed up behind the weir. (That’s why the bears are there.) The Forest Service staff who are spending the summer working at the weir pull up the pickets to create gaps and let the fish through, counting every one.

Jon counting fish as they pass through the weir

Most of the fish get through with no hassle, but 10% of the fish that go through find themselves inside a fish trap, and become research subjects.

Laura nets a fish in the trap.

Since the bears are sloshing around in the water by the weir, and the water is always pushing to get through and down the falls, they check the weir to make sure it is still fish-tight.

Not a corpse – just Joe in a drysuit, snorkeling along the weir and checking the sandbags.

It turns out to be pretty hard to take a picture of someone snorkeling in which they don’t look like dead body, so you might get a better idea from some of the video taken by Elizabeth, the intern working with me.

We’re talking and making noise so that the bears know where are while we’re sitting on the weir and counting fish. On the right you can see Jon standing on top of a log; he’s looking around the corner at the second weir, and then blowing an airhorn to tell the bears they can’t start fishing over there because we’re still around. In the background noise, first I am translating a Russian folksong which I’ve just finished singing, and then later starting to sing the only other Russian song I know. Not captured on this video is my exciting rendition of Angel from Montgomery.

27 Jul

Dead Whale Tales

On our way to Redoubt Lake, we made a little detour to check out this dead whale. It was a gray whale, which died and washed up in March or so. It originally washed up closer to the town of Sitka, but was towed to this location, further from people’s houses.

As you can tell, it has been dead for some time and is an advanced state of decomposition. Large portions of it had melted into piles of goo. As you might imagine, it smelled terrible!

But if you think that’s gross, imagine this image. The fellow we were with said when they cut it open for the necropsy, they unleashed a veritable river of blood. And one of my Forest Service supervisors told me he was once involved in towing a whale corpse from one location to another. When they approached that one in the boat, first, he said you started gagging a quarter of a mile away, and, second, they could see bubbles in the water, from gases escaping out of the blowhole. Yum!

Since it’s a giant smelly pile of meat, maybe you guessed that a whale carcass is a the sort of thing that attracts bears. In fact, the attraction is so well know that earlier in the year there were hunters who came out and shot a brown bear. You can see the bear’s skeleton in the foreground; the hunters only took the head with them. You can also see that Joe’s carrying his rifle in case any other bears come by for a snack.

Perhaps that unlucky bear was the one spotted in June by folks who went on a boat tour with the Sitka Conservation Society.