Day 5 (Land and sea)
Day 5
Today we got up at 6:30, 30 minutes later than our last few mornings, it wasn't a lot of time but those few extra minutes did wonders for me. Compared to the last campsite this one was so quiet and peaceful, no loud horses or cows screaming through the middle of the night, and the soothing sound of the river was really relaxing. I went over to see what my morning chore was to make sure I wasn’t on food duty; I had dishes… We ate breakfast, I had a bowl of honey nut cheerios, and a cup of black tea with milk. After that we packed our lunches (sandwiches and snacks of our choice) immediately after I went straight for my chores. The goal was to be in our cars and ready to go as we had lot of tasks to get done today.
Our first stop for the day was the Imtwha hatchery where Emily Meshke the Assistant manager was kind enough to show us
around. We learned that this is still a new institute being built in the 80’s
and it was being run by 6 employees. We got to see a room with 6 massive pool
tanks and were told that each pool could hold up to 50,000 young adult salmon each. The
pools were big but 50,000 each may be too many, maybe total. With how many
salmon are produced they can only financially afford to clip and tag 30% of them,
however with the amount that this hatchery is producing 30% is more than enough
to track their data.
We were then led to the spawning room where fish are brough
onto a conveyer belt to get measured. Unfortunately for us the room was
currently in use as a salt storage room, as the facility burns so much salt for
salmon treatment, but unfortunately haven’t been able to burn through all of it.
We did see some dead salmon on the conveyer belt and learned that a few of the
salmon have been recently dying, Emily mentioned it could be a variety of
things. The recent heat might be making the water too hot for them. Another potential
cause of death could be coco pods, as a gill infection could cause them to from
the inside. Whatever the cause this facility can figure it out. After that we
walked right on out the door to the salmon tanks where the sick ones were being
pulled from. There were 4 tanks that each held 200 young adult salmon, it was
little tough to see them but if you concentrated you could see their shadows
swim by.
After that Emily introduced us to Brian Startzl a hatchery
tech 3, and Sunhawk Thomas a temp worker who showed us around to the river
where the salmon like to rest. At plain view it may be hard to see any of the fish,
but I was able to make out 3 adults but thanks to Gavin his trusty polaroid
glasses we were able to see all the fish hiding in the water and I counted
easily 10 salmon. We then got to ask some fun questions about the salmon like
how often they deal with animals trying to break in and steal some fish and turns
out they are currently on the watch for a black bear that was seen nearby.
Right after we got to meet Aaron Jackson who showed us his
clipping operation. We got to see the clipping trailer, I got to see one in Spokane,
but I wasn’t able to see it in action like this. We got to see how the fish
were filtered by size and how they automatically got sent through one at a time
to clip them for tracking. There are some fish that filter through due to being
too small or not going through straight, those fish will be sent into a tiny
tank where they will be sent through again or manually clipped based on
inspection.
Big thank you to everyone at the Imtwha hatchery for the tour, I had a lot of fun taking it all in and getting to see how everything works. I’ve become so fascinated by fishery work on this trip.
After that we made our way to the CTUIR plant nursery to meet up with Gail Redburg. Gail was amazing and she had so much to teach us about agricultural work. She taught us about all the local crops in the area like elder berry, milk weed, douglas, hot thorn, and many more. We got to see her green house that was full of all the forementioned plants. The temp was in the 70’s but the greenhouse said it was in the 100’s there. Soon after Gail gave us a quick lesson on elderberry before lunch. We took an hr I took the time to eat and reach out to my loved ones and fill them in.
After lunch we got to see the planting process for these trees. The trees were first grown in cones once they’ve sprouted, they are carefully extracted and placed into a prepped planting pot. We got the chance to try the process and then watched as they were topped off and sent away. For the field activity we helped Gail graft and relocate some trees as they were beginning to dry out due to over growing and block water from the other plants. We all took shifts grafting the trees, passing trees over, and someone replaces them in a new spot. There were some trees that just needed simple clippings but there were some trees that were dying off and so we would cut those down to the green and send those back to the nursery.
After a fun day of getting to checking
out a fishery and spending time with Gail it was time to go to the Wildhorse
resort for a shower in their outside camping area.
We got there, took showers and then took the opportunity to
work on our blogs since we had WIFI. After a quick scare with me leaving my
phone at the Wildhorse campground we made our way to camp. Today Jessica and
Monette cooked for us while we all worked together to knock out our soil
samples. We collected our samples with ease, measured the distance from our dig
site to the river. While half of us went out for samples the other half prepped
for the workstation. We then quickly weighed the samples and mixed them with
water. Compared to the first attempt, this was night and day.
For dinner tonight we had chicken teriyaki rice and steamed broccoli. I tell you Monette is a wiz in the kitchen, if it exists, she can cook it. We all worked together to clean up and then finished up our blogs before getting to relax and call it a day.
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