The Upper Pitt

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Although I’ve lost the vast majority of my field season, there were a couple of projects that needed an extra pair of hands and have enough of a time gap between them that I found a couple of hands-on things to do in the field.

Normally my fall, which actually starts around late July and goes until late December, sees me out in the field about 50% of my time overall during that period.

This year…not so much.

So when I was asked to help on a couple of the few days up on the upper Pitt to capture and spawn a near-to-home stock of sockeye that is enhanced, there wasn’t much of a chance I was going to say no….even though there was a bit of anxiety in getting into a boat, and a truck with six-eight people, and working in very close proximity to close to a dozen other people for today…and then again in a couple of days.

I’d be happier if it was the exact same crew both days. But it is what it is and I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t have anything else on my travel/field work schedule for a couple of weeks.

The weather was a bit too perfect. On a spawning day it’s preferable to have a cloudy day and cooler temperatures. Today was neither. Perfect for humans, less so for fish.

There was clearly a bear in the neighbourhood, though we didn’t see it. It left only tracks, but it will be back later to collect the carcasses we left behind on the banks. It’s easy to tell that there is DFO work going on in this system. If you ever come across a salmon head that has been cut open in the manner below, it wasn’t a bear 😉 it means that someone was collecting otoliths (a small bone made of calcium carbonate and located in the inner ear canal). the otoliths can be read much like the rings on a tree, and used to age the fish.

The trip back down the lake was smoother than the trip up, but the air quality was vastly different from top to bottom. At the top of the lake, when we left for home, the air was clear and the sky vivid blue.

When we were about halfway down the lake, the air was increasingly hazy and the sky was becoming less vivid. The smoke from the forest fires in Washington State has been pushed northward. We are less impacted by it than those on Vancouver Island, but it’s pushing in.

It’s a weird year and the loss of much of my hands-on work is frustrating, but I’m grateful to have been invited by a couple of projects to come out and be a part of what drew me to this line of work.

This will pass……better days are ahead, if we are patient, responsible, and conscientious.