Team Yellowstone at “The Narrows” of the Yellowstone River.
Team Yellowstone had a successful and productive field season. We focused on the Gallatin River and Blacktail Deer Creek. The team managed frigid mornings, sweltering afternoons, hail, freezing rivers, driving rain, lightning, elk, grizzly bears, and temperamental survey equipment with aplomb. Using a GPS and a Total Station we surveyed more than 150 channel/valley cross sections and over 10 km of long profiles, accumulating over 13,000 points in the process. The team characterized the channel bed material by pebble counts, measuring over 25,000 pebble diameters! In addition to surveying, the team described stratigraphic sections and collected charcoal and wood samples for radiocarbon analyses. The team also collected over 50 soil probes for short-lived radionuclide analyses. The team met with the Park Archeologist to learn about cultural resources in Yellowstone. This included instructions on how to identify cultural materials in stratigraphic sections. The team also explored some of the thermal features of Yellowstone, did some wildlife viewing in the Lamar Valley, and learned about landslide hazards at Earthquake Lake. Back at Whitman, the team went to work on digitizing all of the field data and preparing samples for lab analyses. Currently, everyone is back at their home institutions and excited to dig into the data!
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Measuring channel cross-section on the Gallatin River.
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Taking notes on the Gallatin River.
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Collecting a soil probe.
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Describing stratigraphy along the Gallatin River.
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Pebble counting in cold, deep water.
