Sagehen Master Plan.

When we came to Sagehen, Jeff & I had no idea what Sagehen really was, but we quickly realized that it owed its continuing existence to an active & engaged community.

So, we created the Sagehen Reserve Program Planning Advisory Group. SRPPAG consists of a variety of stakeholders with an interest in Sagehen's future. Working together, the group developed the "Sagehen Vision", which defined what the community thinks Sagehen should be.

Recently, we've been working with the architecture firm Cathexes to develop a Master Plan for the facilities needed to address Sagehen's current shortcomings & fulfill the Vision.

Download the plan here. [PDF, 28pp.- 7MB]

This Master Plan is a tool which we will use for the environmental impact work & to begin the funding hunt. It draws the footprint & outlines the general concepts that will drive the final building designs. Below is a fly-through animation of the site, including our existing structures & the planned structures.

Our pre-existing buildings appear in the fly-through as very simply, undetailed shapes. Remember, the new structures are still very rough because this is just the first step in the design process!

There are more video fly-throughs here.

Field Station struggles with tourism impacts.

Here's an article about a serious, existence-threatening issue that one of our fellow field stations is dealing with in Colorado.

Many field stations find themselves faced with growing user group conflicts as people begin to enter these formerly quiet & remote areas for intensive recreation. As a measure of the growing problem, off-road motorized vehicles rose from about 5 million in the 1970's, to about 43 million in 2005.

So far, we haven't had major problems at Sagehen & we're hoping that the new Tahoe National Forest OHV Plan will help arrest some developing issues that hold the potential to grow into big problems for us.

Cat-cam!

Here at Sagehen we are dreaming of [& working hard toward] the day that we can track critters through the basin in real time.

This will yield huge breakthroughs in our understanding of how animals use the landscape, since we can only get very periodic fixes on animal position using currently available technologies like camera traps, GPS collars & radio-tracking.

Here's a guy who is working on the same thing using his cat! He has developed a commercial cat-cam that snaps periodic images from the cat's P.O.V., & he is exploring real-time video transmission. Generously, he puts lots of relevant information on his website, including schematic diagrams & part lists. He also offers a GPS tracking system.

You can go along on his cat's travels, or subscribe to an RSS feed for news updates.

Users of the CatCam send in their own cat photo journeys. It's sort of an interesting meditation on the perceptual choices of human photographer-artists to see pictures of what cats think is important.