Despite the snow on the ground and the pouring rain, we decided to meet anyway since we already had a date on the calendar, it's impossible to quickly and easily reschedule, and the purpose of the trip was to look at the effect of rainy weather on gravel roads. You see, there are a number of roads that the counties own and/or maintain, but that the BLM uses. However, if the roads are "not great," then they can have an effect on water quality and/or fishes and their habitat. We need to quantify those effects and mitigate them if possible.
We definitely found some areas in need of improvement that would constitute an effect. But we also came up with a handful of potential remedies. Unfortunately, our remedies only apply to BLM actions and not private actions (landowners and industrial timber) and so the vast majority of effects will go unmitigated.
A sediment plume is seen here (above and below) entering the ditch which leads into the stream network. The sediment is coming from a crushed road subgrade.
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