Walking

The sun isn't up yet.  Not even close.  Abbey is too tired to move, even when I dump the crunchies in her bowl.  The woodstove went cold about midnight.  My wool socks, fleece pants, t-shirt and fleece sweatshirt constitute the most pajamas I have worn in ages.  Yet I am still cold.  If I roll my head in either direction, if I stretch my legs, if I move my body at all, I find the bed all around me cold.  Who knew when I moved in here that I would actually use the giant 70s sunshine California king comforter as a blanket.  I had saved it, from house to house, since Boulder Creek, to hang on my wall or ceiling.  As a decoration.  Now it provides a little extra warmth.  I never thought, living in Northern California, that I would need more warmth than a thick down comforter could provide.  I mean, this is a Mediterranean climate, right?  

Mediterranean climate.  Wet.  Very wet in the winter.  Mold.  Wet firewood.  Puddles everywhere.  

The new place I live in is a yurt.  That's a picture of it up above.  

It is surrounded by pygmy forest.  The thing about pygmy forest is podzillization.  Did I spell that right?  Blogger doesn't think so.  Did I tell you about this already?  Oh well, sorry about that.  "Pygmy" - the word means little, small, something to that affect.  In this case it describes a forest that may have been growing for 100 years, but has not gotten very tall in the effort.  Not for lack of trying, but every time the trees put their roots down, they find podzillized soils - a hard pan layer of clay like soil a few feet below the surface.  A layer so hard, so dense, that the roots can't get through.  So with shallow roots, a tree that is 100 years old can only grow a few feet tall. Now the yurt is located in "transitional pygmy", so, thankfully, there are some tall trees around too.  But, also thankfully, there are lots of short trees, so, thankfully, there is a lot more light than I was previously dealing with in the thick of the redwoods. 

I have no real indoor plumbing.  Well, I have a sink, but I do my best not to pee in it.  So when I have to pee, I go outside.  One of the best surprises about the yurt, besides the view of the moon and stars out the dome in the middle of the night, is the view of the moon and stars in the middle of the night when I stumble outside in the crisp wet cold to pee.  Orion is hanging around, as he likes to do in the winter.  For us Northern Hemisphere folks anyway.  It is nice to be able to see him again.  I think if I had to pee outside all my life and didn't spend the last few years living in a thick redwood forest valley and the first many years in light polluted cities and suburbs I would have a better knack for naming more of this winter sky's occupants.  In the meantime, it is enough, while half awake, and relieved, to marvel at the beauty of the crisp dark sky dotted with stars or a big round glowing moon.  

Back to it though.  The floor is cold.  The bed is cold everywhere around me except where Abbey is.  She doesn't know what she is missing, having to sleep on top of the covers.  I hope to keep it that way.  Some nights she is so tired from work that she won't leave her own bed on the floor.  Nights aren't too bad. I load the stove with wood and go to sleep toasty and warm, and at a ridiculously early hour for all of you who have known me a long time.  Work takes it out of me.  Mornings, before sunrise, are hard.  Scramble out of the cold bed into my slippers (yes - slippers and socks), find the headlamp. and build a fire in the stove.  Using a firestarter and a propane torch like any good boy scout who has access to technology would.  Scramble back into bed.  Too soon the alarm goes off again.  I smack it a couple of times, then find my senses just in time to make some lunch, feed the dog, fix a quick bagel, and grab the headlamp again in order to find my way to the car. Usually at this point I am wearing long johns under my clothes, a wool cap, gloves if I can find them.  Some mornings if I am industrious I go do the trick I learned from my Mainer friend - start the car early, let it run while I build my breakfast, let it warm up.  Did I mention that the sun ain't up yet?  Well, it ain't.  And I am tired.  

Some mornings I wish I was headed to an office all day. A cubicle.  Give me a nice warm cubicle.  Let me swivel in an orthopedically correct swivel chair all day.  Let me stare at a computer screen.  Let me worry about carpal tunnel.  Okay, maybe that's most mornings.  That feeling can last all the way through my NPR filled 10 minute commute up the coast, past the view of Noyo Harbor and the Pacific Ocean, past the sky beginning just barely to turn pink in spots, past the coffee hut where amazingly good coffee is only a dollar, and they love to give Abbey biscuits as she sticks her head out the window from behind my driver's seat.  It lasts all the way into the office, past the point when my boss tells me who I'm walking with that day, which creek we are going to.  Sometimes it fades as I load my waders into the truck, or as I marvel at the still cold temperatures (okay, I know, it's really only in the 30s, but it's a wet cold) and the beautiful sunrise hanging over Fort Bragg, CA.  Sometimes it lasts past the point of putting the waders on, grabbing the measuring stick, entering the initial entry into the palm pilot.  Some days it take the first beautiful riffle or pool to bring me to my senses.  Some days I am in pain walking the creeks half the days, sore from the days before, hating every log I crouch under.  But infallibly, every day has at least one moment of revelation - check out that log, look at the way the moss is growing out of it like a thick glowing green carpet.  Look at the beauty of the way that rare sunshine glints off of the water as it flows downstream.  

That's the first month of work.  Walking, marvelling at the beauty of my surroundings.  Feeling and appreciating the soreness in my legs, a reminder that I haven't been walking up enough creeks lately, climbing over and crawling under enough fallen logs, stumbling over enough cobble, hopping across enough chest deep channels cut through bedrock, scaling enough short walls of rock next to waterfalls, wandering up enough beautiful rivers, searching for enough fish.  I've been at this job since the beginning of November.  We expected we would begin seeing fish around Thanksgiving.  Now we've spent all of December wondering where they are.  Beginning to wonder if we will ever see fish.  Or redds for that matter.  Where the hell are the fish and redds?  

Oh.  There's one.  See that area that looks like something came along and swept the bottom of the creek, moving rocks and gravel around, cleaning it of algae and silt, digging a large wide hole in the bottom of the creek, spilling rocks downstream in the process.  Well, a female salmon did that.  Probably a coho salmon, based on the shape of the dig and the time of year.  That's Jon next to the redd.  Asa took the picture.  The fish finds a good spot, digs out an area of gravel, and lays her eggs in the area near where the "pot" (that's the hole part) transitions into the spilled area of cleaned gravel (the "tailspill").  

Our job is to walk the creeks around here, looking for redds, and, ideally, fish.  We measure the redds, we poke, prod, capture, tag, measure, and generally monitor the fish.  We record all we can about there location, size, species, and the characteristics of the redds we find.  We compare what we find out about the population of migrating salmon in this area via redd counts to what we find out when we trap and count fish on their way upstream from the ocean and downstream when they are done being juveniles.  We haven't seen many fish in the rivers yet.  A few here or there.  Not nearly as many as folks who have done this job before have expected. We are still waiting for more good rain storms.  Not the type that sprinkle for a day.  The type that pound on a tin roof so hard you can't hear yourself think.  The type that make the creeks run swollen in their banks and brown with silt (hopefully not too much silt).  The types of storms typical of Christmas and New Year's in Northern California.  The type that flood roads, that wash away hillsides.  The type that saturate the ground with inches and inches of rain in a day or two.  The type that get the creeks so wet and full that they don't go shallow again. They stay full, rushing heavy all winter.  They stay brown for a few days, and you can't see anything.  Then they turn green.  An opaque green.  That's when the fish start moving.  At least that's what we guess.  The thing about these fish, I am starting to think, is that they like to mess with the people who are trying to monitor them.  

So we are trying to monitor them, and they are maybe messing with us.  And we are waiting for more rain, because we are guessing - maybe we know, even, to a point that the research has been done, the patterns have been established - we know that when the rains swell the rivers to a constant point called "bankfull" - the rivers are full to their normal winter banks - well, that's when the fish will move.  But folks, it's winter.  It's wet outside.  It's been raining.  Just not enough.  It's making me smile to have  job that makes me ask for rain, and to have a last name like the one I have.  

We spend part of our time at the traps.  We have two places on two different rivers where any fish that is on it's way upstream gets temporarily trapped.  When these traps are working right, the fish cannot get by without entering the trap.  And once they enter they can't leave.  One place is an old salmon egg collecting station on the South Fork of the Noyo River.  The facility used to be a bomb shelter.  At least I think it used to be a bomb shelter.  It feels like it used to be a bomb shelter.  

Across the river next to the egg collecting station is a weir, or dam, or spillway.  Fish can't, during most normal river flows, get over it.  They are forced to turn and climb the fish ladder into the egg collecting station.  Once they are inside they can't get back out, and they are trapped in the channel you can see on the right side of the photo above.  The channel is blocked by a removable gate.  The fish wait in the channel until we show up to net them, tag them, record some info about them, and release them upstream.  This is me measuring a fish just after tagging it.

We also trap fish at the weir on Caspar Creek.  This is more of a floating barrier that rises as the stream flow rises.  Fish are diverted into a holding pen with a one way door.  They also get to wait until we show up to tag them and release them upstream.  This way, on both these rivers, theoretically, we know the gender, species and size of every fish that enters that river and it's tributaries.  When a coho salmon is done spawning, it dies.  With luck, we find the carcass (which we also have the pleasure of tagging) and with more luck we can check the tag on the carcass and determine when this fish entered the river.  

The other big part of my job, the part which we spend most of our time doing, is walking the creeks.  As I mentioned before, it's not your normal, every day walking.  There's no flat surfaces, most of the way.  The best you can hope for is a bit of a game trail next to the creek for 30 feet.  Into the water, out of the water.  Wading through ankle deep, knee deep, belly deep water.  Constantly using the measuring stick for balance.  Marvelling at the feeling of cold that surrounds my legs, and the fact that it's temperature alone, and not the wetness of the water, that I am feeling.  Maybe a little sweat in the socks and long johns.  Splashing into the creek at the beginning of the day, while frost still covers many of the valleys, an the warmth of the morning sun is just starting to try to break through.  Huddled in layers of polypro and fleece, wool, and sometimes a rain jacket.  Waders.  I haven't had more than one day yet in a dry suit - this is me enjoying my drysuit during training.  

Fun stuff.  They fill with air as you enter the water.  A giant floating stay puffed marshmallow man.  

Walking.  Stumbling.  Crawling.  Stooping.  Climbing.  It's fun work.  Fish or no fish.  I saw my first salmon in the river last week.  It was amazing.  A female was working on building a redd, and as we walked up to the redd, we didn't see her.  We stepped in the water and the fish swam quickly away from us, upstream into a sheltered pool.  We hung around for a while, waiting quietly on the bank, and the fish swam a little ways out of its hiding spot.  We were able to see it was a female, and to get a general estimate of her length.  We noticed that the bottom of her tail - the lower caudal peduncle - was very worn, whitened.  Based on the size of the redd, this was understandable.  She had been hard at work for a while, using her body and tail to move gravel, to dig the pot, to clean the gravel - the substrate - of small sediment, so when she lays her eggs and a male comes along and fertilizes them, the eggs will be washed in clean cold oxygenated water, and the eggs and the fish that they become will not be suffocated by fine silt. I had been waiting to see a fish, and it was wonderful to finally see one at work, spawning.  Carrying on the survival of her endangered species.  

It made me sad too, in that she was just one fish.  We did see a male hanging out in the pool above her redd, so there was hope that her eggs would get fertilized.  But these creeks, according to locals, used to be filled to the brim with salmon, such that you could walk across their backs, such that a horse would refuse to ford a river for fear of the commotion that was happening in the water.  

Now we walk, we search, we hope, we count.  We try to be scientists, to remain as counters, observers. I try.  I try to have the ability to count without putting too much thought into the numbers.  What we are counting goes into a database.  Ideally this style of counting is done all over the regions where salmon spawn.  Ideally, we form a big picture.  We want to know, I think, in the end, what we can do to help these fish reestablish their populations.  We want to know if they are reestablishing their populations.  We don't have a ton of historical data on these fish.  Sometimes, only stories of horses that weren't willing to ford these rivers.  So it's hard to set goals, it's hard to understand what we are hoping to see happen.  Maybe the world has changed so much, there's no going back.  It's all fascinating to me right now, to do work that offers just a small piece of what will hopefully continue to be a very useful big picture.  When it comes to restoration, and helping fish, and counting fish, I am sure there will be a lot more to say before I am finished with this job.  

Thanks to Asa Spade for the photos and videos.