I have the best job in the world

Wow, today was the best day of work yet. And they've been pretty good.

So, backtracking a moment, I'm actually doing work while I'm here (no, I didn't just come up here for the mountains) - I'm working with Cook Inletkeeper , a nonprofit that does watershed management stuff. I help out the stream ecologist, which basically means I get paid to go hiking. Hahaha. What that really means is that I'm essentially her field assistant, and we have sites all up and down the Kenai peninsula where we collect data (temperature, turbidity, discharge, lots of delicious hydrology/water chemistry stuff). The sites we visited last week were all pretty easily accessible - park on the side of a road and just walk down a little path to a stream. But today, we drove east out of Homer to the very end of the road (35 minute drive or so) and hiked a bunch of switchbacks down this steep bluff to the beach, walked on the beach for maybe a mile and half, to find Fox Creek, which is a new site this year.

For one thing, it was a GREAT day for a hike. Its FINALLY warming up here (and by warm, I mean around 60 degrees...there have been very few days since I've been here thus far that its been above 50), and today was just a sunny, warm, clear blue sky day. Second of all, the site was really interesting - its right by a bunch of cow pastures, and you could really see the detrimental effects the cows were having on the stream. All the other sites I've been to thus far have been pretty healthy streams, and the difference here was really evident. For one, this stream was brown, the others had been pretty clear. The water was much warmer - 15 °C, rather than 9-11 °C which is what other streams we've visited have been and which also above the standard for salmon spawing (max water for eggs really is around 13 °C). Then upstream, someone had built a fence across the river!! Which is definitely not ok, because streams are government property. Anyways, all this stream management stuff is really cool to me, because it ties biology to hydrology, land use, environmental law...but I won't go on and on about that.

We found a cute pack of ponies when we were walking on the beach, who ended up following us curiously for at least half a mile.


And at the end of the hike back up those switchbacks (which was really thigh-burning steep) we were awarded with a lovely lovely view.




And I'd just like to remind you all again, I get paid for this :)