Day ten: Today I woke up at 6:00 AM, I had some breakfast as usual and packed my lunch. Today we will be doing some field work, and help the forest service with restoring some of the beaver dam projects they have been working on. Like what we helped with at Swamp creek around the Mount Adams area on the Yakama reservation. It should be very fun, I am looking forward to it, I like working on stuff like that. We departed camp at 7:30, and went to the Deschutes national forest offices in the city of Sister. We met with some program managers and botanists. The first person was Alex Enna, program manager for various programs in the area he also has a masters degree in forestry from Colorado state, next was Liz Day, district manager, she got her wildlife major from the University of Delaware. The next person was Christine Meyers, Partnership coordinator for the Deschutes national forest she has a degree in forestry but now is in botany. We went to an area called lower black butte swamp in the forest area, they had restoration in the area back in 2022, for the fish habitat. They help the western pearl shell mussel and also with the redband trout. The fish and mussels help each other out during spawning season. There also 122 different species of birds in Black butte, they are also planning on making a wildlife crossing on the highway. After introductions we went to there warehouse and got fitted for water waders and made our way to black butte swamp to help with restoring the beaver dams. We had to hike in for a mile to reach the site, then we had some lunch. Then we got to work with replacing the dams, we did that for a couple of hours until they were completed. Then we hiked back and made our way back to camp and had some dinner, and gram stained some of our water samples, then we went to bed, because we have a travel day tomorrow. We are heading to Pendleton for our last stop on the trip.
Day thirteen: I woke up today a 7:00 AM. Today is the last full day of the trip and we will be heading tomorrow. The first thing we did was go to the Walla Walla fish hatchery and took a tour of the facility. We met Thomas Tallbull. He is a Hatchery manager there, Thomas graduated from the University of Idaho in 2012 with a bachelor's degree in fish and wildlife, and a master's from the University of Oklahoma in 2021, he was the one giving us the tour. He showed us everything there is that happens at a fish hatchery, from the spawning pools, and where they tag the fish so they can keep track of them. Next he showed us how they separate the natural fish from the tagged fish and he even showed us some lamprey. He said that they release hundreds of thousands of fish each year, I liked the tour it was very interesting. Then after the tour we went back to camp and did some gram staining on the rest of our water samples. We did that for almost two hours, and had some lunch, then we ...
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