Walnut Gulch experimental watershed fieldtrip

Saturday's field trip began with an hour long journey south towards the town of Tombstone. This is a place I've always wanted to visit and to undertake fieldwork at this location too, kills two birds with one stone. Tombstone is a historic town of the southwest and was known for its regular gunfighting. Driving through the town felt as though I was in a completely different place altogether. It was like driving through a time machine, back a hundred or so years to the time of horse and carts.

This trip was focused around the Walnut Gulch experimental watershed just a few minutes drive from Tombstone's centre. We was joined by Dr Mary Nichols who works for the USDA Southwest Watershed Research Center who was able to give the class a detailed insight into the setting of the watershed, tours of the flumes and data which we aim to manipulate to heighten our understanding of bed load transport.

Walnut Gulch experimental watershed is an area covering 60 million hectares of brush and grass between the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts. It is a tributary to the San Pedro River and is wet only 1% of the year. This area since the mid-50s when the experiments began, has since become one of the leading sites in semi-arid research.

During our trip we was able to visit the "Santa Rita" flume with a traversing slot sediment sampler and the supercritical flow flume (flume 6), as well as flume 103 and previous sites of research.

Flume 6: metal fencing causing water to flow centrally

Flume 6

Since our visit, our aim is to now use data from flume 6 and flume 103, which are on the order of one magnitude different in size to determine the sediment transport rates for each site and whether the similarities or differences expected based on how we think sediment transport works in fluvial systems. And so expect another update soon with my results...