Recharge

10.863 kilometers off the highway, good gravel all the way - over the bridge then creep along to spot the stream where it crosses the road.  According to the map I was going to see an unharvested alluvial fan channel (colluvial really - some note), but the stream at this location was tiny - barely a half-meter wide flowing through thick forest at the road edge.  I followed it up.

After a few minutes the young forest gave way to open old-growth, a sloping forested wetland.  The channel meandered up, sometimes disappearing briefly under tree roots but always emerging to twist a and babble a bit more.  Eventually I ended up in a bog - the stream split to drain a few ponds.  Disappointing.  I walked out into the clearing and listened.  To my right I heard the sound of water - more water than I'd left and I understood, the channel was there - close by but not quite mapped correctly.

As I stepped into it I knew I was in the right place - 4 meters or more wide, large cobbles and vertical eroding banks - I turned upstream and followed it - sometimes in the stream sometimes on the bank looking at the deposition and the age of the trees.  I walked it for a half hour or so until it went vertical - a waterfall - then up and around it as well to see another set of jagged falls and steep valley walls containing the channel.  Back down below the first falls I rested, filled my water bottle and reveled in the location.  It felt good to be there - working - mapping - being there - not thinking about anything else but the creek, how it looked, how it developed, how it behaved.  Beautiful.

An alluvial fan channel as narrowly defined here in southeast alaska encompasses a fair range of behavior with several points in common.  At some point in its history - perhaps recently after the glaciers relinquished their grip on the valley - rocks high up on the steep erodible hillslope began to be funneled down the mountain to rest at the toe of the slope.  The incised upper high-gradient portion of the channel acts as a sediment pump - pushing pulses of stone down until the gradient breaks and they come to rest.  Large cobbles bound in a matrix of gravel and sand pile up as lobes forcing the stream this way and that - around and down.  Over time the forest takes hold on these deposits - big spruce, devils club.  On large systems the telltale triangle of giant spruce is a dead giveaway and always attractive to loggers.  Sometimes if the pump stops - either when the substrate is held up by dams of wood high up in the notch or perhaps when the slopes reach some sort of equilibrium state - and the stream begins to downcut through its own deposit.  That was the case here - As I moved downstream I looked at the downcutting - a meter or more - and wondered.  If it's not here then where - I kept on going.

Near the toe slope I found the active portion of the fan.   A split channel, gravel all over the place in all directions, live trees dying as they stood buried centimeters deep in gravel.  I followed the lefthand channel at the major breaks - the newer channel and wound down and down until it dumped me out on the side of the main channel, a beautiful low gradient salmon stream.  Then I went back up and followed out the other channel - the original one down to where it intersected as well.

I'll fix the mapping of it - and maybe I'll come back and make some measurements - but not today.  I'm headed home - happier - recharged.

Sun, rain, fog

The late spring days alternate between sun and rain and the mood of the town follows.  On the sunny days the streets are full and smiles abound, but each time the rain returns the talk turns sour.  On the way to the beach today the DJ joked "I hope you enjoyed summer... all 24 hours of it!"  I suppose the pessimism insulates us from the reality that it really does rain most of the time here.

I spent half the day at the beach, participating in a group learning about wilderness first aid.  I spend a fair amount of time in the forest and it's good to be up on the techniques that could get someone (including myself) out of pinch.  From up on the beach we have a nice view across the sound to the cliffs on the other side.  Over the course of the afternoon as the tide crept in with hardly a wavelet to disturb us, the fog moved across.  It made for wonderful views as the mountains disappeared and reappeared - colors muted white grey and dark green.  The rain of earlier in the day turned to mist and by the time we left you'd be hard pressed to call it rain at all.  I find it one of the nicest weather types to be out and about in - cool and misty - quite mysterious.

We dined this eve. on some wonder full fresh shrimp - this time sauteed as Pad Thai and accompanied by a green papaya salad.  The girls ate the rice noodles plain with a few green beans.  After dinner we strolled down to the harbor and out to the end of the C float to jig for herring.  After a few tries we got a dozen or so and they now reside salted in the fridge, and I hope they can be traded for larger fish this weekend.

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.