That Tuesday morning I found myself back in the Rock Springs field office with Kee and our BLM advisors working on learning where our sample sites were going to be. We focused in the once around the Rock Springs office which consists of 16. Our plan is to sample a couple weeks south of town and then another north of town. Looking at all of them, they seem to be fairly simple to get too. All of them will be focused on us camping because it would just be too long of a drive back to Rock Springs depending on how long it is going to take us. The first one we decide to do is this Friday, the only one that is on the Westside of Flaming George Reservoir. Next week we are going to try to do four sites south of town.
On Wednesday, I drove to Kemmerer for Kee and I to work on our emergency plan if one of us gets hurt or our truck brakes down. We have to use this device called SPOT to check-in everyday after we make it back to camp or town. It is a satellite GPS Messenger that consists of four different buttons that consist of one sending a text to our advisor in Kemmerer telling him that we are ok, an SOS one, Help one, and a custom message one that we set up to say that it is not life threatening but we need assistance. That afternoon, I had the opportunity to go out with my advisor to meet with a contractor at a creek to go over what they are going to us to direct runoff to the creek instead of all over the road. It is an organized effort between BLM and Wyoming Game and Fish and there is going to be 11 different sites. They decided which ones they will use rip-wrap, trees, culverts, and ones that will need the creek to be curved differently. It was weird that most of them that the contractor was talking about changing was changing the flow of the water and to me that is never a good idea let alone easy. Water is going to flow where it wants to and some of those changes had tighter curves to the channel which would cause a higher velocity leading to erosion. Overall it was interesting to see some of the different aspects that go into planning these types of things. I did not get home until 8:30 pm and needed to be back in Kemmerer the next morning. Hoping to find a place to crash at here soon.
Kee and I packed up our gear for next weeks hitch and headed to Pinedale to meet up with our advisors for lunch at the Wind River Brewery. Lunch was really good and it always is every time that I have eaten there. The only thing that was missing was having a beer. After lunch, we went to the Pinedale field office to go over our sample sites there. There is going to be 9 and one of them we will need to contact the boat crew to come up because it is not wadeable. One of our sites is going to be a really long hike in that does not involve a trail and up over the mountains North/East of town and I guess there is bait sites set up for Black Bears so I don't know if we are going to change it yet. We had to plan all of them for July to September because everything is still flowing over the floodplain. Pinedale has been having flood warnings for the past couple weeks now so it is not going to end anytime soon. When I got home, Miguel was cooking on the grill for us and it turned out great. I'm glad that he likes using it because it now relieves some stress from me.
Friday, Jim and I heading out of the Rock Springs field office to head to Antelope Wash on the Westside of Flaming George Reservoir close to the Utah boarder. We meet Alex and Kee there to do our first site! It was a really nice creek to work in because the water was below bankfull allowing us to be able to figure it out easily. Alex and I went off to collect macroinvertebrates while Jim and Kee accessed vegetation and other influences at each transect. After lunch we all started working from A up to K doing physical measurements and were able to get into a rhythm. Alex had to get back home as soon as possible because he was flying out of Salt Lake City at midnight. So we were moving faster then we would have liked for the first but were able to get it done by 4 pm and I was back in Rock Springs by 5:30. Hopefully we can keep this pace next week when it is going to be mostly just Kee and I.
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