May 14th 2019 - Rain Rain Go Away!

This morning we were welcomed to camp by a downpour of rain. For the first week we had beautiful weather, and all of us hoped it would last much longer, but nevertheless, we worked in the rain for hours. Though the rain soaked through most of our gloves and 'waterproof' gear by the end of the field day, we all had a fun time completing our activities.

The walk to our site today. 

After putting all of our rain gear on, students spread out around the McKenzie Creek site to mark boundaries for surveying and remove some recently grown plants off of important features. Myself and five other students went to the west side of the paved path and measured 10 meters deep into the forest for 40 meters along the path. The south border of the survey area started where one student found some broken pieces of glass yesterday, and moved north until the water system mentioned in the previous blog post. The six of us walked in a straight line from one end to the other through soft mossy ground, over and under fallen trees, but as we ventured through the survey area, nothing was spotted. The ditch next to the path was also searched to check for anything that could have washed into it, but it was difficult to spot anything due to the heavy rain creating a 4 inch deep mud puddle at the bottom of it.
Another group of students worked on creating a surveying site on the east side of the cedar plank road that runs through the McKenzie Creek site, and it ran 20 meters into the forest. Once groups were finished with their flagging tape, for the rest of the day we all helped clear overgrown foliage off of features that we will be studying this term.

Students huddled under the tarp taking a break from the rain.

Two students also helped organize our equipment into two containers for daily and non-daily use, which will help us in the coming weeks. All of the grunt work, such as clearing organic materials and creating borders with flagging tape must be done in order to work and study in an organized fashion. Tomorrow is a lab day where we will most likely be looking at artifacts found by past field school students, and on Thursday we will be back in the field, hopefully with some better rain protection.