Student Blog Post - Clay Brock

Student Blog Post- Hat Creek Youth Initiative 

Hi my name is Clay Brock and I’m going into Grade 12 at Fall River Junior and Senior High School. I’ve played three years of basketball at the high school and I’m going to play my first year of high school baseball this year. I decided to participate in the Hat Creek Youth Initiative because I felt like it was a good opportunity, and it could help me further down the road. I’m interested in Forestry as a career potentially, and thought doing this program would help on my resume.

One of the first things that we talked about when I first started my job with CalTrout was photo-point monitoring. Photo-point monitoring is simply a before-and-after picture of the work that is going to be done on Hat Creek. The first thing as a group that we did, is that we all collaborated to determine a reasonable layout to plot each photo-point location…which took quite some time. Then after we all had agreed on the photo-point locations we took our plan to the field. We began taking pictures from the Carbon Parking lot on Hat Creek to the 299 Bridge on both sides of the stream-bank.  We organized the pictures based upon the different restoration features we wanted to capture, such as the future bridge, trails, and planting locations. Then after we took around 50-60 photo-points we felt like we had gotten enough before pictures for the project.

After photo-point monitoring, we were introduced to a new task where we took slope and stream-bank measurements along the banks. I found out that this new task was a lot of physical labor, walking up and down the slope, and therefore was one of my favorite tasks so far. Our Crew Leader taught us how to use a clinometer to take slope measurements, and a GPS unit to take exact GPS points. I learned that Foresters use clinometers in their work a lot so I liked that I got to learn how to use one. I feel that as a group we can get any task done that is given to us and that we work well as a team. 

I’m looking forward our next tasks, especially the forest and vegetation inventory. I also am excited to go on the forestry tour later in the summer.

Thanks, 

Clay Brock