Saturday, June 7, 2008

View from a Canoe

Things all get switched around from time to time. It’s nice for me, not being hooked into any one specific project because apparently I will get to experience them all!


The water quality team has been having some trouble with getting the U.S.S. Clifford back onto Pewter all by their lonesome so we’ve rearranged teams somewhat. Because Matt doesn’t always need both Anna and Jeff in the lab with him during the day, one of them gets hooked up with trapping or water quality in order to have the right number of people to get things done.


This means for the past two days I’ve been a temporary member of Bravo team. Do they have a nice job or what! Water quality, my foot, they just want to do this so they can paddle around all the gorgeous lakes here.

- Rachel



Jana, above, hard at work.
Below, Rachel and Sophie

Thursday, June 5, 2008

I Went to Alaska and I Came Back Weird

So the fearsome foursome is back together for a day or two using Pewter to tote traps and one big red canoe about the Mat-Su. The specific things we did this day hardly matter. At this point, we are used to our long work days, and it’s the little things that make them distinct. On this slightly cloudy, threatening-but-not-quite-raining day in June a few interesting things happened. We almost hit a moose that came running out of the bushes on the side of the road at the van. Lauren’s lightning reflexes saved both van and moose, and the animal looked even more scared than we were as it trotted back into the forest.


Second, we got to hear a few choice quotes from Ms. Jana Loux-Turner. To wit: “It’s not as lake-y as the other lakes,” and “I just kissed the motor.” Who knows what either of these was really supposed to mean. It’s Alaska. You go with it. Lauren had a nice quote as well — about some of the experiences we’ve had losing things at the lakes around here. “Lynda stole our temperature probe and Irene ate a trap. Those thieving ladies of the Mat-Su!” In a brief psychological retrospective (this is Clark after all), it behooves me to note that the week we spent camping on the Kenai Peninsula together at the beginning of this trip went a long, long way toward bonding us all as friends. This explains things like A-lab-skan and our penchant for naming inanimate (and animate for that matter) objects. Stickleback summer in Alaska quickly becomes all about the inside jokes and the fast friendships. Days are spent working, of course, but it’s rarely work to any of us. And nights are spent sitting around the table long after dinner, discussing the crazy things that happened that day or playing cards or harmonizing with Matt and Lauren on the guitar. I’m not sure what I expected when I flew out here, but the easy-going attitude and calm efficiency of this “working vacation” is just what the doctor ordered.


- Rachel


Lauren, above, and Jana, below,
model the latest in Alaskan fashion

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Friends In High Places

It's good to have friends in high places.


Scott Christy, a local pilot (and retired geologist, among other things) is a great friend to our lab, and is kind enough each summer to take us in search of stickleback in hard-to-reach places in his float plane. Today he took Jeff and me to several lakes around the Cook Inlet in search of what may prove to be some interesting stickleback populations. Our best catch came at an unnamed lake just west of the Little Susitna River. We dubbed it "Birthday Lake" on account of it being my birthday. Scott's not only a great pilot, but also a fantastic naturalist and storyteller, so spending the day flying with Scott was a great way to spend my 25th (wink, wink) birthday. You can see from the pictures that Jeff enjoyed himself as well. There's also a nice shot of the Little Susitna River from the air.


- Matt






Pup Lake and Yard Dogs

It’s Matt’s birthday! The “death” of June. It never gets old.


Matt’s friend, Scott Christy, took him and Jeff up in a float plane today. Meanwhile, Lauren and Anna gave me a day off to write — so while they headed out to the field, I took a brief trip to downtown Anchorage with Sophie and Jana to do some souvenir shopping.


Matt turns 13 ... er, 31!

They then headed off to do their water quality sampling for the day. The plan was to do two lakes today — Stepan Lake being the first. However, when we trapped Stepan a few days ago, we walked in over muskeg. It being rather difficult to carry a canoe between two people over water-logged marsh, Bravo Team set out looking for the public access. They ended up at the end of a dirt road where a house stood overlooking a lake. There were dogs outside so they bravely got out and went to knock on the door. The man who answered kindly informed them that they had ended up at Big Beaver Lake and let them come into his incredibly nice house to look for the public access to Stepan on Google Earth. So they go off looking… End up at Pup Lake which they knew was wrong. Pulled into a driveway that looked oddly familiar — it was a friend’s house on Lazy Lake. Wrong again! Turned around and saw a side road they hadn’t tried, so down it they went. There was a house at the end of this road with a black dog in the yard. This detail had been in Susan’s description of where the public access to Stepan was so they got out to ask the owner if this was indeed the place. And that was how they met “Mrs. Key, but call me Dee.” An incredible character study ensued that would be impossible to relate through mere words on a computer screen because it involves a lot of relevant body language. And that would be why Bravo Team only got through one lake today.


- Rachel

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

One Long Day

Jana and Sophie at the end of a plankton tow on Bruce Lake


What a day. Some of the days on the Kenai were long, but this day may have taken that cake for Lauren and me. I suppose it’s partially our fault for starting later than normal due to running errands, etc. But I’m getting ahead of myself.


We begin at the beginning. After a long night of playing cards and chilling out in the main unit, we took our time getting going in the morning, lolling about the kitchen while we ate our cereal and packed our lunches for the day. Today, Matt, Anna, and Jeff were only working in the lab a few blocks away from the main unit, so the fearsome “deathsome” effectively had two cars at their disposal. Jana and Sophie were taking the beloved Pewter out for the day, looking forward to a productive day of testing four lakes. Lauren and I were to gain control of the Forester, who quickly became known as “Sean Connery” due to the actor being in a movie called “Finding Forrester.” We divided our equipment, and each headed our separate ways.


I heard at dinner tonight that Jana and Sophie had an interesting time of it. Their potential four lakes turned into two perfectly tested lakes. The weather had turned somewhat stormy and windy for them at the end of the second lake so they decided to lay off and call it quits before getting drenched. Not counting the hour-long nap they took in the middle of the day! Since it was just the two of them for the first time, they had to get used to taking the canoe off and putting it back on pewter’s roof rack without additional muscle support. And while reaching for something in the van, Sophie twisted her shoulder and didn’t want to risk further injuring it for awhile, so the two of them decided to rest for a few minutes while parked at the public access to Rocky Lake. An hour later…


Also heard that Matt, Anna, and Jeff had an uneventful day in the lab, making crosses and being generally productive.

No wonder $20.00 won’t even get us 5 gallons of gas – this is the “death” pump!


Lauren and I, on the other hand, had a very eventful day indeed. When we left the unit in the morning, we headed over to the lab to get Matt’s keys so we could get into his room and get hold of the power inverter for the car so I could possibly plug my laptop in and write while we drove. We picked him up because he’d also managed to forget his own charger. The power inverter didn’t work, but at least Matt got his charger. Next, we took a drive over to Frank von Hippel’s lab to pick up the hard drive Lauren’s father mailed to her while we were all still out on the Kenai. No dice. So we drove off to find a gas station (which still hurts, even though we are used to the above-four-dollars-a-gallon prices)


One of the two beautiful swans at Beverly Lake.

Once in Wasilla, we hit up the Aquarium Zoo store to replace the temperature probe I managed to lose at Lynda Lake about a week ago. Ran over to the Kaladi Brothers coffee shop and picked up a new coffee mug for Rich King to replace one he’d lost. Lauren is an excellent friend. Drove off to the Beverly Lake area and picked up all the traps thrown on the previous day at Kalmbach, Bruce, Cloudy, and Seymour Lakes. We left our tenth trap next to the water at Bruce Lake and had to walk all the way back down the trail to get it back again. Also, come to find out that the man at Seymour Lake who told us we’d better be Republicans or he wouldn’t let us trap on his property is also a bear hunter. He was loading up his float plane with equipment as we gladly took our leave. There was another errand run to Fred Meyer to pick up supplies for a huge map of the Mat-Su that Lauren is making for us to be better organized in our trapping plans. After this, we drove off looking for Spring Creek which we found easily enough. Also easy to trap, but incredibly buggy. We were happy to jump back in the car and crank the A/C.


Lauren gets the GPS coordinates at Kalmbach Lake.

Headed over to Walby Lake to get GPS coordinates we’d managed to forget not one, but two trips in a row. And managed to find some very nice people off Trunk Road who let us trap off their property at Wasilla Creek. Three kids. All talkative. And a very large, friendly dog who was content enough to follow us all over the yard while we looked for likely places to catch fish. Run to the storage unit to get more traps for Matt. Some of our traps are in need of repair though, so quick change of plans! No trapping at Lucille Creek today, we’d save those traps for Matt. Instead, we ran off down the road to drop our last traps at Knik Lake and then Goose Creek (this was our creek dropping day, if one couldn’t tell). Took a lovely ride down Burma Road which is very long and hilly and entirely made of dirt. Roller coaster ride of a road. It was great fun. Lots of trees chopped down on the roadside, however, where last year there was forest. We speculated on this for some time, and think maybe it’s because the spruce trees are sick and dying. Not sure. Something to keep an eye out for. Burma Road led us to our final stop of the day. Yesterday, Matt, Anna, and Jeff dropped twenty traps at Whale Lake in order to pull a live collection of juveniles today for behavior testing, as well as a collection of about 300 other fish for Mike Bell, another stickleback researcher spending the summer on UAA campus.


Whale Lake is an adventure just to get to. You park across the highway, hike straight up the hill of an ATV trail, and then walk across quite a stretch of muskeg. Waders required! At this point of the day, the storm clouds that chased Jana and Sophie away were threatening Whale. Lauren and I steeled ourselves, grabbed a cooler and a jar for the fish, and made the hike in. Near the end of counting the fish for Mike Bell, it began to sprinkle. And we realized we had only pulled 19 of the 20 traps. We went scouting for the 20th (which Lauren found in a corner) and then contemplated how to pack twenty traps plus a cooler full of water and live fish back out from the lake. We didn’t want to make two trips, so I got the traps loaded on my shoulders and set off across the muskeg, Lauren attempting to tote the cooler behind me. This ended in me putting ten of the traps down halfway across the muskeg, walking ten out to the trail, then coming back for the others which Lauren and I split between us, held under one arm, and used the other to carry the cooler between us. Once at the trail, we added the other traps so that we each held ten, plus the cooler still between us. Those juvie fish went for a ride! We had to put everything down only twice because we are monsters made of steel. Team Alpha stands for awesome. Made it all the way back to the car, and got into Anchorage again around 10:30.


- Rachel


I get one foot out the door of the main unit and this is what I see! A moose outside North Hall.
A perfect moose print in the mud.


Sunday, June 1, 2008

Lassie, the Spruce Chicken


Really need to remember to put bug spray in the van! Lauren and I went to pick up our traps at Zero Lake today and nearly got eaten alive. We also got led down the trail by a spruce grouse for awhile. We were told by a local while camping at Hidden Lake that most people here call these spruce chickens — wanting to blend as much as possible, so do we. This particular spruce chicken soon earned the name Lassie as it would settle on the trail some ten yards in front of us, then startle up as we drew close and settle on the trail another ten yards away. This continued for so long that we began to ask it, “What’s the matter, Lassie? Timmy fell down the well? Show us the way, Lassie the Spruce Chicken!” Er ... maybe you had to be there.

- Rachel