People of the Big River 2026

Wow, we really got to sleep in today! 7:30 wakeup call felt like the middle of the day. Today we had a really cool activity, we got to go to the US Forest Service Seed Extractory in Bend, Oregon. We got to meet Kayla Herriman, who is the National Seed Specialist for USFS and was our tour guide for the day. Before becoming the National Seed Specialist, she was actually the manager of this facility for 12 years. Kayla is an extremely knowledgeable person, I felt like I was listening to a professor! Her tour was super interesting to me, and I got to learn so much today that there was no way I could’ve written everything down, but I tried my best to get a good bit of it all! To begin, the USFS nursery system has eight facilities. Of those eight facilities, six of them are nurseries and two are seed extractories. Of those six nurseries, the only one that doesn’t also do seed extraction is the nursery in Central Point Oregon because it is so close to the bend facility. The Bend Seed Extracto...

Today we had our earliest morning yet, the only other time I’ve woken up before 6am this year was for cherry harvest! We had to get up early to meet with Marlo Fisher, the US Forest Service District Botanist for the Bend-Fort Rock ranger district. She manages around one million acres (wow!!!) of which around 20% is wilderness. She has been doing botany for over 15 years, and originally started out as a wildland firefighter out of Cle Elum. Our job today was to survey for Botrychium Pumicola, known as Pumice Moonwort, but we referred to it as Bopu (combines the 1 st two letters from each scientific name). Bopu is endemic to central Oregon, with some outliers to the north and south by Crater Lake and Mt. Jefferson. Bopu loves the pumice soil found in these areas, which came from the Mt. Mazama and Newberry explosions. We were in the Pine Mountain area to see if there is habitat the Bopu are occupying that scientists do not know about. It took us a while to find our first few, which we n...

Today we met up with Alex Enna at the Lava Lands visitor center before our tour. Alex is the partnership program manager for the Deschutes National Forest. He said a lot of his work is setting up partnerships or securing funding and grants. These partnerships are very valuable as they get a lot of trail maintenance and vegetation management done. With around 2,000 volunteers doing about 50,000 hours of work each year, that is the equivalent of 20 full-time employees! We then got an amazing explanation about the lava flows in the area, the history of the volcanic activity, and a great little geology lesson from Christine Hughes, a park ranger at the visitor center. This helped us understand how the geology of the area changed over time and the major events that have occurred and shaped the landscape. Thanks to DiscoverNW who got us tickets to ride the shuttle to the top of Lava Butte, the hike would’ve been too much! There were absolutely amazing views up here and it was really nice to ...

Today we had another 6am wake up call and had to pack up camp. Dave Purdon went his separate way, but we were all really thankful for him for coming out and hanging with us for a couple of nights. It was great to talk to him and get some good life advice! After making sure we had everything ready to go, and finished eating breakfast and making lunches, we went to take a soil sample before heading out. It was really cool to see the different layers of soil at this site as they were very clearly separated and even had a lot of mycelium growing throughout. On our drive to our next campsite, we stopped at the Warm Springs museum on the Warm Springs reservation. We were able to meet with Jolene and Louie Pitt, Alysia Aguilar Littleleaf, and Elke Littleleaf. Louie had a great story to tell us about what inspired his life of environmentalism early on. While doing a redd count for work one day he was sitting down taking a break on the bank. When he stood up, the hen that was on the redd near h...

Today we had another early morning at 6:00am, no extra hour of sleep for us! We had to make sure we would have plenty of time for our activity today, making beaver dam analogs! I would like to express my gratitude to Yakima Nation fisheries and the Yakima nation for allowing us the opportunity to visit and attempt to restore some of their ancestral lands. I realize the significance and importance of the land we were permitted to try and help improve. The people helping us learn what to do and who are in charge of working on this project are Jeanette Burkhart, who is a watershed planner, Gerard Foley, who is a habitat biologist, and David Lindley, who is a habitat coordinator. We spent the day working in a meadow that swamp creek runs through, and we were attempting to raise the creek to allow the wetland to flood. This will slow down the water as it goes to Cunningham creek and eventually the Klickitat River. This will improve conditions for Steelhead and salmon, and is going to be ver...

I think I got eight hours of sleep last night for the first time on the entire trip, it felt amazing. We also had a hot breakfast for the first time since the trip has started, thank you to Monette for making us eggs and bacon! I also decided to help wake myself up by dunking my head in the creek, and the cold water felt so amazing. We then headed out to the White Salmon River to view some really cool sites. We first went to Husum falls, which was awesome. There was so much water churning in the river that it was hard to hear anything when we were right by it. It is extremely impressive to me that just a few years after the removal of the dam that native spring salmon were already jumping past these falls to get to the river above. After Husum falls we went down to Northwestern park to view some of the restoration that is being done to help the different fish species migrating back to this river. There were some ponderosa pine that had been planted and lots of work has been done to hel...

Today, Sergio, Dallas and I left a little earlier than the group so that Juan could make it to Pasco in time to get picked up for his family event. It was great to have Juan out here with us and he was really helpful in the field. Especially for all of the soil testing with different kits, he got us comfortable with everything so that over the next week we’ll be able to take soil samples and analyze them ourselves! Hopefully he’ll be able to do some adjunct teaching with Heritage and get us a soil science course. We hung out at the Starbucks in Pasco for a few hours to make sure everyone is able to get up to date on our blogs and data entry. I think we all enjoyed our time in the AC and getting a bit of rest. And thank you to Jessica for getting us all a drink! Salvador Ayala made it to Pasco to take over as our second driver now that Juan is gone, he’s a super friendly guy who I have had the pleasure of hanging out with at my internship down at the WSU IAREC location in Prosser. We al...

 Once again, we were blessed with another half an hour of sleep. I was feeling especially tired after breakfast, so I headed down to the river at our campsite and dunked my head in to wake up. Nice and chilly! Then we did the quicker part of our soil analysis before heading out. We got soil samples yesterday from the mix that Gail uses at her nursery, and we also got some near Harris park. We figured Gail's soil would be a great control as it is a mixed and homogenized soil that should be good for growing a wide variety of plants and give us a good baseline. After getting our pH measurements and doing our nitrogen and phosphate sampling with test strips we got ready and left for the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute. It is both a museum and research institute, and an interesting fact I learned is that it is the only Native American museum along the Oregon trail. I think there should be more! Anyways, I had an amazing time getting to explore this museum. They have it set up in a sort o...

 Today we were blessed and got to sleep in an extra half an hour till 6:30. Our first activity of the day was visiting the Imtwaha hatchery and getting an amazing tour from Emily Meshke and also got to talk to Bryan Startzl and Sunhawk Thomas. I have been lucky enough to visit a few hatcheries throughout Washington and Oregon, and I have to say this was by far the most technologically advanced and impressive that I have been to.   They also had an ODFW sorting trailer on site to clip fish. It was a 5 line and it was doing around 7,000 fish per hour with a 98% success rate. This allows them to clip all of the around 500,000 fish in about two weeks. From the SCADA machine that can run the entire system and pumps while also providing alarms to getting to see the sorting trailer it was like looking into hatcheries of the future. They aim for 500,000 spring chinook each year, and this is the first year they hit that number with only Walla Walla strain fish. They have the capacity f...

Today is our last day camping at the Welpinit Pow-wow grounds. We woke up early to finish all of our data collection that we needed for our experiments. We learned how to differentiate between soil colors using the Globe and Munsel soil books, how to determine the texture via the ribbon test, and Juan also reminded us that the USDA soil web net will be able to tell us a lot about the soil as well. They then showed us how to use the old school densiometers which have a grid you use to determine the canopy cover in an area. After this we got to use the newer and more advanced CI-110 Plant Canopy Imager, which I have attached a picture of.  This device was very cool, it auto levels and has a wide fisheye lens so you can take one measurement instead of needing to take N, E, S, and W. It gave us a lot more data such as PAR, average Par, the sunfleck percent, PAR LAI, gap fraction LAI, canopy density, leaf angle, and even our coordinates and bearing. After this we packed up our camp and ...

Today we got after it in the field! We met up with Jordan Matherly, Casey Flanagan, and Brian Crossley to help them check on the progress of one of their projects. We went to Chamokane creek to see how their weirs had been doing at trapping sediment. In the past, the portion of the creek that we were working with was dredged and straightened. They are trying to help raise the stream back to its historical level where it would've flooded the plain we were on and slowed down that water. They said that when there is a heavy rain or snow event that the creek will flow very hard and lower sections can be impacted or even get washed out. We used a transit and measuring pole to check the elevation of the stream, and they had placed fixed points in the ground when the project started to have a consistent point to base elevation from. They also mentioned that usually a project like this could be harder to achieve if the landowners weren't growing pasture for cows to graze and instead we...

Today we got up at 6AM so that we could all have breakfast and make lunch before heading out to the Spokane Tribal Hatchery. There we met with 3rd through 5th graders who were there on a field trip and helped them make bracelets representing the different stages of the salmon lifecycle. It was a good time and the kids were actually really into it so I'm glad they enjoyed the activity. We also got a short tour of the hatchery, from the raceways where the eggs start to the very advanced trailer that is capable of clipping over 60,000 fish in one day according to our wonderful tour guide Anthony. Afterwards we returned to the campgrounds we are staying at where Juan taught us how to take soil probe core samples. Tomorrow we will finish our analysis on those samples. The heat started to get to me a few times today but with some AC breaks and water I was fine. Hoping to get some more sleep tonight, hopefully there isn't a loud horse again!

I think I have packed everything I need and I am excited to begin our trip. Hopefully sleeping on the ground for two weeks won't kill my already sad back! We had a nice drive over to the Wellpinit campgrounds where we will be staying for a few days. Luckily the weather has been nice to us so far and there hasn't been any rain or extreme heat. I am excited to learn and to get out there in the field and do some work!