After a couple weeks of bopping around, I returned to Salida, CO. Back on the job hunt, my prospects felt grim, at least until my mom sent me a link to a Facebook post on the Salida Community page. It was a simple job ad:
While this opportunity was by no means a new career, the job sounded perfect for me, and I perfect for it. I knew it would be a great transition from being funemployed to normal working life. I got in touch with Maddie, and after a few days we scheduled an interview. Sure enough, I got the offer! I think having hiked the PCT definitely helped me land the job. To anyone who says thru hiking is a waste of time, I am here to prove you wrong 😛
Maddie was conducting soil and hydrology research for a master’s thesis with Montana State University. The area of interest near Monarch Pass was a sort of experimental forest at the headwaters of the South Fork of the Arkansas River. The US Forest Service partnered with a timber company to cut down extensive beetle kill. Rather than harvesting the wood for sale, much of it was cut and left on the ground as “slash”. The experiment is to see if the slash has a positive impact for limiting erosion and run off, compared to no treatment at all.
For the uninitiated, beetle kill is the result of the exploding population of mountain pine beetle and spruce beetle, which was driven by the convergence of climate change and a century of fire suppression. Warmer temperatures have allowed the beetles to enter higher elevation forests, where they were once unable to weather the cold. Fire suppression has led to dense, overgrown forests that provide a near bottomless buffet for these bark burrowing bugs. The eggs are laid beneath the bark, then the larvae feed on the living tissue between the heartwood and the bark. This “girdles” the tree, cutting off the flow of water and nutrients between the roots and the leaves. Millions of acres of Colorado’s forests are now dead, although it seems the epidemic is slowing down in recent years. Land managers are now grappling with the effects of the mass die off, such as forest fire, as well as increased erosion and run off. The goal of this research is to help land managers make informed decisions going forward.
7 September 2023
My first day of work in 585 days. I met Maddie and the other temporary field tech, Keen, at 7 am, and we drove up to Monarch Pass together. Maddie had all sorts of strange equipment that we packed into her truck. On this day, we would be surveying “rills”, small rivulets of erosion in the surface sediment. We used a super precise GPS device, accurate to 10cm, to record the rills. We found a rill early on, surveyed its length and width, then kept hiking. The timber was cut clear in ~30 foot wide strips going straight up and down the slope. We would hike up one cut strip, then down the next – up 600 feet, down 600 feet. The slope was consistently 25-30°, which is certainly steep. I was glad to be in great shape since I had been keeping up with running and big hikes. Even so, I was pretty beat after my first day of work.
Scenes from my first day
Surveying rills was just one small part of the work. In order to compare run off and erosion rates on bare ground, slash covered ground, and undisturbed ground, Maddie had to collect data by simulating rainfall. This was definitely the most involved task. We would pick a plot with the right slope and ground cover, then set up a collection trough below it. We had to pump water from a pond into a cistern on the truck, drive it up to the simulation site, then transfer the water to a holding tank near the plot.
We set up a tripod for the “rainfall” nozzles. Lastly, we had to label and stage about 50 one liter collection bottles. It took most of a shift to get everything set up. Invariably, something would always go wrong when we were ready to start the simulation… Nozzles got clogged, the wind was too strong, or the seal on the collection trough was bad. It was a lot of physical work, hauling equipment up and down the slopes, but also a lot of problem solving where we had to work with what we had in the field.
When everything did work right, we made it rain. Keen and I were responsible for collecting the run off in one minute intervals for one hour while Maddie monitored. After all the work it took just to get set up, it felt like a great success to finish each rainfall simulation. However, the simulations were only one step of the scientific process, since all that collected water had to get turned into data.
Enter the vacuum pump. When division of work allowed, one person would run the vacuum filtration system. We had a small generator to power electric equipment in the field, and we also brought a small desk up to the mountain for a couple days. It was a bit noisy and tedious filtering all the collected runoff, but this was perhaps the best office I have ever had. At the end, we had a bunch of filters with the sediment from the rainfall simulations, each representing one minute of erosion. These would go to a lab for analysis.
It was really wonderful to work outside. I felt like I had more purpose having people who were counting on me to show up. It was also nice to get more social interaction. But perhaps one of the biggest perks of working with Maddie was her super sweet dog, Roots. He was a golden retriever-great pyrenese mix, so he looked like a big, dopey golden. We brought the good boi up to the mountain a few times, and his presence always boosted worker morale!
Roots the dog 🙂
The gig only lasted for three weeks, as Maddie had to get back to Montana for the start of the fall semester, and none of the Forest Service personnel were interesting in continuing work into October. The timing actually worked out quite well for me, since I finally got a job offer back in New Mexico and Maggie was wrapping up her summer at Glacier NP. Everything was starting to fall into place for transitioning back to “normal life”…
Distance Over Time 