Ahhh...to poke a tree finally

Finally and after long last, the first tree has been poked! This Friday John and I went out to the Elwha fish hatchery, in lue of permitting issues, to make some headway in the Dendro REU project! With the sound of construction high over head from the replacement bridge going in, we rooted around for some big strapping conifer trees in witch to collect samples from. As the trip continued, we managed to find a big tree far enough away from the alders to get a decent sample, so we gave it a good poke! Using our know-how, muscle and plenty of WD-40, we cored this nice Douglas-Fir specimen near the west bank of the Elwha River. As can be seen from the picture, John is expertly coring the tree (the one with the cougar scratch, safe)- as I, ever lazy, am taking the picture: D The data that we collected will be used in conjunction with the Olympic National Park samples to construct a chronology based on the Marine Derived Nitrogen signal of the Elwha river and the prevalent climate conditions of the Olympic Peninsula. Sounds fun eh?