Banner: Chain Lakes Provincial Park. Photo by Sofie Forsström. Blog by Watershed Stewardship Assistant Rachel Morris.

Hi everyone, Rachel here. You may have met me at an Oldman Watershed Council (OWC) event or outreach booth, or ‘met’ me via social media or by reading one of my blogs. I have been one of OWC’s Watershed Stewardship Assistants (WSAs) since April 2024, when I made the exciting journey from Ontario in my tiny car with my tiny cat. The time has now come for me to say goodbye to the OWC and the very cool places and people I got to meet.

a map of the Oldman watershed with green, blue, and yellow dots to show activities — Pictured above are all my Oldman watershed adventures! Blue dots are monitoring, green are restoration, and yellow are educational activities. I even (rarely) stepped outside of the watershed for events: see the two dots in Calgary and one in Milk River. Map: Lauren Thompson.

Over this time, I wore a lot of hats (both figuratively and literally, you’ll see). I planted trees, shrubs, and flowers; sampled creeks all over the watershed; did a brief stint in event planning; and met thousands of watershed residents in the backcountry, frontcountry, and everywhere in between. The best thing about this job was getting to end up in all sorts of places I wouldn’t expect to: an isolated creek up in the mountains, a classroom in Taber, someone’s backyard, probably every event venue in the watershed (my favourite was Willow Valley Hall), and all the nooks and crannies of our public land.

There is no way to convey to you how it felt to get to know the watershed like this, in big stretches of highway and in little pieces of heaven, but I will try to share the journey of the past few years in a series of pictures. Come flip through the photo album with me!

(If you’re going to say, “Rachel, it looks like you’re wearing the same pants in about half of these photos,” don’t worry about it. These days, it’s actually called slow fashion.)

The Photo Album

This is the earliest existing “Rachel at OWC” picture. It was my third day on the job, April 24, 2024. Sofie and I had a booth at the Stavely career fair teaching fifth graders about environmental science! I remember feeling very silly because I was about 15 hours into my environmental science career. I also really enjoyed my first trip to Stavely , because we stopped at the bakery in Fort Macleod en route.

May 2024. This was pretty much exactly one month in. To this day I remember it as one of the best programs we ever did. Sofie and I drove up Willow Valley Road on a beautiful spring day, stopping to look at mountain bluebirds. She demonstrated how we monitor creek health by evaluating the invertebrates that live in the streambed, and then I got to explain each and every insect I found to an incredibly willing-to-learn group of people, the Livingstone Landowners Group. Magical!

July 2024. Backcountry outreach: it is fun, and you’re always in a beautiful place, but oh man is the sun ever powerful at high altitudes in July. Phew.

This is how we spent our summer Fridays and Saturdays in 2024 and 2025; on some days, we talked to more than a hundred people, and on some days we were happy to get to a dozen.

This picture was taken at Ceasars Flats, a staging area along Dutch Creek. I am consistently amazed, whenever we come here for summer outreach, that anyone manages to haul a camper or RV up the Dutch Creek Road when the road is as bumpy as it is. True grit (and gritted teeth, I am sure).

This is from my Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network (CABIN) sampling training in August 2024. At the end of a CABIN sample, you carry out the 100 pebble count, which is when you randomly pick up 100 pebbles from the creek bed and measure them. Many people find this tedious, especially at the end of a long day, but it’s one of my favourite parts. So many cool rocks!

We stayed at the University of Lethbridge’s West Castle field station for this course, which was absolutely magical. I saw my first Calliope hummingbird on this trip!

August 2024. I have a very long-standing habit of stopping to look at every cool plant I see (and chasing after every bumble bee, and pulling over for cool birds). I used to worry that I was sometimes hampering the field team, because this slows us down when we are trying to get somewhere. However, I quickly discovered that this is called “place-based learning,” and it’s good for you. Hooray!

This was also at the West Castle field station. You can’t see it, but there was a bumble bee on the aster.

August 2024. A video clip of these very caddisflies became part of OWC’s most popular TikTok video, which got something like 60,000 views, and many encouraging comments. Through this, I learned that some folks call caddisflies ‘periwinkles’. The more you know.

The caddisflies in the Castle park are really unbeatable thanks to all the tiny colourful rocks they use to make their cases.

September 2024. There can be no mention of CABIN sampling without a moment to highlight processing the benthic sample. You do a sample of a creek bed by kicking up the sediment and catching it in a net; then a lucky soul gets to pick through the sediment to remove rocks, fish, twigs, and other unnecessary objects. Pictured: Cody (an amazing volunteer) bringing me more rinse water for a particularly silty sample. Probably something like 30 hours of my life have been spent cross-legged on the ground picking through a benthic sample. Wouldn’t trade it for anything.

This was Burton Creek, on the western edge of the Porcupine Hills Public Land Use Zone.

September 2024. This is the less glamorous side of CABIN sampling: decontamination. Most of our sites are suspected or confirmed whirling disease zones, and so, after our gear gets wet or muddy, we need to clean it and then soak it in a disinfectant solution. For every epic photo you see of us in the backcountry, knee-deep in a creek, there is a corresponding decontamination scene where everything gets taken apart and deconned (as we say in the business). Always remember to clean, drain, and dry!

September 2024. Camping at Maycroft Provincial Recreation Area. We sampled a bunch of sites on and around the Waldron and got to stay here for a few nights (strongly recommend, if you’ve never been). I remember Sofie making this bean-cheese-rice skillet and eating all the leftovers straight out of the pan. A really incredible time. This was also one of the scruffiest times in my hair growth.

October 2024. This was our most rugged CABIN site. Yarrow Creek, way up in the Castle Wildland park, almost at the Waterton park boundary. Here I am measuring the steepest slope we ever recorded at a CABIN site (I can’t even reach the height measurement on the survey rod), looking confused, having apparently lost my wader belt. In the background is Maria (another WSA)—spot the little orange dot that is a hi-vis toque. The hike in and out of this site was too steep and bumpy for our wagon, so we had to abandon it and haul in the gear by hand. The water temperature was literally 1 degree Celsius. A strong candidate for my favourite day of this job.

November 2024. Last planting day of the year (and the ground was more than a little frozen at this point). We’re down in the coulees of the Belly River, and our planting site was right on the shore. This is a great shot of the 2024 OWC field team: Kallie, Deb, Maria, Sofie, and me. Something like 75% of our field pictures wouldn’t exist if not for Kallie’s dedication to the group selfie.

February 2025. Syncline-Castle Trails Association put on a family event, and the snow was PERFECT snowman texture. I think I named this bear Bearimy. (I promise that we did also set up a tent and do some outreach). We’re in the Castle park here, at Syncline South staging area. A great place to cross-country ski when there’s enough snow!

April 2025. Seedy Saturday at the Lethbridge Public Library. This is the beginning of my pollinator-related content. Over the winter, I’d assembled a pollinator display box, and here I am nerding out about bumble bees. My educational background in biodiversity is very insect-focused, so I was thrilled to work on OWC’s bumble bee project.

Mid April 2025! First planting day of the year! Way up by Chain Lakes. We were planting willows all around a newly made dugout, and over the course of the day all this snow got mixed into the clay soil and everyone got covered in mud. I had SO MUCH FUN and then the next day I also had so much fun power washing all of the shovels, and everyone’s work gloves, and my boots.

May 2025. Kallie, Deb, and I planted potted willows on the Belly River with Ninna Piiksii and one brave volunteer. This was the first really hot day of the year, and we got sillier as the afternoon went on. I’m sure you can’t tell.

May 2025, planting a pollinator garden in Lethbridge. Deb meticulously planned out which plants would go where. Shoutout to Kallie for taking this picture—one of the cutest candids ever!

June 2025, planting a community pollinator garden in Claresholm. This was Chantel’s third or fourth day on the job as a WSA, and it was a long one. Here we are acting as helpful weights to keep our prepped site from blowing away in the wind before the soil arrives.

July 2025. Scouting potential sites for CABIN sampling. We have learned, over much trial and error, that if a map shows that there’s a creek, it doesn’t mean there’s water there now. Ground truth everything! This was along highway 22, just north of Chain Lakes.

Chantel and me at Open Farm Days, August 2025, in Lethbridge. We had just built the build-your-own-garden activity you see on the table, which we dubbed ‘Little House on the Prairie”. You may also notice that every single piece of paper on this table is weighed down by nature’s paperweight, the rock. You learn a thing or two after chasing your handouts across the parking lot.

This photo also marks the debut of my pink-tinted glasses, which are in every single subsequent photo.

August 2025, CABIN season, near Chain Lakes. An INCREDIBLE lunch spot. Anyone who has ever worked a field day with me knows my love for sandwiches. In the valley behind me is Willow Creek.

Camping at Chain Lakes between CABIN sites with Chantel and Sofie. This was such an awesome trip. Yes, I specifically chose this photo of Bananagrams because I won that round. No, I certainly did not win every round. The competition is pretty steep with this crew.

September 2025. This is a stage in our evolving gear-carrying strategy. This year, we sampled a lot of creeks that had pretty long hikes in, over rough-ish terrain. We moved from our previous ‘put everything in the wagon’ strategy to a more flexible approach where we loaded our gear into packs and carried the big stuff by hand. This only resulted in about three instances of forgetting a sample jar and having to send a runner back to the truck. If you are considering a career in environmental science, especially aquatics: make sure you like carrying stuff!

September 2025. Tennessee creek. THE siltiest sample we have ever pulled out of a creek bed. We actually wrote an apology note to our taxonomist (the folks in the lab that do the hard work of identifying our specimens) and tucked it into the sample jar with the bugs. Prairie creeks are just built different.

December 2025. We were invited to display our bumble bee materials, but we had to make our booth winter-themed. Chantel and I cut out these beautiful paper snowflakes. Adorable!

2025 OWC holiday get-together. Team Sofie (aka Sofie, Chantel, and me), at Nikka Yukko in Lethbridge.

A peek behind the scenes! This is my office assistant, Pringles, who takes her duties very seriously. If you’ve ever received an email from me, she probably proofread it.

March 2026. Bumble Bee-ginners at the public library in Lethbridge. Chantel and I planned this event to feel like a lab session at university, but without a quiz at the end.

Another photo from Bumble Bee-ginners. I can’t begin to express how happy it made me to see everyone nerd out about bumble bees! Truly heartwarming.

One last shout out to one of the best field crews ever to do it. Left to right: Chantel, Deb, and Sofie. It’s truly been an honour to work alongside them and the whole OWC team for the past two years.

And with that, I’m very happy to share that I will be going on to work on the Government of Alberta’s Aquatic Invasive Species team. I will be handling a trained detection dog to sniff out invasive zebra and quagga mussels, keeping Alberta’s waterways clean and safe!

A big thank you to everyone I’ve met and worked with over the past two years. This is such an incredible place to live and work, and I’m so glad I made it out here. So long, folks! Best fishes, and always remember to clean, drain, and dry.