Wall tenting below zero
On this, my first job with Environaid, I didn’t pay attention to WHY we sloshed around in subzero temperatures injecting CO2 into a streambed 65 air-miles south of Juneau. And Dan’s report & files are mute on who commissioned this study. I’m pretty sure it was for the Forest Service, Dan’s former employer, and that our contact there was a guy named Fred Glenn. Chuck River wasn’t Wilderness in 1985, and I doubt USFS interest in sediment size was from concern for fish eggs.
Lingít Aaní’s mainland is pretty lean pickings for a logger, but by the mid-1980s, finest island timber
was gone, and “best-of-the-rest” was getting the hungry eye. Was it those 2-century spruce stands on the Chuck’s raised terraces, which Dan admiringly called “beautiful cabin logs,” that paid for our midwinter helicopter ride?
The team for this early-February investigation was senior hydrologist Dan Bishop, famous Glacier Bay ironman Leigh Smith, and wet-behind-the-ears end-of-roader Richard Carstensen. My favorite memory was of Leigh sloshing across the stream in leaky hipwaders, singing “I feel like Dancin!“, carrying two 80 pound cannisters and a backpack.
In addition to Dan’s very technical report, and photo section (rescanned in the original color for this digital version!), I’ve added some follow-up on the fate of Chuck River. I included air-photo page-flippers and a stereopair, for the light they shed on topography, forest structure, and 42 years of fluvial & successional change. Spoiler alert: The Chuck dodged the timber bullet and is now capital-W Wilderness.