September field work in Snake Valley

Looking toward Nevada.

A couple of weeks ago Aaron (Utah Division of Water Rights) and I went back out to Snake Valley to continue our installation of spring discharge monitoring stations. We worked from sun up to sun down in the perfect September days and accomplished much toward our goal of metering six important sources of surface water. Our data will provide water users with good background information against which to gauge hydrological changes.

First, we finished up the work we started in July at Clay Spring, a smallish spring on private property that is habitat for a certain spring snail found no where else in the world. Second, we installed a radio signal gathering station at the Utah Dept. of Transportation station in Garrison. This is where all the gage height signals from the six springs will come to upload to the State network.

Garrison UDOT installation. The guy that runs this station is one great guy, as are most of the Snake Valley residents.

Third, we installed a radio repeater station near the top of a small mountain. Because this site has excellent line-of-sight to 5 of our antennas, we will collect the signal here and beam it to the Garrison site for upload.

Location of the repeater station. No trees to interfere here!

The truck in action.

Lucy in action mounting the solar panel below the radio antenna.



Moonrise over a playa that occupies what used to be a lagoon area behind a gravel bar on the shores of Lake Bonneville 12,000 years ago. It is hard for me to imagine what this valley would have looked like with the ice-age lake present.

And lastly, we installed an antenna on a local farmer's center-pivot sprinkler irrigation system to monitor how much of Foote Reservoir Spring is used for irrigation.

Antenna above the blue box on the pivot.