FIeldwork is done

 Well, for the summer, anyway. Depending on what I find in this set of samples, and if we get decent rainfall in the rest of August and September, I might do an October sampling.

Yesterday was the most difficult site - the one with the longest walking, and a lot of it is over downed branches and stuff that was carried in in a past flood and hasn't decomposed yet. So it's very uneven ground, which is uncomfortable on my bad knee and I also worry about falling (I had people with me - a colleague and her research student, they wanted to scope out some sample sites and grab a little quick preliminary data). 

Today was the remaining two sites, both of which together only amounted to about the same amount of walking as yesterday's site. 

The first site is a more "public" area, and unfortunately right at the entrance, either a dog had got hit by a car and crawled off onto the trail to die, or someone dumped a dead dog there (I sort of suspect the second). It had been a little while - the turkey vultures were there. It's kind of sad to see, and worse, the smell in the heat was very unpleasant. (When I finished grabbing my samples, and my colleague and student were still working, I had to go stand upwind, by my car, because I was starting to gag)

The second of today's two sites was better - it's a local reservoir that allows fishing and has some "semi natural" land around it, including small stands of trees. It was kind of a pain in the stand because cedar trees have very pokey branches, but it was easy to collect the soil and there was no poison ivy where I was sampling. 

I was pretty worn out when I got home. I have to go in tomorrow and change over the "extraction" set ups (I have Tuesday's sample extracting currently) and do a couple other things. I'd LIKE to go somewhere and do something fun this weekend but it's going to be brutally hot again so I'll have to think about it.