Blue River, OR
Elevation: 2,504 ft.

It’s been such a relief to be back in the woods again. It crept up into my bones slowly and surely the few short days I spent in Portland resupplying, packing and eating - I was growing depressed. I think a big part of it was getting out of the woods and so suddenly being thrown back into regular, developed society. Filled with cell phone signal, wifi, cars, concrete, money, noise and responsibilities. That’s the big one. I think the sudden surge of my life picking back up where it left off before the season was overwhelming. It was only 3 months to everyone else but 3 months in the field is so much longer. There were times where I turned my phone on airplane mode just so I wouldn’t look at it as anything other than a camera. The HJ Andrews gig coming up when it did was a life saver and the perfect opportunity to get back into the woods with a grateful heart. And let me tell you, this project as been absolutely amazing!

Balls! But Chris how could hauling heavy digging equipment to steep slopes and digging a 1m x 1m x 1m pit for 10 hours a day be amazing? The answer is location, location, people, whatever-the-fuck-they-are-making-us-do. No way in hell did I ever think I would be able to work, let alone live, at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest yet here I was nestled in the foothills of the cascades surrounded by towering conifers and living on a compound filled with young ecologists and Forest Service researchers. It was like SCBI and SMSC met the west coast. We were housed in a 8-person apartment with running water, soft beds, a full kitchen and wifi (abiet extremely slow wifi) - and there are only 3 of us! The campus and the housing where the first things to put a smile on my face.

The next thing that brought me a lot of comfort and relief was the forest itself. The forests here haven’t been burned as much and, the section that our plots are in, run a long a large watershed which both add up to a very open, shaded, cool forest dominated by Oregon Grape, ferns, maples and hemlock. The brush is so low and mild that I can work in just a t-shirt and pants sans gaiters, long sleeve or thick Carhartts. The cool, moist air and the open green of the forest reminded me of cold days at SCBI walking alone looking for trees and it reminded me more of why I loved forests - the Klamaths just weren’t for me.

Now, the people. Matt and I had our suspicions of how Brett, our team lead, would be. Us both having been big leads in our own project as well as having graduated Klamath death camp feared we would be working with a snot-nosed, overly-enthusiastic, cocky OSU grad student upstart motherfuck. We were pretty sure we were going to have to show him how hard work is done and were bent on scaring him with our absurd standards and work ethic. But we were wrong.

Put in a way he would be proud of - Brett is a big, badass motherfucker. A Research Assistant from OSU he holds the same job (but not necessarily level) as my cousin Amanda and my Klamath boss Rob. I would rank them about ODST level-ish. Right off the bat I was like crap he’s huge and has a big red beard and he’s going to kill us shit what did I get myself into. 5 minutes into meeting him he brought in a shit ton of beer and had already made a “that’s what she said” joke. I instantly knew this was going to be a fun job no matter what they had us doing. That’s when the job comes in. We are part of a soil crew slated to be the first short season of a revival of soil analysis of sorts. I’m not completely clear on it all but Mark Harmon was explaining to us that there just wasn’t any consistent data collection being done on the HJA soils particularly in the watersheds and that the idea was to do short but regular seasons of soil and litter collections. What does that mean? Soil pits. A shit ton of soil pits.

Admittedly it’s easy to understate soil science and the protocols that come along with it. We are actually digging, sieving and collecting samples from 1m x 1m x 1m pits carefully chosen and dug to exact dimensions and weighed and recorded one bucket at a time. Step 1 is hiking to the site and choosing an appropriate spot to set up our pit - it has to be a place with vegetation and slope characteristic of the area and it can’t be too close to trees for nutrient and practicality reasons. Then we have to photograph it form different farthings and then carefully remove all of the vegetation from it. Then we cut around and remove the forest floor. It literally peels off like a mat and goes into labelled paper bags. Then we measure the height of the surface of the bare mineral soil at 16 intersecting points on a grid laid over the plot (and will do so at each dug interval) and THEN the fun begins. Digging carefully we create a perfect square into the side of the slope making sure that the distance from the top of the pit to the bottom is the same both upslope and downslope. We collect, weigh, sieve, weigh and store all of the soil we dig and damn we were all surprised at how much soil can come out of a meter cubed pit. The tiring part is when the big muscular movements like digging and hauling and weighing are interrupted by the tedious tasks like using a plumb bob and gently scraping the sides of the pit with a paint spreader to make sure its completely vertical or separating the rocks and roots by hand to be weighed and sampled. It creates a mental tired which compounds the physical tired we already feel.

We do 10 hour days so inevitably we are starting to wear out. The mornings have gotten slower to start and the drives home are quiet but having showers and beds and clean clothes everyday really does something for moral. Brett and Matt both have sweeties waiting for them back in Corvallis and Eugene respectively and hearing them talk about them of course makes me feel lonely but being 25 and in the middle of trying to figure out where I want to be in the field I always end up in a reasoning flow chart that ends in - it’s ok. There is a lot of things I am still working on both professionally and personally and I just don’t think that I am a wholesome enough person for a relationship yet. I know three women that would tell you the same. That all being said and done it still sucks and its tough sometimes. There are a lot of young people at this facility but because we are all up to so early and get back so late there isn’t much chance for dialogue. Also, everyone is housed in the buildings away from us and it’s just us soil guys, a solo researcher next door and a couple of researchers from Colorado State below us. All very quiet and keep to themselves. Anyways, one morning as we are getting our coffees and breakfasts going I am emptying my instant Quaker oatmeal into my camp bowl when through the window our of the corner of my eye I catch a golden flicker of light. There across the street walking with her arms crossed close to her chest was a girl walking with long brown hair. She was wearing a tanktop and running shorts and the way the morning light breaking through the trees hit her skin and her hair was unlike anything I’d seen in a long time. Now in reality she was just a cold girl walking over to the work trucks probably to get it ready for her team. She probably woke up late and had no time to get into her field clothes and figured she’d just get the truck closer to the apartment to make loading easier. Probably didn’t even brush her teeth or take a shit yet. The point was that I had spent so much time with sweaty, dirty field men and women that a clean, tanned barely clothed girl was just unbelievable - goddess like. Laughing at how much it affected me the guys didn’t let me forget about it all day. By the end of the day her name was “Oatmeal Girl”. My patheticness aside, a Tatum is an old term for something that holds papers. Essentially a clipboard. More specifically in forestry a nice metal one with several compartment. We have one on our crew and it’s dirty as hell and bent out of shape from so many seasons and we simply call it, “the taint”. I’ll leave that one for you to look up.

I have one week left here on soil crew and then I’m being transferred to a veg crew. From talking to some of the other researchers here it sounds like the HJA veg team is working out of Cascade Head on the Oregon coast which would be fucking amazing! Word on the street is that we may even get up into the Olympic Peninsula. Now I know I complain a lot of veg work but I think I can certainly stand to get into some more awful shit if it means getting that close to the coast again - and getting paid. My weekend starts today and I’m planning to take Rhyhorn out to explore some of Three Sisters Wilderness and Deschutes National Forest. Here’s to living each day like you die eventually and not being afraid to just say what you mean.

As always love and miss you all,

Chris