Life on the Outer Coast

"waste not, want not" (Part I)

Rust lake experience turned out to have rather convoluted logistics, marginal weather, but very interesting natural history.

Things started out a bit crazy; Richard and I got to the float dock a tiny bit late and Mary Emerick looking a bit frantic with a phone in her hand. It turned out that RC's partner's father had passed away and he couldn't go on the trip. This left me a bit frantic, it was the second trip in a week that would have been cancelled for some reason or other and I was beginning to feel like I wouldn't get anything done on the Wilderness survey project. After some frantic phone calls looking for a last minute substitute (on another phone, I couldn't find mine), I gave up and went to yoga and ate some pizza. At about 2pm, I found my phone and a field partner, Jonathan Goff. Called dispatch, arranged a flight and off we went. I should have taken the time to get a sat phone and perhaps checked my backpack for the aerial photos and topo map...

We did have half the food, some gear and a boat with oars (no life jackets, no outboard) and landed at the lake without much of an issue. The only question was; when were Barth and Mary going to join us?

The rest of the day, we set up camp; fortunately Jonathan found a large tarp in the trees (not since grad school had I felt so materially wealthy) and two 8ft (?) treated 2x4's and two 2x2's and we built a pretty skookum shelter. My earlier attempts at building a shelter from alder was fairly pathetic, but it kept me entertained.

Rust lake was dammed in 19?? as a reservoir for a power supply for a Sister's lake mining operation. They put a valve that seems to have malfunctioned at some point and Rust lake has a lower water level than it had in the past; there is a noticable band of rock or gravel (bathtub ring) around the lake.

The beach near the campsite had a cover of Racomitrioideae and Stereocaulon (brown apothecia) with scattered small spruce, mountain hemlock and sitka alder. There were deer and goose tracks along the shoreline below camp and a somewhat pesky pair of nesting mew gulls on a large rock in the lake near shore. They didn't seem to appreciate dish washing.

The next morning we decided to try to paddle across the lake to see if Barth and Mary were in sight. Paddling proved rather difficult in the wind, we made it about half way across the lake and decided to explore the south shore instead. Found a population of what seems to be Viola langsdorfii with an impressive amount of variation in size and color. I collected a range of the plants and plan on sending them off for a second opinion.

Adjacent to the lake was some shallow to bedrock muskegy like vegetation and outcrops. Found a Primula cunefolia, Dodecatheon jeffreyi, Elliotia and Pinquincula. Kind of an odd mix for 800ft.

On the far side of the outcrops and muskeg was a tall sedge meadow (we would see alot of tall sedge meadow in the area). Blooming Petasites and Caltha leptosepala, young Veratrum, Frittilaria and Athryrium made up the bulk of the non-graminoids. It turned out that most of the bear sign we saw was in this area. We started around the lake through the moutain hemlock/spruce forest thinking that it might be alot better to walk around than paddle, but decided that leaving the boat would cause alot more hassles than retrieving it. The highlight of the forest was finding large patches of Nephroma on the trunks of a few Mountain hemlocks. It was green; which reminded me of N. arcticum, but the habitat was wrong. I still haven't quite decided about the identity of this lichen. Also noted many Streptopus streptopoides blooming.

Collected blooming Sibbaldia procumbens from the lake shore.

Paddling back to our side of the lake was a real chore, the head wind was not merciful. We couldn't stop paddling or we traveled backwards, much vocalization and swithing of sides was required to make the trip.

Made our first foray up the creek to look at the gravel bar vegetation (poppies, cerastium, oxytropis, dandelions) and set out the snap traps in the meadow in the afternoon in hopes of catching a vole.

It turns out, I'm not much of a trapper, not surprising. Probably should have read up a bit on the habits of voles or brought more traps ( had 11). The next day we found a more heavily used (at least that we could see) vole site on the first gravel bar. We did catch and lose something in that area, at least the trap was knawed).

The lower reaches of the creek had pretty interesting cut banks which gave an indication of the role geomorphology had in determining the vegetation type. We could see a band of peat over what looked like till and in an adjacent rill, we found a nice outcrop of fine silty sediments. Not clay, at least it didn't roll into much of a stable worm.

The vegetation in the the valley along the river was fens (tall sedge) and small patches of Spruce-Mountain hemlock/ blueberry forest . The dominance of tall fens seems to be due to the layer of basal till and the preponderance of small minerotrophic water ways running through the area. It was rather spring-like up there, so I couldn't identify all of the sedges etc, but did see Carex lenticularis, I suspect that there are probably a few more species eg. C. aquatilis. Dodecatheon jeffreyi and Rubus stellatus were in bloom.

I was oddly enthralled with the slumping peat banks along the river. Right across from this bank we found our first and only poppy in bloom. The rest of the plants were on the opposite shore and not quite blooming.