Essay by Cassie Peller and friends about perks and challenges of beachmonitoring

["Richard L Whitman" <rwhitman@usgs.gov>]

Junk or Jewels: Hidden Rewards of Beach Monitoring


      It is never easy to walk up a sand dune.  Even the elite runners
would "feel the burn" as their feet sink with each step into the sand.  We
walk up Mount Baldy everyday, and when we reach the beach, we collect our
water samples.  We could call ourselves the "samplers," or the ones who "do
the dirty work," or even the "beach glass collectors."  Beach glass?

      It's 6:30 in the morning.  The sun pokes over the horizon.  The lake
water glistens as the waves slowly rumble.  We heave up the infamous Mount
Baldy and witness nature's wonders as we reach the peak.  For 2 intense
months in the summer of 2004, we sampled 6 sites along Mount Baldy and
Central Beaches in Porter County, Indiana.  Sure, it was a great summer
job; out at the beach every day!  Every day.  Eventually, we could count
the number of steps between Mount Baldy 1 and 2.  Or, we knew exactly when
the guy on the 4-wheeler would drive by to pick up the trash.  It didn't
take too long for the repetition to eat at us, and we needed a way to
"spice up" the sampling.  After all, we walked between 2 and 3 miles daily
on the beach to collect these samples.  By the 4th of July, Alissa had a
plan.  Collect the beach glass.

      Beach glass? sounds like trash.  Trash?  Quite possibly.  To Stacey,
our hard-core environmentalist, we were doing the National Park Service a
favor collecting the beach glass.  To Alissa, Jessica, and I, it was a
contest to see who could collect the prettiest pieces, or the most pieces,
or the very rare blue pieces.  Beach glass is simply that.  Pieces of glass
found on the beach.  However, the "acceptable" pieces are those worn down
by the sand so much that they are soft and smooth to the touch.

      By far, the clear ones are the most abundant.  If the edges were
sharp, however, Alissa would instruct me to throw the piece back into the
lake, in hopes that it would come out a week later, sanded down and smooth.
The beach glass is mostly, we figure, pieces of beer or pop bottles thrown
down somewhere north of us in Lake Michigan, only to land right by our feet
on Central Beach.  At the southern tip of Lake Michigan, we are fortunate
enough to collect the discarded glass from probably anywhere north of us on
the shoreline.

      Now what?  We had a huge bag full of beach glass sitting in the lab.
Alissa and I proposed putting it in a jar and passing it back and forth
when we visited each other in college.  Stacey was a little more creative.
She suggested purchasing wire, thin leather rope, and a few metal pieces,
and the end result would be a beach glass necklace.  Thus, one Friday, the
four of us went on a mission to find beach glass necklace supplies.  We
were successful, and after careful consideration and some trial and error,
we ended up with at least a dozen different, neat-looking beach glass
necklaces.

      Hopefully, all the data compiled from our water sampling will give
our bosses, Richard Whitman, and Meredith Nevers, new thoughts and ideas
regarding the relationship between water chemistry and E. coli counts.  In
the summer of 2004, we collected even more than 6 water samples and 25
conductivity measurements a day.  We assembled a fantastic beach glass
collection, made some nifty necklaces, and in some weird way, helped clean
up the shores of Lake Michigan.  Our necklaces will not only remind us of
the sampling of the summer of 2004, but they are now symbolic of the
friendships the four of us formed along the shore in those 2 months.

Cassie Peller, United States Geological Survey
Porter, Indiana

This is for my sampling buddies:
Alissa Bishel
Stacey Byers
Jessica Hardesty






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