Crawford Award

My colleagues and I recently received recognition for work we have been doing in the West Desert. The Crawford award is presented once per year to the authors of an outstanding publication.  Hugh Hurlow is the main author; the rest of us contributed in a significant way.  The award comes with a small cash award - some money to buy that field case I've been wanting.

2015 Crawford Award

The prestigious 2015 Crawford Award was presented to UGS geologists Hugh Hurlow, Stefan Kirby, Lucy Jordan, Paul Inkenbrandt, Janae Wallace, and Mike Lowe in recognition of their combined work on the outstanding geologic publication Hydrogeologic Studies and Groundwater Monitoring in Snake Valley and Adjacent Hydrographic Areas, West-Central Utah and East-Central Nevada (UGS Bulletin 135).
This 294-page book presents hydrogeologic, groundwater-monitoring, and hydrochemical studies in Snake Valley, Tule Valley, and Fish Springs Flat in Millard and Juab Counties, west-central Utah. Collectively, this work delineates groundwater levels, flow, and chemistry in Snake Valley and adjacent basins to a much greater degree than previously possible, and emphasizes the sensitivity of the groundwater system to possible increases in groundwater pumping.
The Crawford Award recognizes outstanding achievement, accomplish­ments, or contributions by a current UGS scientist to the understanding of some aspect of Utah geology or Earth science. The award is named in honor of Arthur L. Crawford, first director of the UGS.



http://geology.utah.gov/2015-crawford-award/

Every time I think my job is cool, it gets cooler

I really do love my job.  It is science. I work with great people. And I get to go do things like this.

Measuring stream flow in a creek in Cache County. Note the brown boots. By the time I got out of the stream I was sloshing inside.  The boots had a leak.

 

Same activity but with my fashionista pink plaid boots from my closet taken on this trip because I had a stinking suspicion that the brown boots leaked.

These pictures are from a quick project last October-November that two of my coworkers took the lead on.  The project involved evaluating how much surface water flow was coming out of different parts of the geologic system. To do that we had to measure stream flow, the quality of the water, and document where the streams were flowing vs. where they were dry.  We were racing against the oncoming winter at a ski area on the county line between Cache County and Weber County to document base flow conditions (the hydrologic conditions that are creating the constant flow in streams, as opposed to run off events in the spring or after rain storms).

Coworker Maddie

 

 

Measuring.

 

Beautiful country.

No water in the stream bed.

 

Measuring water quality field parameters.

 

Driving crazy roads.

 

Nature is unbelievable.

 

A spring

 

Sometimes you gotta get in there and measure that junk.

 

At the base of the carbonate rocks.

 

Taking field notes before measuring stream flow.  Damn those boots are hot.

 

Not the most secluded natural stream channel to measure flow, but man-made structures are convenient and repeatable.

 

Six of us worked long days in October to knock out the data collection. We hiked in some really interesting (hydrogeologically speaking) rugged terrain searching for places to measure water. My job is fun.

Salt Lake Tribune article about work

Here is a link to a recent newspaper article that mentions the monitoring I do out in Snake Valley.  The pictures in the photo gallery were taken near springs I monitor and one shows some of the equipment I have in place.


http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/58442329-78/groundwater-snake-valley-nevada.html.csp

Combining work and play in May

In early May 2014, I was able to go to the National Groundwater Association (NGWA) annual Summit in Denver: a professional meeting to discuss new research in my field.  My employer sent me, but I went a couple of days early to spend time with my sister and brother in law.  Drew was able to arrange to fly into Denver after a trip to join us.

What do we do as soon as we land? Go hike!

Di and Tod took us north to Boulder to hike the Flatirons at Chautauqua Park. The Flatirons are a famous formation that was tilted when the Rocky Mountains were uplifted.

The Flatirons are the five slabs of smooth rock tilted at a 45 degree angle in this picture. Classic front range geology!

Front range hikers.

Lying flat on a Flatiron!

Monkey in a tree.

Rugged terrain off the trail.

Quite the view of Boulder from the trail.

I'm happy about the geology. It must have rubbed off on them.

After a day of hiking I spent the next gorgeous spring day in a conference room in a downtown Denver hotel learning about ways to quantify recharge.  Woot woot. 

My lodging for the week of the conference was my sister's high rise condo in downtown Denver.

The view from the condo is spectacular.

Thanks to Facebook, I realized that Judy, my old friend from college, and her boyfriend were in town for a separate conference.  We got to spend a fun evening together in LoDo. The next few days were filled with more conferencing and a visit with a high school classmate who lives in Denver, which broke up the conference nicely.

After the conference I jetted off on Southwest to Vegas.

Before Drew arrived I got in a nice solo ride on the Blue Diamond area trails.

May is beautiful in the desert.

Work conferences all around: Drew's little brother was in Vegas for a trade show so we stole him away to show him the Hoover Dam.

The Hoover Dam from the new bridge.

Dikes of dark basalt cut through light Tertiary-aged andesite or dacite on the walls of Black Canyon downstream from the dam.

One of the giant spillways. You could almost fly one of Drew's planes through here.

All told, a fun week of work and play.

Springtime in Moab

 

Drew had vacation in late April so we went down to do some work on the vacation condo in Moab. 

The weather was chilly and there was a lot of work to do, so we didn’t ride the first day. 

The next day Drew went out for a looooong road bike ride on the La Sal Mtn loop since I had forgotten to pick up his bike from the shop.

It was cold on top of the La Sals

Castle Valley is amazing

Meanwhile, I checked on a monitoring well installed by the Utah Geo Survey.  I helped design this well a few years ago and it was time to collect some data from it.

Details of the well can be found in this publication.  The well flows just a little bit, even though we have tried to seal it between checkups.

That quick check took longer than I thought so I barely had time to get out for a quick ride.

The dessert is especially pretty in bloom.

Work or play? Field work on the Wasatch Plateau.

I am a lucky geologist this week because my coworker, Paul, is really a go-getter.  For the second year, he secured funding to do a project for Manti-La Sal National Forest managers that involves some of the most enjoyable field work imaginable.

The project involves taking inventory of "groundwater dependent ecosystems" (GDEs), a.k.a spring-fed wetlands, in an area of the Wasatch Plateau in central Utah.  We focus on coal mine lease tracts that have or likely will soon have new coal mining underneath them. The idea is to assess the status of the GDEs now so that future changes, possibly due to piracy of groundwater into the coal mines, can be assessed.

What that boils down to for me and my co-worker Janae for two weeks is hiking around the forest looking for and documenting springs. Paul and our other coworker, Rich, were doing the same thing a few miles south of us.

The Terrain

Yeah, so this part of the job is really hard.  Ha ha.  Fall colors on the Wasatch Plateau were lovely.

Me with a pack of gear, the large weir plate, and the soil core auger above a wetland.  Normally Janae and I split up carrying the gear, but for some reason I had more of the heavy stuff in this photo.

Janae above a lovely little wetland.

Sometimes the GDEs are near roads.  This one has been developed for stock watering.

Other times the GDEs are harder to get to.  The area has been hit hard by pine bark beetle, which makes for tough hiking through dead fall. The spring flow we were mapping goes right down the hill through the center of this photo under the downed trees.

There is some pretty steep terrain in places.

But other times the GDEs are just spread out there before you!

The Housing

Our lodging is a 14-foot travel trailer.  We were one of two campers at a remote Forest Service campground.

Living in style.

With the propane heater, little fridge, and gas stove, were were comfy and cozy at night.  Our coworkers working a few miles south of us were camping in tents.  Lucky us.

 

Field work is tough on clothes.  I ripped two pair of pants this week!

The Work

The FS has this really long, detailed inventory assessment they want us to do on each GDE.  There are 10 field sheets worth of notes.  We draw a map, describe a soil core, measure flow and water quality, identify plants (as best us geologists can), collect plant samples (since we are horrible at identifying plants), identify fauna if we can, and answer a bunch of questions about the health and status of the GDE.

One of our site sketch maps.  The GDE looks like a skewered amoeba in this map.

Soil Cores

Soils are a very important indicator of the health of a wetland.  Ground that is trampled by cattle gets churned up and doesn't develop the soil structure needed to support plants.

Janae collecting a core in a fen, which is an area of spongy organic soil.  This soils in this area were relatively intact.

Me collecting a core in a sedge-dominated wetland.

Me extracting soil from the auger. Janae actually did a lot more of the soil coring and describing than I did because she was way better at the soils part.

A soil core.

Flow

My favorite part is measuring the flow.  For this we have two weir plates that we temporarily install in the spring brook, if present.  We inventoried 8 GDEs this week.  Only one had flow large enough to need the larger weir plate.

Large weir plate installed 15 feet downgradient from the spring head.  The height of water flowing through the notch is proportional to the flow.  This was about 22 gallons per minute. 

Down the hill from the previous photo, we measured flow again to see if more flow was gaining on this large landslide-complex GDE.  It wasn't.

The size of my smile is proportional to the enjoyment factor for this work. :-)

All the other springs had only diffuse, unmeasurable flow, or flow that would fit though this smaller (and lighter!) weir.  The plate is supposed to be installed facing upgradient so you can read the level of the pool, but because of the geometry of this channel, I had to flip it around.

It's a dirty job!

Weir installed and quantifying flow.

Another way to measure the flow is volumetrically.  That is a fancy word using a stopwatch to time the duration it takes to fill a container of known volume.  

Measuring flow volumetrically: Directing the flow from a culvert into a 500 milliliter bottle.

 

The Geologic Setting

Of course, Janae and I both loved figuring out the geologic setting of each GDE.  Part of the area we were covering is underlain by the Cretaceous-Tertiary North Horn Formation, a unit of mudstone, claystone, sandstone, and conglomerate that is infamous for landslides. The largest GDE we inventoried (4 acres in size) was at the head of a very large landslide.  The water is instrumental in lubricating the sediments and facilitating movement on the slide.  We saw several fresh headscarps and this area:

Can the geologist in you figure out what is going on here?  Flow comes off the elevation we are standing on in a little stream channel to our right.

The area outlined in green is a back-rotated slide block; it has rotated so that the upslope area is lower than the higher ground with trees, and therefore is creating a wet area - not quite a sag pond, but if rotation continues, a pond might form.  Because there are two out flow areas and because the vegetation in the wet area, outlined in red, looked unhealthy, I suspect there has been recent movement.  If this area had been stable for a long time, the drainage would most likely evolve to one outflow and the vegetation would adjust to the amount of water available, but it looks like perhaps the veg is being drowned.  There were huge storms in late September which added water to the already unstable ground. Landslide!

Water Quality

Another assessment tool is to measure the temperature, pH, and electrical conductance of the water.

Sometimes the best pool of water is hard to get to.

Other times we captured the water in a basin.

Animals

Cattle grazing is allowed in most of the Manti-La Sal NF, and it takes a pretty severe toll on the wetlands.

This GDE was on a steep hill slope and completely trashed by trampling.

While we were there, Bessy came to drink. 

A nearby wetland was in slightly better shape, but cattle use this one heavily too.

Only in very limited places that are off limits to cattle, did we find healthy GDE.  This 20x30-foot area was "fenced" by large dead fall, which protected it from grazing.

Besides cattle, we didn't experience much animal life except we heard elk bugling, saw a few deer and squirrels, and lots of these guys...

Spiders are our friends.

Not sure what critter made this track, but we really were not surprised, since wetlands are important for the wild ones too.

We had mostly good weather this week, despite being at between 8,000 and 10,200 feet elevation.  We got a little rain and snow on the last day, but we were on our way out and managed find two springs close to the road so we had the truck to use to warm up when needed. Let's hope for similar weather next week!