John Moreau Oral History Interview, May 12, 2014

Samuel Schmieding: Good morning. This is Dr. Samuel J. Schmieding, Oregon State University College of Forestry, and U.S. Forest Service. I am here at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, ready to do an oral history interview that's part of the greater history project on the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, which includes archival work, as well as oral histories with staff, scientists, land managers, and local citizens who have had some involvement with the Andrews. I'm here today on May 12, 2014, about 11:00 a.m. in the morning with John Moreau. Good morning, John.

John Moreau: Good morning.

SS: Would you like to tell me today your job description actually is, I mean, what are you to the Andrews?

JM: Well, right now, my main duties are to run the climate program, the field portion of the climate program, and that consists of the following benchmark 00:01:00climate stations: UPLO, Central, Primary and Vanilla, where we take our main meteorological data. And then the secondary stations which includes the reference stand dataloggers and the climate station CS-2 Met. Then I also run the NADP, the National Atmospheric Deposition Program collector, and ship a sample off to them every week. And then, there's a network of sensors in the Blue River drainage that we just installed a year ago. And I help the professors and the graduate students with their field work, professors such as Chris Daly and Chris Thomas, Mark Harmon and Sherri Johnson, people like that.

SS: So, you're kind of the technician, jack-of-all-trades, for the forest?

JM: I go out and collect numbers out in the forest. [H.J. Andrews EF]

SS: But you're also a monitoring specialist as well?

JM: Yeah. You got to be very familiar with dataloggers, programming dataloggers, sensors, wiring up sensors, and then checking the data with the data managers, so we can graph it in a real-time basis. And look at the data to see if any sensors are acting improperly or if any sensors need to be replaced or worked on or calibrated.

SS: Today, this interview is going to be a little unusual, a little different than the rest of the interviews we're doing for this project, where they will be 00:03:00with people sitting in one place. We'll be talking about history and memories and experiences as well, today, but we're going to mix this with a little office time like now up front. Then, we're going to walk around the H.J.A. Main Campus, and John's going to explain some of the infrastructure down here. Then we're going to also take that same idea into the field, and we're going to various infrastructural/technical equipment stations, the things that are, shall we say, the hardware, the infrastructure that makes the Andrews do what it does. He's going to kind of take us through the lay of the land, if you will. And so, we're going to break this up into three sections. We're going to start off kind of standard with some basic questions. And so, I'll ask you John, where were you born and raised, or just give me a biographical sketch on your terms.

JM: Well, I first grew up out on Peoria Road just outside of Corvallis. And it 00:04:00was real idyllic. All the neighbors had gardens, and we grew things and raised chickens. I could roam around and collect filberts, and my brother and I could wander down through a hop field, and go down to a slough in the Willamette and catch catfish and bring them back. And I really enjoyed it out there on Peoria Road.

SS: Now, were your parents farmers?

JM: My dad was a real estate agent in Corvallis and my mother was a secretary in the schools that I went to school in.

SS: In the Corvallis public school system then?

JM: Yeah, I went to Washington Grade [Elementary] School, and my mother was the secretary. She was really tight with the principal, so I could do no wrong when I was in grade school. I couldn't get away with anything, let's put it that way.

SS: Oh, so you had the inside track, but you also couldn't get in trouble? (Laughter)

JM: Yes, that's a good way to put it. And so, we moved to Corvallis, 10th and Garfield, and I grew up there. Early on, I had one neighbor who was an official with the Fish and Game, and I ended getting a red-tail hawk chick. So, I built a mews in the back yard, that's an area to keep your hawk, and I and my hawk would go out, and I'd train my hawk to go hunting. I'd get on my bicycle with my hawk, and I'd go out to fields in the Corvallis area.

SS: It was a red-tailed hawk?

JM: Yeah. A red-tailed hawk, and go rabbit hunting. I was so happy when she 00:06:00finally caught her first rabbit. Normally, I would walk through the fields with her on my fist, my gloved fist, and she could jump off at anything she wanted to.

SS: So, you trained her like a peregrine falcon, essentially, the same kind of principal as falconry, right?

JM: Yeah, it's falconry. Yes. And so, she would jump off on things like snakes or grasshoppers and things like that. And so, when she got her first rabbit, I thought that was a real achievement.

SS: What was her name?

JM: Tamara.

SS: Her name was Tomorrow?

JM: Tamara.

SS: Oh, Tamara.

JM: Yeah, yeah.

SS: Tamara, very good. And how did that come about?

JM: Well, there was, the Fish and Game Department raised pheasants north of Corvallis out at the old Adair site. They raised chicks out in the open, in a penned area out in the open. And in the center of the penned area was a post 00:07:00with a snap-trap on it so that any raptor who would come down to try to get the pheasant chicks, would be killed in this snap-trap. And so, there was a red-tailed hawk's nest within, in a cottonwood tree within sight of the pens. And so, they figured that these red-tails were all goners anyway. So, they decided, what the heck, let's give them to some local kids and let them raise them. So, that's how I got my red-tailed hawk.

SS: Wow, that's very interesting. So, I take it that this was obviously one of your seminal experiences in terms of connections with nature. Was there a time before that when you became interested in science and natural history, perhaps 00:08:00through a science teacher in grade school or your father, your mother, or was that kind of your big first experience?

JM: I was just always interested from my days on Peoria Road. I was just always interested in staying out in the country. And so, when we moved to Corvallis, I didn't like that move. All I could think about growing up was that I've got to get back to the country. I've got to get away from towns and cities, and I've got to get someplace really rural. That was my main motivation.

SS: Interesting. So, did you also have a bent and an interest toward technology and equipment and repairing or monitoring things when you were younger, or did that develop later?

JM: No, I did not. I'd just want, just trying to be as rural as possible. Go out fishing and stay out in the country. I'd take my bicycle out. When we moved to 00:09:00Corvallis, I would take my bicycle out and ride to the McDonald and Dunn forests.

SS: Which are the forests that are essentially the Oregon State University College of Forestry forests, right?

JM: Yes. And take my bicycle out there and play in the forest. And that was what I wanted to do. I'd go out and enter at the Oak Creek entrance.

SS: John's got a map on his computer here for us. He's ready with props, it looks like. (Laughs)

JM: Yeah, and I'd take my bicycle out there and just play in the forest. And now, that whole area is just completely covered, and sometimes 100 percent covered in false brome [invasive grass species]. It's just completely invaded by 00:10:00false brome now. But back then, it was pristine. I'd go fishing on Soap Creek and it was quite fun to play in the forest.

SS: Now, let's take it a little more philosophical. What were your views on nature and the environment when you were young? Was it more just a shared wonder and love, or were you developing the rudimentary intellectual framework that you would develop as an adult?

JM: I just wanted to be out in the forest all the time. That was my motivation.

SS: Did you have any cultural heroes or icons, you know, the John Muirs, or the maybe lesser known people that were, that lived that kind of life where they were, they always wanted to get "out there?"

JM: When I came out to the Andrews and first met professional biologists in the 00:11:00"owl crew," I realized I had a real strong connection there. And biologists are really fun people to hang out with. They know a lot more about nature. So, I got to learn from some of the best about plants and animals. And that was always very fun.

SS: You met Eric Forsman [spotted owl researcher] and some of those people?

JM: Oh, yeah.

SS: When they were very young in the careers, right?

JM: Oh, yeah.

SS: I mean, when they were just developing the studies that became so important and controversial, or what have you on the NSO [northern spotted owl]. Right?

JM: Yeah, yeah.

SS: Now, if you were going to describe the ecology or the aesthetic of where you 00:12:00grew up, or even more broadly speaking, shall we say, the Coniferous Forest Biome, how would you describe that?

JM: Could you go in a little more depth, I mean?

SS: If you were going to describe the ecology, number one, and then secondly, the aesthetic, the feel, the look of it, how would you describe that?

JM: Of the Andrews, of the --?

SS: No, western Oregon.

JM: Oh.

SS: I mean, you grew up in Corvallis and the area out there, and then you had experience in part of the Coast Range, and now of course, obviously, you've traveled around and you probably came up to the Cascades?

JM: Well, western Oregon's just ideal, because you've got the valley, you've got the coast, you've got the Coast Range, you've got the Cascades, and you've got eastern Oregon. And I really enjoyed all of them. I really liked to go to the coast and go fishing and clamming and crabbing. And the Cascades are very nice. 00:13:00I used to climb mountains. Henry Gholz, and his wife, Nancy, one of the first people I met out here. We'd go, we climbed Mount Jefferson together, and which was a really unique experience.

SS: That's' supposedly one of the toughest, one of the toughest peaks in Oregon.

JM: Oh, yeah, it was very difficult. Henry and I tried the east side, which it turned out to be, we got caught in an avalanche. But in fact, we got caught in a couple of avalanches, and that's pretty much where I gave up mountain climbing.

SS: Really?

JM: Yeah.

SS: Did you climb the Sisters [Three Sisters], too?

JM: Oh, yeah, climbed all the Sisters. Climbed on Mt. Hood, and Three-Fingered Jack.

SS: Jefferson? Or, not Jefferson, Washington?

JM: Mt. Washington, Henry and I climbed. He had the skills in rope-climbing.

SS: So, he was your technical expert?

JM: Yeah, and so I was following Henry's lead on that.

SS: You ever do Thielsen?

JM: Never did Thielsen. I did Three-Fingered Jack, but we didn't make it up there. The rock, that's a nasty little peak because --

SS: It's a crumbly, craggy-old thing, isn't it?

JM: And somebody had just died on there just before we went up. And you could still see a trail of debris going down the mountain. So, that was --

SS: It was a sobering experience to see where somebody fell, right?

JM: Yes, it was. And so, it is dangerous, it's definitely dangerous.

SS: But now, if you were going to say, give me your favorite place on the coast 00:15:00and your favorite place in the Cascades?

JM: Well --

SS: Well, maybe a couple of each if you have them?

JM: I've got a fishing boat now. And so, I have fished out of Depoe Bay for a number of years, and that was quite fun. But we also fished out of Newport and Coos Bay and Brookings and Crescent City. I really like all of those places. And Seaside is great for razor claims. I'm really enjoying that. And so, the coast is quite fun. The Cascades, there's many places up and down. You know, when in 1981, Jack Booth retired. And so, I took over his duties on the cone count that Jerry Franklin set up in the 1960's.

SS: Up by Carpenter Mountain?

JM: There's --

SS: One of them, right?

JM: Yeah, there's cone counts; they stretch from southern Oregon all the way up to northern Washington, along pretty much the Pacific Crest Trail. So, I get to go to every fall, get to go to a number of really beautiful places.

SS: John is segueing into showing me the original cone count material for some of the work. And this is some of the things I've found in my archival work with the Andrews project [curating historical records]. And he is going to go off on this because I brought something up here on the break.

JM: Yes, these are the cone counts that I currently do. And they start, in the north, they start up by Mount Baker, which is an absolutely gorgeous place. The heather meadows are simply spectacular.

SS: Is that right by Mount Baker?

JM: Yes, it is. On a clear day, the view of the north Cascades, it's just magnificent. Then there are the others in the Wenatchee and Snoqualmie and Gifford Pinchot and Mt. Hood and Willamette [National Forests] and -

SS: Here's the Carpenter Mountain one.

JM: Yeah. And then down here is outside of Ashland. Ashland RNA is just beautiful. And Meridian Overlook is beautiful.

SS: Did he ever do cone counts down in northern California?

JM: Not that I'm aware of.

SS: I thought he might have, but maybe not. So, anyway, very interesting. We will return to that when we're in the field. But we'll go back to our questions where we're at right now. Now, within the context of what you're telling me now, you a person with a passion for being "out there," and the fact that you 00:18:00happened to be in Oregon, you had a lot of "out there" and contrasts in nature; coast, valley, mountains, high desert; how did this affect you? Also, during that time, did you ever hear about this place, the Andrews? Before you became a professional, when you were younger and you were developing, did you first hear about this place? Or was it only when you started working here?

JM: Yeah, I started in '74 and I'd never heard about it. In fact, we hardly ever came down here. I came down, the only other time that I'd ever been on the McKenzie River, was for a whitewater festival, a whitewater parade.

SS: Yeah, the parades they used to have from McKenzie Bridge down, right?

JM: Yeah, my parents brought me down to one of the whitewater parades. And we saw all these people floating down the river in these marvelous contraptions. That was the only other time I'd ever been on the McKenzie prior to 1974. And 00:19:00then, they had a job employment board there at OSU and I just saw a flyer for a job out in the woods. And so, I took the flyer completely off the wall and just took it to the, I can't remember who I showed it to, but anyway, I went down and said, "I'm your man."

SS: At that point in time, what had been your education?

JM: Oh, I'd graduated from high school and I was going to Oregon State. And I started out in Fish and Wildlife and had a real checkered career at OSU. I couldn't make up my mind what my major was going to be, so I started out in fish and game, and then went to engineering, and then went back to fisheries, and 00:20:00then ended up in chemistry.

SS: Was your undergraduate actually in chemistry, though?

JM: I never graduated from college.

SS: Oh, really? How do you think the fact that you kind of had a mixed-bag 00:21:00transcript, and you didn't go through and you didn't have high degrees and all that, how do you think that affected you positively, in ending up becoming who you were here, this jack-of-all-trades, who does everything up here?

JM: Well, I think the main thing was that I knew I was never going to be a Ph.D. or a PI or anything like that. And it didn't bother me that other people were in the limelight, and other people had their names on papers and stuff. I didn't 00:22:00care. I really didn't. All I cared about was being out in the field. And I really enjoyed the people. All the people I met, almost universally, were just wonderful people. And I was really happy to be out here and working for them, helping them with their projects.

SS: What experiences did you have outside the Pacific Northwest, living, traveling, working as a youth or early in your professional life which may have provided context or points-of-comparison for how you viewed the Northwest, the ecology, and obviously what you've done here up at the Andrews and in the general area for many years?

JM: Well, I'm not much of a traveler. Not like some of my friends. I just basically move up and down the West Coast. My idea was the ideal lifestyle would 00:23:00be to fish in either British Columbia or Alaska in the summer time, and then spend spring and fall in Oregon, and then go down to Baja in the winter time, or Arizona or Baja, and fish and clam, which, for a number of years, I would go down into Baja in the winter time. Take my two-week vacation down there. They've got some really spectacular fishing and clamming, the water's beautiful, and you can go down there in January and February and be in t-shirts out on the water. And it's just really, can be a pristine environment.

SS: Around Ensenada?

JM: No, we'd go down to San Luis. We'd cross the border at San Luis and San 00:24:00Felipe, and Algodones.

SS: Are you talking about the Sea of Cortez side or the Pacific side?

JM: Both.

SS: Both.

JM: And at San Felipe, we'd go down on the mainland side down to a little town called El Golfo. And then we'd get on the beach and drive down the beach about, oh, for about an hour to a little camping spot down there. And you could see the lights of Puerto Peñasco, Rocky Point.

SS: Right, correct.

JM: At night. But there's some really-good fishing down there. And then we'd go down in Baja, down to central Baja, down to St. Ignacio, and we'd go out to the whale calving areas. And we'd get on a Mexican panga, you can't take your boats out, your own personal boats out there. And we've got out in these shallow, very 00:25:00salty bays, and just stop out in the middle of the bay. And then you lean over the panga and splash your hands in the water, and the whales come up to you and want to be petted.

SS: What kind of whales?

JM: They were big, giant, gray whale mothers and their calves. And the mothers would come right up to the panga and want to be petted and scratched like a dog.

SS: Really?

JM: And so you'd lean over the boat and you could not be in, like you'd be -- one person called it groping, you're groping a whale. And the calves would come up right next to the boat. And all this, why, you know back in Oregon, it's just raining non-stop. And if it isn't raining non-stop, the valley's fogged in, and 00:26:00this was quite beautiful. It's quite beautiful. And then, I'm going up to Canada right now and fishing in British Columbia.

SS: Off of Vancouver Island or farther up?

JM: No, I'm concentrating on Vancouver Island. I'm fishing out of Winter Harbor. And I've got another trip lined up for Bamfield, and I'd take my boat up there and fish the inside passage up by Campbell River, and in the Gulf Islands up there.

SS: My grandparents and my mother's parents, she was born in Ocean Falls, which is up by Bella Coola.

JM: Oh my, that's wonderful country.

SS: Yeah.

JM: I went fishing up in Prince of Wales [POW] Island, and on the way back I 00:27:00took the ferry back from Ketchikan to Bellingham, and I went by Bella Bella and Bella Coola, and that area. I thought it was spectacular.

SS: Ocean Falls was at that time, a Crown Zellerbach mill town. And eventually, the mill shut down and they did, what they call, "normalized" the town, which was very controversial in British Columbia, where they literally bladed flat half the city trying to return it to some, I don't know what kind of form. There was such a protest because of historical stuff, that they only did half of the town. But my mother's house, my parents went up to find it, and all they could find was some nails.

JM: Oh, that's sad.

SS: But they have pictures and memories. Now, how did you become technically 00:28:00proficient? I mean, obviously, to do what you do up here, you have to have some love of, knowledge, or aptitude for gadgets, for equipment, for maintenance, for trouble-shooting. How did that develop?

JM: Well, it started out when I first got here. Everything was done with pen-on-paper instruments. In the stream, when I got here, I first started working in Watershed 10, but then that gradually morphed into, Ross Mersereau was back then what they called the hydro-met technician, the resident hydro-met technician. And he took care of the gauging stations, which were the stream gauges, a small watershed program which is stream gauging stations. This was all built in the 1960's, way before I got here. And there's a number of small 00:29:00watersheds that have gauging stations on them. And there's 10 and 9, 1, 2 and 3, Mack Creek, 6, 7 and 8.

SS: Now, a quick clarification. Are 6, 7 and 8 part of, or close to what used to be called the Hi-15 Watershed?

JM: They comprise the Hi-15.

SS: That's what I thought, okay.

JM: And as far as I'm concerned, as far as I know, no one's ever figured out where the name Hi-15 came from. [See Levno interview for answer].

SS: Yeah, even Fred Swanson doesn't know. (Laughs) He doesn't know. I asked him about that. I said, "Where's the Hi-15 come in? Except it's fairly high, right?"

JM: No, it's one of those things. And so, but the main thing was, we had 00:30:00pen-on-paper instruments back then. There was the A-35, which was the main instrument. And I'll show you one.

SS: You're talking basically, that the instrument, the gauge was attached, it had a pen that went over a graph, or you also would chart the data by putting pen-on-paper in a field notebook? Both, right?

JM: Yeah, so what we ended up with was paper charts that had ink traces on them for stream flow. But also, for the reference stands, we had what was called a Partlow Chart Recorder. It was a circular chart that had two pens, one for the air temperature and one for the soil temperature. One was red and one was blue. And so, there was many, many ways that you could screw up on these instruments. You could forget to wind the clock. You could forget to add ink to the pens.

SS: So, they had like a tank of ink?

JM: Yes.

SS: Almost like it was attached to a quill pen?

JM: I'll show you one.

SS: Yeah, okay, right.

JM: And so, the ink could run out. Or this ink could simply dry up, or the ink was there, but it was not flowing onto the chart. Or, if you were dripping wet and had your rain gear on, and leaned over the instrument, water could fall onto the paper. And then the paper could absorb the water, and when the ink hit the --

SS: And it would run?

JM: And it would blob out, and run, or it could even tear the chart because the paper was soft. And then, the chart itself could not track properly. It could, the 835 chart could start gradually rolling off proper. So there had to be an offset. And so, there was many, many ways that this had problems. Then you had 00:32:00to, somebody had to sit down and digitize the chart. And that introduced an error of its own, of plus or minus a degree or maybe even more, to the accuracy of the instrument. And so, when dataloggers came along, Campbell didn't make their first datalogger until I believe, 1987, it was a huge improvement, both in terms of accuracy and cost-effectiveness, because you didn't have to hire students to digitize the charts and the data could be proofed more easily. It was just a huge step forward. So, I was really interested in working with dataloggers, and since you had to program a datalogger, I had to learn programming.

SS: And this is back in the old DOS days, right?

JM: Well, the first language that they came up with was Edlog, what Campbell calls it. We pretty much exclusively work with Campbell Instruments, because they're so easy. Campbell's a great organization [Campbell Scientific]. They have many engineers and are very aware of their customers' needs.

SS: This is hydrological equipment, correct?

JM: No, it's dataloggers.

SS: Oh, okay.

JM: The one, the main company for streams is Stevens [Stevens Water Monitoring Systems]. They make their own equipment and dataloggers.

SS: So, you were telling me about the different equipment. Why don't you continue with that again? You were talking about Campbell, Stevens, and go through, just continue on that track.

JM: So, I started with Campbell stuff, and Campbell dataloggers, and I'm really 00:34:00impressed with the quality of and the engineering and the support of Campbell. Because they really make it possible to have really reliable instruments out in the field. And that is so important from a technician's point-of-view that you have reliable equipment because we can't get to a lot of these sites in the winter time without a lot of expense in the snow.

SS: In other words, you have to gauge and measure the times when you have to go up and monitor stuff just to make sure it's working, correct?

JM: Right.

SS: Because you've got snowcats and all that, or snowmobiles, but it's still a tremendous effort, right?

JM: Yeah. And so, reliability of the equipment is paramount. And Campbell does such a good job with it, I'm really very happy with Campbell. I went to Campbell 00:35:00early-on, and they have a training course there, they're located in Logan, Utah. I went back there and talked to the engineers, which was a big plus, because afterwards, I could phone them up. They knew me, I knew them, and we could develop a personal relationship, which helped. We could work through any problems I would come up with.

SS: And how many Campbell dataloggers do you have out in the Andrews Forest today, for example?

JM: Oh, there's more, there's a lot. I would have to sit down and total it up, but, and we're adding more, whereas back in the day, we started out with just a simple CR10 to try to do the entire meteorological station, which was a real stretch. Now, we've broken that up and we have three Campbell dataloggers doing 00:36:00Primary Met, which we've just upgraded.

SS: That's your station right down here close to the headquarters [Andrews].

JM: Yes, just outside the headquarters.

SS: That we can see outside your office.

JM: Yeah, we're going to go, I'll give you a tour.

SS: Okay.

JM: And they're now upgraded to the newer versions which run on Basic, the language for them is Basic. So, we've gone from the entire Campbell progression, from CR10's to CR10X's. And there's a LEX, or here's a ten. But this was actually one of their later models.

SS: John is showing me a......what would you describe this as, a box?

JM: Well, it's just a datalogger.

SS: A datalogger, it's called the CR10, Campbell Scientific Company. And this particular model, John, would have come out about when?

JM: Well, I think it was, they first put out the CR10, not the 10X.

SS: Is this analog?

JM: Analog. Okay, so, I never graduated from college. I'm not an engineer. I don't know much about engineering at all, and that is what is so brilliant about Campbell. I don't have to be an engineer. They have plenty of engineers and support, and they will turn out, they've got wonderful manuals and technical notes that they will send you if you have a problem.

SS: And they actually are readable guides, too?

JM: Very much so. And so, that's what's so wonderful about Campbell. I don't have to be an engineer. I don't have to come up with algorithms to try to output dew point or saturated vapor pressure or any of these other things. It's all 00:38:00automatic. And if you follow the instructions Campbell gives you, it all comes out very beautiful, very wonderful numbers.

SS: So, in other words, just so for the record here, we have two dataloggers here, the CR10, which is the one that John said is an earlier model.

JM: We have some of the earliest ones.

SS: And the CR23X, the bigger box here, is a more recent model, right? A more advanced one?

JM: And I'll show you some more of their latest stuff. These are all early editions. And so, we've gone through the whole lineup with Campbell.

SS: How interesting. John just confirmed that 1987 was when Campbell started selling dataloggers. Now, we're going to go out in the field, and in general, 00:39:00what are some of the big advances that have happened in the technology and how it has improved the ability to monitor, store and even calculate and process data, from the increasingly complex system of the studies here at the Andrews, which is not only connected to the Andrews and the individual studies, but the entire LTER network?

JM: Well, like I'm saying, the first thing that happened was we transitioned from pen-on-paper instruments to dataloggers. That was a huge step forward. The next step, and as we got into dataloggers, we could get into more sophisticated instruments. And as we go along with Campbell, their instruments improved over time. That means change is pretty much constant. We get new instruments and the 00:40:00old instruments change, so they have a whole list of discontinued instruments that you are no longer able to purchase. So, you pretty much have to go along with the flow and be constantly upgrading your instruments and dataloggers. The other new thing is telemetry. We've vastly improved our radio telemetry capabilities. And so now, I can, each morning that I come in, I can call up a program called Local Live, and I can get an up-to-date, up to within an hour or two, weekly graph of almost every sensor from the radio telemetry sites. For 00:41:00instance, when I come in in the morning, I can even in the dead of winter, when there's many feet of snow at the Upper Met [high elevation] stations, I can call up the graph and look at the air temperature sensors, graph the air temperature sensors over the last week, graph soil temperature, all the different sensors.

SS: And you can also tell from a remote location if there's problems that have to be fixed?

JM: Yes. I've been fishing up in Alaska or British Columbia and get on the website, and look and see what sensors are doing all right, or I'll be down in Arizona, I've done the same thing. Get on a computer and I can call up my stations and look and see what's going on.

SS: What are some of the most memorable problems, emergencies, have-to-fix-now kind of situations that you've faced? I'm sure we'll talk about some of them in 00:42:00the field, but I'll give you a first shot at it right now.

JM: Well, the main thing was the stand-alone rain gauges. They had a lot of problems. They are our own design. And so, there was a lot of problems with them in the beginning, and rain and precipitation is a real important type of data that we get here at the Andrews. So, when a rain gauge fails, it goes right up to the top of your list of to-dos, to get that running again. And there could be a lot of problems. Because to get a good rain gauge reading in a very mountainous area, at high elevation, where we get a lot of snow, you have to heat the orifice. If you don't heat the orifice, the orifice fills with snow 00:43:00almost immediately, and you stop getting good readings. So, to keep the orifice heated, it requires a lot of work and a lot of systems in a remote site, where you don't have AC power.

SS: When you have some kind of light, you have some kind of small battery power that just keeps this area just slightly warm?

JM: Oh, no, you have to do much more than that.

SS: Oh, really?

JM: Oh, yeah, you have to have a 500-gallon propane tank. You have to have a tankless water heater. You have to circulate hot water through the orifice in a circulating system. You have to have many solar panels to charge a big battery bank to keep an electric pump that circulates the hot water running. Because in 00:44:00the winter time, you can get, say, a month straight of rain, so you don't get very much solar power. So, you have to have a large solar array and as many as, well, about six golf cart batteries hooked up to get you through the periods that don't have much sun.

SS: Now, let me ask you this. If it wasn't for the snow, it wouldn't be such a problem. It's mainly because of the snow. When it's just the rain, the times of the year when it's just rain, you don't have that problem?

JM: Well, it's solar. You need sunny times to get your solar power back up. So, you've got to have some sun. You've got to have a good site, too. Some of our sites, we just can't do a full met station because they don't have a good solar 00:45:00view to the south. So, that's another consideration, what's your solar view, especially when the sun is low in the winter time. The sun gets low and you've got to have power -- that's your critical time -- in December and January. And you've got to have at least some sun view to the south.

SS: So, your northern slopes are the big problems?

JM: Yes.

SS: And there are some that you have up there. Although, the watershed of the Andrews is kind of southwest facing, if you wanted, the triangle, right?

JM: It just depends on your individual site. If you have a poor solar site, that means you're going to have to have more solar panels and more batteries to store the power to get you through the bad periods.

SS: I've read about data gaps in the past history of the Andrews, and I'm 00:46:00assuming there's a variety of reasons for that. One, being the '64 Flood, another, the '96 Flood, particular weather events, but also technical problems. Correct?

JM: Yeah. So, that's why you want your instruments to be as reliable as you can possibly get them. So, that's all I'm thinking about when I build a station. Terry [Cryer - HJA maintenance worker] and I built the climate shelters in Up-Lo and Central and Vanilla in 1994 and 1995. And so, when we think about, well, that the solar panels have to be at least so high, as we've had 15 feet of snow up there on two different occasions.

SS: That's the max you've ever had here?

JM: Yeah, 15 feet of snow. The Up-Lo Station was completely buried in snow. Tommy, the guy that came, you saw this morning, and I had to get, take a 00:47:00snow-cat up there, get on top of this giant mound and dig for two hours to get down to the orifice of the rain gauge on top of the shelter, to get it functioning again

SS: Now, where is that exactly? Is that up by Carpenter Mountain or -- ?

JM: It's up the 1506. It's up at the headwaters of Lookout Creek.

SS: Okay, right. What's the least amount of snow you've had here?

JM: We've been able to drive to Wildcat Mountain in January, I think, is the least. Sometimes you can drive pretty close. You can gauge that by how many hours we've put per winter in the snowcat.

SS: This year, what kind of snow did you have this last year?

JM: I think this was a relatively low snow-pack winter. I think the deepest we got at Up-Lo was, I'm going to say somewhere around six feet, which is pretty low. But it varies widely. We've had a couple of feet of snow here in the headquarters before.

SS: And that's the most you've had down here?

JM: Well, I think early on, I think there was one year when it might have been four feet in Blue River, which was the most I've ever seen.

SS: Interesting. (Break in audio) We're back on now, and we're preparing to go out into the field, not literally out into the Andrews Forest, but into the area around the campus where we're going to go to the climate station first. And John is now showing us a graph?

JM: Yeah, this is a Local Live [computer program-real time images]. So, when I come in the mornings, this is what I look at first. And this is the station called Vanilla Met. It's one of the main benchmark stations. And so, you can see that this is updated to, well, it's May 12. So, current day, probably a few hours old. You can tell that the sun, so this is the air temperatures for the last week. And you can see that they're all tight. Everything looks good. They're all tracking really well.

SS: And that is one station and the different things that it reads. Correct?

JM: So, we'll go through a bunch of screens here. I can tell that the air temperatures are good. This is the solar radiation in watts-per-meter- squared. Air temperature, we do everything in Celsius. And so right now, up there, I can tell that it's going to be a good day. It's already over thirteen degrees 00:50:00Celsius. Solar radiation is climbing right up there. So you can tell right away the difference between a cloudy day and a sunny day. This is a real sunny day right here. And then this is snow depth, and you can see we got a little snow on that last storm, but it's pretty much melted off. This is relative humidity. You can see that it's going to be a good day because the relative humidity has already dropped below forty percent. The temperature of the soils, you can see that in this last storm, the soil temperature, the upper soil temperatures, dropped way off.

SS: And of course, this reflects that the snow is now melting and the sun is starting to take over and warm up the soil, and it's now water and not snow any more. Correct?

JM: Right, correct. When you get snow on all this, when it's in a deep snow pack, well, when there's any snow on it, all these temperatures will flatline right around zero. And so, when they pop up, you know right away that the snow is off the soil temperature site. This is wind speed in meters per second and 00:51:00it's fairly calm. This is the dew point, vapor pressure deficit. Come on, get back here. Then this is saturated vapor pressure. This is battery power. This is real critical. You can seeing during that bad weather, the power got down to a little under 12.2 volts, and I get real worried when any station goes below 12 volts. I pretty much have to do something.

SS: What does that mean? Is it the solar is not working enough and you're starting to lose backup power?

JM: Yeah, the batteries are getting drained down.

SS: Okay.

JM: And you can see right away when the sun comes out, that the power shoots right up to 14 volts.

SS: If you go below 12 or 10 or whatever, what do you have to do? Do you have to go up into the field and juice up the batteries, replace something, or hook it 00:52:00up to something?

JM: If you're spending a lot of time below 12 volts, you really need to do something. You either have to increase your solar panels, increase the number of batteries that you have storing power, or both. And as we add more instruments, some of the instruments draw more power than others. So, I've got to be aware of that all the time. My goal is to have every station out in the field always be above 12 volts. And if it's not happening, I've got to go out and do something.

SS: What's the longest time when some kind of failure caused a break in the data collection, whether it be exceptionally long, bad cold weather, or some kind of technical problem beyond that?

JM: Well, when you're first getting established in a station, first building it, 00:53:00no one can tell you exactly how much solar power you're going to get in the coming winter. And so, and then there's the process of deciding how much power you're going to draw from all your combined instruments. So you have to feel it out as you're building the station, and then assume, give yourself a cushion, so build bigger, that's one of the things about reliability. You need more for the crunch periods. So, I'm always thinking about adding more solar panels and adding more batteries. And I also make sure that I swap out the batteries after five years. That's critical. You don't want to keep your batteries up there until they fail, because after five or six years, their life is pretty much used up.

SS: How much does it cost to replace those batteries approximately? In today's dollars.

JM: Oh, it's about $100 a battery, and like, we'll have just six alone to run 00:54:00the stand-alone rain gauge. And we'll have another four to run the Main Met Station, and then we'll have another six at the Tower. And right now, you can see that we're getting down close to where it's getting too close right now. So, this summer I'm going to be adding more solar panels and more batteries up there at Up-Lo. Because we've been adding new instruments, or this is at Vanilla Met. This is a new instrument that we've added and it's called a Net Radiometer, and it measures both incoming long-wave radiation, incoming short-wave radiation, outgoing long-wave radiation, and outgoing short-wave radiation. So, this is an important instrument to do heat budgets with, and getting heat budgets, of 00:55:00course, is real important work. When there's snow on the ground, we have a lot more outgoing reflected radiation. So, we need to know that. And so, this is incoming short-wave radiation. Incoming is the up one, and outgoing is the down one. And then, this is infrared radiation. So, you can see all our variables coming in here. And then this is the wind speed. We have a sonic anemometer, which we've just added recently. And sonic anemometers are much more effective, collecting the data, collecting good data, at low windspeed, than the old propeller anemometers. The propeller anemometers, it takes almost a half-meter-per-second of wind to get that propeller turning.

SS: What's the highest speed you've recorded since you've been here, John?

JM: Well, when the wind really gets cranking, it gets up to about four meters per second.

SS: Which, in miles per hour, what would that be?

JM: I don't translate myself.

SS: Okay, we'll figure that out later. Did they have wind gauge statistics from the Columbus Day storm in '62? Did they have that kind of -- ?

JM: No.

SS: They didn't have that type?

JM: No.

SS: They basically went by the blow-down, in other words, the damage, almost like they'll determine the Fujita scale of a tornado by the damage afterwards?

JM: I think our first wind gauges, they're R.M. Young. A company by the name of R.M. Young in Traverse City, Michigan, makes them. They're propeller anemometers, and they're called wind monitors. And I don't think we, our first ones were here until '94-'95.

SS: Oh, okay.

JM: And so, net radiation.

SS: But this is the first thing you do when you come in the morning, is you look at the screen?

JM: Yeah, I'll look at all of my different stations and see what's going on.

SS: How many different stations would that be on a typical morning, John?

JM: Well, it's Prime Met, which is out here. But Prime Met has a light fan that has different dataloggers. So, Prime Met, Van Met, VARA [Vanilla Rain Gauge], which is a rain gauge, that's also been upgraded to do air temperature, snow, it's going to update here. There, you see that last little bump, it's pretty much all gone now. Precip. And this is a real important number because I've got to go up and drain the cumulated precip before it gets up into the 500's. You can see we're at the 370 now.

SS: You mean, there's a natural retention for the water that comes through the system and you'll overflow some kind of tank or something?

JM: Yeah, it'll just flatline if it gets up around 550.

SS: Okay.

JM: So, I've got to get up there and drain it, and you can see we're at 370 now. I've got to keep looking at the weather forecast because we've been having a lot of rain for May. That last week, we got a bunch. You can see right here, we went from about 285 millimeters to 370 millimeters.

SS: In three days.

JM: In one, two, three days, yeah. So, if another big storm comes in like that, I'm going to be in real trouble here, so I'll have to get up there. And the temperature orifice, you can see that the stand-alone rain gauge is working here because it's keeping our cutoff temperature for the stand-alone rain gauge, is at four degrees Celsius. So, if the temperature drops in the orifice drops below 00:59:00four, I know that we've got a problem. And I have to, and that shoots right up to the....you've got to get that going right away.

SS: Now, did you have problems the last December when we had that really cold snowstorm that was almost continental in nature?

JM: No, everything was working fine there.

SS: Okay.

JM: But in the last couple of weeks, I've been having problem with VARA, the rain gauge stopped working for two different reasons. One, a part failed, and the second one was, a filter plugged up. So, I've had two unrelated problems at VARA the last month where we lost a little bit of data. And so, every morning I come in and I look to see if it's working. This is definitely working. It's 01:00:00working really well right now. And then also, Adam Kennedy has set up a program where if it drops below four degrees, it'll put a red flag up.

SS: And just for the record here, Adam Kennedy is the Onsite Data Manager for the Andrews, correct?

JM: Correct, yeah. And so, he's got that set up. It'll red flag that. And so, I'll know right away that there is a problem up there. And then the battery, here again, we had a little drop here. It's hanging in there, but you know, that's the thing. I could always use more solar panels and batteries. But my budget is, I've got to fit that into my annual budget.

SS: It's what it is.

JM: (Laughs) And so, I'll go through and look at the Central, oh, this is Watershed 1, no, this is a bunch of them. So, I'll go through and check all the 01:01:00battery power. And then, this is Watershed 1. Make sure the battery power over at Watershed 1 is doing good. This one started out as Barbara Bond's project, but now it's Chris Thomas' project. And so, he --

SS: On?

JM: On cold air drainage. When I got a tree-climbing certificate from the Dorena Genetic Improvement Center, they're the people that, for the Forest Service, that go up and collect cones to grow trees for their reproduction studies. And so, they're into tree climbing. So, I went down there, it's just outside of Cottage Grove, and got a certificate from them to climb trees. And then in, I 01:02:00forget what date, I've got it in my notes. But anyway, I rigged a tree called "Big Tree" with temperature sensors, and we could see that there was a lot of cold air drainage, that on good days you get cold air drainage. Cold air flows just, air flows just like water down our valleys. And cold air drainage is going to be real important in relation to climate change because not all of our areas out in the forest are going to be affected the same way. And there's sites that are going to be buffered due to cold air drainage. Cold air is really important. And you can see that we have diurnal fluctuations in wind speed and wind direction on strong cold air flows. Big Tree was our first good look at that. And so, from Big Tree, we went to Watershed 1 to study, Barbara Bond went to 01:03:00Watershed 1 to study cold air drainage. And so, cold air drainage has been a big part of our research in recent years.

SS: Interesting.

JM: So, this is Chris Thomas' work. Then, we've got Up-Lo, Van Met, VARA, and Watershed 7 Tower. And so, not all of our sites are on radio telemetry, but there's a lot of important sites that are.

(Break in audio)

SS: We are in, what is this room?

JM: This is called the Watershed Lab.

SS: This is the Watershed Lab --

JM: Where I do all of my electronics work and where we store all the equipment. It's right opposite my office. So, I've an example of an A-35s here and --

SS: What is an A35, for the record, John?

JM: An A35 is a Leupold and Stevens instrument [Leupold and Stevens Inc.]. 01:04:00They're manufactured up in Portland, Oregon. And this one is from 1963. And we have some Stevens that are from 1945, I think, is the oldest one.

SS: Do you still have any of those working in the Forest?

JM: Yes. Yes.

SS: Wow.

JM: And it's a real complex way of measuring stream flow. This one has a wind-up. You wind the chart up using a crank right here. And then it turns this chart. So, this chart, one day is this much time on the chart. You can translate this into cubic feet per second of water going through the flume, and it's got a wind-up clock. Some of the clocks were weight-driven. And then it's got a spool 01:05:00here, and this sat over what we call a stilling well. There was a big six-foot diameter culvert that was upturned and turned into a well, and it was connected by a pipe to the intake in the flume. So the height of the water over the intake of the flume was exactly the same as the height of the water in the stilling well. And so, there was a tape, a perforated tape that went over this spool here, and one went down, one side went down to a float, a big, flat float that was floating in the stilling well. And the other side went down to a weight, a lead weight. So, as the water rose, this turned this mechanism here. And this 01:06:00guy would be sitting here, there was a pen assembly here. And so, as the water rose, this guy would turn up like here and it would when the water fell, it would turn back down. It would leave a trace on the chart of the ups and downs for a storm, and a typical storm would trace a pattern like this. It would go up fast, and then peak, and then gradually come back down.

SS: Really?

JM: Yeah. And there was a reversing, there's a real cool reversing mechanism in here. You can see it right here. When it turns --

SS: It looks like a bicycle chain.

JM: Yes, it is. And everything has to be working just right to get this reversal to work correctly. There was a lot of ways that this could get messed up and it's a real pain if this got messed up, to get it back right again.

SS: Now, what year did this technology came out, the one that you're showing us now?

JM: Well, some of our earlier instruments were from 1945. But personally, I think Leonardo Da Vinci designed this.

SS: Are you serious?

JM: (Laughs) No, but -- okay, and so these are some of our dataloggers. This is an old CR10, a 23X. This is a brand-new CR, an old 23X. A CR3000 with an internet, ethernet module. This is our telemetry. And so, here's an example of the programs. This is the old Edlog program, and we write it originally, and then every time we change it, we have to write down what we did to it. So this 01:08:00is an example of the old program. Then in the back here, I get the wiring diagrams, because I've got to know where every wire goes. So, I write the wiring diagrams from the point-of-view of the instrument where each wire goes, and then from the point-of-view from the datalogger where each wire is coming from. When we used to have multiplexers, I had to write the wiring from the multiplexer's point-of-view. So, I had three wiring sheets to keep everything straight.

SS: Wow.

JM: And so this is an example of the new program language. And the old one was Edlog, and the new one is Basic. So, basically, I've had to learn over again how to program.

SS: Especially because the new technology is just much faster and much more sophisticated, right? It's probably easier to use once you learn the new 01:09:00language. Correct?

JM: Yeah, it is. It's definitely, some things are much, much easier. Saturated vapor pressure, and vapor pressure is just now one line, whereas before we had to do sub-routines. So, that's much easier. And it's much shorter, but you still have to do wiring keys for everything to keep everything straight. Okay, so that's that. I think we're ready to go out in the field.

SS: I think so. I have no idea what's going on with the camera.

(Break in audio)

SS: We're back on.

JM: Okay, so now we're outside and we're at the Primary Met Station, and this is one of our benchmark stations. And so, the three other benchmarks are very similar to this. They have the same suite of instruments. So, we have a 10-meter tower. And on top of the tower at this site we have a sonic anemometer and an 01:10:00old propeller anemometer for wind speed. Then we have a 1.5-meter air temperature, 2.5-meter air temperature, 3.5-meter air temperature, and 4.5-meter air temperature sensors. The way that we ended up with that is that the standard height for air temperature is 1.5 meters. But we knew we couldn't do that up in the higher elevations because we get a lot of snow. And so, the first proposal was, well, let's send a technician up there, and we'll move the air sensor 1.5 meters off the snow level. So, he'll have to run up there every time it snows and move it up and down. And the technician said, "No, we can't do that." So, we came up with this system. And so, at the upper sites, I will have to remove the 01:11:00-- if the snow gets too deep -- I have to remove the 1.5-meter and the 2.5-meters, because if the snow gets over them, they'll just destroy the instruments. The instrument at 1.5-meters is H&P 45C that takes air temperature and relative humidity, and they cost about $600. So, we can't allow the snow to destroy our instruments. So, we also have four different soil temperatures, 10, 20, 50, and 100 centimeters deep.

SS: You mean, sensors?

JM: Temperature sensors.

SS: Temperature sensors, yeah.

JM: Soil temperature, and then we have soil moisture, four different instruments at the same depth. We have a pyranometer which measures solar radiation in 01:12:00watts-per-meter squared. We have a rain gauge. We have a snow depth sensor which is over our heads here. It's a sonic. It measures the snow -- it sends down an ultrasonic signal and listens for its return, takes ten measurements, and then throws out the bad ones. Then it gives you a number, and then, it gives you a second number to tell you what it thinks of the first number, whether it's good or bad.

SS: Okay.

JM: Then we have this net radiometer on this other arm out here. That's a four-component net radiometer, like I described before. And then we have a snow pillow over there. It's --

SS: So, what's a snow pillow?

JM: Well, a snow pillow is a 4-foot x 5-foot --

SS: Oh, it's the thing in the ground here?

JM: Yeah, it's a 4-foot x 5-foot sandwich of stainless steel. Inside it contains about 15-gallons of 50 percent water, 50 percent antifreeze mixture. It's kind of like a waterbed. And it's got a pressure transducer on it over here, and it can tell you how many pounds are sitting on it.

SS: Oh, I see. Okay.

JM: And so, it tells you the weight of the snow.

SS: John is putting his foot on it to exhibit its waterbed-like qualities. It's covered in mosses and lichens and grasses and weeds right now, so you can only see part of the cover. But it's kind of a plastic cover, right?

JM: No, this is all stainless steel.

SS: Oh, it is, okay.

JM: Yeah. And it gives you the weight of the snow pack. So, you've got the depth of the snowpack and the weight of the snowpack. But the weight of the snowpack 01:14:00gives you the SWE which is a very important number that we need to know. It's called the Snow Water Equivalent [SWE], if you melted down the snow, how much water would it give you. Hydrologists are very interested in knowing how much SWE is out in the field. Anne Nolan [OSU Faculty] is currently very interested in SWE throughout the Cascades. And this tells you whether, how our snow packs are doing, and Anne Nolan has just recently come out with information that says that our long-term snow packs are declining. And this is the number that she uses. Because we have a whole number of SNOTEL sites that are run in our area. And are you familiar with the SNOTEL sites?

SS: Aren't there some of them run by the U.S.G.S., also?

JM: This is USDA, I think so, is the SNOTEL program. They've been running for many years, and in our area, and I think since the 1930's. And we'll have to check that number, that date. But anyway, that's how we get our long-term snowpack. And of course, that's of primary importance in climate change, knowing what the long-term trend in snowpack is.

SS: Now, one of the chief snowpack scientists was Dennis Harr. Correct? For the whole Northwest, wasn't he? But he also did work in the Andrews.

JM: Yes. Dennis Harr.

SS: But it's been a while, though, right, since he's been around?

JM: Yeah, it's been a long time. I met Dennis Harr. He's a nice guy, I liked him.

SS: Okay, what about some of this other stuff here?

JM: Over here, this one's called the NADP, a collector for the National 01:16:00Atmospheric Deposition Program. I installed this sensor here in 1980. This is one of the ways we do precipitation chemistry. It has a lid that has a sensor on it, and a heated sensor. When rain falls, it shorts out this sensor, this lid moves over and uncovers this bucket, the rain will go and the precipitation will go into this bucket. Then, this sensor here is heated, so, when the rain stops, this connection, because it's heated, it'll evaporate off the water, and it'll open up again. Within 15 minutes or so after the rain stops, this lid will come over here and close over this bucket, so there's no evaporation losses, or 01:17:00evaporation losses are kept to a minimum.

SS: Minimum, right.

JM: And also, we don't want any little birds sitting up there and doing their business up on the --. That will absolutely ruin a sample.

SS: No guano accepted?

JM: No. (Laughter) And so, I will come out every Tuesday morning, and I will replace that, I will take, I will cap that bucket off and replace it with a sterilized bucket that they send me in a plastic bag. Then I will take that, the water sample, back to the lab, and I will decant off a 1-liter sample into a plastic bottle. And then, I will ship it to Champaign-Urbana. There are about 200 sites throughout the United States and Puerto Rico and Alaska. And they all send their samples, we all do the same thing, use the same equipment using the 01:18:00same techniques. Every Tuesday morning, all 200 sites ship a 1-liter bottle, if there has been precip in the past week, to Champaign-Urbana. Then they will do a real complex analysis of the precip chemistry. The upshot of this is that the Clean Air Act is really working. It shows a real improvement in the nation's quality of precip. And so --

SS: In other words, the acid rain effect, even in the areas that are downwind of heavy industrial areas when the sulfuric oxides or the nitrous oxides, all the things that cause acid rain, especially in the Northeast up into Canada, even those areas are showing marked improvements?

JM: Yes.

SS: Okay, cool. Back on.

JM: So, this is a real cool, what we call the NOAH 4 electronic rain gauge. And 01:19:00we've just in the last few years, started to install electronic rain gauges out in the field. Prior to that, we used what was called an old Universal rain gauge, and they were a pen-on-paper instruments, whereas this one's got a CR1000 datalogger inside here.

SS: So, what's this for?

JM: This is an Alter Shield, what's called an Alter Shield. It's to dampen the wind around the orifice, and to try to get the rain to fall more vertically into the orifice.

SS: Right. To get a more accurate reading.

JM: Yes. And so, this has got about a capacity of about a little over ten inches.

SS: So, how much is this one at now, for instance, comparing to what you showed in there about the buildup in the high-level gauges?

JM: Oh, this would --

SS: A different mechanism, but still --?

JM: Oh, yeah, this is a load cell technology.

SS: Okay.

JM: And this really wouldn't work at a high-elevation site because it doesn't have enough capacity.

SS: Okay, I got you. Because you wouldn't be able to get up there enough to keep it from overflowing or filling up, right?

JM: Right, right.

SS: That was my question.

JM: Because we can get a lot of rain, and it's only got room for, I think 14 inches is the absolute max. And we can get, like 8-inches of rain. At least a couple times per winter, we will get more than 8 inches of rain in a week. So, this one, you've got to drain out. You've got to put a tube down in here and suck the contents out using a little pump.

SS: Okay.

JM: This is an old MDN collector here from the Mercury Deposition Network. It 01:21:00was funded by the Oregon DEQ [Department of Environmental Quality]. We ran it for four years and then there was a gap when it was disconnected, and then we ran it for another year, and then the funding ran out again. But this was a measurement of mercury.

SS: In rain?

JM: In precipitation, yeah. And this is associated with the National Atmospheric Deposition Program, the NADP. There's a whole series of these sites throughout the United States. And Oregon is one of the few states that now does not have any working MDN sensors.

SS: Why?

JM: Funding. DEQ just doesn't, well, the funding ran out. But this was really, it was a flask, a jug down in here with a little bit of diluted acid to fix the 01:22:00rain. And the interesting story about this is they told me that my fillings in my teeth were the old, silver-mercury ones, you know?

SS: Right.

JM: And they said that if I breathed into the orifice, they could detect the mercury coming off my teeth.

SS: That's pretty sensitive.

JM: That's pretty sensitive. And my dentist, when he heard this story said, "Oh, John, that's great. I can change all those fillings for you."

SS: That's how many thousand dollars?

JM: (Laughs) That's what I've been doing. Every year, I'll get rid of an old filling, and I'm just about done getting all my old fillings removed and replaced.

SS: Oh, great.

JM: Well, that's the MDN sensor. And then here, we have an array of our old temperature, these are called radiation shields. This is for air temperature. 01:23:00And these are some of the old ones that we used to use. We used to be able to build these guys out of scraps in the bone yard for about fifty-cents a shelter. Then this is the standard way people take air temperature is in, these are called Gill Radiation Shields. And this is the way people do, they're still, they're a little bit better than these guys. These guys have real trouble with reflected sunlight off the snow.

SS: So, it gets a little bit of a false reading or a little dissonant?

JM: Oh, yeah, they'll be off by, given the worst possible conditions, the worst possible conditions are snow under the sensor, no wind.

SS: And bright sun?

JM: And bright sun. And these will be off, these will give you a reading that's about 7 degrees Celsius too high.

SS: That's pretty significant.

JM: That's very significant when we were looking for tenths of a degree Celsius change in the overall [temperature].

SS: Right, especially when you're trying to find indicators of climate change and things that are very important.

JM: Yeah, 7 degrees Celsius is a lot.

SS: Yeah, I mean, like for instance, if we get 7 degrees climate change, Celsius up, there aren't going to be any more ice caps.

JM: So, Gill Radiation Shields are a standard way of doing, these are R.M. Young Gill Radiation Shields, and they are better. But this is the best way of doing it. This is called, this is also from R.M. Young, and it's an Aspirated Radiation Shield. It has a fan in it that sucks in air right here, a constant flow of air over the radiation shield. This is our gold standard are far as air temperature. And we have to use solar panels and batteries to keep them working 01:25:00out in the field. The drawback is they take power.

SS: And it's high maintenance, in terms of labor and everything?

JM: No, it's not.

SS: No?

JM: All you've got to do is have solar panels and batteries. And a solar panel battery system, the batteries, they are not sealed batteries, that way they're cheaper batteries. They have to be, you have to keep the water level, look at the water level, fill it up to the max about twice a year, spring and fall. And then the solar panels last forever, unless they get hit by a tree. And the batteries have to be replaced every five years. But other than that, they're really reliable. It's a really good system. So, this is the gold standard for air temperature. And this is radiation. This is --

SS: Pyranometer, is that right?

JM: Pyranometer, yeah.

SS: Pyranometer.

JM: It's incoming solar radiation in watts-per-meter squared. And then, there's 01:26:00one facing down that gets reflected radiation in, off the snow or whatever.

SS: Now, how many of these arrays do you have out in the field, for instance?

JM: We call this the Primary Historical Radiation Shield Comparison, and we're just doing this here. This is the only site we're doing this comparison.

SS: Of the different technologies?

JM: Of historical radiation shields that we've used.

SS: So, this is a comparison. You're basically comparing the technology, so when you're looking either forward, backward or however, at statistics, you're able to build in a probability and an error into the calculus?

JM: Correct.

SS: So, you can cover yourself in terms of what the range of errors might be, correct?

JM: Correct, absolutely correct.

SS: All right, good.

JM: And I forgot to say that this is an old Cotton Shield Shelter. And this is the way that the Forest Service did air temperature starting in the 1800's. I 01:27:00think this was invented in the 1860's.

SS: Really?

JM: And so, this is the way temperature was done for many years. And it's got its problems, too. But it's actually fairly accurate.

SS: Let me take a picture of the box.

JM: Do you want this door open?

SS: Both. First, I want that. So, this is the kind that they've had, really, that early?

JM: Yep.

SS: What's inside it? Let me take a picture.

JM: Well, we've got a modern one. This is called a Campbell 107.

SS: What did they used to have?

JM: Well, they had pen-on-paper technology. Little charts on drums. And I think in the beginning, they had maximum/minimum thermometers, you know, that little thermometer with a little rod inside of it that you could get the maximum and 01:28:00minimum temperatures for the week.

SS: Right, right.

JM: The problem with this is you've got, well, they're not very compatible with high elevation, and the wood soaks up water. So, if you're trying to do a relative humidity test inside here, like we used to do, it'll just stay pegged out at 100 percent for a few days while it dries out. And then after a few days of good weather, then it'll finally start showing that.

SS: Just watch out for me with doors.

JM: Oh, and then over here, we have --

SS: John is now pointing to the area outside the inner enclosure to --

JM: A red building.

SS: A red building, yes.

JM: And this is our, what we call, our stand-alone rain gauge. It's got a 01:29:0020-inch diameter orifice. And the orifice is heated to 4-degrees Celsius all winter by a propane-powered tankless water heater. There's a temperature sensor in the orifice. And when the temperature falls below 4-degrees Celsius, a signal is sent to the datalogger. The datalogger tells a pump, a 12-volt pump, to turn on. The pump pumps a 50 percent water/50 percent antifreeze mixture, through a tankless water heater. The tankless water heater has just got the pilot light burning. When it senses fluid moving through it, it turns the main burner on. The hot water is then forced up through a series of copper pipes that are embedded in the orifice. And so, when the temperature sensor gets back up to 01:30:004-degrees Celsius, the datalogger turns the pump, the 12-volt pump, off. The fluid stops moving through the system. And then, the tankless water heater main burner turns off and goes back to the pilot light.

SS: I see.

JM: So, you have to have, it takes about 100 gallons of propane per winter to operate the system. And it also takes, in the upper elevations, three 120-watt solar panels and six 6-volt golf cart batteries that are hooked up in pairs, to give you 12 volts.

SS: Now, what's the white?

JM: The white is, this is Chris Thomas'.

SS: How would you describe that for the record in terms of its appearance, an 01:31:00inverted -- ?

JM: It's an inverted sound device. It's called a SODAR and it's like Sonar in water, except it's pointed up. And it sends out a beep and it listens for returns.

SS: It's for birds?

JM: No, it's for measuring wind movement up to, what the different masses of air up above to about 450, I think, meters up, above the sensor.

SS: Basically, right at the high ridge up above here would be about the level?

JM: Well, you'd have to check me on this. You'd have to talk to Chris Thomas. It might be feet.

SS: Okay.

JM: But there's five different arrays of sound-producing devices in the bottom, so you get an east-west, north-south, and then one, straight up. And so, there's 01:32:00five beeps in the progression, and this white box beside it is a computer that stores all the information. They're a standard operating device at a nuclear power plant because if a nuclear power plant has a release, you want to know which way it's drifting.

SS: Oh, all right.

JM: This will tell you which way the air is moving, and the lower air can be traveling in a different direction than the upper air.

SS: Do you think they had something like this at Fukushima?

JM: I bet, yeah. I think it's standard at all nuclear plants. And he's got another one out in the field, so we're trying to determine, he's trying to determine, the way the wind moves around in the Andrews.

SS: Interesting.

JM: As you can see right now, we're getting a down-slope effect. The wind is moving.

SS: Down the valley, down the ridge.

JM: Down the valley.

SS: Down the watershed.

JM: Yeah.

SS: We're looking, just for the record, we're looking basically northeast, which would be kind of up from the watershed, the kind of triangle-shaped geography that makes up the greater Lookout Creek watershed?

JM: Yeah, and we're getting a pretty strong downward downflow right now. (wind noise) It's good, switch around 180 degrees at a different time of the day.

(Break in audio)

SS: Interesting. Do you want to move on now?

JM: We're standing outside the Gray Barn. This was the first building on the Andrews, and it was just an open shed when, and I don't know when it was. I don't have a date as to when it was built, but it predated me.

SS: Is this the original warehouse, though? This is the original warehouse?

JM: Yeah.

SS: Okay, but it was painted a different color at one time, though, wasn't it?

JM: Well, at one time it was gray, but we changed the color.

SS: Oh, okay, right. That's what I thought.

JM: I think it was Cape Cod Gray.

SS: How ironic, huh? During the Kennedy Administration. (Laughs)

JM: And so, when we moved out at one point, this was turned into an office. This was my office at one point. For a short period of time, this was an office. It doesn't look like it now.

SS: Boy, it's cool in here. Now, it's just kind of a storage for whatever, correct?

JM: Yeah, it's definitely just a storage space now. It's been added onto. We 01:35:00built a little shed over here on the side.

SS: But this is the original warehouse that was here. Correct?

JM: Yeah.

SS: And it was actually gray?

JM: Yep, back in the day.

SS: Let me just stop this for a sec. (skip in audio) Now, continue.

JM: When we first came out there, all this was old-growth stumps. And so, I came out here, there was a contractor hired, and he had to come out here and clear all this area for building. One good story I had, he had a caterpillar tractor and we parked it right here, and he would go out to the stumps and take a chainsaw drill and drill a hole underneath the stump, and fill it with blasting mix. Then he put a piece of dynamite down in there to set the whole thing off. We were right here looking at a stump that was, I think it was if I remember 01:36:00right, over by near Roswell Ridge. We were both peeking up over the seat, looking at it, he touched it off and there was a huge explosion. And I thought, boy, that was great. We could see, so what we saw was a whole bunch of rocks flying at us, so we both tucked our heads down and then after the rocks bounced off the Cat, I jumped out and stood about right here, and I thought, "Boy, that was amazing to see." And out of the sky comes a huge piece of root.

SS: It flew up in the air hundreds of yards?

JM: Yeah, it landed about right there. (Laughs) So, the moral of the story is, wait a while after the explosion.

SS: In other words, watch out if you're playing with dynamite. (Laughter)

JM: And he built a huge pile up here, and then had the fans around it and it burned for days to remove all the slash and debris to clear the site. And then, 01:37:00like I say, we started moving in old trailers. We were above the, we had a trailer court above the Blue River Ranger Station. And we had a PNW trailer and an OSU trailer. And I lived in the OSU trailer.

SS: And that was here in this flat?

JM: No, that was above Blue River.

SS: Okay, that's what I meant, yeah. Above Blue River?

JM: Above the ranger station.

SS: Okay, so down in Blue River, the town?

JM: Yeah. We had a little trail that you could walk out of the back yard of the trailers and right down to the Blue River Ranger Station. In addition, PNW had a house, a regular house, where Al Levno and Ross Mersereau lived. Ross Mersereau lived with his family there for many years. And then we started moving stuff out 01:38:00here after it was cleared, the site was cleared, and we moved the two trailers, the PNW trailer and the OSU trailer out here. Then we got a whole bunch of trailers donated to us from a Forest Service unit in Oakridge, and they were double-wide trailers. And so, we had a whole collection of old trailers out here. And then, during the winter time, snow would come down heavy and you had to shovel the snow off the roofs or the trailers would collapse. Then we started saying, we had to build roofs over the trailers. So, this is one of --

SS: This is one of two or three that you had here?

JM: Yeah, this is called the Salt Salmon Pavilion now.

SS: Now, just for reference, Salt Salmon Pavilion is kind of the centerpiece of when the Andrews has a big shindig up here. [Large roof-structure.]

JM: H.J.A. Days.

SS: H.J.A. Days or a talk or just social gathering or a big dinner or what have you, when it's in a good season. They will be out here, but it was at one time serving a very utilitarian purpose of keeping the snow off of these trailers because of their flat roofs.

JM: Yeah, we had a big double-wide trailer in here and so we built this big structure. I was the crew leader on this project. And we had an OSU truck that we, a flatbed one-ton truck that we built an A-frame over, and then we would set these posts up. And there's a huge, there's a 3-foot by 3-foot by 3-foot square concrete foundation down in here that you can't see. But anyway, with that OSU truck, we would set these posts up and build this framework. And then, we had big trusses manufactured for us down in Eugene that were brought out and set up 01:40:00with a crane truck, and then, we built these roofs. It was a big project. We had this one here. We had one over there. And then we had two over at the Conference Hall. Terry [Cryer], when he came in the '80s, converted the two that were over there, and you can still see remnants of them inside the Conference Hall.

SS: So, the Conference Hall is kind of built over some of the foundational and infrastructural aspects of these, one of those shelters, I guess?

JM: Yeah. That shelter was torn down and demolished for the, over there, that one was torn down.

SS: And this is where the McRae Creek, you call it the Cafeteria or -- ?

JM: It's the Cafeteria/Laundry.

SS: Cafeteria/Laundry facility.

JM: Yeah, the roof structure was torn down at that site, so they could build the 01:41:00Cafeteria/Laundry. Then there was no concrete in here. Terry and I and others poured the concrete. Well, I had the concrete come up, and then, Terry's really good at finishing concrete, so we did this all ourselves in-house. Finished all the concrete.

SS: It's interesting that my question, with all the work that went into building one of these shelters, you wanted to say, why didn't you just build a dormitory or a house. Correct? (Laughter) It's a lot of work.

JM: So, anyway, I'll show you, if you want to see it. I'll show you inside here, you can see that the remains of one of the --

SS: I think I'll turn this off for a second.

(Break in audio)

JM: The Conference Hall.

SS: We are back inside the Conference Hall.

JM: And these are the old beams from the old roof structure right up here.

SS: Okay, so the old beams around the edge of the Conference Room were actually part of one of these structures.

JM: And there was a real ratty, rodent-infested double-wide right here. At one point that was our official headquarters where all of us had our offices.

SS: Was the rodent infestation really bad?

JM: It was.

SS: Did you ever have any Hantavirus problems there?

JM: You'd think we would, but I don't know. I think I've had so much exposure that by now I'm immune.

SS: You're immune, yes.

JM: And so, you can see, but Terry did all the remodeling here. He did, Terry did the painting. [Carpenter, craftsman, painter/artist].

SS: Yeah, I know, he's pretty amazing. Something else.

JM: And then Terry did the, I guess we're now in the kitchen quarters. And Terry did the fireplace. He does really beautiful work. But you can see the old structure here of the, here's the old structure again of the roofs.

SS: That's really cool that they used that. I mean, why not, you know? Especially, considering, this is some serious structure.

JM: Yeah, it sure is. And we got a tree cooler donated to us. And so, that was a project that I worked on. So, this is the old tree cooler.

SS: What do you mean, explain, tree cooler?

JM: It's a place where you can keep things, like a big refrigerated room. And it's a place where we used to store our water samples. We'd take all, we'd go, at each of the gauging stations, at many of the gauging stations, we'd have water collectors to measure stream water chemistry. Once you'd collect one of 01:44:00those samples, it has to remain cool until it's delivered to Corvallis.

SS: Which can take as long as how many days or --?

JM: Well, we'd collect them on a weekly basis, and then pour the samples together at a three-week period, and then ship them to Corvallis every three weeks.

SS: So, if you didn't have a cool facility, the biological and chemical content would be corrupted?

JM: Correct. So, that's what we used this, we now have another cooler in the mud room now that takes the place of this. And this is a storage facility where we'd keep all sorts of samples. And then the owl crew has a mouse condo someplace around here to keep all their mice.

SS: You mean, living mice?

JM: Oh, yeah, to attract the owls.

SS: Well, I figured that.

JM: Yeah, they got a whole mouse -- well, I don't know, a mouse condo.

SS: Oh, yeah, I can hear them (mouse squeaks). They're chirping around, or they're running around in there.

JM: Yeah, you can smell them, too.

SS: Wow.

JM: Yeah, they go through a lot of mice each year.

SS: I would think so.

JM: Okay, so now, let's -- okay.

(Break in audio)

SS: Okay. We're back on the record after a lunch break. And John has me in the, what area would you call this?

JM: This is the "Bone Yard," the official bone yard [old vehicles, parts, etc.] We're looking at snowcats. Snowcats are a big part of what I do. Because my sites are at high elevation and I've got to get up there to the sites every 01:46:00three weeks.

SS: As John just said, we are in what they call the "Bone Yard." Correct?

JM: That's correct. That's the official name. And we're looking at the snowcats. Now, we have an OSU snowcat, which we got a brand-new Sno-Cat from Tucker. Tuckers are manufactured down in Medford. And we just bought this about six years ago, paid about $120,000 for it. It was from a special NSF grant. And it's just a fantastic snow machine. It's got a blade on it. It's got four-wheel steering. It's got four-wheel drive. It's got rubber tracks, which is a huge improvement over the old steel tracks because you can, now you can drive up and down the roads and give you a smooth ride.

SS: The steel's just really rough.

JM: Just beats you up.

SS: Yeah.

JM: And it's got a diesel Cummins engine with an Alison transmission. It's 01:47:00really a modern snowcat with really good features, so improves our winter access. And it's got room for five people inside of it.

SS: Five? Really, so you could take a whole crew up there to do whatever work you had to do?

JM: Yeah. And it's able, a lot of times in our winter work, we'll come across trees that are down across the road. Having a blade on the Sno-Cat and a Sno-Cat to push the tree off the road, is a huge improvement.

SS: Do you always bring a chainsaw with you just in case you have to cut something up?

JM: I bring two, maybe more, chainsaws with me, and all the tools, and extra chains and everything. They stay in this big toolbox in the back.

SS: Got you.

JM: So, this is a radical improvement over trying to do things with a snowmobile because we've got so much stuff we have to take, all the equipment to repair 01:48:00anything that may be bad, water sample bottles. Of course, we've got to take snowshoes, and like I said, chainsaws.

SS: The second snowcat here, what's the manufacturer, what's the year?

JM: This is the Forest Service snowcat. And this is --

SS: Also a Tucker?

JM: Also a Tucker. It's a 1970's model Tucker with the engine up front and the steel-belted treads.

SS: This is the one that I saw a picture of Dennis Harr, isn't it?

JM: Well, we've had a series of snowcats. Our first snowcat was an Imp with a Ford industrial four, straight four-cylinder engine, in it. It was a really bad machine. It broke down, it was incredibly loud. You had to wear earplugs and earmuffs at the same time.

SS: To drive it?

JM: Inside, yeah. And it had real expensive, frequent breakdowns. Then we got an 01:49:00LMC, which is a Logan Manufacturing Corporation. It was a different style of snowcat. And it was you had to be a contortionist to work on it. It took, I think, four of us to change a fan belt in it.

SS: Wow.

JM: Because the engine was all encased in the inside.

SS: So, what kind of engine does this one have?

JM: This one's got, I think, a Chrysler 8 in it. It's a real good engine.

SS: A V or a straight-line?

JM: It's got a V8 in it.

SS: How about the other one, the other truck or the new one?

JM: Oh, it's got a Cummins diesel in it.

SS: Okay, that's right, you said that.

JM: Yeah, it's really, it's --

SS: So, do you still use the old one occasionally, or just use the new one?

JM: Pretty much, once you've driven in the new one, you just don't go back to the old one.

SS: But do you have to occasionally run that, just to make sure it doesn't lock 01:50:00up and freeze up?

JM: Yeah, we ran it once this year, Greg [Downing] took it out on a trip once this last winter. And prior to that, we'd just fire it up and move it around a little bit in the shop area.

SS: Just to keep it from --

JM: Yeah. It's definitely the backup vehicle.

SS: Keep the oil moving, keep the mechanisms from locking up.

JM: Oh, yeah.

SS: Now, how much gas would this take to go up to the top of the mountain, for instance, and come back?

JM: It's a diesel. We run, in the winter time, we run a Number 2 Off-Road Diesel, which is the winter, also called the winter blend. And it's actually pretty efficient. It doesn't take that much more. With the older Tuckers, we were figuring we were burning about five gallons an hour.

SS: Wow. How long does it take to get up the top, let's say, up to Carpenter Mountain just from one, or Frissell Ridge, or anywhere that's high?

JM: It just depends upon the snow conditions. If you go out right after a storm when the snow is light and fluffy, you can sink in all the way up to the door. 01:51:00In conditions like that, you can only drive it at maybe less than five miles an hour. But on the other hand, after the snow is consolidated, and if we get east winds where it freezes up, it's really cold, you can drive this over the snowpack and not even see where you've been. You can be right on top of it. Then the maximum speed for these Sno-Cats is about 15 miles per hour.

SS: Interesting. Very cool.

JM: It's not my department. Now, there's Terry's house over there. There's the new "Green Building" out back.

SS: The new Green Building, you're referring to the new dormitory, or whatever you want to call it, apartment?

JM: Well, Mark's [Schulze] lodging, and apartments.

SS: Right.

JM: Mark has the upstairs, and then, we have like the writers stay down below. There's two apartments down below.

SS: Mark Schulze is the Andrews Forest Site Director.

JM: Yeah.

SS: Okay, I'll turn this off.

JM: Fortunately, we have a backhoe now. This comes in really handy when we get to rock slides on the road.

SS: Do you take this up maybe, not the Sno-Cat, or maybe with the Sno-Cat, if you had both, right?

JM: No, one or the other. And so, I use it to move logs. When we have old-growth logs fall down across the road and there is no snow. Of course, it doesn't do very good in the snow at all.

SS: No, because those tires are too slick.

JM: Yeah, but it's come in handy very many times moving rock debris off the road. For three main things, moving rocks off the road, moving trees off the road, and clearing culverts. The Forest Service budget for road maintenance has gone, when we first got here, the Forest Service had a huge budget crew and 01:53:00equipment for doing road maintenance. And now that's all, the crew and the equipment is almost completely gone away. In fact, this is going to be the last backhoe in the Willamette here shortly. Other than that, the only thing that they have is one snow plow. So, we've got to take care of the road, all during the winter, because we're the only ones that travel the road in the winter time. And then, we've also got to take care of the road between here and Highway 126. If nobody else has, we'll plow it. So, we've got to clear all the snow in here in the winter time. So, Terry and I take turns plowing the road. We've got a snowplow that we put on Terry's truck, and we will plow the roads between here and 126 as often as we need to. And then, we'll also take care of all the trees 01:54:00that come down between here and 126. And like I say, we've got trees that fall down, old-growth trees that fall down across the road that need to be moved. We have to move them out. And the culverts, too. Right now, we've got a new little reservoir up on the way to the Hi-15 because a culvert plugged up. And so, we're going to have to clean that out and get that culvert working again. So, the backhoe's really essential. This is Adam Kennedy here. He's our wonderful new --

SS: He's the data manager.

JM: What else, he's everything else, too, right?

SS: We've already described you in this ongoing interview. Say, hi, Adam?

Adam Kennedy: Hello, there, everybody, how are you?

SS: Well, anyway, Adam is somebody that we may interview later on. But right now, this is part of the Andrews history project.

AK: Nice.

SS: And so, we're doing an interactive field trip and oral history interview with John Moreau all day.

AK: Cool.

SS: And you happened run into the middle of it.

AK: It looks exciting.

SS: And it's very exciting.

AK: Nice.

SS: Do you have anything controversial to say?

AK: No.

SS: Just joking.

AK: See you guys.

SS: See you.

JM: The rest of the stuff, I didn't have anything to do with. Up here, we've got the gas house that Terry built. And then beyond it is the flume, U.S.G.S. flume. I haven't had anything to do with that whatsoever. And the "Green House" was all contracted out. We didn't have anything to do with that.

SS: All right. Well, I say, we go load up and get out into the back country.

JM: Okay, that sounds good.

[Start of Inteview Segment 2]

SS: We are on the record with the next file. And we are going to go up the road to Watershed 1, with John Moreau here on our continuing interview/field trip. And now John's going to talk a little bit and take things over when he has to. Okay.

JM: Are we on?

SS: Yes, we're on.

JM: So, we're here at the gate to the upper landing at Watershed 1. And I've 01:56:00constructed and installed the gates, so we've got similar gates at Watershed 10 and Watershed 2, and Watershed 1 here. A little side project, I took a course. Art [McKee] always wanted us, he was really encouraging towards us to further our education. So, he would allow us to go on field trips, and learning trips, to like Campbell [Instruments]. He was always in favor of that. And so, Terry and I took a welding course at LCC [Lane Community College in Eugene], and so I got to learn to do stuff like this. So, that was a good thing that Art always said. He was always, whenever I'd come up with some new, a learning project, to further my career, Art was always in favor of it.

SS: I got you. Repeat what you just said (noise).

JM: So, Art wanted me to go to a computer course at LCC. I took Excel and Fortran programming. And so, it's been a constant learning experience here at the HJA. You'd never, I could never sit still and I always had to learn new things. Every year, I'd have to learn something new. Down there, I'll give you the full tour (water rushing sound).

Standing at the head of the stairs to the Watershed 1 tower that I and a crew built for Barbara Bond, in, I think it was the early 2000's. It's in my notes, what year we built it. But this is a 90-foot tower, I do believe (water rushing 01:58:00sound) is for cold-air drainage [measure].

SS: Which creek is this, by the way? JM: We're in the Watershed 1 drainage, and this is Watershed 1.

SS: So, there's not a name for the creek?

JM: Watershed 1 Creek.

SS: Oh, really, okay. No romantic name?

JM: No. That's Watershed 1. And so, I built the little shed for her and I built the bridge for her, and we had another guy build the steps here. But it's all an associate, Barb Bond came out here and started doing sap-flow transects where she would (sound of birds) put sap-flow sensors in trees on a transect that were perpendicular to the creek, and to study transpiration in trees. The first 01:59:00sensors were really power hogs. So, I had to build steel towers that were 10-foot tall, and put as many as, I think, six solar panels on top, and then as many as 24 batteries down in the center to power. And then, we'd run the power about 400 feet away from the solar towers to her transects using three-gauge wire. So, it was real, pretty labor-intensive, to do Barb Bond's sap-flow sensors. This was another project that she had, cold-air drainage, and so, we've got the 90-foot tower has been rigged with all sorts of sensors. When Barbara Bond retired, she passed this work on to Chris Thomas, who's currently running 02:00:00it. And so, there's all sorts of equipment in the shed now, some of which is, takes in air and analyzes it for CO2 content.

SS: Basically, the different heights on this tower are for a variety of reasons; the chemical makeup of the air, temperatures, wind speed, basically, the whole dynamic down in this drainage in this little canyon here?

JM: Wind direction. Yeah, because air flows like a liquid. And so, (sound of birds) we have really-strong cold-air drainage days where there's a real pronounced wind coming down out of the watershed. Whereas, if we get a big, warm, wet storm off the Pacific, everything kind of, there is no pronounced air flow. And so, when, as climate changes, colder drainage is going to act like a 02:01:00buffer for some areas. So, it's going to be, it's very important in mountainous terrain to know about cold-air drainage. We can go down there and open it up and take a look inside if you want to?

SS: Yeah, let me take an overview picture. Okay, go.

JM: So, we're here at the Watershed 1 shed that I built for Barb Bond. Now, Barb Bond has turned everything over to Chris Thomas. And Chris Thomas has a bunch of really high-tech gear in here to sample the air, monitor the carbon dioxide, and do other things. And he's got some, whoops, sorry....

SS: It's okay.

JM: He's got a couple of CR3000's here with the ethernet cable. So, all his data is being --

SS: Beamed up to --?

JM: Yeah, it's using radio telemetry. It's beamed up to a ridge that has a radio 02:02:00relay station on it, and then from there it's beamed down to the headquarters. And so, Chris Thomas can sit in his office --

SS: In Corvallis?

JM: In Corvallis, and look at all the sensors and the data that's being generated. Not only that, but on his SODAR site that we talked about before.

SS: Down by the main met station, right?

JM: Right, he can change the program and reset the computer all from his office in Corvallis.

SS: Pretty cool.

JM: Yeah. It really is, I didn't think it was going to be that big of a change. You know, I'm an old guy where you go out and manually download the data and then bring it back to the office, and then put it on the inner-web. But it's amazing to have the scientist be able to communicate directly to the equipment, and be able to do whatever he likes.

SS: Now, what is all this in here?

JM: Well --

SS: A computer, obviously, then you've got?

JM: He's got an air sampler. And this samples from different heights.

SS: Yeah, and that's up on the tower, right?

JM: On the tower, yeah. Air samplers, and I know he's got a carbon dioxide meter in here. It'd be much easier for Chris to explain it to you, but we've got many, on that local live area, we've got a whole bunch of different, maybe a dozen at least, graphs of the different outputs coming out of here.

SS: Now, what's the gas for, is that oxygen, or what is that?

JM: No, I think it's for standards to calibrate the equipment.

SS: Oh, okay. How much maintenance does this equipment take here?

JM: For Chris Thomas, it's a bunch. For me, it's nothing. Right now, all I'm 02:04:00concerned with is making sure that, it sucks down a lot of power. In fact, if we did not have AC, it would probably drain the batteries in just a few short days, if that. And so, my only concern here is making sure that we've got lots of power to run everything.

SS: Cool.

JM: Chris Thomas has graduate students to maintain things, and himself. Chris Thomas is an incredibly-talented person. He's a master at all these machines and programming, and he's really amazing when it comes to the new technology.

SS: Okay, go on now.

JM: Okay, so Barb Bond wanted to transect a forest, the eight stations, perpendicular to the creek, on Watershed 1. And so, we built these stations, and 02:05:00they were incredibly labor-intensive because they required a lot of power. For instance, on the north-facing side, we had to climb a tree on top of the ridge. Teva White helped me with this. And we had to go up 90 feet on this old-growth tree to find a sunny spot.

SS: Is that why you had to take that tree-climbing class then in Dorena?

JM: It was one of the reasons. Well, "Big Tree" was the main reason, but this was a secondary reason. And so, we climbed the tree and we hung the solar panels up there, and then we packed batteries. And these batteries each weigh 60 pounds.

SS: Sixty pounds on a tree?

JM: No, just the solar panels were on the tree. The batteries were on the ground.

SS: Okay, I got you.

JM: And so, we had, each station required six of these batteries. So, we had to pack six of these batteries all the way up.

SS: And how'd you protect the batteries from the elements?

JM: Oh, we had to -- SS: Build a little house, like a dog house or something?

JM: Well, no, we had big Tupperware containers.

SS: Oh, I got you.

JM: But anyway, that project ended, and the batteries, they're only useful, a useful battery life's about five years. So, the batteries were dead and we had to pull all that stuff out. At that time, we had a sheriff's crew, an inmate work crew. A sheriff would drive up from Reedsport, of all places.

SS: Really, wow.

JM: And not get here till about 10:00, and he'd have as many as a dozen inmates. These were all strong men usually. So anyway, we had to pack the batteries out, all these dead batteries out. It was a sheriff, me, and about a dozen inmates. We hiked up this trail, and we were packing, we had successfully packed out all 02:07:00the dead batteries out, from the south-facing transect and we were working on the north-facing transect, and I had a couple of inmates with me and was up high on the hill. And I heard some shouting down below me, and so I figured it didn't sound right. And so, the inmates and I walked down and we'd found the sheriff had lifted one of the batteries and was trying to walk down the trail with it, when he turned his ankle and, in fact, broke his ankle. He could not walk. And so, we got on either side of him, and packed him down a little ways, but he couldn't take that. So, we had to sit him down and then I had to go back to the headquarters, and then, call the sheriff's department and tell them that the sheriff had broken his ankle and couldn't move. They had to send another sheriff 02:08:00out, and a medical crew, but the inmates were all short-timers, and so, were on their best behavior. At the end of the day, they were such nice guys you'd want to invite some of them home for dinner.

SS: Almost.

JM: Almost. (Laughter) But anyway, the inmates were all on their best behavior. We ended up getting a tarp and putting the sheriff in the tarp.

SS: And carrying him down like in a tarp-type of structure, tarp stretcher?

JM: Yes. And then we got down here and it was a whole scene going on down here. There were medical people, sheriff's people.

SS: Did the news show up?

JM: No, thank God. (Laughs) Okay, that's the end of the story.

SS: All right.

JM: The sheriff and the inmate crew has never shown up at the Andrews again.

SS: So, so much for ecological research and prison reform. (Laughter)

(Break in audio)

SS: Okay, we are on the side of which road?

JM: We're on the 1506, just a couple hundred yards into the Andrews, and we're standing at an area that's got false brome. In 2006, I got a pesticide applicator's license from the Oregon Department of Agriculture. Since then, every summer, I go out and try to find, I will flag, first flag, and then spray, individually spray, each false brome plant. The Forest Service has generously donated a budget every summer so I can, that we can hire a couple of people to 02:10:00help me. These people will come out and go ahead and flag the false brome, and this year is an unusually early year for the false brome.

SS: Is this grass, the false brome? Right?

JM: Yeah, this is how you can tell false brome. It's got this unique color, this apple-green color. And then it's also got these hairs. If you look real closely, there's hairs on the edge on the margin. But right now, it's easy to spot. You can see the hairs right there on the edge, can you see that?

SS: Yes, I do.

JM: Right now, it's easy to spot. At some times of the year, it's not as easy.

SS: Now, are you combining chemical and manual methods of removal?

JM: Yes, we are.

SS: Combination of the two?

JM: Yes, we are. We've got a large infestation of false brome. And we know from 02:11:00our experiences from looking at the McDonald-Dunn Forest, if we don't do anything, it could be a disaster, because false brome can grow under the canopy. It likes these dappled areas under the canopy. It does well in that kind of conditions. And it could, like in McDonald-Dunn, it has eliminated all the other native vegetation. It can form dense stands of just 100 percent pure false brome.

SS: Where is the original source of false brome? JM: It originally came from southern Europe and northern Africa. Also, it's in Switzerland. So, it can grow at high elevations, too. If we don't do something about it, it could take over completely. So, we put a lot of effort into --

SS: Keeping it at bay?

JM: Well, doing the best we can to eradicate it. So, right now, I've got Ari and 02:12:00Sarah out.

SS: Those are two grad students?

JM: No, Ari's a grad student, Sarah is not, and they're out flagging today. We might run into them. And they're both really-good at spotting false brome. As you can tell, it takes an eye.

SS: Now, what are those other grasses that they did not flag?

JM: Oh, those are native plants. We definitely don't want to spray the natives. We want to keep them nice and healthy, but we want to make sure that we get all the false brome. So, we spray. There's different sets of rules. There's EPA rules, of course, on the pesticide. There's ODA rules about how we can spray.

SS: Oregon Department of Agriculture?

JM: Correct. Then there's Forest Service rules on top of that. And so, 02:13:00basically, it's a two-percent solution of the active ingredient glyphosate and it's name is AquaMaster. Then we combine it with a surfactant. And the Forest Service has strict guidelines about what surfactant you can use. And so, it's a two-percent solution. Then I have to use a backpack sprayer. I can't use any power-driven equipment. I have to spray each individual plant, and then, I will come back in two weeks to see if it's dead. And if it's dead, then I will remove the flag. We've reduced our amount from when I initially started, I sprayed 100 gallons the first year of spray.

SS: What chemicals do you use?

JM: Glyphosate and a surfactant, a two-percent solution.

SS: Okay, right, you said that.

JM: And last year, I used twelve gallons.

SS: That means that you're doing good, because that's a lot less. Right?

JM: Yeah, it's a lot less. But we've got to keep going back. And as you can tell, this is an old site. You can tell it's an old site. But the edges of the old sites keep coming back in. So, we cut.

(Break in audio)

SS: Oh, I'm sorry, I had a wrong thing turned on (recorder).

JM: Okay. With false brome, you have to get it before, both flag it and spray it before the bracken can get up and get over the top of it. Because once the 02:15:00bracken gets up there, you can't see either the flags or the plants.

SS: Got you.

JM: So, we have to move up. We start in the lower portion of the Andrews and then move up over the weeks to the higher elevations.

SS: Got you.

(Break in audio)

SS: Tell me what that is?

JM: We're at the Lookout Creek Gauging Station for the Army Corps of Engineers. It's a cable with a cable car that goes out across the creek, and then, they drop a stream-flow device down into the water to gauge it.

SS: Kind of old-school?

JM: Yeah, it's been there a long time. (Short break in audio) CS2 Met. This is the original met [meteorological] station on the Andrews. It's been here since, I believe, 1952, and it's a rain gauge and an air temperature site. We've recently upgraded it with an electronic rain gauge.

SS: How far up there is it?

JM: Not far, a couple hundred yards. And it was also, yeah, this is the site of Big Tree.

SS: You want to show this to me then? Okay, got you.

JM: Yeah, we'll go in here.

SS: Okay, I'll turn this off.

(Break in audio) JM: Standing at, are we on?

SS: Yes, you're on.

JM: Okay, we're standing at CS2 Met, which is the original Met station at the Andrews. I think it's, I believe it was started in 1952.

SS: This would have been Roy Silen that would have installed this or monitored it anyway. Right?

JM: I don't know who set it up originally. I know Levno [Al] was --.

SS: He was after that, but yeah.

JM: Yeah, Levno and Mersereau [Ross] were running it when I first got here, and there was a cotton shelter here. At one point, we had a hygrothermograph in it, another pen-on-paper instrument. But the interesting thing, yeah, I had it a drum.

SS: The wheel? Yeah.

JM: Yeah, it had a drum. And there was pens on it. But the interesting thing about that instrument was that it had air temperature and relative humidity. For 02:17:00the relative humidity part, they used horse hair, and as the horse hair got more moist, I guess, it lengthened. And as it got drier, it shortened up. But anyways, it was a horsehair instrument.

SS: That sounds very technical. (Laughs)

JM: And then we've had a rain gauge here, and then, recently, we added another electronic rain gauge. You can see it right behind the old Universal, this is a Universal rain gauge. It's another pen-on-paper instrument. You can see the drum and you can see the pen.

SS: Is that leakage there on the bottom, that purple thing?

JM: Yeah, that's ink. That was another problem with pen-on-paper instruments is when it rains, the ink absorbs water and it swells up, and then runs all over the paper.

SS: And so that's what that is right there?

JM: Yeah, that's real common. It's real common for me when I change a chart to end up with purple on my fingers.

SS: You've got to wash your hands with heavy soap, right? JM: It stays on there. And so, you can see, so that's one problem. Another problem you can see, is that the chart has migrated up. It's no longer on, when I put it on, it was on the bottom roll. And as it's moved, it's come up, oh, about an eighth of an inch off the bottom. So, and then, the chart --

SS: Look at all that spilled ink on the bottom there.

JM: Yeah. And so, and another thing is the drum doesn't stay, isn't completely perpendicular, so it wobbles as it turns. A little bit of a wave.

SS: So, you get a little bit of a wobble or --

JM: Yeah, even on a day there's no precip, there will be a little up-and-down movement on the line.

SS: Okay, I got you.

JM: So, you've got to interpret that. So, but it's all, the electronic rain 02:19:00gauge is much more, it's got algorithms in there to take out all the defects.

SS: So, it basically -- ?

JM: Even if it evaporates, even if it goes down, it can handle that.

SS: But these machines, these are not connected with the telemetry, you've got to come up and take these out or measure them?

JM: Yeah, I have to download that onto a storage device, and then manually carry it back to the office.

SS: But you still monitor it?

JM: Oh, yeah.

SS: So, this has been 62 years that this machine's been --?

JM: Yeah, that's the thing about long-term records, once they get long-term.

SS: You've got to keep them?

JM: Yeah.

SS: You've got to keep going?

JM: Absolutely.

(Break in audio)

SS: Realizing that today, just today. Okay, tell me about Big Tree?

JM: Big Tree was the first tree that I climbed in a professional way. We rigged it up. I was the first person to climb it. We had it rigged with air temperature 02:20:00sensors and wind-speed sensors and wind-speed wind-direction sensors, all the way from top to bottom. We had a mast over the top of it, so we could get the sensors over the top of the canopy. And we ran it for four years. And on a day like today, where there's going to be large diurnal fluctuations between the temperatures, it produced these wonderful air temperature charts showing the difference between what the canopy does to the air temperatures, how the lower air temperatures are buffered, and the canopy acts like an insulating blanket. But anyway, it was a real nice project.

And right now, we have a graduate student that's working with Chris Thomas, and 02:21:00she has installed some gear up there. She's installed an infrared camera, and she's looking at, I think she's looking at this hemlock tree over here to see how it progresses. I think she's got some equipment up in this hemlock, too.

SS: Have they ever talked about putting a canopy crane up here like they have at Wind River?

JM: You know, not really. Not that I've heard about, but I'm pretty far down the chain-of-command. I did go up to there and ride up in the gondola with Jerry Franklin before they - [removed Wind River Canopy Crane].

SS: That's pretty special.

JM: Yeah, it was. That was terrific.

SS: Excellent. Okay, go.

JM: You can see other trees have lines in them, too. See, there's a line in that 02:22:00back tree. There's a line in this forward tree. A bunch of these trees have been climbed in here. So, this is an active site here.

SS: Is there any reason why that tree was chosen other than the fact it's just an old-growth tree that's probably 200 feet or so high?

JM: Well, it was a good climbing tree. And we chose it because it's a full tree. It's got a full canopy. And it's not leaning.

SS: It's got a nice, balanced crown, too. Right? JM: Yeah. I thought it was a pretty-big tree, but once I got up there, we realized that it was just a medium-sized tree compared to its neighbors. In fact, that there were bigger trees down below. We used it for Barbara Bond, and Tom Pipker, a graduate student of Barb Bond, and he used it in his study to measure how mosses wetted up and released their moisture over time.

(Break in audio)

SS: Okay, we're back on. We're still here right in the same area. And go on, John?

JM: Oh, I'm standing on a concrete pad. This was one of Barb Bond's original power sites for sap flow transects. And so, I poured this concrete pad, which I probably shouldn't have, seeing how it was only a temporary project. And I built a tower here, and I put solar panels up on the top, and then I had batteries here at about waist height. Then we had big cables running off into the forest for the sap-flow sensors. And this site is a real-bad site in the winter time. The south, you don't get much sun at all.

SS: Because that's because, we're on the northern exposure of this --

JM: Yeah, that's where you want. And the sun actually dips behind in there when it's low.

SS: So, it's really dark.

JM: We weren't getting enough power in the winter time, so I would have to charge a whole series of batteries over at the compound, because she wanted it 02:24:00going early before the sap started flowing. So, we had to get a real early start on this. If I remember right, like in March or real early April. And so, I would have to charge a whole array of batteries over at the shop, and then bring them out here by truck, and then back up here and swap out dead batteries for new batteries. It's real labor-intensive.

SS: We are standing now at the base of Big Tree.

JM: Big Tree. And come over here.

SS: Okay, I got it.

JM: Okay, so this is the route that I took to climb Big Tree. This is where I'd have my rope up here. And as you can see, well, it's clear for a very long way. The first branch is at 92 feet.

SS: Holy cow. JM: Then we had all the sensors come into a junction box, and the 02:25:00junction box was at 175 feet. One afternoon, we tried to come out here first thing in the morning and get going real early, and be down on the ground in the afternoon, because the afternoon is when the wind would pick up. But one afternoon, we had a lot of work to do and I was still up there at 175 feet when the wind came up. I could look from 175 feet straight down to this spot, and as I was looking, I was watching the bowl do this S-thing like a piece of spaghetti. And I thought, "Boy, if I keep looking at that, I'm going to puke." So, I had to stop looking at that and just focus in on the --

SS: A little vertigo, huh?

JM: Yeah.

SS: How did you get over that when you first started climbing the big trees? I mean, a lot of people, you know, would get pretty spooked by that?

JM: Well, you've just got to concentrate on what's right in front of you. 02:26:00Because when you're up in the tree, all the trees are not doing the same thing. Each tree is doing its own thing.

SS: So, you can get motion sickness, almost, right?

JM: Oh, yeah, if you're looking at the other trees. Because they're all, each one of them's doing its own thing. And it's the same way on the tower over at Watershed 1. When you're climbing up when you're not above the canopy over there, the trees will be moving, but your mind thinks that it's you and the tower that's moving.

SS: So, you, yeah.

JM: So, you have to focus just right in on stuff that's just a couple feet away.

SS: Cool.

(Break in audio)

SS: We are now by Watershed 3. Correct, John?

JM: Yeah. We had a big blow-out here. Watershed 3 is real slumpy, and it's a partial cut up there. One of the roads, I can't remember what year it was, but 02:27:00one of the roads up in Watershed 3 gave way, plugged up the creek and formed a temporary dam. Then, the whole thing washed out, and we ended up losing the gauge station and this road. This whole road had to be rebuilt.

SS: In what year?

JM: Well, I can't remember what year it was.

SS: Was that '96, the big flood?

JM: Maybe. And so, this whole area had to be rebuilt. And I can remember, we had to make a quick decision about whether we were going to leave the snow-cat on this side of the break or the other side. And we ended up leaving it on the other side of the break.

SS: So you could get to the high country till this all got fixed?

JM: Yeah. But, we had to go back and try to find, we had to bring the backhoe up here and try to find the flume again. The flume was under a lot of debris, and we had to search for the flume.

SS: Oh, okay.

JM: The gauge station was completely wiped out, and parts and pieces of it ended up in the reservoir [Blue River]. The same thing happened to Watershed 10 twice. There were big events that wiped out the gauge station.

SS: And that's way up high by Carpenter, right?

JM: No, it's down low over here.

SS: Oh, okay, my fault, 6, 7 and 8 are the higher ones, right?

JM: Right.

SS: Yeah, okay.

JM: Okay.

SS: John, talk about roads and road conditions?

JM: Well, I think that the road, our current road conditions, are the worst they've ever been.

SS: And that is because of?

JM: Well, the budgets are just not there. If you're logging, they will fix up the roads like, for instance, they're logging over on Deer Creek right now, and the roads are in good shape. But our roads are really in poor condition, 02:29:00especially this section of 1506.

SS: Now, what can you do in terms of just with your local abilities, labor and technologies, to at least make some of the stuff less problematic, or is there anything you can do?

JM: There's nothing we can do. It takes gravel and equipment, and we don't have either. It's getting to the point where you need a four-wheel drive, almost.

SS: That's what I was talking about. I would never take my Prius up here. I wouldn't even take in a slightly higher clearance economy car up.

JM: It's the reason why the backhoe is important, because it's the same thing for the culverts. We've got a culvert plugged up on the Hi-15 road right now that's making a little, new reservoir on the Andrews, and we'll have to take the 02:30:00backhoe up there this summer once the stream flows get lower, and see if we can't get that culvert working.

SS: So, you don't want to have a big dam build up and then break, and cause a lot of damage, right?

JM: Right. We had that happen on the upper 1506 up near, on the way to Up-Lo, nobody'd taken care of the culverts for a long time, many years. And it was just a cascade effect. One culvert failed, then it built up, and then another failed, and about a half a dozen culverts up there failed, and it ended up really causing problems with the main road, with the creek running across the road or down the road. So, they had to come in and rebuild the road. Anyway, I took the backhoe up there and cleaned all those culverts out, so, we haven't had any 02:31:00problems for the last two years. But that's one of the jobs that we've kind of taken over now, keeping an eye on the culverts. Also, Lookout Creek is starting to eat into the abutment of the concrete bridge.

SS: The one down below where we are now?

JM: No, the one we're coming up to right now.

SS: Oh, okay.

JM: So, this could require some work if we get a big storm. (Noise from driving). That was an owl crew member. That was Liz from the owl crew.

SS: But this bridge right here?

JM: Yeah, you can see where the creek's eating out this side of the abutment right here.

SS: Oh, yeah. So, that could be a problem down the road, or maybe pretty soon? Boy, this really is getting worse, I can tell.

JM: Well, and you can see in here that we really, desperately need some brushing, so that we can see around the corners, too.

SS: Yeah, because that can cause a head-on collision without people really going that much too fast.

JM: Yeah, yeah. You can see how tall these alders in the ditch have become.

(Break in audio)

JM: This is the McRae Creek Bridge, and it used to be a wooden bridge. Then we had a big flood event and both abutments got washed out, and the creek, we could no longer get across here, and the bridge on one end fell down. So, the guard rails were wooden and they were bolted on, so we had to unbolt them and make our 02:33:00own little trail by using them to get a snowmobile off to the other side. And then we would pack five-gallon cans of gasoline over to the other side to fill up the snowmobiles so we could have access past this point one winter.

SS: Wow.

JM: There was also a big mudslide across the other road leading up to the Hi-15, and we had to build a corduroy road using logs to get through the mud, the deep mud.

SS: Corduroy, that's a term for using logs, so you have the corduroy appearance, in other words?

JM: Yeah, just lay one log after another on the mud.

SS: Got you.

JM: So, you can get across. (Driving, rain/water noise)

SS: What is this, a Dodge or -?

JM: It's a Ford. Here's another little spot where the creek is starting to eat on the road right here.

SS: Yeah, I see that. (Driving noise) Nature keeps on going. Now, that's Lookout Mountain, right, there? Now, did Lookout Mountain ever have a lookout tower on it?

JM: No.

SS: I didn't think so.

JM: Carpenter did, and Frissell did, but not Lookout.

SS: Now, you know that, the photograph from Carpenter Mountain that's in the office?

JM: Yeah.

SS: It's got the three panoramas? Now, do you know the origin of that?

JM: No.

SS: This is something I found out in my research, even though I'm not doing a formal analysis yet. That was during the original survey in 1933, and they were 02:35:00looking for lookout tower locations and were surveying the region, they used an Osborne Fire Finder and mounted a camera on it, and that's why you got the calibrations that are like that. In fact, it's probably the same Osborne that's still up there with the guy now, but that's how that it was. And the one that you've got there is probably a scan and a print of a scan, and during this research, I found the original.

JM: Really?

SS: Yeah. So, anyway, I just thought that was kind of cool.

JM: That's cool.

SS: But no, the Osborne Fire Finders are making a come-back now to the point where there actually is a company after, oh my, it must have been 35 or 40 years of them not having anybody that was machining or manufacturing replacement parts, that there's somebody that's starting to do that now, because the Forest 02:36:00Service is still using the Osbornes in most of its fire lookouts. And of course, they use them and use them and use them, and mechanical stuff goes wrong, and so that is really interesting. Because you've been up there, you know what I'm talking about, right?

JM: Yeah.

SS: What's the name of the guy that's up there now? JM: It takes a while for me to, his --

SS: We're on the record, by the way.

JM: It'll take me a while to come up with his name.

SS: Okay. Okay, we're on.

JM: Oh, well, this is, we're parked on the road at the entrance to one of Mark Harmon's log decomp sites. Back in the early '80s, Harmon established, I think, there were six log decomp sites, and this was one of them. And they built a road in and it goes in about 100 yards, and then it makes a loop. Then he brought all these logs in and set them out. And it's a 200-year log decomposition 02:37:00experiment. I helped him originally with this setup, and then he would go in and cut cookies off the logs, and then we would take the cookies back to the headquarters, and then cut them up.

SS: When you mean cookies, you mean like a slice?

JM: Yeah, it's round, and it's about that thick.

SS: Two inches?

JM: Three to four inches thick. And the logs were about, oh, about two feet in diameter. And there were different species. There was hemlock, and Doug-fir and a couple other species. I think one was a cedar. And then, we would take the cookies back to the headquarters and dice them up into blocks that were about 02:38:00four-inches square by about one or one-and-a-half inches thick. And then Harmon would take those back to Corvallis. I did that for a number of years, and then Jay Sexton took over that.

SS: So, how much work was involved in setting up, not only his original study, but the expanded version of it that, it's all over the Andrews, right?

JM: Yeah, we harvested logs and then would take them up and deposit, tag them, and then deposit them in streams, and he would --

SS: Were they all in streams?

JM: Well, these were land sites up here.

SS: Got you.

JM: And then, he had stream sites, too.

(Break in audio) JM: We're at a site where a large cedar naturally fell down 02:39:00across the road.

SS: Is this the remnant of it right here, on the side that's been cut up?

JM: Yeah, and so, we have to deal with those ourselves, so I have to cut them up and move them off the road to get access, because nobody else is going to do that. And so, we cut it up and took it back down to the headquarters site a year or two ago, and had a guy from Cottage Grove come up with a portable mill and we milled a bunch of this cedar up into cedar 2 x 6's, which had come in very handy building stations because cedar's so rot-resistant. I built the stand for the 02:40:00electronic gauge, electronic rain gauge at Primary Met Station using that material, and it's just wonderful. And I'm going to have to rebuild that stand for the NADP Station using that material, too. It'll last for years and years, that cedar will.

But we had the backhoe up here, and we definitely had to clean that culvert out. That culvert would not be working if we hadn't have done that, and this would have been another big reservoir up here, if we hadn't cleaned that culvert out.

SS: For the record, John is pointing out and up on the uphill side of the road in the little canyon, where there was a stream coming through where it would have blocked the culvert up and it wouldn't have gone under the road, and you would have had another water dam.

JM: Yeah, it would have been a big one, too.

(Break in audio)

JM: So, now we're at Central Met Station. Terry and I built this station in the mid-'90s, '94 and '95, something like that. We have a building here, a 500-gallon propane tank, and the usual array of sensors. We've got a snow-depth sensor, we have a tower of our own design, a 10-meter tower with wind speed and wind direction on top, and then the array of air temperature sensors. Then down at the base, there will be soil temperature sensors and water, soil-moisture sensors. And then we have a heater inside the building that heats what we call a shelter rain gauge, and we heat up the duct to keep the orifice clear. Then we 02:42:00also abduct heat up into a tube and on top of the tube is a pyranometer, and that's how we get our solar radiation readings. So, we heat that to keep the snow off to get a true solar radiation reading. Then on the other end of the building is a mast for our radio telemetry, and then on the south-facing side, we have a solar panel that powers the station. So, our power's hooked up to four batteries. Come on inside, I'll show you.

(Sound of unlocking door) So, we have, this is the datalogger here. It's a 23X datalogger.

SS: This is another one of those, the same brand, Campbell?

JM: Yeah, this is a Campbell, and these are all the sensors coming in. And we have a multiplexor on this one. We're getting ready to upgrade this to a newer datalogger, and we'll get rid of the multiplexor which will improve our accuracy. And so, we have the time. We stay in PST all-year round. That way, there aren't two jumps in the data, time of data. And then the year and the day. Then we run through here and these are all the sensors. Right now, it's currently 20.6 degrees Celsius, a little over 20 degrees Celsius outside. And these are soil temperatures, and this is the orifice temperatures of the rain gauges. One's 27, and another's 30 degrees.

SS: Now, often do you have to calibrate or check the mechanisms of all this stuff, in general?

JM: Well, we'd like to do it on an annual basis. For instance, on the HMP-45C's, I have replacement heads for them. I send them back to Campbell and they will calibrate it for us, and then send it back to us with a calibration certificate.

SS: Okay, I see. So, they calibrate the machines in their own lab then, after you send them in?

JM: Yeah.

SS: Because you wouldn't have the technology here in the field to do that?

JM: No, uh-uh. Some of the things, I will calibrate myself. For instance, this is a tipping-the-bucket lysimeter here. And it's a tipping bucket that flips 02:45:00over in the lysimeter. It's a snow lysimeter. And it's a big bathtub, and it tips over. It's calibrated to tip over when there's one millimeter of precip accumulated in it. So, and the rain gauges, I can calibrate those myself by pouring in one liter of, or one gallon of fluid, and then seeing what the reading is. So, here's the battery bank for this guy right here. This is just for this datalogger right here.

SS: Now, is there a solar array hooked up to those?

JM: Yeah, we've got a solar panel right on here.

SS: So, those are rechargeables then?

JM: Yeah. SS: More or less?

JM: Yeah, the solar panel will keep them charged up. And these have been in 02:46:00there about five years.

SS: And that's about when you said that you needed to start thinking about switching them out, at five years?

JM: Yeah, I'll switch them at five years. I won't go until they fail, because they could fail like on Christmas Day or something like that. And it'd be a real problem changing these out in the winter time.

SS: So, that would be a Christmas spent in the snow-cat?

JM: Yeah. (Laughs) Things go bad at the worst possible time, like Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year's.

SS: Murphy is always with us, right?

JM: Yes, that's right. So, anyway, that's how we collect the numbers. And then this is the radio telemetry unit right here.

SS: So, this actually goes back down to the office?

JM: Yeah, every hour, this will, all the data will be taken off here and then put on our local area net. And then, we have a T1 line back to Corvallis.

SS: Now, is there a way, like an alarm if you ever have an issue where the data stops coming in, it'll say, "Central Met is no longer transmitting data," and somebody would be watching or at least there'd be a computer go off that would make a phone call or somebody would find out about it?

JM: Well, we don't have that set up quite yet. We're working on it. Adam's setting it up, so it would automatically send me an email and say, "Hey, take a look at Central Met, some sensor, because it's not in its normal bounds."

SS: Now, does this need to stay at a certain temperature inside here?

JM: Yeah, we have to keep it, we keep it about 55 all winter long. We've got a propane heater there. And then this is the shelter rain gauge comes into here, and we have an electronic float here that gives us the measure.

SS: Is this the one that you told me you have to empty out?

JM: Yeah, this needs to be emptied out. SS: This is the one you were telling me that's up to 277?

JM: Well, both this guy and the stand-alone rain gauge have to be manually emptied before they fill. If they get too much, there's only so much useful travel in this float here. And if you get too much water, the reading just flatlines and you won't get another reading out of it until you drain it.

SS: Has this ever served as an emergency shelter?

JM: It can. I've never spent the night up here.

SS: I mean, obviously, it could, you'd be fine in here.

JM: Yeah, but that was the idea, especially of Up-Lo and Vanilla, in case a snow-cat broke down. We used to have a lot of problems with the snowmobiles to where you were worried that you might not make it back. Then we built actual A-framed cabins out in the field, so just in case a snowmobile broke down on you.

SS: Now, there was at one time, a Mack Creek cabin, correct?

JM: Yeah, I built that.

SS: Is that still --?

JM: No, it was torn down. There was also a Wildcat Mountain cabin that Don Niley and I built.

SS: That's on the other side of the ridge though, right?

JM: Yeah, it's not on the Andrews.

SS: Yeah, it's right just a couple miles over?

JM: Yeah, it's a research natural area. We had to go up there once a month back in the day. So we ended up building one [shelter], and it was really difficult to get into with our snowmobiles, which back then, were really not the best. And so, we built an A-frame cabin up there. But one year, a snag fell down and hit it square. We had the sheriff's crew come up and dismantle it and take it down.

SS: You mean, the inmate crew?

JM: Yes. Yeah, it was a fun project. But then, we took out all the dataloggers out of that site, so we don't go up there in the winter time anymore.

SS: Now, that's Lookout Mountain right over there, correct?

JM: Yes. Yeah, the peregrine [falcon] nest is on that cliff up there.

SS: Yeah?

JM: Yeah.

SS: And we're getting up fairly close to Frissell Ridge, right?

JM: We're on the way to Carpenter Mountain.

SS: That's what I meant. But Frissell Ridge, we'd go up on the edge? Oh, no, we're not.

JM: We're on the north end.

SS: That's over there, correct. Okay, got you. All right.

(Break in audio)

JM: That's in the area.

SS: Okay, talking about the danger in the back-country up here and incidents that have happened. You mentioned the one about the sheriff and the crew, but what about some others?

JM: Well, they were helicopter logging right across from the Saddle Dam, and in a roadless area.

SS: Down in Blue River area?

JM: Yeah, you know, where you leave 126 [highway] and come up to the reservoir, 02:51:00and there's a little dam there?

SS: Right, right.

JM: That's called the Saddle Dam. And directly across the reservoir, they were helicopter logging with one of those great-big insect-looking helicopters, you know?

SS: Yeah.

JM: And a guy I knew was logging, and he couldn't hear anything because of the helicopter was directly over his head. And then, a log got loose and crushed him and killed him. SS: Oh.

JM: And then other times, they have young firefighters for the Forest Service driving water trucks, big heavy equipment on these logging roads. And sometimes they have accidents and the guys could get killed that way.

SS: But there's been no fatalities in the Andrews proper?

JM: Not that I'm aware of.

SS: Other than the sheriff broken leg incident, have you had other similar type stories, or people that have been lost or got hurt and had to be rescued?

JM: Well, we had a young woman working on one of the trail crews get hurt up in, while she was working on the trail, get hurt up in Mack Creek.

SS: Are you going to have to remove this log coming up here on the right?

JM: No, that's pretty much out of the way now. But we did have to get rid of the other parts of it. There's been lots of that, and clearing logs off a road is definitely one of our chores to do.

(Break in audio)

SS: John's going to talk about driving in weather conditions now.

JM: Yeah, you've got to stay right in the center of the road when you're in the winter time, in the snow. Because if you slide off into the ditch, it can be a real problem.

SS: And you don't have winches on these trucks, do you?

JM: No, no winches. And so, early on, you determine that if there's any snow, you just go back and get the snow-cat, and don't mess with it. And then, I had the old snow-cat up at Watershed 6, which was way up at the end of Hi-15, and it all came apart on me. The drive line fell out, or broke. That's why we had the radios with us, so then you can call in, if everybody hasn't left for the day, and then tell them to come on up and send a rescue team up.

SS: So, have you ever had to sleep in the car for the night?

JM: Nope, never have. But we came close. I had the snow-cat come apart on me up at Watershed 6, and then we had another snow-cat break down on me up at Up-Lo.

SS: Now, Watersheds 6, 7, and 8 are over that way, correct?

JM: Well, they're on this ridge, but down from us.

SS: They're this side of McRae Creek, though, right?

JM: Well, they're in the McRae Creek Drainage.

SS: Okay, right, got you.

JM: So, this is the trail up to Vanilla.

(Break in audio)

SS: Where we are, John?

JM: Oh, we were lucky and the snow was not on the road to Vanilla Leaf, so we drove to the trailhead to Vanilla Leaf, and we're hiking up the trail to Vanilla Leaf. And we're passing an old exclosure experiment started by Bill Emmingham 02:55:00where he built a fence to exclude rodents.

SS: Is that what that little grill, that metal stuff is for?

JM: Yeah, and to see the effect on seedling survival, small tree survival.

SS: I got you.

JM: But, unfortunately, trees came down and wrecked the fence.

SS: So much for that. Interesting.

JM: Yeah. (Trudging sounds) I didn't have anything to do with that study. But this is why Vanilla Leaf was started up in this area, to give climatic data for this experiment.

SS: But the climate stations continues?

JM: Yeah, the climate station turned out to be an important one. It's one of our benchmarks, one of four main benchmark sites. Terry and I constructed it in the 02:56:00'94-'95 time range, and then Leroy Ray and I built this ATV trail up here because I have to haul batteries back and forth up here, and all sorts of equipment back-and-forth. So, I have an ATV that I drive up and down to get up here. Haul loads, I've got to haul in antifreeze and batteries, and propane and other stuff.

SS: Was there a fire here? See this, this snag? JM: Yes. They may have burned it when they logged it, shelterwood-logged it.

SS: Now, what's the shelterwood logging? That's one of the sales, right?

JM: A shelterwood is a type of logging where you don't remove every tree.

SS: Right, right. Okay.

JM: Every major mature tree.

SS: That's what I thought, okay. (Walking sounds)

JM: It's tough just driving from the low-lands in a vehicle and coming up here and just hopping out of the vehicle. We must be at, what, somewhere above 4,000 feet.

SS: Probably 4,500 right now, 4,400.

JM: And then hopping out of the car and just hiking up to the station. (Hiking)

JM: It gets the old heart a-pumping, though?

SS: Oh, it's great, I love it.

JM: You feel all that old cholesterol moving around.

SS: Yeah, I know. Stuff that's going to kill me if I don't get in shape.

JM: Well, you know, you just take cholesterol-lowering pills.

SS: Probably should. Lipitor? Aha, the station.

JM: Yeah, Terry and I built the shelter here. Of course, we had to haul up everything by ATV to get everything up here.

SS: Okay, on the record. You ready?

JM: Yeah.

SS: Oh, we've been going. Whoops.

JM: Yeah, okay. So, yeah, we're now at the Vanilla Leaf.

SS: So, that previous sound was the sound of the interviewer panting. Okay, we're going to go. We're up at now, at where?

JM: Vanilla Leaf Met Station. It's one of our benchmark met stations. And Terry and I built the shelter in '94 and '95. And the tower, also. It replaced a smaller shelter and tower. And currently, last year, we upgraded this site to a CR3000 and a CR1000 datalogger. And we also installed, and I installed a net radiometer and a sonic anemometer up top. And we also have at this site, at 3.5 03:00:00meters, we have an aspirated air temperature [gauge] to give us a true air temperature reading.

SS: This is great for solar power, too, because of this exposure.

JM: Yeah, this is a wonderful site. But we are maxed out. And this summer, I have to build, I'm going to build a tower right back in here and put solar panels on it, and then, put a battery bank right here, and then cable the power over there. Because this site is maxed out.

SS: You mean, in terms of what?

JM: I mean, the power, the usage. It's using too much power.

SS: Basically, you need to, if you want to continue even the operations now, but even maybe add one or two things, you'd need to upgrade the power source?

JM: Yeah, I think we're going to go from two solar panels where we have now, to at least three, maybe four solar panels, and from I think, we've got eight or 10 batteries, and we're going to have to increase that number to give us some more power up here.

SS: Give you a budget question, and just a guestimate, and maybe you know the exact numbers. What is the average budget for the technology of the Andrews from what you can best ascertain?

JM: I don't get the numbers. So, I can only tell you what the numbers of the climate program are.

SS: Yeah, what is your budget, just for example?

JM: And over the last few years, it's been $7,500 a year.

SS: That's not very much.

JM: But this year, I'm getting a big raise, and I'm going up to somewhere north of $12,000 that I'm going to get to spend this year.

SS: It's a little more. It's not really enough, though, is it?

JM: Well, we crank out a lot of numbers.

SS: So, with that extra money, you're going to be able to buy the solar panels you want, and the batteries? Or is that going to have to come from a special expenditure?

JM: No, that's going to come out of the regular budget. But we've already got, we get special funding sources that come up from time to time. And last year, we had one and we got the upgrade dataloggers for both Central and Up-Lo on that. And from time-to-time, we get other funding sources kick in. So, you just got to play it by ear.

SS: So, what else about this site? Why do you like it again so much, just because it's good solar power?

JM: Well, it's --

SS: Good memories associated with the construction or anything like that?

JM: Well, yeah, I like this site. It's a great site.

SS: Best view, too.

JM: Oh, it's a wonderful view. But it differs from Up-Lo, which is in the Upper Lookout Creek drainage over there, and this is hotter, drier. It's got a steeper slope, and it's facing south more. So, while the accumulation rates are for snow are the same, the snow melt-off is much faster over here, so while there's still a snowpack over at the Up-Lo Met Station, there's no snow here. So, we determined that there's a meadow about a couple hundred yards behind us up here that retains the snow much better. And so, we decided to move the rain gauge 03:04:00back to the meadow.

SS: So, the rain gauge is up there on the hill, huh?

JM: Yeah, the rain gauge is back there. And there still could be some snow back up in there. So, it's a much better snow site back there. It's got a better ring of trees around it, old-growth trees.

SS: In terms to protect it from the wind and the drifts?

JM: And the radiation, yeah.

SS: Okay.

JM: So, we, originally, we had the rain gauge here, but we moved it back up to, the site is called VARA Rain Gauge, or VARA, V-A-R-A for short. SS: How do you compare your arrays, shall we say, your sites, number one, who determines how they continue, what you add, and how do you commnicate with, shall we say, other research sites with different arrays on what works best, or what problems you 03:05:00have or how to solve problems? Or is it mainly just you guys learning what works, because you've both been here for so long?

JM: We had a climate committee back in the day, and we'd meet regularly and everybody would be there. But right now, we normally have at least one climate committee meeting every year. And the people at the meeting will be Sherri Johnson, Chris Thomas, and Chris Daly. They'll be the scientific people. And then, Don Henshaw and Adam Kennedy will be the data managers. And then, Mark Schulze [Forest Director] will be there, and I will be there as a technician. We try to make a lot of the decisions there. And really, I don't make any 03:06:00decisions. I don't make any big, major decisions without input from the scientists. It's a group decision. And they will come along and say, "Well, we need net radiometers at both Primary and Vanilla Met." And so, it's not my decision at all.

SS: How much do they listen to your technical abilities and expertise, and just your on-the-ground multi-decadal experience here? Do you feel that they listen to you because of that?

JM: Oh, yeah. It's like when we originally built Up-Lo, there was some idea to move it farther up the road, but I said that this was as far as we could logistically hope to travel each winter. They took my advice on that one. And then, for datalogger programming and the space left in the dataloggers, and how 03:07:00much power we need, yeah, I get input on the areas. But the scientists really tell us what instruments they want to see and where, and then how often we need to sample. Now with upgrades, we're have more space, but back in the day, we didn't have much space on the dataloggers. And in the original CR10 datalogger, there was only 29,000 storage locations. So, we had to be very frugal as to how often we took our data. But with the new stuff, the standard datalogger now comes with 4 megabytes in memory. So, the scientists really want to take --

SS: Everything in?

JM: Take more often. So now, what we're doing on our upgrades, we're upgrading to measuring all the sensors every five minutes. That's what I just did to 03:08:00Primary Met, and I'm going to be doing that to all the other stations, rewriting the program and upgrading the programs to do that at all the other stations.

SS: Have you ever been at loggerheads with scientists or the site as a whole, when they're trying to maybe do something that just doesn't work or doesn't make sense to you, technically? Or maybe is failing consistently, and finally you say, enough is enough, or they say enough is enough?

JM: Well, like I say, most of our decisions are made in the climate committee. And my job is really to --

SS: To implement?

JM: To do what the scientists want. And if I come up with a problem, I can talk 03:09:00it over with them, then tell them what the issues are, and we can work around it. So, it's a fairly-smooth process, really.

SS: That's enough there. Now that we're up at such a beautiful place, I'm going to ask you a more cultural question. What is your attachment to this place? Describe it.

JM: Oh, the Andrews is home to me, really. I've worked here since '74, and I really don't want to quit. I'm not looking forward to quitting. The people are, they're actually like family to me, really. I spend my time with them. And the 03:10:00vast majority of them, I really like them. Not only that, but a lot of them are smarter than me. So, I'm hoping that if I stand close enough to them and get my picture took with 'em, that maybe some of it can rub off, you know?

SS: You want to increase your neuron capacity?

JM: (Laughs) Maybe people will think I'm smart, too, if I stand next to people like Jerry Franklin and people like that.

SS: Did you ever think it was going to turn out this way when you came here as a part-timer, that you'd end up staying here for your whole career?

JM: Well, yeah, that was the deal back then. I didn't think it was a career, I thought it was a job. But I guess it's turned into a career.

SS: I think so, forty years, probably. (Laughs) I don't know too many people that stayed anywhere that long. But looking out over this landscape, because 03:11:00this is about as a good a view, except maybe at Carpenter Mountain or a couple other places, what do you see down there? When you look at this landscape from a high angle like this, what goes through your head, other than obviously it's beautiful? What do you think about?

JM: Well, the beauty of the place is, it's always there. And then looking at the site, like this site, I've noticed how much the trees have grown. The view used to be a lot better when the trees were smaller here, the second-growth trees were smaller. And then I'm looking like at the snow at Vanilla, still on Frissell, and I'm wondering when I can drive into Up-Lo. And then when I get on top, you can look and see all the, if we were on Carpenter Mountain, we could look around and see all the recent clear-cuts which are not as many as when I 03:12:00first got here, when they were really logging, during the '80s, they were really logging the old growth.

SS: You mean, outside the Andrews?

JM: Well --

SS: And some in here, too?

JM: And some in here, too, yeah. There were very large numbers of log trucks going down the highway with --

SS: Big trees?

JM: Three-load, or sometimes even one-log loads. But now that's pretty much stopped. And thankfully, we still have a lot of old growth left.

SS: What goes through your mind now when you think about what this forest was originally set up to do, which was to study old-school, basically industrial forestry practices and its effect on watersheds, etc., and roads and road building and all that, to what it's become? How do you look back through the 03:13:00lens of that, and seeing all the re-growths and you can tell where the first, the old-growth cuts were, what goes through your head when you think about that whole dynamic, of culture and political and management changes?

JM: Well, it's really changed a lot of over time. The Andrews is a much different place than when we first started. And in my view, it's a much better place. In recent years, we have really broadened the scope of the Andrews, and the Andrews has really rapidly expanded, our education side has just mushroomed, and we now have lots of school groups coming up. The use by PIs and graduate 03:14:00students has risen dramatically. And it's always evolving. There's never, it's never stagnant. Cold air drainage wasn't an issue a decade ago. And that's become really important. I really didn't know the importance of snow measurements when we first started.

If I could do it all over again, of course, we would really change how we measured snow back in the day. And we didn't realize the importance of aspirated air temperature back in the day. So, but it's always changing. That's one of the 03:15:00things that keeps you hopping. We're making changes, we're evolving and making changes to the sensors and the data all the time. And the volume of data that is coming out now is just immense over what it used to be. Because it was so laborious cranking out numbers back when I started, we didn't turn out very many numbers. But now, you're talking lots and lots of data, and flowing, and it flows out via telemetry, and it's getting faster all the time.

SS: And this is also telemetry, this station?

JM: Yeah, yeah.

SS: I figured as much.

JM: See that square thing up on top there?

SS: Yeah.

JM: That's beaming it up. There's a repeater station over there on, that's what 03:16:00we call Roswell Ridge over there.

SS: Right.

JM: And there's a repeater station up on Roswell Ridge that was put in the last couple of years. And it beams it down to the headquarters.

SS: How would you describe the culture shift at the Andrews? And you can describe culture however you want.

JM: Well, it's always been a diverse set of people, interesting people coming out to the Andrews. But now, there's just a lot more of them, really interesting people.

SS: What do you think about the addition of writers-in-residence and poets and artists, is that what you're talking about?

JM: Well --

SS: In part, at least?

JM: In part, yeah. It's interesting to see what they're doing.

(Break in audio)

SS: Okay, we're on.

JM: We had a real interesting guy come out this last week from, his name was Paul, I forget his last name. And he turned out to be a real, it's just a real eye-opener to have him describe what it is he does, and what other people are doing. It's makes you stop and wonder, am I keeping up with change like I used to, you know? Because it's really rapidly evolving.

SS: Are you talking about ecological research or science or society or all?

JM: All.

SS: I agree. Talk to me about relations with the local community during your 03:18:00tenure? The HJA community, you've already talked about that, but mainly about experiences with the local folks? Now, obviously, you live in McKenzie Bridge, you lived in Blue River before, you know the people. They know you work up here, or at least some of them do. Tell me about your relationship with them, and also how they perceived what you do up here and what the forest, what the "scientists on the hill" do, or do they even know?

JM: Well, a lot of them don't know us, is my feeling. And they know us better now because we have, now, in the modern form of the HJA, we have a lot more contact with the kids. And so, the McKenzie High School kids. Back in the day, 03:19:00we were pretty insular. But the community is, there's a lot of Forest Service people. There was more Forest Service people back in the day. And there's a lot less Forest Service people now, but a lot of the community has relations with the Forest Service, and so they know us through the Forest Service and they know us through, I have to go in to, it used to be Harvick Store, but now it's the Blue Skies Market, to UPS, the NAUP packages out every week. So, we had constant contact with people at the market. And so, they knew us from there. But we are, I think we're a lot better known now that people's kids come out to the Andrews 03:20:00on school trips, and also to climb the trees.

SS: Now, what about in the time leading up to the spotted owl injunction, the Forest Wars, and the Northwest Forest Plan and aftermath, during and after that period, was there any contentiousness, or did they ever connect the two in terms of the science going up here and the drastically changing forest policies?

JM: Well, back in the day there in the '80s, there was a lot of logging going on in the area, and there were a lot more loggers. There's hardly any loggers now. And I never took any pains to announce that I was working at the Andrews or that 03:21:00I knew spotted owl people.

SS: You didn't advertise it, in other words?

JM: That's right. And in fact, I'd go the other way. I'd wear what we call camo, and it was like I'd be in a chainsaw ball cap, I'd wear that.

SS: Now, OSU and the Forest Service co-administration of the Andrews is a model for effective institutional management and science, especially in the last thirty years or so. Now, during your tenure, how would you characterize this 03:22:00relationship and how it evolved in terms of what you did, OSU, and the Forest Service?

JM: Well, OSU and the Forest Service are two very different organizations. OSU, of course, is an academic place with lots of professors and graduate students who are into their own individual projects. So, when you're doing business like what I have to do with the Forest Service, there's a lot more rules and regulations. So, I have to adapt and I'll follow a lot of Forest Service rules. 03:23:00So, actually, I'm kind of a hybrid employee. While I do get paid by the OSU and I'm an official OSU person, as you can see, we're driving a Forest Service vehicle, I drive a Forest Service backhoe, and we're driving on Forest Service property, and are in the National Forest [Willamette]. So, I've got to be attuned to how the Forest Service does business, and there's a lot of work I need to do in making sure I'm up-to-speed with all the Forest Service rules and regulations.

SS: But how effectively do you think they have worked together over time? And 03:24:00have there been marked changes in how that dynamic worked out?

JM: Well, there's what they call the Forest Service culture. And back in the day, it was a lot different than it is now, and understandably so. When I first got there, you could just walk in the door, any door at the Blue River Ranger Station and wander around anywhere you wanted to go and talk to people. But now, of course, that's all changed. And in fact, the Blue River Ranger Station got merged with the McKenzie Ranger Station, so that's just an evolving thing. Oh, there's a bear.

SS: Oh, yeah! A black bear on the road, wow! How cool.

JM: Yeah, that's, I only see one or two black bear a year.

SS: He's going over there in the woods.

JM: Yeah, that was --

SS: See if you can see him?

JM: Do you see him down in there?

SS: No, I don't. Ah, there he is. There he is, no, I think? It looks like a young one to me. Not very big.

JM: It wasn't this year's cub. It was just -- SS: Last year's?

JM: It might have been last year's cub. Like I said, I only see one or two bear a year. There are a lot more than, I've only seen one or two cougars ever.

SS: Like I said, when my wife and I saw two cougars on the lower road here, at night, we knew that it was a rarity because I've never seen one in the wild anywhere. I'd seen droppings and other things of them, and evidence of them, but 03:26:00never one live.

JM: Yeah, that was a good rare siting.

SS: Anyway, so tell me about some of the people that we haven't talked about yet. Some of the people you've had the most interaction with that you maybe haven't mentioned so far?

JM: Well --

SS: The scientists, the Forest Service managers, anybody we'd like to talk about?

JM: Well, I like working for the professors, so I've always liked working for people like Mark Harmon and Chris Thomas and Chris Daly, and Sherri Johnson and Jerry Franklin. And so, that's always been fun.

SS: Did you ever work with Fred Swanson?

JM: Not too much, but he was part of the climate committee early on. And so, 03:27:00that's where I got to know him. And the graduate students. I've helped a long list of graduate students from Barbara Bond's to Chris Daly's, and that was always fun. I like graduate students. I always have. But it's real hit-or-miss with graduate students. It can be, some of them are real great out in the field, and some of them struggle out in the field.

SS: How so? They're just not physically tough? In other words, they're smart, 03:28:00but they're not good out in the woods?

JM: Well, it's just a combination of factors.

SS: Or they're just not good at the types of activities and work that have to take place on-the-spot in the field?

JM: Some of them can get sidetracked off and not stay focused. So, it's a real hit-or-miss proposition with grad students. But we've had some really great ones. And Georgianne Moore, it was a real pleasure to work with her. SS: What was her field and where is she at now?

JM: She was doing sap flow studies for Barbara Bond and she moved on to, I think 03:29:00it was Texas A&M, faculty at Texas A&M, I believe.

SS: Tell me a little about Jerry Franklin and your experiences with him?

JM: I always looked up to Jerry Franklin and still do. And I thought he was a real great person. Of course, he was on Clinton's "Gang of Four" settling forest policy. So, I always listened very careful to Jerry Franklin and what he's got to say. And I took over for Jack Booth on the cone count, and so every year, I'd be up doing cone plots that Jerry Franklin set up in the '60s.

SS: Yeah, you told me that early on. You've actually gone around Oregon and Washington to some of the other sites, right?

JM: Oh, yeah, I visit each one of the sites every year. Every fall, I try to do it in September and go visit all the sites and count the cones.

SS: That must be a lot of fun.

JM: It is. It takes about two weeks. Well, it's actually two or three-day trips. One, I get the local area ones whenever I can around here. And then I take a trip down to southern Oregon and down to the Ashland and Medford area, and Prospect. And then I take another trip to southern Washington on the Gifford Pinchot and get the ones around there. And then, one more trip up to northern 03:31:00Washington to get the ones at Glacier Peak behind Bellingham. And Snoqualmie Pass and Stampede Pass, I get those.

SS: But when you started working here, what was your view of ecological research and what, in your view, constituted long-term?

JM: Well, Harmon, when we set up the log decomp, was going for 200 years. This other stuff, I definitely see the value of long-term research, so I fully expect this research to go on for decades at the very least.

SS: Or centuries?

JM: Yeah, and well, it's going to be extremely valuable. Currently, Anne Nolan is using all the SNOTEL data, to which we are adding our own snow measurements to determine what the long-term effect of the snow pack is. And that's going to go a long way towards convincing people about climate change. When we can, when people can point out that we used to have snow packs that started early and lasted late, and were deep. And so, we have that down in the record as what the snow pack was like and what the temperatures were like. And so, yeah, it's going 03:33:00to be incredibly important in the future.

SS: Now, you kind of went to it there at the end of that answer, but how would you characterize the roles and responsibilities of ecological research and what this place does and what you have been a part of for so long toward human society, as well as toward the biosphere, the planet? I mean, how do you feel in terms of the ethical mission of a place like the Andrews?

JM: Well, if the Andrews can further scientific knowledge as to the true state of the forest, anything we can do will be of great help to people in the future.

SS: How many other LTER sites have you visited, John?

JM: I have not visited any other LTER site.

SS: Okay. But you've been to other experimental forests, right, like Cascade Head or any of those?

JM: Cascade Head?

SS: Yeah.

JM: Yeah, I worked in Cascade Head doing surveys there. And I'm really glad I'm at the HJA. That was pretty intense stuff there at Cascade Head.

SS: You've also been to Wind River, correct?

JM: I've been to Wind River. Jerry invited me up to go while I was up on a cone count. We went out to visit a cone count site, and then he took me up on the gondola at the canopy crane and showed me the viewpoint from there, which is real interesting, of how from above you can really see how understory plants 03:35:00like vine and maples are trying to crowd into open holes in the canopy. That was real interesting. And how from, up to then, I'd just been a tree-climber, and you have to hug, at least I was hugging the bowl pretty hard all the time when I was tree-climbing. But with the gondola, you could just park yourself right at the end of a branch and study the end of the branch, and without working a sweat. And so, that was sure something you couldn't do by climbing the tree, so I thought that was real interesting.

SS: Now, you worked at Cascade Head and you were starting to say that it was pretty-intense there, do you want to elaborate a little more on that?

JM: Well, the Sitka Spruce under a regeneration is, can be really nasty stuff to 03:36:00try to fight your way through.

SS: You're talking about the prickly needles?

JM: Yes. And at times, you're crawling on the ground, and then in the next ten feet you'll be above the ground, but you won't know how far you are above the ground because you can't see the ground.

SS: So, it's an ankle-sprain waiting to happen, right?

JM: Oh, yeah. It's so much better in getting around in the Andrews. To tag all the rhododendron has nothing to compare to that spruce replot.

SS: Isn't it interesting, since you go back to the IBP days before the LTER, and at one time they were even talking about decommissioning this place, I think in the late '60s, early '70s, how its evolved from, shall we say, one of many experimental forests, into this world-famous ecological research site? Doesn't that give you reason, just a little pride or cause you to pause and really 03:37:00reflect on that?

JM: I'm really happy about that. Because like you say, it could have gone down another path. And where we didn't evolve and move forward and so, I'm really happy that we always seem to get new scientists, new graduate students, and new ideas. Hopefully, that will never change, and we'll be discovering new and important things all the time.

SS: If you were going to have a list for Christmas of what you could get to make your job better, and the Andrews better, what would be your short list?

JM: Oh, well, I'm always for new and better dataloggers, and new and better 03:38:00sensors. That's my idea. I want to, I always looked at -- oh, there's another deer. I always looked at more data coming out as more job security for me. So, I always want more stations. I want more data. I want more sensors. I'm always into that. So, that's my Christmas wish.

SS: Is there anything that we haven't talked about today that comes to mind, a story, another person you want to mention, or just anything else?

JM: Yeah, I've met a lot of really-fun people. They're, I'm sure I'm going to, 03:39:00if I start naming them, I'm going to forget some of them but --

SS: Don't worry, it's not an Oscar ceremony where you're thanking all of your producers and cast and support crew.

JM: But it should be, because there's been plenty of them. They're just too numerous. But all the PIs that have come and gone, and graduate students and crew members, field crew members. There's just been, that's the thing about the Andrews, we're such a busy place that you can hardly keep up with all the people that come through, and really get to know them as well as you should.

SS: Now, in terms of getting to know, we kind of talked about this up at the 03:40:00Vanilla Leaf, but just kind of go into it again a little more specifically, you have seen this place change for forty years, season to season to season to season. How does that feel, like the cycles of your life as you see the colors change, the leaves come back, the snow comes and goes, some years more than others, how would you characterize that kind of cycle of life through this place and you specifically?

JM: Well, the winters are, can be difficult. If we get a deep snow year with a lot of blow-down, that translates into a lot harder work for me because I have to travel to the met stations every three weeks or so, and so on.

SS: You've got some long snow-cat trips?

JM: A lot of snow-cat trips. And if we get a bad blow-down year, well, one time, Terry was helping me in the snow-cat and he was driving the snow-cat and I was sitting on the back of it. It was the LMC snow-cat. And I was sitting on the back of the snow-cat with a chainsaw running, and he would drive up to the next blow-down, and then I would get out and have to hump the chainsaw through the snow and cut the next fallen tree. And then he would push it out of the way, and then I'd hop in, in the back of the snow-cat. Then we'd drive up to the next blow-down.

SS: Quite a chore, though?

JM: That's a young man's job right there. And so, this time of the year, I am really happy, because now, today was the first time we could drive to Vanilla 03:42:00Met. And so, I don't have to stop at the last snow pack.

SS: What's the latest in the year that you've been able to get up to the high country? Do you remember a specific year that was especially heavy?

JM: Yeah, well, we've had 15 feet of snow. And it hasn't melted out until the middle of June, so here we are. This is the middle, the 12th of May, and we could essentially drive, we just drove to Vanilla Met.

SS: Did you drive up to Frissell?

JM: Oh, well, the last station I've got to go to is Up-Lo. SS: Yeah.

JM: So, I don't have to, I don't have anything up on Frissell.

SS: Oh, okay.

JM: Really, if anybody asked me, I wouldn't put anything up on Frissell because it's just too difficult to get to and dangerous in the winter time. So, this 03:43:00time of the year, I'm real happy because now I can drive to the stations and I can begin work on the summer list of things that need to be done. And then, it'll be steady work until September. Then in September, I've got to take off for the cone count and do my fall run. And so, then in October, I've got to get all the stations ready for winter, to make sure that I don't have any, I can get all the heavy work done before the snow comes. So, there's a big push in October to get everything ready for the snow. So, that's how I view the year.

SS: So, you have three favorite seasons, spring, summer and fall, right?

JM: Yes.

SS: And you like them all in different ways, correct?

JM: Yeah, and winter time can be really-difficult at times.

SS: And I'll bet you've seen some really-beautiful things in the winter when you're up there all alone with the snow-cat, too, huh?

JM: Well, it reminds me, driving the snow-cat can remind me of driving my boat out on the ocean. You know, you get that, it's not smooth, and you're wandering around. So, it kind of reminds me of that.

SS: Signing out.