WyCEHG hosted a summer field course from May 17-30, 2015. This summer marked the program’s third year,
its second at UW, and brought in students from historic black colleges and
universities around the country to join our UW students. Students learned about the water cycle
through the combined disciplines of ecology, hydrology, and geophysics. The two-week intensive seminar is designed to
bring these concepts together and answer questions about water in
interdisciplinary ways. Above all, the
course is meant to be hands-on: students used cutting-edge equipment in action,
and heard lectures about mountain hydrology.
Blair Wallace, near Vedauwoo in the Medicine Bow National
Forest, was the program’s primary site. I
had the chance to accompany the students on a field trip to WyCEHG’s No Name
Watershed site, where they took a tour of the high-altitude area, making stops
along the way to see at the instrumentation WyCEHG uses to explore water flow
in the area.
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| Top: Students in WyCEHG's Field Course in the Snowy Range; Bottom Left: Students setting up a weather station at Blair-Wallis; Bottom Left: Up in the No Name Watershed looking at equipment. Photo Credit: Liz Nysson |
We arrived at the No Name Watershed at mid-morning. After strapping snowshoes to our feet, we waddled
across the parking lot to the trailhead.
The day was bright and the air felt warm and fresh.
Signs of recent WyCEHG activity were plentiful. We saw water stations measuring wind speed,
humidity, precipitation amounts, and temperature; water gauges in streambeds;
specialized equipment testing the amount of sap in trees; and cameras helping
to create a photographic record of snowfall from its first arrival on the
mountaintop.
Although our snowshoes came in handy, sunlit parts of the
trail were slushy, and rich brown mud showed through in many places. Snow melts bottom-up instead of top-down, as
the ground thaws and the slow current of snowmelt starts to trickle downward towards
valleys and rivers. The terrain was already
saturated, and cold water welled up under our feet as we made our way down the
trail. We saw bear tracks in the snow by
a slow-running stream, winding back and forth over the open water.
Beetle kill was everywhere, both in the rough yellow sap
that ran down boreholes like tallow from a candle and in the dead trees
crowding the living evergreens. In many
sections of the forest, most of the trees had been killed. Single-species groves were hardest hit, while
diverse stands of trees were less likely to suffer total devastation. Second-growth was evident in many
places.
The last stop on our hike was a fen, an area where
vegetation had condensed over centuries and millennia into a dense tangle of
spongy undergrowth. The role fens play in
the mountain ecosystem is still being explored.
Their specialized environment may also be an especially delicate habitat
for micro-organisms and flora, so the fens near No Name are protected by the
Forest Service. WyCEHG scientists are
interested in the possibility of using fenland water and soil measurements to gather
information about the ecological history of the mountainside.
By the time we reached the parking lot, the sky had clouded
over and a flurry of snow had begun to fall.
WyCEHG’s EcoHydroGeophysics field course is just one way the
center encourages a water resource workforce in Wyoming. To Learn more, go to www.uwyo.edu/wycehg.
By Jess White
