A little late, but it counts right?

First off sorry everyone for the delay, but I took two long and amazing canoe trips. One of which I had planned since January and one that was a last second idea with a friend. The past two weeks which I spent entirely technology free minus one night that I came home to get supplies and leave for my families annual BWCA trip gave me a lot of time to reflect on my experiences this summer.

Caution! Water Quality Advisory

As Kyle and I have traveled around the Red Cedar River watershed in the last four weeks one thing keeps resurfacing anytime you get near a lake, river, or even small streams such as Tiffany Creek in Boyceville: "CAUTION! WATER QUALITY ADVISORY". In all caps of course.

It seemed that no matter where we went we couldn't escape the wrath of the blue-green algae and streams with high sediment loads. Until today that is. We spent our day collecting water samples and discharge measurements in just the Wilson Creek watershed that empties directly into Lake Menomin. Following Wilson Creek and its many tributaries as close to their headwaters as we could collecting samples that will be analyzed for concentration of both soluble reactive phosphorus and total phosphorus along the way to determine primary sources in the watershed. And along the way we found some beautiful streams with perfectly clean water and other small streams chalked with sediment.

Time to run the samples and do the route again in a week or two and look for patterns throughout the Wilson Creek Watershed.

Blake Lea

"The more I learn, The more I realize how much I don't know." - Albert Einstein

The first question posed to us this week was "is individual research still necessary in the age of technology?" My answer to that question is YES! Especially from a geological and biological background. There is so much about this world that we still do not know enough about or know about at all and the only way we can begin to discover and learn more about these things is through research. This past weekend when I was going over the things that I have noticed, learned, and discovered I realized how much more complex the phosphorous problem was in the lake than I originally thought. This lead me to what seems to be the reoccurring theme in my career as a young scientist:   

“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.”

― Albert Einstein 

Getting started and settling in!

Hi! My name is Blake Lea and I traveled to Menomonie, WI on Sunday afternoon from my home town of Rushford, MN. Despite Menomonie being only a short 1 hour and 45 minute drive from my hometown I had admittedly never been here until last Sundays move in. The drive up was very familiar for the first half hour as that took me to Winona, MN, which is where I am currently attending Winona State University and studying Environmental Geoscience and Biology. From there I traveled up beautiful Highway 61 to Wabasha, MN. This is where I began to see some new stretches of highway, bluffs, fields, rivers, streams, and lakes that I had never seen before!