First Trip!

On friday, Tom (the grad student) and I drove south from SNARL about 70 miles to get to the trailhead at Onion Valley. From there we hiked over the Kearsarge Pass (11,760 ft), which marked the transition from John Muir Wilderness into the Sequoyah/Kings Canyon National Park. We went about 11 miles total the first day, camped for the night, then went a couple of miles to a small lake in Center Basin that so far has not been infected by the Chytrid fungus which is rapidly killing the Mountain Yellow-legged frogs to near extinction. The top right picture shows Tom placing one of the small, cage exclosures we are putting in the lakes that prevent the tadpoles from eating the algae, but still allow the nutrients in their poop to get to the algae. There's a ton of snow up there still, and many of the lakes we intend to work on are still frozen. This one was only 6 degrees Celcius haha, and anchoring the exclosures to the lake bottom is just a little bit brutal. As the lake got warmer later in the day, more tadpoles and frogs appeared (bottom left).

At these relatively high elevations the UVs are intense, so we try and stay covered up by wearing nerdy hats, but my hands still got roasted. All in all the trip went really well. Tom has spent over 500 nights in this area so I'm doing my best to keep pace, and I'm learning a bunch from him....this summer is going to be a lot of hard work, but after getting this first trip out of the way, I am super excited for what's to come...