day on the river Options

[Robert_Oddo]

The morning started out horrible. Driving rain, 35 degrees and it felt like a wet soggy winter day. But it cleared by 10 am and it turned into one of those cold, crisp, clear, autumn days. Worked on the river today with the folks doing 48 hour sampling of the water as well as flow rates. It is important to measure the flow rates up near the glacier and down near the lake during a rain event so that we could compare them to base flow. To measure flow rate, we get into our survival suits and use two different flow rate meters to measure the flow of the river. We stretch a tape measure over the river and measure the flow at meter intervals across the bed of the river. Once you do this a couple times it goes quite quickly. You have to be careful that you don't trip on any big rocks on the bottom or get swept away by the current.

We then collected the water samples the automatic water samplers collected and put the samples in our backpacks. The final task was to map out the river and its tributaries using the GPS one of the moraines of the glacier to the mouth of the river. That was a lot of fun. There was mud up to our knees in places and a lot of stream crossings. There were a lot of laughs as we got caught in the mud or got soaked. This was all done with packs full of water samples. Got down to the lake at about 5pm and it wasn't until 7:00pm until we returned from another full day of work and great views!!!


Here is one of the flow meters

Here is the 2nd flow meter. I am so lucky to get experiences using all of this cool equipment

Nora and Lauren measuring the flow

Here is where the autosampler puts its samples

Lauren crossing those cold streams. After a while it doesn't matter how wet or muddy you are!!

All the hard work is worth it when you get these views!!! My new computer background.