Finished!

22 July 2007

Well, we finished excavating and sieving and closed up the pit (at least temporarily)! We had quite an interesting last week. We got some visitors to our sieving site last week from a houseboat that was docked nearby. There were quite a few kids and they were very interested in the bones and the sieving process. It was very fun to show them what we do and they even helped us find bones on the sieves. We also had some visits (to our neck of the woods, not to use personally) from DEA agents looking for marijuana plantations. It's not every day you can follow humvees full of men in camoflauge holding machine guns on your way to work! In the middle of this, we also saw a wakeboarding video being filmed right in front of us. It was great to see some top wakeboarders, but after a while the boat wakes and the helicopter noise from the camera crews got to be tiresome.

Luckily, the middle and end of the week was quiet and fun. We got a lot of rain, with lightening and thunder, on Wednesday, so Ronny, Xue and I drove up to the town of McCloud to see the upriver portion of the McCloud arm of Lake Shasta. We stopped at Castle Crags State Park on our way back and did a quick hike. It would be great to go back to CCSP for a full day because it seems like a great park! On Thursday, an intern with the Forest Service Public Affairs Office joined us for the day- he is planning on writing an article about what we are doing. Finally, on Friday we closed up the pit and finished sieving! (Here's a photo of me coming out of the cave for the final time this season) It was quite a long and momentous day.


And now, I'm back home. It was quite a feat to pack everything into the truck. All of our stuff barely fit, but luckily we were able to close all the doors and made our way home safely. Now it's time for the identification to start!

Our last week

14 July 2007

Well, now it really is the home stretch! I got to the bottom of the pit on Thursday (pictured at left), so all we need to do is map the stratigraphy of the pit and shore up the walls so we can close it up for the winter. I'm not going to fill it in completely, in case we need to get additional samples, but I am going to put a top on it and disguise the location so people can walk all over it and never know! Not that many people will be walking around in that part of the cave!! So, we're in Redding today buying wood and groceries. We also have some sieving left, and tomorrow we are going to explore the inner part of the cave!


I am getting anxious to get back to Palo Alto and start looking through the matrix. Luckily Xue and Ronny will still be with me for 4 or 5 more weeks, so we can charge through it together. They have been busy mapping out the floor plan of the cave, which will be a great visual to have for conferences and papers. We also have all been trying to learn the trees and shrubs of the area (a maddening experience for non-botany types!!). Luckily, my friend Andrea came up to visit recently and showed us a couple of plants before she had to get back to her real botany job!

home stretch?

29 June 2007

Well, it feels like the home stretch to me. Carrie left on Thursday and Xue and Ronny arrived early in the week, so we now have the “permanent” field crew in place. We excavated and sieved this week. We are down to Level VIIb, which is where we found the horse tooth in the main deposit. We haven’t found anything quite so flashy again- in fact, we’re not finding many large animal teeth at all. Tomorrow, we will probably go back to the pit and see if we can hit bottom. After that, it’s time for all of the little details necessary to finish up the summer (with the possibility of additional excavation)- vegetation surveys, mapping the floor of the pit and the cave, characterizing the stratigraphy of the pit, etc (with breaks for 4th of July and my friend Nicole’s wedding!).

lots of help!!

23 June 2007










Well, I had quite a week and lots of help. We hit the floor in a large part of the pit, so we decided to extend the pit east about 50 cm and start anew from the top. I had four wonderful field assistants to help me do this: Bob Feranec, Carrie Glenney, and my parents (Steve and Barbara Blois). Bob and Carrie excavated with me in the beginning and the end of the week, and my parents got into the cave on Thursday. By yesterday, we were about 50 cm deep and seemed to be glimpsing the top of the floor in the new location. I am hopeful that we can get another 20 cm down before we hit the floor again.


The sediment is really interesting- it’s very dry and loose, and very easy to excavate. Sometimes it’s so easy, it makes it difficult to avoid going to deep! We found quite a few intact jaws as we were excavating on Friday- a Lepus (probably the black-tailed jackrabbit), a Sylvilagus (a bunny rabbit), and a sciurid, probably Spermophilus beecheyi (California ground squirrel). It will be interesting to see if we find more stuff while sieving. I head up on Sunday or Monday with Carrie and Xue, a Stanford undergrad who will be helping me the rest of the summer. And Ronny, another Stanford undergrad, will join us on Wednesday. It will be great to have so much help to finish the excavation and the other small little details of wrapping up!

Pleistocene??

15 June 2007

I was up in the field earlier this week with Liz. We started sorting through some teeth and found...a horse tooth! This is really significant because it means we have transitioned into the Pleistocene! We may have found some other things- a bovid and an extinct pig- but those ID's are more tentative. I am very excited and can't wait to get back into the field on Monday to excavate some more!!!

New blog element

9 June 2007

Well, I'm back home for 2 days and have been organizing things. I added a link to this blog in the upper left corner that takes you to my Picasa photo gallery. I'll try to post photos from each trip on Picasa so everyone can access the photos.

busy week and weird teeth

5 June 2007

I'm back up in Shasta with two wonderful assistants from UC Berkeley (Kelly (left) and Lauren). We have been busy excavating and sieving. I am past the 1/2 m mark in the pit and may have just hit the floor. There is a very large rock ~20 cm wide that spans the pit, though there is still sediment on either side of the rock. So, we'll see how much farther I can go down! On the sieving front, Lauren and Kelly found some interesting things yesterday- a large deer tooth, something that looks like a worm cast, a carnivore canine, and a completely unknown piece of bone/tooth. So, things are getting busy up here!

It poured down rain last night, but we were nice and dry in the cabin. Today, we're in Redding resupplying our groceries and checking our e-mail. More soon!

Reprieve after a busy week

24 May 2007

Well, I’m back after a bit of a blogging lull. I have had a whirlwind week. After excavating and sieving last week, Jeremy and I flew down to San Diego Saturday morning for my friend Debbie’s wedding this past weekend. It was great to see all of my college roommates and see Debbie marry her wonderful husband Mark. On Sunday, I went back up to Shasta with two great volunteers- Lily and Dan (pictured sieving). We spent three days in the field and got a lot accomplished. I’m now back at Stanford for the next week. It’s nice to have a bit of a break. I have managed to strain a muscle in my back and the week off will help it heal, plus I can regroup and get some paperwork stuff done. Plus, there is a fire that started 7 miles northwest of my field site and the Forest Service is using the area in and around my cabin as a staging area for fire crew! Overall, it’s a good time to be out of the field!!!

Happy Mother's Day!

13 May 2007

I am taking a day of rest…well, physical rest at least. I am sitting in my cabin, typing away at a grant proposal, and listening to the birds chirp and crickets click outside my door. It’s a beautiful day up here! I also got a chance to review some of my photos. Here’s a great photo of a theoretical population geneticist doing field work! It’s not every day that this happens, and I was fortunate to capture an image of this rare event. Thanks to both Emily and Jeremy for coming up to help and keep me company! Well, my computer battery is about to die, so I think I’ll sit on the porch and sort matrix. One of the unexpected benefits of living in a cabin without electricity is not being a slave to my computer. (An ironic thought for someone writing a blog!)

Larger bones!

10 May 2007

The excavation is going really well. We have started to find some larger teeth, not all of which I can identify! But, it looks like there are some deer teeth, possibly an artiodactyl canine, some squirrel teeth, a carnivore canine, and a claw. These recent finds have added several species to our overall list, so we probably have over 20 species in the deposit. As of yesterday, the deposit is about 1/2 meter deep and it's getting difficult to excavate. Our next step is to start opening up the deposit so we can continue to go deeper. We'll need to start excavating down along one of the walls to make the pit wider. I'm not sure how all of this will work in such a tight space, but Paula is coming up next week to join me again and we'll come up with a plan!

Paula's in the cave!

3 May 2007.

Paula was up in the field with me during the early part of the week, which was wonderful. She left on Tuesday, but will be back in a few weeks. Here's a great photo of her in the cave. She is pointing to one of the corners of the pit. You can see that the pit goes through an archway. Luckily, you can squeeze into the back of the archway to excavate the other side of the pit, which is where I am taking the photo from. Paula is also holding the main tool we use- a trowel- and you can see part of a dustpan in the bottom of the photo. Generally, we slowly remove layers of dirt into the dustpan, then empty it into a bucket to be hauled outside and up to the car. It's very physical work, and definitely helpful to have someone else in the cave with me!

Sieving

28 April 2007

I learned how to sieve today! We found a great spot next to McCloud Bridge and spent the day sieving the material from yesterday. My dad made me a wonderful set of sieves and a great stand with adjustable legs. Everything worked really well and sieving is pretty fun because you can see the bones emerge as you are running water through the sieves. Based on the material from one day of excavation, we already have a species list that includes 16 species! We found mammals, birds, salamanders, snakes, frogs, and fish. It will be interesting to see what the lower levels reveal!

First excavation day

27 April 2007

My first day of excavation! We had a great day. Paula (my labmate), Liz (my advisor), and Gail (a Stanford art professor) are up here to help me get started. Gail and Liz are collaborating on a project that combines art and science, so Gail is video and audio-taping small vignettes associated with the excavation. It will be great to see the results of that project. One thing I will do is take a picture each day of the excavation pit from the same location, so at the end we can make a time-lapse video of the excavation.

Today, we set the datum for the excavation, staked out the corners and started excavating. The datum is a fixed point on the rocks from which we can measure the height and distance of any point in the pit. Once we had the datum set, we staked out the four corners of the pit, and then started excavating! We took off the top layer of the pit (~3 cm) and then started excavating in 10cm depths. We got down through part of the second layer and then quit for the day. We are all really sore this evening and we’ll see where our bruises pop up!

Arrival...

25 April 2007

Well, I finally made it up here! I am staying in a Forest Service cabin on Hirz Bay that is great. There are three bedrooms, a nice kitchen, a large deck, and hot water! It is really quite an ideal field set-up. I’ve been told the main problem I may encounter is bears sniffing around for food, but it hasn’t been too much of a problem at the cabin in the past. And as long as the bears stay outside and away from my truck, I’m ok with them!

This evening, I walked down to the lake (about 5 minutes away) and sat on a dock to soak my feet in the lake. The evening temperatures are very pleasant here and it’s nice to sit outside and enjoy the sun (though the mosquitos detract from the ambience a bit). Amazingly, I also get cell phone reception at the cabin. The open expanse of water must act as a corridor for cell signals because I don’t get service anywhere else around here unless I am in the I5 corridor. All in all, a great start to my field season!

Delays...

Well, as with most field work I've done, everything takes a bit longer to get started than you think! After setting a "firm" date of Saturday, April 14th for leaving and running around like mad trying to make some last minute purchases, my plans were upended just a day later. So, now I am heading to the field on April 25th. There are some advantages to waiting 10 more days. First, it's supposed to rain this weekend! Plus, my advisor (Liz Hadly) will have a bit more time to spend in the field with me initially, one of my labmates (Dr. Paula Spaeth!) will be able to come up, and it gives me a bit more time to spend with my friends in Palo Alto. On the minus side, the pile of stuff continues to pile up in the corner of our living room (see photo)! So, no posts from the field yet...but soon.

Opening post...

Well, I am trying to enter the new world of technology with this blog. Hopefully I'll be able to find an internet connection consistently enough to post...

Hopefully, this blog will allow me to share some photos and thoughts with those of you who can't get up to my field site to visit. My goal is to post about once a week throughout the field season. We'll see if this experiment works!