Walking upstream

The water is crystal clear and cold, fed by snowmelt from the headwaters. After the slow and tepid channel we walked the day before it is blissful.
We were all surprised at the amount of sand in the substrate - a legacy of steep rock avalanches higher in the valley. Where logs have fallen into the channel, great pools form - some nearly a meter deep - and filled bank to bank.

I touch the water and then my forehead - my reminder to smile and look around; to appreciate and focus my thoughts on here and now.

We've come to measure. Working to quantify these channels. Digesting beautiful streams into spreadsheets, building curves.

Pristine
Low gradient
Alluvial
Pools and wood. Sand, gravel, cobble
Dimension.

Steep, bare rock upper valley walls. The valley floor is narrow - the forest dominated by young spruce overtopping red alder.

Walking upstream we find where beaver is building a dam across the channel. Halfway across, the jumble of live and dead sticks and rocks looks like it will never survive the fall rains.

Downstream the creek flows through a bedrock gorge - and somewhere below a series of falls block upstream migration of salmon. The few fish in here, Cutthroat trout, Dolly Varden or both, dart away as we wade through.

Near one of the cross-section monuments, pink-flagged aluminum rods stuck deep in the bank, a moose or elk had bedded down. We found tracks in the forest. Once I thought I heard something in the brush off the creek, but we never saw the animal.

We catalog the flowers:

Black Lily
Paintbrush
Cow Parsnip
False lily of the valley
Early yellow asters
and the beautiful Sitka mistmaiden (Romanzoffia sitchensis)

On average we spend two days in each stream. Two days of stream noise drowning out the trivialities of modern society. In the days when I spent more time in steeper channels the sound of the water was a white noise the drowned out idle conversation and idle thought alike. In two days we walk a mere 200 meters of channel. Measuring, counting, and trying to interpret the recent history of the channel by the pattern of substrate sizes, vegetation and scour.

I never fail to return home happy.