Sunday Bankful Sunday

 

Bela taking cross section measurements 

in the Rattlesnake Creek at Site 10. 

Standing waist-deep in a creek watching a tennis ball floating downstream with the ambition of a tortoise is not how I usually spend my Sundays. Since moving to Missoula in June, I've spent more time on running trails than I have just about anywhere else. Between graduate school, work, and ultramarathon training, I was feeling fatigued. Last Sunday was my first free Sunday since school began, and I wanted to do something solely for the fun of it. Enter: the Watershed Education Network. And so, I found myself with and awesome conglomerate of people eager to get into the Rattlesnake Creek. Shimmying into waders and anxiously eyeballing the clouds hovering overhead, we split up into groups to tackle the different aspects of stream monitoring. 

I was in Brook's group, taking measurements of the physical features of the stream, measuring elements like bankful, flow and stream velocity. We waddles back and forth across the stream, hesitantly stepping over underwater boulders and carefully measuring alongside the newly formed beaver dam. The dam posed more of a challenge than I initially realized. Interrupting the stream flow meant that we had to wait minutes at a time for each velocity measurement; hence, we all stood around cheering on a neon tennis ball as it we at the Kentucky Derby. 

Though I spent time this summer working with the Clark Fork Coalition, I consider myself a noice when it comes to river and stream monitoring. The cool part about working with the Watershed Education Network is that I really didn't need to know anything beforehand. They taught us what we needed to know and getting hands-on experience collecting data allowed us to feel like stream scientists. It was one of the most insightful and playful Sundays I'd had in a while. Plus, we got chocolate at the end.