Hauling field gear up Gothic Mountain…
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is holding a training course focusing on field methods for identifying and quantifying stream and groundwater connectivity. For the field components of this class, we intend to focus our stream corridor teaching efforts along the Slate River, along the reach from the Oh Be Joyful campground down to the SLAC research area/Gunsight bridge. Proposed field activities would occur between July 27th and July 31st, 2026. Proposed field components would mainly take place on 7/28 and 7/29 (the rest of the course is offered in a classroom setting), and no equipment would be left installed after the end of the training week. Proposed activities include: The brief installation of seepage meters/piezometers/permeameters, and fiber optic cable (placed at the streambed interface) for collecting distributed temperature measurements; a small drone-based data collection demonstration; non-invasive thermal methods including thermal infrared mapping with cameras and water and bed temperature collection via probes; non-invasive geophysical data collection on the streambanks; and the injection of inert tracers to identify spatially distributed groundwater inflows along the reach via dilution. We plan to make the various field data collected during the course publicly available for possible future research use, and so they could be leveraged to augment the ongoing 'baseflow' related data being collected along the Slate River by the USGS and others. The course teaching will highlight the wide range of RMBL, University, National Laboratory, and Federal data collected throughout the East River watershed related to groundwater-surface water exchange processes.