WatershedEvents

JULIET SHEN - SEATTLE ARTIST

"Transient Chaos #3" - Copyright by Juliet Shen and reproduced by permission of the artist.

I want to heap unsolicited praise on a friend of mine whose art career has been fascinating to follow. I met her in 1984, when she was working at Hornall-Anderson Design (now Sid Lee). She was an exceptional art director, one of the best I ever had the privilege of working with. More than that, however, she was (and is) a gifted designer and fine artist. Visit her truly wonderful (and still affordably collectible)work HERE. 

The theme of her latest work is "Transient Chaos." The idea is taken from some pretty hard and math-heavy science aimed at understanding such things as the inherent unpredictability of patterns in weather and other dynamic systems. Another "system" where most of us have seen something like transient chaos in action is in the comings and goings of shadow patterns along the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunlit day - they are sometimes seemingly random, other times well ordered and semi-predictable in terms of shape and direction...yet other times they vanish completely, temporarily and in strange ways, until order somehow reasserts itself.

In retrospect, I can see the hint of this theme in her work going back for at least two decades. Here it is full-on, and absolutely fascinating to see. I cannot wait for the next images to emerge!

BEST OLD DOG!

Buddy just turned 12 this week. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BUDDY!

MONSOON

Beatty Creek's watershed is in relatively good shape, so the creek is not inherently "flashy." But when a series of damp weeks are followed by a stretch of days in which the rainfall exceeds .1 - .25", the creek swells to the point of overflowing. We are 48 hours into such a stretch, and the creek is running full bore right now. 

Downstream view

Upstream view

I am writing this at end of day, January 6th. So far it has rained measurable amounts locally five out those six days. By midnight, the total in the last 24 hours will be right around 1.75". There's more on the way. If the chum had managed to get upstream in November, their hatchlings would be struggling to survive. The color of the water tells you a great deal about the load of suffocating silt the creek is transporting at this moment.

No slack for Beatty Creek this time round the sun. 

RECENT CHANGES ON BEATTY CREEK

A visit to one of my favorite places on Beatty Creek this morning turned up this interesting development: A new tangle of “big wood,” which has created a fairly extensive gravel bar smack in the middle of this section of the creek. In this downstream view of the channel, the tapered shape of the bar is just visible behind the debris pile:

Here’s the downstream tail-end of the gravel bar:

Note the reddish color along the far side of the stream, where a portion of the channel’s bank is being removed at a rapid rate:

The heavy rains also helped the creek rebuild a previously established gravel bar further down the channel (left hand side of the photo):

All of these changes have taken place in just the last few days, the aftermath of the heavy rains which hit the area a week ago today. The composition and placement of such bars are precise visual interpretation of the energy exchange processes which take place as the creek redistributes the organic and inorganic materials in its channel and surrounding banks.

While the presence of wood in riparian corridors is generally desireable, too much wood can clog small streams such such as beatty Creek. Currently, the log jam at the creek's confluence with McLane Creek could pose an insurmountable obstacle to the chum in next year's run. I will be discussing this issue, along with a couple others when I visit with a representative of the Stream Team later in the month.