rambling-river-demo

Dirt from the Field: October, 2010

Summer’s over and it was a busy one for sure.  The biggest news from your Field Projects Coordinator is the completion of construction of Rambling River, our portable stream table.  There have been several public performances already.  The image shows Walt Anderson’s “Wetland Ecology and Management” class from Prescott College using Rambling River to demonstrate stream processes.  We had moved Rambling River to Watson Woods the afternoon before and let our volunteers from YEI! experience it too. We had been wondering how long Rambling River would run on a single charge of its battery so we left it running all night and found the stream still flowing the next morning as the students arrived…over twenty hours after we turned it on!  The ability to run Rambling River on location in the woods, meant that the class could watch various processes occur and then walk over to Granite Creek and see the same things in the real world. All that remains is for Rambling River to get its colorful graphics installed.  That should happen very soon and I’ll have photos on the web site just as soon as it does.

October will be a month of preparing for this year’s Watson Woods revegetation and construction work.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be working with one of our student interns, Colin Thompson, identifying donor trees, storage areas for cuttings (they need to stay wet until we plant them), getting our tools sharpened and scheduling VOLUNTEERS.  We’ll start gathering cuttings just as soon as the trees go dormant…I’ve scheduled November 2nd as the first day of cutting.  Cutting will continue through November and planting will happen early in December.  If you’d like to join in, click here to let us know.  We’ll get to work out in the Fall air and take another step in the restoration of the Watson Woods.

I hope to see you out there!

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