Day 10

Today I was feeling not feeling good. Head, stomach, my whole body just seemed to be hurting. Brenda woke up to shower and I just decided to just lay there a bit. Breakfast didn’t even sound good. I just wanted to stay in my tent.  I eventually had to get up and get ready to go to the Spokane Tribal Hatchery. There we were received by Tim Peone the Tribal Hatchery Manager, who graduated from Eastern Washington University. He explained how 80% of the people’s protein came from the River. The Hatchery was constructed in 1990. 20 years into the program they were mandated to pit tag their fish so that they could track how many hatchery fish are being fished. Their program is known as give & share, where 100% of the fish that is grown at the hatchery is meant to be harvested. Their current annual release goal for Lake Roosevelt is 3.7 million kokanee fry, 250,000 kokanee yearlings and 750,000 rainbow trout yearlings. They have just started to grow fish on top of fish. Where each bottom container holds 6,000 fish and each top container holds 4,000 fish. While we were there people were cutting the back fin of each fish so that once they were released they can be differentiated from wildlife fish.

Next stop was Anderson Ranch. Eddy Mathlee, the program Manager, was there waiting for us along with Tom Boring and Dawa Numkena, who were techs. They have a Meditation Program/Big Game Biologist that makes sure animals have a good home. They put up fences to keep animals off lands, weed spray and cover up to help with deprivation of local farmers. They plant corn but never harvest it so it could feed the deer, moose, and elk. They also do thinning- No pruning. To be able to hunt moose your name must be drawn and if it is drawn your name is taken out for five years. Out of 158,000 acres of reservation in the past 2 years about 46% of it has been lost due to fires.

Finally we were going to canoeing to the Roosevelt lake. We had to have three people on each canoe. So it was Brenda, Monet, and I on one. As we got on it was a little rocky, mostly because I kept moving and Brenda and Monet kept screaming. But once I was comfortable we were good to go. We got the rhythm down and canoed our way to a floating dock. It was really fun diving off and Monet finally jumped in! On our way back when I tried to get on both of them went to the same side so we ended up flipping. Thankfully there was no rocks. We dumped the water and tried again. We paddled our way back to the dock to load up. I am not sure what happened but all of a sudden we just started to shift to one side and flipped AGAIN! We flipped the canoe over but there was too much water inside it so we weren’t able to get back on. We had to push it back to shore. When we got it there we realized that Monet had lost a sock and I had lost one of my sandals. So I had to hop back to the van. I’m so glad I packed two pairs of sandals.