I remember it got to minus 7 degrees F on this trip, but presumably it warmed a bit before Dan took this photo. The tripod was for winching out gravel samples after injecting CO2 into the streambed to freeze them in place.
Evenings in our heated wall tent, with a $20 wooden pantograph under kerosene light, I drew my first-ever stream map. Active and bankful channel data were collected for sections A through K
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.
