29 Sep

Shooting salmon

As you can see, I went back and was more successful in my photographic pursuit of salmon.

It was sunny over the weekend, so I spent quite a bit of time at the beach and in the creek, trying to get as up close and personal with the salmon as possible, without actually touching them.

The live ones would flee from my shadow, desperately thrashing upstream if they sensed my approach. The dead ones were much easier to work with, but that’s a post for another day. Still, after 700 and some photos, I got a handful that I really like.

It’s easiest, of course, to successfully see the fish and focus on it if you can catch it partly out of the water. However, I’m pretty happy with some of the pictures I got with the fish entirely underwater.

 Then there are some of the ones with only a selected bit of the fish out of the water, like a tail or a back.

Definitely worth standing in a creek for an hour or two!

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….

25 Aug

I have not been blasted

I am back from the trip to blow up culverts. We went 1200 feet away from all the explosives before setting them off, so I have all my limbs and digits, but no exciting explosion pictures. That’s okay, because I like all my limbs and digits as they are, i.e. attached to me.

Cappy the Blasting Bear

Here’s Cappy the Blasting Bear. He’s made out of used shot cord, which attaches to detonating cord which attaches to the actual bombs and explody bits. The shot cord makes up most of the 1200 feet separating people from the blasts, so there’s lots of it left over for art projects.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Prince of Wales, where I’ll be for about 36 hours, I’ll update more after that trip.

16 Aug

Upcoming Adventures

On Thursday I’m leaving for what will probably be my last field trip this year. The fireweed blossoms are near the top and the end of the Alaskan summer is near. The summer intern who’s been working with me has less than two weeks before she heads back to college. (FYI, you can read her summer blog, too.)

However, we’re ending the summer with a bang. Literally.

The purpose of this trip is to remove culverts and bridges from an old logging road, leaving streams and salmon to move freely. This involves dynamite. Lots and lots of dynamite. $10,000 of dynamite, or 18,000 pounds of dynamite–that’s the numbers I’ve heard tossed around.

We’ll be out for 8 days, with 10 people, and remove 50 structures.

I still don’t know exactly what this will be like, but I’ve had discussions with a number of the people who be involved. First, the guy in charge, the main blaster, is a big guy. One of the fish biologists described him to me as someone who could cross the Mississippi in hip boots. Now that I’ve met him, he definitely has a Paul Bunyan thing going on.

One of the main forms of entertainment and bonding here is telling stories about coworkers. The story on Paul Bunyan the Blaster is that he is a meat eater, and really should not be allowed to shop for the food for these trips without supervision. On a previous trip he famously purchased, in addition to meat, one bag of red delicious apples, one head of iceberg lettuce, and a large quantity of Pringles. Varying reports have said that there were enough for each person on the trip to have a can with every meal, that it was 30 cans, that there are still cans of Pringles in the warehouse somewhere. Apparently they were on sale.

My intern and I, both being mostly vegetarian, will be meeting him at the grocery store tomorrow morning to help with the shopping for this trip. As he said to me, if we don’t help him, we’ll probably hate him for what he buys.

In addition, there is another blaster coming in from Canada to help with this project. They refer to him as “Daisy.” I don’t even know what to say at this point. I’ll just have to report back after the trip.

Anyway, I had a conversation with some of the fish techs about this trip–of the ten or so participants, the intern and I will be the only girls–and said that I didn’t know what the stereotypes about blasters were, but I could probably come up with some real quick. Later, I realized that I do actually have an image of a blaster in my mind: Edgar from the Red Green Show. If you’re not familiar with this marvel of Canadian television, you’ve been missing out.

Here’s Edgar. I’ll report back on the trip at the end of the month–I’m sure it’ll be a blast!