Chris and I wandered around the Dungness all day yesterday (100 miles in the Jeep, who knows how much ground on our feet), looking for potential mini-weather station sites for our snow monitoring project. I seemed to have this amazing ability to find holes under the snowpack--this pic is of me after falling into one. Yes, I am waist deep in the snow and salal. Some of our sites were easy walking; some were a bear of a wade through snow, ice, brush, and fallen trees. But we found 7 sites during daylight, and it seems like we'll be able to sample them all in one day once we start the monitoring process. We weren't so lucky the last time in the field, where we found no real suitable sites and spent a discouraging day in the gloomy woods. Thanks to GIS (and the cool guys at Battelle), though, we could ID areas of open canopy, plug the coordinates into a GPS, and wander straight there. Well, as straight as one can in steep, forested terrain. (Never mind the holes.)
Finally, success!
Now all's we need is a sampling plan... and a bunch more snow!!!
