| Monday 17th October 2005 | Alladale Wilderness Reserve |
The full days pics are through a click HERE
Day 9 - Monday 7:15am and time to get up has come all too soon! It is amazing though how quickly once you get out of bed into the frigid air that you wake up. The big question is though what will today bring?
Good news - not stalking. Today we will be out doing river surveys, so it is out with the waders, flow meter, tapes and measuring poles. This is good as it means I will have a bit more of a chance to rest up my knee and with using the deep heat and tubi grip my knee seems to be doing a lot better.
Breakfast is the usual porridge, with brown sugar again, but this time some added honey for decadence! Lunch is venison burger sandwiches, made with the left over burgers from last night.
First of all we needed to do some surveying of a river potential for a hydro scheme to power Alladale lodge.
To do the survey you put up a pole on either side and then connect it together with a tape so that you can drop the flow meter in every 25 cm's to measure the speed of flow. Also at these points you need to measure the depth of the water too. On a narrow channel this is pretty quick, so we did 3 different transects.
Mich and I took turns in doing the flow meter across the rivers. Once we had looked at the potential hydro location we went down to the river Alladale to make a measure across there. Whilst Mich and I were doing the readings across the river Carol and Chris got to play gnomes sitting on the river bank.
The only problem was that at lunch time the weather suddenly changed and got gloomy and cold.
We went and had a look at the Bothy by the river and had a look around it - you can see all the pics here - it is a building with several rooms and a couple of fire places. It is very basic and designed to only have a few people stay at it during any one time.
The afternoon was more of the same - doing another few river flow readings. The only pain this time doing the readings was that we got annoyed by midges. There were only a few, but they are small and get into your eyes and ears and nose and nibble you annoyingly. Fortunately at the moment there are very few of them, but the few there are, are annoying.
It was a good day, doing useful and interesting things. Tomorrow and Wednesday I believe we are back to helping the stalkers for the last couple of days of the season, then Friday we will be out on project things again.
Once we got back up to Deanich I helped make tea, had a bath, made a few phone calls, then played some cards and watched a DVD. Then off to bed around 22:00 to get some sleep ready for the hard day ahead - it will be fun, as long as my knee holds.
