Saturday Morning

This morning is pure pleasure. A storm is coming over the mountains now, but at seven the sun was out and melting the frost on the grass in town. I took Jasper for a longer walk to the moraine to make up for working long hours yesterday. Now I am toasting bread on a piping hot wood-burning stove and smothering the bread with smoked salmon torte, left over from a catering gig for the Nature Conservancy. I'm waiting for the Joseph Public Library to open at noon so I can go get my library card and hopefully check out some books on local cultural and natural history.

Walking along the eastern lateral moraine of Wallowa Lake. The Wallowa Mountains are towering in the distance like ghostly versions of themselves, costumed with fresh snow that fell yesterday.

Ten Hands

From greenhouse to ground, we've almost finished filling the middle beds with onions, greens, and brassicas. I loved the steady flow of the morning, covering the plots with landscape fabric to keep out the weeds, plopping the plants down, and pressing them into place. Ten hands made light work.

New friends listen to a lesson in placing and planting.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop... Gardening

Conquered those pesky, path-inhibiting... poppies.

The spring rain and warm weather last week turned the yard here into a jungle, and when temps soared above 45 F and the sun showed it's face today, I couldn't resist getting the gloves out to fight back. Besides the seemingly infinite dandelions that grow here, I was particularly eager to tackle a mangy, hairy-leafed plant that was threatening passage along the paths around the house. I noticed these weeds were also poking through the landscape fabric, which gave me a bit of a pause, wondering whether they were perhaps an aggressive, but desirable flowering plant of some type. But their abundance along the paths boiled my blood and I took them all out, merrily piling them in three large mounds as I progressed. Just after I switched over to saving a small strawberry patch, BG appeared to check that I wasn't destroying everything in the little greenhouse. We joked about the amount of work the yard needed, and then eager for more info on the hairy-leafed guys, I gestured to my work and asked, "I decided to start with that weed over there, do you know what it is?" She glanced at my impressive piles before informing me that they were poppies. Then she looked at me sideways and hesitatingly added, "They'll put out nice flowers a bit later in the spring." Doh, I felt like a complete idiot.

Later, Jas and I headed back to Hurricane Creek for a run, and I was surprised to find decent snow cover on the trail about 3.5 miles in, just past the falls I mentioned last weekend. With warm and sunny weather in the forecast again during the week, I'm hoping the snowline will be knocked back a couple more miles. I desperately need to get my butt in gear and train over longer distances and with greater elevation gains before the Scout Mountain Ultra Trailrace in Pocatello, which is coming up in a meager four weeks!

A Radiant First Week

Today marks my first week in my new home, and it's been a good one. In order to make progress on my dissertation work at the same time that I try out life as a farmer, I knew I would need to establish a common flow to each week. The plan for now is for weekends, Mondays, and Thursday and Friday afternoons to be research time, and for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and Friday mornings to be farm work days, except when I work at the Wallowa County Farmers' Markets. After having a rather light teaching assistantship this spring semester, and factoring in moving and other life activities, it felt like a packed week! Good thing I enjoy being busy (thanks Mom). Here's how the routine goes.

Every morning, I wake up, make a cup of tea, and climb up the back landing to take a picture of the mountains to the southwest. I'm curious to see how the extent of the snowpack changes over time this summer, and later, how senescence will transform the forest into a patchwork of evergreens and golden tamaracks. Jas and I go for a walk, I have a big bowl of doctored oatmeal, pack my bag and head to the farm.

JP refreshes himself from a delicious rodeo grounds puddle a few blocks from our house under a brilliant blue sky. The contrast between the snowline and treeline highlights the Hurricane Creek drainage in the background. 

My first days working at BYG were a blur, as we scrambled to maintain the overflowing greenhouses and get the fields ready for planting after the wettest start to the water year on record. I learned to harvest and wash greens, transplant pepper and tomato starts which we'll sell at the first market, and maintain the weedwhackers, We put the latter to exhausting use on Thursday morning mowing the cover crop before Beth came through on the tractor to till in the cuttings. The rain this weekend should help get the breakdown process started and prep our soil for planting. Friday we put in our first outside crops: yellow, red, and sweet onions, which were started on a farm in Texas and languished in BG's garage for a few weeks waiting for the sun to come out.

A bonus hoop house stores overflow peppers and brassicas until they are ready to plant in the fields, or sell at market.

New to the farm fields this year are egg and meat chickens, which we'll move around the field twice daily in chicken tractors to add fertilizer and keep harmful insects down. BG, SL, and I will share the protein and responsibility for care and maintenance. The egg hens are on site now and got to enjoy some chickweed harvested from overwintered kale beds. The meat birds will arrive next Friday. SL is finishing construction on the chicken tractors this weekend and I hope to get a picture of them in action soon.

BG points out the freshly tilled beds where we will add ~600 onion starts, which will grow into green, fresh, and storage onions of a few different varieties.

The evenings so far have found me sunburned and sore as my body adjusts to working hard outside. SV and I enjoyed Midwestern tacos at the Stubborn Mule on Tuesday night. The first of many, I'm sure. In lieu of running, Jas and I took a short jaunt up the steep E. Fork Wallowa R. trail at the head of the lake on Thursday, catching the last glow of the evening on the eastern moraine before our path was blocked with snow.

The sunset reflects brightly on Wallowa Lake from the darkness of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.

Cleaning Up!

Here in Joseph, volunteers have been working hard all week to renovate the city park with some fancy new play structures. My housemate suggested that I volunteer too, since it would be a good opportunity to meet some other people in town. I was happy to oblige, and showed up this afternoon ready to work up a sweat. Since it was the last day of the build, after taking down a few tents, I got the inglorious and delightful task of shop vacuuming plastic shavings out of the grass. I'm certain I made a good impression with the members of my new community, because several came over to either apologize for the absurdity of the situation or laugh about it with me. The lady who vacuums grass, yup that's me!

It actually felt pretty rewarding. I filled several large trash cans with tiny plastic shavings that came from all the playground equipment having been cut out of dimensional plastic. Since the park is directly adjacent and upslope of the Wallowa River, I feel like I've done a good thing for the aquatic community of this town too.

The playground build at Joseph City Park. Minimal plastic shavings remain under that Safeway tent!

Slickrock Falls- accurately named, whether colloquial or not.

This evening I went over to Hurricane Creek to check out the trail conditions, and was delighted to find only a few patches of snow between the trailhead and what I've heard called "Slickrock Falls" a few miles up valley. Spring has barely arrived in that north-draining catchment, with buttercups as the sole bloomers that I noticed. Even the buds on aspen had not burst yet. I wonder if there are glacier lilies in this area like there was in McCall, because that was one of the first things I remember coming up last spring. Animal sightings were sparse too, though I did see a couple hen grouse on the way down Hurricane Creek Road, and Jasper terrorized a jackrabbit along the trail. I'm looking forward to exploring further along down the trail soon.

Spring in Joseph

Spring is here, and as usual, it brings with it a change in geography for me. Instead of migrating to the Arctic, or feeling like I finally left it when spring came in McCall, today I moved to Joseph, Oregon. Jasper's here as my first mate, currently enjoying his rank by snoring on my knee.

The view of the Wallowas from my new home in Joseph, OR this morning. Photo credit: SV.

While in Joseph, I'll work part-time at Backyard Gardens, a small vegetable and flower farm, and continue my dissertation research and writing. I'll also be acquainting myself with the surrounding region, which includes such diverse places as the Eagle Cap Wilderness, Hell's Canyon, and the Zumwalt Prairie.

This year I have an unusual context- it's been the wettest spring on record across much of the Pacific US, and the impacts were clear on the drive here. The Wallowas were thickly frosted with snow, and while there wasn't as much flooding as when I came here to interview a month ago, the rivers and streams I crossed were still swollen with meltwater. Still, life pushes stubbornly against its environment, and the fields and forests are coming alive with the delicate green of new leaves. I'm excited to closely observe what the summer brings and invest myself along side it.

Precipitation this winter has been unusually high, compared to the 1985-2010 average, and dark green areas such as Pocatello, ID and Joseph, OR have seen record totals.

Project Introduction and Spring 2013 Snowpack

My PhD work focuses on physical controls on water storage and flux on Arctic hillslopes. I'm going to start sharing some of this work on here in order to practice communicating this information simply, clearly, and concisely. Here it goes.

In many parts of the Arctic, mean annual temperatures are below freezing. Over time, this has caused permafrost, permanently frozen ground, to develop. In my study area in the foothills of the Brooks Range, permafrost is continuous over large spatial areas and extends below ground to several hundred meters depth. However, something changes every summer: a thin upper layer of the permafrost, called the "active layer" warms and thaws as air temperatures soar above freezing for a few months- usually from late May to mid-September. This brief time window allows plants and other organisms to flourish on and in the unfrozen soils. Water too is able to flow into and out of the subsurface, carrying with it the substances that it dissolves such as mineral salts that weather out of the glacial till that makes up the hills and valleys, as well as the nutrients that feed biotic productivity. As the active layer deepens over the summer, the amount of time that water spends in the ground and the depths and subsurface materials that it can reach grow as well. This is one seasonal component to how water storage and flux change in the Arctic.

Water enters Arctic landscapes through rain and snow and leaves through runoff, shallow subsurface flow, sublimation, evaporation, and transpiration by organisms. Unlike many places on Earth, hardly any water is able to penetrate deeply into the ground to become part of a long-lasting groundwater reservoir because the permafrost prevents it. The difference in precipitation phase is another seasonal difference in water storage and flux in the Arctic, although the change is causes is stochastic. Over winter, snow accumulates and is stored on the surface in snowpack. A small portion sublimates, but most of the stored snow is lost during spring snowmelt. This is a rapid event, where the snowpack becomes isothermal then melts away, usually within the span of a week or even a few days. Most of the water quickly flows in the stream network, causing the stream water discharge to increase dramatically too. This flood pulse is the largest in most years, but sometimes summer rainstorms can cause even greater flood events.

One of the datasets that I collect is the amount of water stored in the snowpack on the hillslopes of my study area at the beginning of my field seasons. Here's the procedure:

Dig a snowpit to the base of the snowpack.

Describe the snow profile and identify layers in the snow for sampling.

Take samples of a known volume and weigh in the lab to determine density.

The amount of water stored in snowpack at the end of winter in 2013 was unusually large. For comparison, on average 12.9 cm of water were stored in snowpack in the spring each year in Upper Kuparuk River watershed in the mid-90s. From the 24 hillslope snowpits I dug, I measured an average of 23.6 cm of snow water equivalent. However, half the sampling locations I chose target features called water tracks that form in areas of convergent topography that drain the hillslopes. The other half are from non-water track locations. Comparing the two, I found that the water stored in the water track snowpack was significantly higher, likely because they form topographic lows and contain emergent shrubby vegetation that trap snow when the wind redistributes it over the winter.

Overall, the average snow water equivalent in the water track locations was ~28 cm, while the hillslope sites contained ~18 cm. This is still significantly greater than other years and makes for an exciting peek into what could happen in the future, when climate models predict that over winter Arctic snowfall will increase. I would also predict that ground temperatures, active layer thaw, and potentially water storage in the water track may be greater than the surrounding hillslope. Next, I need to investigate the timing of snowpack formation and melt at my different field sites. Since snow shields the ground from harsh winter air temperatures, both the timing and magnitude of snowpack are important factors in determining summer active layer conditions.