2022 People of the Big River Field Class

​Volcano tings! Today seemed like it was going to be more of an explore and relaxed day, for example less note taking and just enjoy the places we visit, but than learning and taking notes is just a habit ! Laugh out loud! Anyways after our amazing… cereal 🥲. We went to a lava flow cave! We got our introduction by state park rangers and working for the park, which took to long and a lot of talking ahah but than we got spot lights and got on our way to the cave. This is a public park so there is a lot of people too. The cave was nice and cold about 45 degrees down below. The roof of the cave at start was about 60 feet tall. The ranger told us about how the cave gets smaller and smaller, but he explained the roof stays the same level and the bottom is what rises until the cave ends. I was excited to see bats but bats only live in caves to hibernate and it’s the summer so no bats lmao! The cave was fun but it could of been more fun if there was more excising and less people. After cave d

​ ​Our camp site is way up in the mountains so when we have to go somewhere else it’s a “mob”! The drive all the way off the hill took us little over an hour! Than another hour to head south to go meet up with a Deschutes park ranger!   We met up with the park ranger than headed to the site we was going to survey, which took another 45 mins of driving into the mountains. On the way up we seen a big doe!   What me and my classmates was doing today was helping survey this open field to count the population of this rare shrub. It’s important to know where the number are of this shrub to see how healthy the environment is. The plan was to all line up 10 feet apart from each other than slowly walk thru the field and place a flag down where each shrub is we find. It sounded boring at first but than after the first 5 or so it started getting really fun! We only had to survey about 150 yards or so. After a hour in a half we finished and 30 mins of a lunch break we found around 770 shrubs In th

​ Travel day once again!   I was expecting to wake up at 5am but we was fortunate to sleep in until 6! It’s travel day once again. We’re packing it up and leaving Kalispel to head south into bend Oregon area. It didn’t take us long to pack up and leave. I just relaxed and had my head phones in the whole ride. But I did call my brother and told him we was stopping at his regular gas station along the Columbia river where he fishes and I ask him for some salmon. He said yeah he can meet us there and he did. He hooked me up with some smoked salmon and dried salmon and I thank him a lot for doing that for me.  Once we got to bend our professor hooked us up with some take out food because we was on the road to long so we ate good once again!   After heading up the hill from Bend we was in the mountains driving next to huge mountain peaks with snow in them. We had to have passed about 4 camp areas before getting to ours. We was quickly swamped by mosquitoes upon our arrival to camp. We set u

​Kalispel health center! You’d never guess our break fast today! More cereal! Anyways todays plans seem pretty excited. Our first plan of the day was to get a tour of the Kalispel fish hatchery! Upon arrival we had our introduction and meets and greats same ole. The fish hatchery was smaller than Spokanes but they have fish bigger. The big trout they have is bull trout, and they was huge trout!  After the fish hatchery tour we went to the tribe Wellness center to join in with the youth program! The wellness center was pretty big and amazing. They have almost everything at the location! Swimming, game room, gym, locker rooms with showers(big enough for variety of people), weight room, conference room, clinic, language program, physical therapy and a small healthy care! We joined the youth in some activities including speeches crafting, 9 square and basketball. We all seemed to enjoy the 9 square game and crafting. Most of us did medicine pouches and some did keychains. I made a keychain

​Kalispel tribe! After our delicious breakfast cereal, we got introduced to the tribe/natural resource program by the Wildlife and water resource Director, Ray Entz. Ray entz is really cold person and has a good sense of humor. He basically brief us about everything the tribe is doing in the forestry and river. He was able to tell us that much because the tribe is really small! I found it very interesting that they do get grizzly bears and a lot of cougars! The cougar program they have is really big and important. They track the cats down and trap them so they can collar them. The tribe collars them for many reasons, one is to examine the different ways to scare them away from humans. Another is to just track them. Ray had a lot of information he shared with us but that was what I mainly got out of it. After talking for a while we had are first hands on experience at this location, we had to pull weeds out of their native tress nursery! We pull weeds for about an hr in a half!  After R

​Day five! Leaving Spokane Rez to go to Kalispel Rez! Today was a early morning, we had to get straight to eating breakfast at 630 am to go right into making a “lunch” and that is sandwiches like every other day, hahaha! After making our lunches we pack everything up and headed out, right before we got off the rez I finally scene a deer! This wasn’t any deer it was a nice 3 point mule buck! That made my morning!  The whole 3 hour drive to Kalispel I just listened to my peyote jams the whole way. We did actually stop at a laundry mat to clean our laundry. Well we waited I visited with some family over the phone and moisturized my skin because it was looking a little dry! (Lol). We also stopped at Walmart so we can catch up on our groceries and other items people needed to get. I just stayed on the van and caught up on my emails and assignments. Kalispel seems a lot like Spokane reservation to me, in the mountains and has they’re own river. The river here is called Pend Oreille River, an

​ LAKE ROOSEVELT DAY 4 “RELAX DAY” SWIMMING! For Saturday we didn’t have any visitations scheduled so we all agreed upon going swimming! It was my first time to Lake Roosevelt, I got in the water right away. Usually when I swim I only jump in once or twice for just a few minutes, that’s how I swim haha! This time I stayed in the water for about 20 minutes knowing we was going to be there for a few hours.   After enjoying the cool water a lot of people starting showing up so I went to go check on my classmate Jamie who was doing his best to catch a fish for the first time under the bridge next to the swimming area. He had no luck today.  After enjoying the hot day at Lake Roosevelt we went back to camp to observe our Cottonwood Creek water samples and our control samples we took day one of our trip. My CWC sample did have bacteria growth on it! It had about 21 colonies growing. My control sample did have a little growth on it but only small.  After finishing up with our bacteria observa

​ Day three! Tribal Forestry! After a comfortable nights rest and some amazing toasted oats cereal we was ready to visit Spokane Tribal Forestry. We spent the half a day visit with the one and only George Teters, Forestry Tec. Teters is also a fire fighter. The tribal forestry department does a lot of thinning forest areas, planting trees, logging trees and cutting after forest fires.  The goal for the forestry is to “ ‘complete’ the cycle. ‘Planting is only 1% of regeneration. Nature does 99%”, George Teters.  Teters shared with us other work the forestry department has to do, for example tree surveys, where they tape out an area and count the different trees and the percentages of the different types of trees. The tree survey will than indicated the forest tree species percentage’s.    After being out in the forest learning about forestry ways we went to Cottonwood creek to take samples of the water. We use two different gadgets to examine the creek water to find out the size of the

​ Spokane Tribal Hatchery  Day 2 Being a light sleeper has its ups and downs. Being home I can be more aware at night. When I sleeping in a tent though I can hear everything so I was waking up every hour our first night staying in Wellpinit! Although sleeping in the rain was so peaceful, the rain and thunder kept waking me up so I’m the morning I was pretty tired. For breakfast we had cereal, I was satisfied because we have my favorite cereal toasted oaks! For our in field experience today we went to Spokane Tribal Hatchery!, got greeted by the Program manager, Tim Peone.. Tim graduated in Biology at EWU with a bachelors degree, he been working been working with fishers since they started the hatchery back in 1980’s.     Tim shared with us that Spokane river hold many different species of fish like Pike, Walleye, rainbow trout and steelhead. Red band trout is a natural species trout that migrates all the way to the ocean and comes back to the Spokane river as steelhead!  The hatchery w

​ Introduction to Spokane Reservation  Wellpinit  Day one of trip I did not pack what so every for the trip, so the morning of day one I had to pack everything and sure enough I forget all my shower things.  I should of went to the university on time but we was running on “Indian time” I guess, if you don’t know what that means it just means running late! Haha! When everyone showed up we had to pack up the two vans and truck/trailer. During the morning of the day it was raining than the time we starting packing up it was hot!    The four hour trip from Yakama reservation to Spokane Rez seem like five hours to me. Even though I had plenty of room in the big white van I just seem so tired. I napped to first 2 hours than just looked out the window enjoying the rolling hills turn into beautiful mountains of Spokane. This isn’t my first time to Wellpinit, but it is my second time. The first time was when I was 15 I can here for a N7 basketball camp. I really love how Wellpinit is in the mou