Imagine my surprise when I found my job posted online today. This is actually because the other parks in the field unit (Nahanni and Wood Buffalo) might have upcoming vacancies, and it makes sense to get a pool of qualified applicants for the whole unit at the same time. Just in case you or someone you know wants to try out the northern lifestyle for themselves.
Paddling the South Nahanni River
Written by: Faye
I got to paddle the South Nahanni River. For work. Because that’s how my life goes these days. Here was our starting point:
Here’s Virginia Falls from the top:
The first part of the trip involves portaging 2km around Virginia Falls with all your gear, which is pretty brutal, but at least the views at the bottom are nice too.
And off we go down the river.
One of the scenic stops is “The Gate”.
Overlooking The Gate from above:
More scenic river.
Coffee break at the raft.
More paddlin’.
Stream Monitoring Field Trip
Written by: Faye
I spent the last week of August in Nááts’ihch’oh and Nahanni conducting Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network (CABIN) sampling. CABIN is a nationally standardized protocol for the collection of benthic macroinvertebrates and stream information in order to monitor stream health. This involves tasks such as kicking little stream critters off of rocks into a net, measuring the stream depth, width and speed, collecting water samples, taking direct steam measurements, and reaching into freezing cold streams and pulling out 100 pebbles to measure them. This can help to identify if a stream is healthy and if it is changing over time. We also collected environmental DNA samples, which is a really promising emerging technology.
In practice, this meant a week of flying around in a helicopter to scenic locations. I already sorted and uploaded a bunch of photos to facebook, so if you haven’t seen them yet, here they are.
And here’s a bonus exclusive video for our blog readers: flying around Nahanni in a helicopter.