Oral history interview with Charles Avery [with transcript], December 1, 2010.

              Charles Avery
Interviewed by  Jodi Lee Knowlton
Camera by Tyler Starbard
December 1, 2010

Knowlton:  (in midsentence) ... hear about the atmosphere and what it was like on Beaver Creek, and why you were working at Beaver Creek, since we weren’t around during that time.  And it seems like kind of an exciting project to have worked on, so it’d be cool to know how everything kind of played out, I guess.
Avery:  Beaver Creek came out of a joint meeting during the regional foresters in Albuquerque, and the director of the experiment station at Fort Collins.  They were talking one day about the fact that they needed to find out how important it was to manipulate forest stands in order to keep water flowing down the Salt River Project.  So that was the big thing, effective forest cutting practices on water yields.
Knowlton:  And you said that you started working on the project after it had begun?
Avery:  Yeah, following Ed Hansen, who came on the project about six months after it started, as hydrologist.  And Ed left-in 1967 he left the project.  And I was recruited to come down here in 1968 to take Ed Hansen’s place.
Knowlton:  And so that was as an ecologist?
Avery:  [unclear]
Knowlton:  What was your role- a hydrologist?
Avery:  Yeah, sediment studies, and amount of water-precip. and evaporation, all those kinds.
Knowlton:  So were you involved....  I know there was kind of twenty main areas and the different treatments, like the cutting and burning, or the slash piles, or the strip cutting.
Avery:  Right.
Knowlton:  Were you involved in coming up with those treatments, or how were those treatments kind of formed?
Avery:  The treatments had already been promulgated, already designed.  And so what the treatments were going to be had been decided before I came.  But the implementation of a couple of the treatments, I had full responsibility for.
Knowlton:  And what treatments were those ones?
Avery:  Watershed 12 and Watershed 8.  Have you ever seen a map of the area?
Knowlton:  I have, yeah.  We actually have a map somewhere.  I’m trying to remember what actual treatments were implemented in those two.
Avery:  Watershed 12 was a clear-cut treatment.  And Watershed 8 was a partial cut.  There’s a 60-foot cut strip, and a 30- or 60-foot leave strip.  So it was alternate, cut and leave.
Knowlton:  And why were these different treatments kind of studied, and why are they important?  What’s the difference, if you will, between those cuts?
Avery:  Well, what they turned out to be, there’s not much difference.  I mean, [to] start with, nobody could guess exactly what would happen.  But once you got beyond a certain amount, it didn’t make much difference how much farther you took the treatment.  So Watershed 8 and Watershed 9, Watershed 10, were all done prior to my coming.  When you compared Watershed 12, which was designed to be a complete removal of the overstory, there really wasn’t much more I could do.  So we set about doing and analyzing the data for six years, and finally we decided there wasn’t any more ways we could get results out of the numbers that we had.  So a decision was made by the Washington office to close down the project.  And Dave Garrett have you ever come across his name before?
Knowlton:  Dave-what was that, Dave Garrett?  I don’t think I have Dave Garrett at all, actually.  What was his role?
Avery:  He was sent to close out the project.
Knowlton:  Okay.  When I was talking to Tom, there was a change of leadership.  When the leadership changed, I don’t remember if it was Dave that came in towards the end, and took over the project, and then it closed?
Avery:  Closed down.  He was given the responsibility of closing it down, when he was transferred into Flagstaff.
Knowlton:  And so I guess in general, kind of you analyzed your data for six years, and there was twenty years of data collected.  Why is that long term, more than a year or two, why is that information important?
Avery:  To get long-term results?
Knowlton:  Uh-huh.
Avery:  Because it requires a certain amount of time for the overstory and understory to stabilize.  It’s just like when you got hit with a soccer ball when you play.  The bruise doesn’t show up until twelve, fourteen hours later.  Then you’ve got a bruise on your arm and you say, "What was that from?!"  You don’t remember it was from a soccer ball hitting you.
Knowlton:  Right.
Avery:  And the same thing [unclear] impact these forests around here with some kind of a major impact like removing all the overstory in the 35th strip, or clear cutting a watershed.  It’s not a trivial thing.  And so it was decided to run those data collection devices for a couple of more years after each one was implemented.
Knowlton:  And did you notice a big change in the results you got from year to year?
Avery:  Statistically we couldn’t show any change.  So the result was a non sequitur.
Knowlton:  Right.  And do you think that that’s influenced the management that maybe happened twenty years ago, and the management that’s happening now in the forest?  Do you think those results are used?
Avery:  What happens between now and twenty years from now, or what happened twenty years before now, I don’t think has been influenced one bit by the results [unclear] Beaver Creek.  It’s all been driven by policy recommendations, cut more trees or to cut fewer trees.  What Beaver Creek did was lay out various kinds of programs that could be taken-partial cuts, clear cuts; north-facing slopes and south-facing slopes; east-facing, west facing-so a variety of various characteristics that went into each treatment.  But, you know, if you flipped a coin at the end of the period, why, it wouldn’t show much difference between the treatments, do anything, harvest anything you want, harvest any way you want-as far as water yields were concerned. Now in terms of visual, visual implementation is a whole different matter.  That was Terry Daniel, trying to get the public expression of what the various groups of people wanted out of their forests.  But in terms of getting water out of the forest, it really didn’t make much difference what you did.
Knowlton:  And so the experiment started looking at the water, and just originated saying how much is the water yield going to increase, decrease, change?
Avery:  That was the original goal.
Knowlton:  And then it seems like there’s a lot of other research done, like the visual quality came in.  And I know there was some wildlife studies that were also done.  Do you know how all those different players came into the project, and how it expanded to encompass more than just the water?
Avery:  Well, it was costs versus benefits-simple economics.  It took hold, whether it cost a lot to implement the treatment, or whether you got a lot of water out of it-these were all benefits and costs that were taken into account.  (aside about recording equipment)
Knowlton:  You were talking about costs versus benefits, and the economics of the project.
Avery:  Right.  [unclear] analysis [unclear] set up part of the project, took various groups of people out to look at the watersheds to get their impression.
Knowlton:  Did you work on any of the-I know it kind of runs hand-in-hand with the water-but the snow melt?
Avery:  We probably did most of the snow melt work.  There was a little bit of that on Watersheds 8 and 9-snow catchment.
Knowlton:  Can you kind of explain that process to me?
Avery:  Well, Watershed 8 and Watershed 9 were two watersheds which were strip cut.  One had a west-facing slope, and the other one had a south-facing slope to it.  They were stripped.  The strips were cut about 60 feet wide, and trapped the snow.  It was a matter of seeing if the snow melt off the middle section, the cut section, if it was augmented by the trees being on either side of it.  So strip cuts were another alternative that was investigated.  There were clear cuts and partial cuts and strip cuts.
Knowlton:  And what were the kind of results that you guys found with that?  Did you find that it made a difference with the snow?  I know there wasn’t a statistically significant difference, but with that individual snow in catchment....
Avery:  Actually, the strip cuts soon vegetated, soon started to regenerate.  In about five, ten years, you couldn’t tell the difference between the cut area and the strip area, or the leave area.
Knowlton:  And on the topic of all the different players that came into the project, and a lot of them came to Flagstaff specifically for Beaver Creek, how did those kind of, I guess, alliances or partnerships form with all the different people that were working?
Avery:  Did a partnership form?  Yeah.  Yeah, we were all part of the Rocky Mountain Experiment Station, and there was a building that was built to house the Beaver Creek Project personnel, which is now part of the geology department’s holdings out on North Campus.  Anyway, that building was built to give the people that worked out here on the project, an office space to sit at a desk and work out their conclusions.  So if you go to the-the geology department has two buildings on North Campus, and the one most modern-looking one is the one that was built by the Beaver Creek money, and it was built to house the scientists on the Beaver Creek Project.
Knowlton:  That’s great.  And did you continue working with a lot of the people you met at Beaver Creek, throughout your career?
Knowlton:  What?
Knowlton:  A lot of the people who worked on Beaver Creek, it seems like a lot of them are still working together.  I know that Terry and Pete have kept in touch, and are doing a lot of research together still to this day.  I didn’t know if you maybe kind of felt like you continued working with some of those key players in the Beaver Creek Watershed.
Avery:  Well, most of the people have retired, except Pete Ffolliott and he’s about one year away from retirement.  So he kind of caught us on the tail end of it.  Terry Daniel, I think, was about six years ago.  Everybody has their own impressions of what it was like to work for him, but actually it was pretty good, a pretty good assignment.
Knowlton:  So you enjoyed the time you spent on Beaver Creek?
Avery:  Yeah.  I loved the Beaver Creek Project and came over to the university.  That was a good overall [unclear].
Knowlton:  So you stayed in Flagstaff at NAU, working as a professor?
Avery:  I left in ’68 [1968], went back and got my doctorate, and came back in ’73, and got a job at NAU.
Knowlton:  And when did the Beaver Creek Project close down again?
Avery:  In ’74 [1974].
Knowlton:  Can you elaborate a little bit on why the program was disbanded?
Avery:  Well, because it cost a lot to operate it, and the amount of insights that were gained were really....  You kind of peaked out, topped out, you might say.  Information was gathered and was analyzed, and there really wasn’t much to be said for [taking?] it farther.  Just like anything else, it took a while to close it down, to get everybody into a job that they were happy at.  But there weren’t any firings.  Nobody was let go.
Knowlton:  That’s good.  So if you could kind of summarize some of the main findings that came out of that project, and what you guys and we as a whole, have taken away from that project.
Avery:  There’s a publication on water yields [unclear].  It talks about the implementation, about the results of various kinds of treatments.  I can’t remember all the things that went into it.  I wrote several portions of that, but it was a group publication.  If you look at it, look in those boxes at the Cline Library, you’ll find that publication.  It’s the final swan song of the organization.
Knowlton:  Let’s see....  I know I have more questions.  Oh!  When I was talking to Tom Brown up in Fort Collins, he was discussing some of the changes in climate that are happening, and he thinks that as this change is happening and water becomes an even more precious resource than it is now, that some of those results from Beaver Creek might be important in the future as people are making management decisions and deciding how to keep kind of the water source in the West.
Avery:  How do I feel what?
Knowlton:  I was just kind of explaining what Tom was talking about, which is he feels these results might come up again and be important again in the future as water becomes more scarce.
Avery:  Right.
Knowlton:  And so do you think that the findings from Beaver Creek kind of hold a valid....
Avery:  Yeah, there’s going to be an increased demand in production of good water.  It’s a matter of putting sideboards on it.  I don’t know when it’s going to happen, how dramatic it’s going to be.  I mean it’s one thing to say that water is getting more scarce, and that publication [unclear] talking about constraining various activities on top of the watershed.  But they’ve got all these counter-pressures, such as four-wheel drives and all the off-road vehicles.  [unclear] without any regard to the impact on the land.   My feeling is the amount of cutting that’s taking place on the land will settle down to certain amounts of leave areas, and certain amounts of cut areas.  It’ll probably be about a 60-40 result.  Forty percent will be left, and 60 percent will be cut.  The timber in the watershed will be a combination of cut and leave.  Partial cuts are too expensive to implement-when you cut one tree and move over, leave the next tree, and cut one, and so on.  Already have a variety of densities, depending on where you stand in the area.  You’ve talked about different silvicultural options in a treatment of clear cuts and partial cuts, but in between that you have different densities of partial cuts.  The ideal density, it turns out, is about 120 square feet basal area per acre.  If you go below that, you don’t get much augmentation of the amount of growth, and the amount of water yields, you can cut down to a little bit denser than for silvicultural yields.  So if you want to cut for silvicultural yields, you leave a lot of growing stock-a lot more growing stock than for water yields.
Knowlton:  Does that information come from the experiments at Beaver Creek, or is that....
Avery:  Well, from various experiments around the country.  It was all kind of reaffirmed by the Beaver Creek studies.  Each watershed was gauged in terms of the amount of water flowing out, down the stream, and the precip gauges.  So the input to the watershed in terms of snow or in terms of rainfall, and the amount of water that was yielded off the watershed was measured.  The difference is the evapotranspiration.  And if you don’t have any plants or if you have just bare soils, the amount of evapotranspiration is less than it is if you have a whole dense woodland.
Knowlton:  So the cutting-just to clarify what you were saying-is a function of both the amount of water that maybe hits the surface and runs off, but it’s also the amount of water that’s taken up by the trees as water is going downhill?
Avery:  Evapotranspiration, yeah.  And so if the trees, like Ponderosa pine trees, have relatively shallow root systems, whereas if you have the Gambel oak trees that have relatively deep root systems, what you’ll find is that the Gambel oak will out-compete the Ponderosa pines, [unclear] drier and drier land.
Knowlton:  Okay.  And so that accounts for the....
Avery:  [unclear] when you start moving up the [Mogollon] Rim, up into the Ponderosa pine country, it becomes a matter of the soil doesn’t have to be as deep, impacted as deep with the water.  If I’d have known you were going to ask such deep questions, I would have had a bunch of publications ready for you.
Knowlton:  We really do just kind of want more of a layman’s terms, easier to understand than some of the scientific publications, which is why we’re talking to you.  I also had some questions about the burning.  Did you take part in any of the burning that went on, or in the research around how the burning was affecting the different...?
Avery:  Burning?  Well, there weren’t any burns on the Beaver Creek Project.
Knowlton:  Were there burns on the Long Valley Project?  I think I remember reading something about....
Avery:  Well, there were burns on the Chimney Springs allotment.
Knowlton:  Yeah, I have that one down here-the Chimney Springs.  Did you work on that?
Avery:  No, that was a separate project.
Knowlton:  Okay.  I was just interested to hear about some of the first prescribed burns in this area.
Avery:  The experiment station is equal in budget and impacts as the regular National Forest Administration.  So National Forest Administration gets [unclear] Coconino and Kaibab and Prescott National Forest [unclear] national forest.  Experiment stations are all over the area.  Have you ever been out to the Fort Valley Experiment Station?
Starbard:  Uh-huh.
Avery:  You know where Fort Valley is?
Knowlton:  Yeah.
Avery:  And there’s a bunch of buildings up there, and it’s the headquarters of the experimental forests.
Knowlton:  Uh-huh.  So all the experimental forests were out of that, Fort Valley?
Avery:  Well, just the Flagstaff area.
Knowlton:  Okay.
Avery:  (aside about recording equipment)
Knowlton:  So I guess overall what are some of the kind of positive things that maybe came out of the experiment?  I mean, it’s kind of subjective, so what do you feel were the good parts?
Avery:  Well, obviously could have done things differently at the beginning.  We would have gone to look for a much smaller increase and much smaller change.  Some of our methods were pretty gross.  We were looking for a bigger change, and we were out there looking for a needle in a haystack.  We weren’t looking for it in terms of a pitchfork.  If we could have subdivided these waters into the subwatersheds and figured out the amount [unclear] smaller area, it would have been a lot less [unclear] cause.  To say what I mean is a big watershed is 150-250 acres, and a small watershed is about 20-30 acres.  The area was divided up into big watersheds.  So it was hard to look for a needle in a haystack.  Everything was kind of gross, it was done in a manner that was-you know, [unclear] was kind of-well, it was just kind of broad berthed.
Knowlton:  Right.  I talked to a few people about....
Avery:  Who?
Knowlton:  Just some of the people I’ve talked to throughout the project.  We’ve talked about the importance or the difference between that kind of large-scale versus small-scale.  And so you’re saying that it would have been easier to note the change in the smaller scale?
Avery:  Yeah, I think if we’d have had a smaller scale, it would have been more uniform-overstory-and the treatments would have been more obvious.  You always learn by hindsight what you’ll do.
Knowlton:  Right.  I was just going to ask, why do you think they chose to do such big watersheds?
Avery:  Well, they weren’t considered big.  They were considered operational scale.
Knowlton:  Okay.
Avery:  You set out to do something, you had to handle all the administration, including plans-plans for regeneration and so on-renewal and regeneration of the watershed.  That was about the size of it.  Sales would be 150-200 acres.  If it was a small watershed, you couldn’t get any logger to come in and take the sale.  So this was kind of an average size watershed for the areas south of Flagstaff, or the Ponderosa pine area along the Rim.
Knowlton:  And was there temporary operations going on when the program was started?  Were people actually cutting trees for timber and processing them for that?
Avery:  They were.  You know where Happy Jack is?
Knowlton:  Yes.
Avery:  Okay, they were implementing the cutting practices north of Happy Jack.  The Beaver Creek Project was all south of Happy Jack.  So it was all virgin lands, had not been cut over at all.
Starbard:  So one of the reasons that it was on a larger scale, that each watershed was larger, is that they wanted to be able to harvest that timber when they implemented each treatment?
Avery:  Yeah, they wanted to be able to show that these were operational scale watersheds you were talking about.  And some of the yields were decided to be taken for a smaller area, then put back on the watershed itself.  For instance, if you had 10 areas of 10 acres each, you have 100 acres.  And if the cutting practices yields amount of cut wood would be taken off the land for the whole area.  So it was a matter of that 100 acres was decided to be about the minimum size of treatment area, and 200 acres about the largest size.
Knowlton:  And I talked a little bit with Tom about the kind of, I guess, paired nature, where you have this one big area with all these different little watersheds, that have different treatments and have the controls, and how important that is for the research because a lot of treatments just do the treatment and don’t necessarily have a control when they’re that large?
Avery:  Well, in Beaver Creek, every watershed kind of had one that was a control watershed.  And so you could detect the difference of the climate changes between pre- and post-harvest.  Whereas in an operational forest, you don’t worry about having any kind of implementation of a control watershed.  And so Beaver Creek was supposed to provide the information which it did by saying it was immaterial of how you cut the area.
Knowlton:  And so that’s just another way of saying there was no big results saying that it was different from the different management?
Avery:  Right, didn’t make a lot of difference.
Knowlton:  Didn’t make a lot of difference.  There’s still the same amount of water comin’ down the hill.
Avery:  The water that goes to Phoenix is still important, but see, the trouble with Beaver Creek was that after you got through, even if Beaver Creek did make water, you had a lot of losses in the water as it went down.  You know where I-17 crosses [unclear] Beaver Creek, down at Montezuma’s Well and that area?
Knowlton:  Uh-huh.
Avery:  Well, between that and Phoenix, there’s a lot of places that the water gets taken off for irrigation, or gets evaporated, or seeps into the ground.  So even if you did make water on the watersheds, you had to get it to the point of water use.  And that was something that the Beaver Creek Project never addressed, was where the losses would be sustained.
Knowlton:  After the water left.
Avery:  After it was caught.
Knowlton:  Hm.  And so I know that the Arizona Water Project, I think, started up kind of-yeah, the Arizona Watershed Program kind of started up around the same time in the sixties to kind of do research as well, about the watershed management practices.  Was that integrated into Beaver Creek at all, or did you guys work in conjunction with them?
Avery:  [unclear]
Knowlton:  The Arizona Watershed Program.
Avery:  Yeah.  Was it doing what?
Knowlton:  It was another program that started up in Arizona to research watershed.
Avery:  It was much bigger.  The watersheds were much bigger:  5 times, 10 times as big.
Knowlton:  Right.  And so I was just curious if you guys crossed over at all with that, if Beaver Creek played into that program at all.
Avery:  Arizona Watershed Project was run out of Tempe, and we used to correspond.  We’d go down there, and they’d come up and look at our results.  There was kind of an built-in jealousy between NAU and ASU.
Knowlton:  And so was that program run out of ASU?
Avery:  Yeah.  It’s no longer in effect.
Knowlton:  Right.  But that’s where it started?
Avery:  Yeah.
Knowlton:  Okay.  And so you guys had little....
Avery:  Yeah, I think the big area for watershed management was in the early 1970s, 1965 to ’75.  And now it’s being, as you see on that publication, watershed management is starting to come back.
Knowlton:  And why do you think that’s becoming a cycle where it was important, and then it kind of faded?
Avery:  Well, water’s a very important product of the forest.  If you don’t manage it carefully-the headwaters area-you risk losing it all.  And so I think, like up in Colorado, the ski areas and so on, those all melt and go into various creeks and wind up in the Colorado River.  It’s a matter of whether you put the pieces together to make the whole, or whether you treat each piece as a separate entity.
Knowlton:  Right.  And so I guess how do you feel that the better management would be?
Avery:  I think if it starts up again, why, it’ll be undertaken as a little bit different research design.
Knowlton:  How do you think that research will change from maybe the research in the areas you were looking at in Beaver Creek to now?
Avery:  We took-all the output to the valleys were done on a pretty gross scale.  For instance, the outputs were based on a bi-weekly scale or a once-weekly scale.  We used to have the expectation that they have now to allow much finer resolution.  Nowadays you can measure the outputs and telemeter to a base station and instantaneously you get the amount of water that’s being yielded by various watershed treatments.  You don’t have to lump it together, a whole spring’s worth or a whole summer’s worth.  So the [unclear]tation has gotten to work on a much finer resolution.
Knowlton:  And do you think that it will improve?
Avery:  That was forty years ago.
Knowlton:  That’s very true, it was forty years ago.  How has the view of watershed management in the way that we think about our watershed management, changed from that time to now?
Avery:  There’s been a lot more emphasis on erosion control.  And the watershed management now is erosion management, erosion control.  The change is that people think about erosion control now.  They didn’t think about it back then.  I don’t think there was much concern about water yields.  You know, water yields are still kind of a vague premise.  You know that the water is going to come off, and it’s going to come off a lot the same amount that came off before the treatment, so why worry about it?  In other words, if an area’s going to flood, it depends more on the precipitation patterns than the area, the kind of treatment that takes place.  For instance, up just north of Flagstaff is Mount Elden-had the big fire.  What happened then was that the fire burned the ground cover off, so the water that came off was really more free to move, you might say.  [unclear] would have been cut in strips [unclear] would have retarded the streams so that they cut crossways to retard the water flow.  I don’t know what to say in terms of the way the cutting practices are.  They’re much more sensitive to keeping the soil in place nowadays than they used to be.
Knowlton:  And that’s a good thing.
Avery:  Yeah.
Knowlton:  So I guess as the future progresses and maybe we have more issues with water scarcity, do you think water yield will become something people are going to start studying again, and something that is going to become important?
Avery:  Oh, I think so.  I think the days of the big tree cuts are over.  I mean, even the cotton back here, these are all intermediate-sized trees.  The big sawmill that used to be down where-you know where Sawmill Plaza is on Beaver Street, where New Frontiers is?
Knowlton:  Oh yeah, the logging yard, all the trees.
Avery:  That used to be a big sawmill.  The sawmill was designed to cut big trees and make planks out of them-boards.  And the company that operated that was Southwest Forest Industries, and they dismantled the sawmill and sold off the area because they weren’t guaranteed the big trees.  Now what’s going to happen, thinnings are going to be taken out of the forest.  Well, they’re talking about bringing in a small sawmill into Williams.  Wait to see.  I don’t think that logging will take place in the big trees anymore.  [unclear] won’t take place in the headwaters of streams because of the erosion.
Knowlton:  And you guys studied the sediment erosion on Beaver Creek, correct?
Avery:  Yeah, we did.
Knowlton:  And did you find a big change?
Avery:  Not in the outflow from the various watersheds.  But they were cut relatively smoothly, relatively simply.  In other words, they were cut with an eye to erosion control.
Knowlton:  Right.  So if managers....
Avery:  Watershed 12 was a clear-cut watershed, but it was cut in strips to start with, and the slash was piled.  The water that was coming from above goes through these slash piles and dropped the erosion and soil that was eroded.  And so what came out of the end of Watershed 12 was basically the same kind of quality of water as you had before it was cut.
Knowlton:  Okay.  That’s interesting.  And so do they practice some of those same procedures today to keep the erosion....
Avery:  Yeah.  The restraining thing will be erosion control now.
Knowlton:  And how to manage forests for water quality and water yield?
Avery:  The semester [A.A.?] talk about this stuff?
Starbard:  Uh-huh.
Knowlton:  Yes.
Avery:  Sounds like it’s old hat.
Knowlton:  Erosion seems to be a big issue.  Do you have anything you’d like to share about Beaver Creek or about the project?
Avery:  I think it’s important to learn from the past.  If you could resurrect something like you guys are doing, it’s valuable to not let the past be too far out of sight.  So I think if I had anything to say, it would be about every three or five years to revisit Beaver Creek.
Knowlton:  Right.  And I think Tom Brown was going to come back and take pictures-because he did some of the Scenic Beauty.
Avery:  Who wants to do that?
Knowlton:  Tom Brown.  He’s up in Fort Collins, and he took the pictures after the treatments, and so I think he wanted to come back.  He was thinking about doing it this summer, but it got postponed, I believe, until next summer, to come down and take pictures of some of those sites.
Avery:  Really?  That’d be great.
Knowlton:  Yeah.  And then to re-see kind of what they looked like before the treatment, then right after the treatment-a few years after the treatment-and then now, thirty, forty years after some of those treatments were implemented.
Avery:  That’s neat that Tom Brown would do that.  He was on the project long enough to get a feel for it.
Knowlton:  Uh-huh.  He seemed like he enjoyed the time that he worked on the Beaver Creek Watershed.
Avery:  I don’t think there are too many people left that worked on the project, still living.
Knowlton:  There’s only a few.  Yeah, we’ve been trying to get in touch with a lot of them to get their stories down.
Avery:  Yeah, there’s a number of people that were involved in the watershed, in Beaver Creek, who are passed away.  I mean, if you started out on the Beaver Creek Project when you were young enough, you still would retire from it, from watershed management.  But mostly it’d be out of Fort Collins and not out of Flagstaff.
Knowlton:  They have retired.  I think we talked to John Yazzie. He was a technician, I believe, who worked on the project.  And Henry Sanchez.
Avery:  Hm.  I don’t know him.
Knowlton:  I don’t think they did research.  I think they were more kind of like a grounds crew, doing kind of some of the manual labor, physical work, on the project.  They both have retired as well.
Avery:  Got any other questions you want to ask?
Starbard:   I don’t have any others.  I can’t think of anything.
Avery:  It’s been a pleasure to have you guys down here.
Knowlton:  Oh, thank you.  We appreciate your time and your insight.  You helped us out.  There’s a few things that we talked about that I hadn’t read about quite yet, or really thought about.  It’s interesting to hear, too, about revisiting the site, still to this day would be unofficial.
Avery:  You want a job after you get through school?
Knowlton:  I’d love a job!  I’d love a job here, especially at Beaver Creek.  It’s a beautiful area.
Avery:  It’d be fun to have you guys working on a Beaver Creek project again.
Knowlton:  Yeah.
Avery:  Start up the project.
Knowlton:  That’d be cool.  Have you talked to Rocky Mountain Research?
Avery:  [unclear] for salaries and transportation and stuff.
Knowlton:  Yeah.  Maybe we’ll talk to Rocky Mountain Research Station about it!  See if we can pull somethin’.
Avery:  Get somethin’ goin’ on.  I don’t even know who the director of the experiment station is now.
Knowlton:  I don’t know either.
Avery:  Tom Brown’s boss.
Knowlton:  You know the historian at Fort Valley, Susan Olberding?
Avery:  Susan Olberding, yeah.  Have you talked to her?
Knowlton:  Yeah, she helped us out.  She kind of gave us some of the initial information about the project.
Avery:  Yeah.