Cybertracking the ‘power outlet’
On July 29th, 2022, 14 Discovery naturalists and their 3 visiting instructors gathered on tidal sand at Undermine Grove, a ~60-year-old spruce grove standing—sometimes precariously—on the shifting, merged channels of Asx‘ée-&-L’ux (Eagle & H-word Rivers). Our workshop, courtesy of Cybertracker North America, was just one of 3 sessions that tracking scholars Kevin, Marcus and Guuy Yaaw’ held for various groups at Asx‘ée over that extended weekend. Journaling this get-together, it occurred to me that enrollees in their other workshops might be equally interested in resources that Discovery has accrued over decades on The Delta.
Sample page from my journal & appendices for Asx̱’ée (Eagle River)
This excerpt is part of a placejournals format I’m increasingly fond of, called scoping/journaling documents. For each location, I begin by assembling all available bedrock-to-bugs info, especially when mappable. For my home in Áak’w & T’aakú Aaní these places are watershed based. I call this Part 1: the ‘scoping’ portion of the document. Part II is the Journals section, and Part III is typically Appendices. Increasingly, my favorite daily journals from visits to our 13 watershed units are getting tucked into these documents. A nearby example of this evolving format is the 62-page pdf for L’ux, (H-word River). Most of my scoping/journaling pdfs are too enormous and too unfinished to upload to JuneauNature.
But portions are shareable and, in this case, timely. Below, I’ve excerpted both the 20220729 tracking workshop journal, and Appendix-2: ‘pageflippers,’ or precisely registered historic aerials on successive pages, handy for point-to-point examination of succession and landform changes.
Download journal/appendix excerpt here (12MB). 
Future journal uploads to Asx̱’ée-&-L’ux watershed pages will hopefully carry things back a little farther, like this tracking seminar from the 1984 Eagle Beach Field Biology Camp, precursor to what we now know as Discovery Southeast.
Everything is a track. Modeling terminal moraine formation on the way up L’ux in July, 1984. Bare gravelly sand is our species’ original mapping surface. Great, also, for simulating tracks of brown vs black bear (but remember to erase em so as not to upset the next hikers).
