Ever hear of Murphy’s Law? I’m sure you have. Well, if there’s ever a time it applies, it would be now (though maybe not the literal definition of the law, more like the commonly used one).  We went back up to Yost Lake the Thursday of the second week. We had to get our stream flow measurements, our GLX unit readings and our soil samples, so we were contemplating spending the night up at Yost Lake.

Things started going bad almost immediately. To start us off, when we got to the trailhead, I discovered I was completely out of water in my Camelbak; the water valve had been pinched the whole ride over, and two liters of water spilled in the car. So now I was down to one liter for the 3.5-mile-up-1500-feet hike as well as staying overnight. By and by, we made it through the hike and got ready to conduct our sampling and measurements.

I offer to take the GLX readings and so head out to water sample site one, by the SW rocky shore. I’m going through the bag, and I discover that we have three of our four cartridges for the GLX unit. The one we’re missing? Naturally the water quality cartridge. So now there’s no need to worry about the GLX unit readings. I head over to Will and Reid to help them with the soil samples. Part of taking the soil samples is figuring out the slope of the sample location on the hillside. What naturally happens next? The tape measurer we have to help us calculate slope breaks. To solve that problem, we simply cut the tape measurer at about 13 feet to make sure we had plenty to work with. (Good thinking on our part, because we also needed this for the Stream Flow measure procedure).

While Reid went to work on the soil samples, Will and I then decided to go take the outflow stream flow measurement. There’s only one little problem… because of the drought, the outflow has dried up. Completely. So instead, the outflow seeps underground and continues that way. This is where we met up with Reid again, and we finished the soil samples together, on the East Side of the lake. Together we then went out to the inflow to measure the stream flow. It was a very narrow stream, so we bunched our data points together to try and get an adequate number of readings. The measurement involves putting a pvc pipe with a propeller on it in the water, and record (via electronic device) how many times it rotates in 60 seconds. In our practice session on SNARL’s campus, we were getting a reading of several hundred rotations. For Yost Lake, we got an overwhelming 7 times as the most rotations in any of the spots.

Once we got all our data, we decided to head back down. As a WFR, with critically low water levels, no stove to purify more water and enough time to get off the trail before it was totally dark, I made the call to go back instead of trying to risk dehydration and altitude sickness without water. It makes for a humorous story though.

Until Next Time,

Joe