Day 4 : Fish!


July 11th /Tuesday day 4

Well, today turned out to be a great day we actually got to go to a fisheries facility where we got to meet a few people. Upon arriving at the Lyle falls fishery and research facility we met fisheries biologist Shawn Bechtol, his main job is to capture and tag wild and hatchery salmon and other fish from the Klickitat River. This was probably one of my favorite parts of the entire trip, for as long as I can remember I always wanted to do work with fish. seeing someone handle a fish and collect data from that fish helped me get my motivation for school back by giving me a vision of what I want to do in the future. I hope to one day have a career similar to what he has so that I can actually enjoy what I do.
scaffolding used by native fishermen
shawn handling a wild steelhead


The second person we met was John washines who was a fisheries technician who explained to us how the native people would have finished using the traditional ways of fishing and how they still to this day continue to use similar methods with slight modifications.

The third person that we met was a maintenance man named Jared Bartholomew, he was the only maintenance man for the entire facility he showed us around the back rooms and explained to us how everything worked and why it was built the way it was. Together these three men along with another technician whose name I did not catch, run the entire facility all on their own.


We later went on a long trip to the Deschutes national forest , on our way there our original six members seemed to grow a little closer which was really nice because I finally get to annoy everyone the way I usually do.
Today we also visited a safeway for the first time and I may have gone a little overboard with the snacks, rudy thankfully let me use his Safeway rewards card, thanks to him I didnt have to waste half my money of on snacks I didnt need. Rudy for some reason purchased some hot wheels. oh I forgot to mention there was a family of birds in the safeway we visited.

When we finally arrived at the new camping site I was surprised because everything looked so nice like it was almost too good to be true, they had a decent restroom, and the weather was nice, not to mention how friendly the bears were….oh yeah I forgot to mention that there was a bear around the camp ! Which was fine I guess.

The only bad part of this campsite was that you had to brush your teeth feet away from where they heard the bear. On the bright side, jessica gave me some great advice on how to handle the whole bear situation. In case of emergency, all I have to do is make sure im walking with someone so I can trip them.

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