Six Steelhead!

My teacher, Mr. Graves has been taking kids down to the Mark West creek for over 22 years. Mr.Graves takes four kids from Mr. Ryan's class and four kids from his class. In all of his experiecne, in the past 22 years he has NEVER seen a steelhead before. He has heard some people claim that they saw a steelhead come around the creek once or twice, but never saw one with his own eyes, well untill last week. He took his 8 kids down to the creek with our new student teacher, Ms. Hansen, and he saw for the first time a fully grow male steelhead around 3 years old and about 20 inches long.

Then this week on Wednsday, it was my turn to go and we saw 6 STEELHEEDS!!! When we first got down there, we dicided who was going to take the tempeture, who would check the pH level, and who would check the disolved oxygen. Jocelyn and Jaden ended up checking the tempeture. Connor and I checked the pH level and Maggie and Nester checked the Disolved oxygen while Patrick was in charge of the clipboard, writing down all of the data that we collected at the creek. Since it has been raininng, the water has risen and the steelhead have come home. For the temputure we got 49 degrees. The perfect temputure for the steelheads is 50 degrees. For the dissolved oxygen it rained just 2 weeks ago and this week we the dissolved oxygen measured 9 ppm. Even though it has been raining and the water looked muddy, luckly the turbidity was low.

Then the steelheads came, there was 6 of them!!! they all circled around the edges of the creek. Then 3 of them went down the small rapid waterfall and will hopefully make it safetly to the ocean. Then there were 3 steelheads left. They circled around the creek 3 times in a school, then the smallest of the three made its way for the waterfall. After that, we thought all of them went down so we packed up. Jocelyn believed that they were still there so she keep a look out. She was right now 2 of the 6 steeheads were left. They circled around 1 more time and they left. We headed over to a little pond with very little water then we made our way back up to Mark West School. -Mellissa Sorensen