Fall is coming to Jackson
Fall is coming to Jackson, Wyoming these days. The temperature drops down below freezing each night, bull elk can be spotted in groups roving around and the bison are on the move. We are still working on the Henrys Fork. Our last aerial flight was a BAP low altitude photo recon of the Henrys Lake outlet. The outlet was restored to its native river bottom after years of the water being channeled through a man-made straight ditch. Seems the irrigators wanted more water for themselves. We were baselining the natural channel and flow patterns for the Henrys Fork Foundation. We shot these photos at 100 ft altitude and the resolution is pretty awesome. We will put some up on our website and blog this weekend.
We have two more sets of aerial flights on the Henrys Fork left to complete this year. We go back to the Ranch and shoot the entire 7 mile section in early October and will also shoot some of the 1990s macrophyte transects done by Ruth Shea. We can talk about this project in another post. We also will be doing our third and final Lighthawk aerial survey of the entire Henrys Fork in early October. So still lots of work to do.
We have also found some time in the late afternoons to get out on the river and do some fishing. Our favorite deep hole on the Gros Ventre River has been unproductive and we are not sure why. There was a family of four river otters living there back in August. Maybe they ate the big cuts that lived there.
Between our aerial and ground work, we have taken over 40,000 photos this summer. We have tried to capture the best images of the Henrys Fork and Snake River ecosystem for conservation use. We have a couple months of work to do just to process and post them on the web where they will be available to the community. Our goal is to build awareness of both the beauty and complexity of the ecosystem so that more informed management decisions can be made by federal, state and local communities. Let us know what else would be helpful here.
