  [Intro] [Overview] Page: Page 6ANNOTATED NOTES FROM SUMMER, 1998 FIELD INVESTIGATIONS IN ALASKAThursday, July 9: After breakfast we headed over to Cavern Lake to begin coring operations. It was a cool, gray day with light rain, so we pulled on our rain gear. Josh and I rowed out to the coring platform and set the casing in place. By the time we were set up to take our first core tube of sediments, Dr. Jim Dixon arrived with Dave Bassinger, a cinematographer from the Denver Museum of Natural History. Dixon is Curator of Archaeology at that museum, and he is in charge of ongoing archeological investigations on Prince of Wales Island, and is currently excavating an early man site at a cave on the northwestern tip of the island. He is putting together an educational film aimed at the general public about the ongoing archeological and vertebrate paleontological work being done on the island, but we are coordinating our research with his. The work we are doing will provide a rather detailed history of environmental changes on the island over the past ca. 13,000 years since glacier ice receded from most of the island. Our data should be very useful to the archeologists and vertebrate paleontologists, as they attempt to reconstruct their data derived from cave deposits. So Jim Dixon rowed our inflatable dinghy out to our coring platform with Dave Bassinger. Dave was very courageous to stand up in that unstable dinghy, holding an expensive digital video camera to film us while Jim conducted an informal interview with us. It was totally unrehearsed, but I think it went pretty well, and I did the entire thing without the use of a stunt man. The film should be a bit amusing because during the course of the interview the rain kept falling harder and harder, so the sound of the rain may have drowned out whatever we were trying to say. It will be interesting to see how that video comes out. We were able to demonstrate how the coring system works, and we took our first meter of sediment on camera. Capturing the coring operation on film during the rain was probably far more realistic than waiting for one of those rare but photogenic sunny days.
While Josh and I cored Cavern Lake, Jim Baichtal, Dan Muhs, Larry Phillips, Jim Dixon, and Dave Bassinger went off in the truck to hike into a cave that Jim Baichtal has recently discovered. He thinks it has some potential for archeological and vertebrate paleontological purposes, and he wants Dixon to see it. Sounds like more fun than coring a lake, but they will have quite a hike to get into that cave through dense vegetation. So I am not too jealous.
Josh and I spent all day coring the lake, and we got about 8 meters of sediment altogether. The lowermost sediments encountered were sterile looking blue gray clay that is almost certainly glaciolacustrine in origin. So the record from Cavern Lake should go back to the time soon after glacial ice receded from the immediate area of the lake, but may have been nearby. Should be a good record. We perhaps should have kept coring until we hit glacial till or bedrock, but we were getting worn out and I figured that the sterile looking blue clay probably does not contain any pollen, since the local landscape was newly deglaciated at the time it was deposited. So we packed up, hauled the casing up, retrieved anchors, and rowed back to shore. We were disassembling the platform and packing up bags of gear when the others returned from their cave explorations. Sounds like it was very interesting, but the cave sounds like it would be a tough one to excavate...lots of rocks fallen from the cave roof, a remote location, and there is evidence that a stream has run through the cave at times in the past. We have all had a long and strenuous day. We got all the gear carried back to the truck and headed back to the cabins for the evening, arriving just before 7 p.m., just in time for dinner.
Friday, July 10: Woke up to find another cool and very rainy morning. After breakfast we drove back to Cavern Lake to give Larry Phillips some time to take some water samples (pH of water in this lake is 8.1, which is unusual for SE Alaskan lakes, but not so unusual for a lake sitting on limestone). He is also going to try to get enough depth measurements to produce a bathymetric map for us. As he rowed out into the mist and rain, we drove off to sample a very interesting site that Jim Baichtal had discovered during one of his hunting trips. We had stopped there briefly a few days earlier to take a quick look at it and take photos (it was a sunny day so the photos turned out pretty well). It is a cross section of a small pond deposit that was exposed by quarrying operations aimed at obtaining conglomerate bedrock for road construction (for logging roads). The site is up at about 800 feet (244 m) altitude, on the east side of the valley. Jim suggested that we call the site the Turn River Valley Quarry site. Unfortunately, it was pretty cool weather and it varied from light rain to heavy downpours, so it was not a lot of fun trying to sample this section. Next year I may have to bring along an umbrella so I can write notes and label sample bags more efficiently when it rains. The site exposes 85 cm of peat that contains tree sized wood. The peat overlies pond sediments that are about 65 cm thick. The pond sediments contain much more organic material towards the top of the sequence. The sediments are silty in texture and range from brown near the top to gray towards the base. The lowermost 10 cm of pond sediments have a slightly reddish-brown color. Below the pond sediments we found a 2 cm thick layer of tan silt/clay, that might be an altered volcanic tephra. Below that we found a 20 cm thick layer of blue gray clay and sand, which may be the first sediments filling the pond soon after ice receded from the site. Below this clay-sand layer is a glacial till containing boulders, and smaller gravel in a clayey, sandy matrix. The till is 50 cm thick where we measured it. It is sitting on the Paleozoic conglomerate bedrock. This site should be a good one for reconstructing the postglacial record, but it may have a record very similar to what we get out of Summit Lake, which is nearby. With good pollen records from this site, Summit Lake, and Cavern Lake, we should have a very good handle on the terrestrial environmental history for the north end of Prince of Wales Island. Next year we will have to find some sites farther south to compare with what we get from the north end. Since the seed sources for most of the flora came from the coastal areas south of Prince of Wales Island, the chronology of invasion for many taxa may be quite a bit different on the south end of the island, with earlier arrival times than on the north end. How much earlier remains to be seen. Jim Baichtal left us at the quarry while he went back to retrieve Larry Phillips, so we ended up spending a fair bit of time at the site. We got a campfire going in the bottom of the quarry, so we could get a bit of warmth while we ate our lunches in the rain. We are thankful to have good rain gear. Jim showed up a bit after lunch, so we all headed back to our cabins at El Capitan. Dan, Josh and I drove to Craig that afternoon to run some errands, and that pretty much shot the rest of the day. Along the way we saw four black bears and many Sitka deer. Saturday, July 11: Another gray and rainy morning. After breakfast we all got in the truck and drove down to the Staney Creek area on the northwest side of the island. The main purpose of the trip was to collect more marine shells from uplifted marine deposits, but this trip also gave us a chance to see some magnificent stands of old growth coastal forest. They are truly awe-inspiring. The open meadows near Staney Creek estuary had several Sitka deer grazing in them. Along the creek at low tide we saw good exposures of shell bearing Holocene marine deposits that Dan was able to get some good specimens from for various analyses. There were also well-preserved sharpened wooden stakes that had been driven into the mud to make a fish weir. This one had been previously radiocarbon dated and I think Jim said it was about 4000 years old. At this locality we also found a layer of woody plant detritus that had been deposited in the estuary perhaps in mid-Holocene time. It contained twigs and chunks of wood of various sizes, much of it modified by stream transport. Some layers contained well-preserved Sitka spruce cones, which I collected for possible radiocarbon dating.
Sunday, July 12: Had breakfast, then packed up our gear and headed north to Red Lake, where we hiked in to see some giant conifers in old growth forest. The canopy is pretty dense, so it is pretty dark in the understory...in fact too dark for me to take good photos without a tripod. Next year I will need to bring more film with faster film speed. Maybe 400 ISO would work well in these low light situations. On the drive back to camp from the trailhead to the lake, Jim Baichtal pointed out some Douglas firs (Pseudotsuga menziesii) that the Forest Service had planted a couple decades ago as an experiment. Douglas firs are not native to southeastern Alaska, and they have migrated into southern British Columbia since deglaciation, but are still a long ways from Alaska. The trees we saw were maybe 8 meters tall and were bearing seed cones. So the climate of Prince of Wales Island appears to be suitable for their growth and reproduction. This is pretty good example of the many tree and shrub taxa have modern ranges that do not yet occupy all the territory that they could survive and reproduce in. The lag time required for the natural dispersal of seeds over large areas following deglaciation can be very long. Some of the trees that showed up very early following glaciation either have very efficient seed dispersal mechanisms, or perhaps some of them survived in refugia within the region during glacial times and spread seeds from those nearby areas following ice retreat.
We drove on to the Port Protection area where we met up with Jim Dixon’s group. We got a ride in their archeological project’s Zodiac inflatable dinghy to make the trip over to the entry point to hike into the cave site that Jim and his crew are excavating. The boat trip did not take too much time, maybe a half hour or so, and it skirted along some scenic coastline. It continued to be gray and rainy, but the wind was minimal so we did not have rough seas to contend with. We were dropped off at the trail head leading up to the site. The embayment where they tie up the boat has a rugged shoreline of sharply eroded limestone bedrock, and at low tide the intertidal zone is full of tide pools, barnacles, mussels, marine algae such as Fucus, starfish, and anemone. The trail leading through the dense forest to the cave site is a rugged hike, up and down hills and over logs slippery with wet mosses. The regular traffic over the trail has churned up the peaty soil into a slippery morass. I was glad I was carrying only a fairly light load in my backpack. It took us about 45 minutes to get to the archeologist’s camp. The terrain is so steep that the camp is spread out, with individual tents set up wherever someone could find a patch of relatively flat forest floor. Their kitchen structure is quite a feat of engineering. They built a platform that is about 12 feet (3.7 m) off the ground at the downhill end, and about 6 feet (1.8 m) off the ground at the uphill end. They erected a sturdy yurt-shaped structure on top of the platform. Log ladders were constructed to allow people to climb up to the platform level. The forest canopy was so dense here that a number of trees had to be cut down to provide an opening through which some of the camp equipment and food supplies could be lowered in helicopter sling loads...sounds like very dangerous work for the pilot and for people on the ground waiting to offload the sling loads. The camp had been suffering from lack of rain lately, which created problems because they depend on rain for much of the camp’s water supply. A lot of water is needed not only for cooking and drinking, but to wash sediment samples from the excavations. Preliminary washing is done on site, then the residues are carried on people’s backs down that slippery trail to their shoreline camp (where we landed in the Zodiac) for further washing and sorting. We got a tour of the cave, which is not something anyone with claustrophobia would care to attempt. The cave is a small one, accessible by crawling through muddy passages to the areas that are being excavated by the vertebrate paleontology crew under the direction of Dr. Tim Heaton. Working conditions are pretty grim, sitting in cramped spaces in that cold, wet cave while they fill bags with laboriously excavated sediment. I admire them for doing such difficult work day after day, all summer long. The cave is yielding a lot of well-preserved fossil material of bears, marmots (no longer living on the island), fish (carried in by otters probably), and many other critters. At the cave entrance the archeologists have been digging a trench that has now penetrated about 1.5 meters or so of sediment sitting on top of glacial till. I collected some samples from the trench wall that may give us some pollen evidence for the local vegetation development since deglaciation, but previous samples we analyzed from the site often contained little preserved pollen. They have found more than one cultural horizon in the trench, but the most exciting one is an early Holocene unit with human artifacts. I hope that the samples I collected contain usable amounts of pollen, but even if they don’t, the records we have obtained from our lakes southeast of the cave should provide a good history for the north end of the island.
We had dinner with the excavation crew and I gave an informal talk to the group about what we are attempting to accomplish this summer and next summer. Then we headed back down to the beach camp where there is a bit more room for us to sleep. We slipped and slid down that long trail to the shore, and were glad to be back there. We took over their big wall tent that they use for drying clothes and samples from the excavations. That evening we checked out the tidepools for a while. A couple of humpback whales swam by, exhaling loudly. They came within perhaps a hundred meters of shore. That evening some came in much closer, apparently in pursuit of schools of herring that were swimming on the edges of the offshore kelp beds. So the herring were coming in to lay eggs on the kelp, and the whales were following the herring in to feast on them. The loud exhalations from the whales woke me up several times during the night. It was pretty neat to have whales so nearby. Monday, July 13: We got up early this morning to catch a ride in the Zodiac back to the place where we could drive back to Thorne Bay. One of the grad students working at the archeological site took us across the bay to the dock, then drove us all the way to Thorne Bay in their project’s truck, since we were without a vehicle at that point (Jim Baichtal had to go back to Thorne Bay on Saturday). To compensate him for the long drive we bought him breakfast at Thorne Bay and paid for a case of beer to take back to the archeology camp. We arrived early enough in the day to have the afternoon for drying out gear, packing crates, and boxing up samples for shipment to Denver. We also had some time to do some laundry. Much of my field clothing was pretty mucky from all the work we had done in the rain and mud for the past week. I had to hose off my rain suit before I could wash it, it was so heavily coated with peaty mud. Tuesday, July 14: We spent the day finishing the big job of drying gear and packing crates and boxes. We are leaving much of our equipment in the Forest Service warehouse so we won’t have to ship everything back to Denver until the end of next field season. That is a huge help to us, and it will save a lot of air freight expenses. We boxed up a lot of excess personal gear and miscellaneous samples to ship back to Denver. Some will go by mail and some we will express ship to Denver from Ketchikan. The weather got pretty nice by afternoon. Wednesday, July 15: We were planning to fly to Ketchikan in float planes first thing this morning, but a big storm came through in the night, with heavy rain and high winds, and no one is flying. We fiddled with our gear for part of the day, wondering if and when we would be able to fly out of here. After nearly 5 weeks of field work (for three of us anyway), we are eager to head home. There were some encouraging reports early in the day that suggested that the storm would blow through by early afternoon, but by mid-afternoon there were still whitecaps even in the protected embayment at Thorne Bay. Finally things calmed down enough for the two float planes we needed to arrive from Ketchikan. So we loaded one with gear and the other with the four of us, said our good-byes to Jim Baichtal, and took off into the gray skies. It was still pretty windy and the channel between Prince of Wales Island and Ketchikan had big whitecaps, but the flight was not too bumpy. We landed along the waterfront and taxied into the dock where Taquan ties up its float planes. We unloaded all the gear onto a freight cart, and were wondering how we were going to push that load up the steep ramp when we found out there was a crane there on the dock to lift the freight up to the street level dock. So we sorted out our gear at the air freight terminal, and did the paperwork to ship several crates of samples and equipment to Denver. Then we called a taxi to take us up to the hotel. Had a good seafood dinner at the hotel that evening. Thursday, July 16: We got up early to catch the shuttlebus from the hotel to the airport. The shuttle bus ride takes a while because the trip includes a ferry trip across the channel from Ketchikan to the airport. We got to the airport on time, but the airlines announced a long delay in our flight departure because of a mechanical problem. Just what we want to hear. The long delay will make it impossible to make our connections in Seattle, so we had to make new flight arrangements. Finally got airborne 2.5 hours behind schedule. Made our new flight connections in Seattle. Larry Phillips headed for California, and the rest of us were on our way home to Denver. We arrived at about 6 p.m. It’s been a long trip, with a very busy schedule, but it has been a very successful trip from the scientific standpoint. And no one got injured or became ill during the field season, and we had a good group that worked well together. For further information, contact: Bottom of Page 6 [Intro] [Overview] Page:
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