Alan's Ramblings - rangers tag

It's that helicopter time of year again

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:40:49 GMT

The Moors For The Future project has been working since 2003 to repair the damage caused to the moorland of the Dark Peak, which I live on the edge of. Part of this work involves spreading heather brash over the areas of eroded peat, so as to provide a micro-climate that will enable the surface of the peat to revegetate. Because of the nature of the terrain, it's impossible to access it by conventional means so everything has to be airlifted in by helicopter. There's a short period when this work can be done, between the end of the shooting season and the start of the nesting season, so it's a pretty hectic time. This year the project is doing its biggest-ever airlift which will be using three helicopters to transfer 24,000 dumpy bags of heather brash onto the moors, which will be spread across 1,600,000 square metres of eroded peat. The Peak District Rangers provide ground support for the helicopters, so I'm going to be out at least a day a week for the next month or so helping out. There's a video below that I took a couple of years ago showing what's involved - the helicopter carries six bags at a time and drops them off in pairs at the places we indicate. It's a bit scary the first couple of times, but the skill of the pilots is really amazing, and so far nobody has been buried under a bag :-) The project been front-page news in the local press - yeah, it's quiet around here - see these articles in The Glossop Chronicle and The Glossop Advertiser

A busy day on the moors

Sat, 22 May 2010 21:38:00 GMT

I got a phone call from Fiona yesterday asking me if I'd help with some research work being done on Black Hill by the University of Manchester on behalf of Moors For The Future (MFTF). Beth is doing the research and she's using a spectrometer to measure the light reflected from different types of vegetation over the course of the year. She's doing this so that subsequent aerial surveys can be analysed using the information. Areas of different vegetation can be identified on the aerial survey by looking for areas with the same absorption characteristics as found on the ground survey. The spectrometer is a ASD FieldSpec Pro supplied by NERC, one of the UK's research bodies. It allegedly portable - well, perhaps if you have a donkey it is, because as well as the spectrometer there are four lead-acid batteries, a laptop and a number of other bits and pieces. to be carried, so myself and David went out to help Beth - and poor David got the biggest lump to lug across the moor :-)

The readings can only be taken when there's no cloud obscuring the sun, hence Beth's heavenward gaze. Each plot has to have four readings taken, one on a white reference tile and three of the vegetation, from different positions to get an average reading. You can see the reference tile and the sensing head in the pictures above. There's a bundle of fibre optics that takes the light from the sensing head into the spectroscope on David's back, where the light is analysed and the results fed into the laptop that Beth is carrying. I had the difficult job of carrying a clipboard and writing stuff down :-)

A couple of hundred meters away from us there was another group of people who were also working on the MFTF project. The moors in the Dark Peak are an internationally important habitat, Blanket Bog. The peat was formed originally by Sphagnum Moss, but over the last hundred or so years, environmental degradation caused in part by the Industrial Revolution has taken its toll and much of the Sphagnum has disappeared, and there has been widespread erosion of the peat. MFTF have been re-vegetating the moors with heather, but Sphagnum is one of the really important species to re-establish because it is responsible for generating the peat in the first place, and locking up CO2 as a result. MFTF have contracted Micropropagation Services to prepare Sphagnum pellets so that they can be spread across the moor to effectively "inoculate" the ground surface with new Sphagnum.

The pellets are going to be spread from helicopter using an adapted agricultural sprayer, they were testing out the system and working out the snags in preparation for spreading the pellets on a wide scale. It took three years to get to the current stage, so there's an immense amount of effort going into this environmental programme. There are more details of the project on the Moors For The Future website.

After heading back from Heyden Head to Holme Moss summit, David noticed what appeared to be smoke drifting across the Bleaklow plateau. We are in a period of high fire risk at the moment due to the recent dry weather, and we've had catastrophic fires on Bleaklow in the past, so David and I had to bail out and leave Beth on her own so that we could go check out the smoke. We drove round the other side of the Bleaklow plateau and up onto Snake Summit expecting to see smoke, but there was nothing visible. We headed off rapidly down the Pennine Way to Alport Low where we could get a clear view of where the smoke had apparently being coming from, but there was nothing to be seen from there either - we passed Terry on the way with a group he was out with, and he also hadn't seen anything. I managed to get hold of Mike on the radio, he was on Kinder and had seen the smoke as well, but by the time we got to Alport Low there was nothing to be seen. Most puzzling - the three of us had quite clearly seen smoke from Holme Moss, all I can think if was that it was a small accidental burn that someone had put out quickly.

We then headed back to Snake Summit where we met up with Peter and Bob, then headed back round to the north side of the plateau again to put up "high fire risk" signs at Crowden and Arnfield - kinda ironic really - before heading back to the briefing centre and then home.

Wrecks walk

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 07:56:28 GMT

On Thursday last week I got a phone call from John Owen, one of the other rangers, asking me if I'd like to help out on a guided walk. I'd agreed before he told me that I'd just let myself in for, a 24km trog round seven of the aircraft wrecks that litter the Peak District. I got in contact with my friend Bob to get GPS coordinates for one of the wrecks I hadn't visited and he mentioned that he'd been having problems getting GPS data into Google Earth, so I decided I'd record the track of the walk with my GPS and see if I could get it into Google Earth. The GPS management I use (OziExplorer) can export data to Google Earth, so I've provided a 'fly through' KMZ file, if you have Google Earth installed you should be able to load the file and then press F10 twice to start the tour. Fortunately Google have just added high resolution photos of the Bleaklow area so you can actually get a fair idea of the terrain. The KML file also includes the boundary of the Peak District National Park as well as the route of the Pennine Way within the park.

Because of the distance involved we started bright and early at 9:00am. For me that just required a leisurely stroll the 150m from my front door to where the walk started. We had 14 people turn up at the starting point in Old Glossop, some who had come from as far as Norfolk for the walking festival. The forecast was for poor visibility , and it was spot on - there was a heavy overcast sky as we started down Mossy Lea, but thankfully it didn't look like it was going to rain.

We headed up Mossy Lea, passing Shire Hill on the right and Lightside on the left before heading up Doctor's Gate and and up Crooked Clough, climbing up past the footbridge and then stopping for a quick rest before heading up Ashton Clough. This view is west back down the valley, towards Glossop. The high ground to the left is Coldharbour Moor.

This is the bottom of Ashton Clough, a steep gorge that climbs 240m in about 750m, and the sides are even steeper. A Douglas C-47 (Dakota) crashed up on the edge of James's Thorn to the west (left) of this picture. Over the years bits of the wreckage has slid down into the bottom of Ashton Clough - here you can see the cylinder block of one of the radial engines.

This is the location where Douglas C-47 2108982 (Dakota) of 314th Troop Carrier Group USAAF crashed on 24th July 1945, just below James's Thorn. Unfortunately all the crew were killed. If you look at the GPS track just below this point you can see how we zigzagged up the hill, due to the steepness of the slope, some of the folks scrambled up the rocky bottom of Ashton Clough, those with a more nervous disposition took the (only slightly) easier route up the left hand side of the clough. The fence in the immediate foreground is part of the fence that was put around the entire Bleaklow plateau as part of the Moors for the Future project, and the rocky area in the background is Higher Shelf Stones.

Just above the wreck of the Dakota is all that remains of Lancaster KB993 of 408 Squadron R.C.A.F., which crashed 18th May 1945. The crew of six were all killed. This view is looking west back towards Glossop, and beyond that, Manchester. By the time we got here the low mist and cloud had burned off and it was really quite warm - spring is finally on the way!

We then headed over to the wreck just north of the trig point at Higher Shelf Stones. This is Superfortress B-29 44-61999 "Over Exposed" of the 16th Photographic Reconnaisance Squadron U.S.A.F. It crashed on 3rd November 1948 whilst descending through cloud, just days before the crew were due to return home to the USA. This is the biggest wreck site in the Dark Peak, a significant amount of wreckage remains. A couple of years ago a wedding ring belonging to one of the crew was found at the site, and was eventually returned to the granddaughter of the crew member. There is a memorial service here every Remembrance Sunday (the Sunday nearest to 11 November) for the crews of the 50+ wrecks in the Dark Peak area. The smoky mist near the ground is water vapour coming off the peat - as the mist burns off the surface of the peat heats very rapidly as it is so dark, and water starts to evaporate from it, re-condensing as it hits the still-cool air.

Due to time constraints we missed out the Botha and Wellington wrecks to the north and instead cut across to the Blenheim on Sykes Moor. This was Blenhein Mk.I L1476 of RAF 164 Squadron, which crashed on 30th January 1939 while on a training flight from RAF Church Fenton. This is hidden in the bottom of a grough and is quite difficult to find, but the GPS coordinates I was given by John Fielding were spot on. Finally we headed over towards John Track Well before crossing over the newly-replanked shooting path to Glossop Low and thence back down the quarry track to Old Glossop. All in all a splendid walk - any day when it doesn't rain and doesn't require thermals is a good one :-)

Airborne muckspreader

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 10:12:20 GMT

A couple of weeks ago the Moors For the Future folks started up the heather brash spreading operations that I've helped out with before. The aim is to spread a thin layer of chopped up heather (brash) over the bare peat as part of the process of getting it to regenerate. In the past the heather has been airlifted by helicopter onto the moors and then spread by hand. This is a very time and labour intensive process, and it is quite difficult to get an even layer. This year they are using a different technique (and a different helicopter company). Instead of the heather being lifted on site and then spread it is loaded into what I can only descrive as an aerial muckspreader which is then flown under the helicopter.

Here you can see it on the back of the truck - there are a pair of the spreaders, whilst one is being filled the other is being flown over to the spreading area. The bottom of the spreader is a conveyor belt that moves the heather towards the back of the contraption. The two vertical shafts with the disks and tines on them rotate towards the gap in the centre and fling the heather out of the back. The whole thing is powered by a small petrol motor underneath the hopper.

The lift site was right at the summit of Holme Moss, next to the transmitter tower. Being a peat bog means that even though the ground looked frozen it was actually very soft underneath - as they found out when they tried to drive the truck over to the stockpile of brash bags!

Needless to say a cooperative farmer and a large tractor were required to hoik the truck out of the hole it had dug for itself and move it over to the bags.

The helicopter they were using was a Squirrel. They'd taken all the seats out to keep the weight down - each spreader weighs about 1/4 tonne and holds up to 6 cubic metres of brash, so they needed all the umph they could get.

Unfortunately this meant we had to walk the 2.5km onto the moor, and boy was it cold. The spreading area was directly around the trig point on Black Hill - anyone who knows the area will understand just how bleak it is, and it was pretty windy too, which made it feel all the colder. The mast you can see in the background is the Holme Moss transmitter - at one point this mast provided TV coverage for most of the North West of the UK.

Once on site two people stood either end of the swathe they wanted the helicopter to cover and the pilot flew over them, turning the spreader on at the appropriate moment. It took about 30 seconds to dispense the 6 cubic meters of heather. The area on the right of the photo has already been covered, and the area on the left is not yet treated. Depending on the height, each run covered a swathe about 5 - 8m wide and perhaps 100-150m long. This was at the start of the day and the pilot was coming in relatively high, by the end of the day he was coming over us at about 2 - 3m above head height.

Here's a view of the contraption in action - you can see the stream of heather being flung out by the counter-rotating spreader shafts at the back of the hopper. The aerofoils above and to the side of the spreader shafts are to keep the whole thing stable as it's being flown under the helicopter.

And here's the net effect when you are stood underneath acting as a human marker flag. And yes it does itch when you get a load of heather down your neck, although the helmet and the goggles keep most of it off of your face :-) I was initially a little skeptical about the likely efficacy of this technique, but it was really very impressive. It gave a much more even coverage than hand spreading and is obviously far faster. The only problem was that the heather bags had been standing for some time, and the combination of them being stacked on top of each other, compressed, soaked in rain and then frozen meant that a lot of the brash was in solid lumps that jammed the spreader. However on subsequent days they got a machine up to re-shred the heather to get the lumps out and solved that problem.

As with the spreading done last year this is still very much an experimental technique, it will be interesting to see how effective it has been over the next couple of years.

Jack Frost

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 09:52:09 GMT

I was out on Patrol today, and Peter was nagging me because I hadn't blogged anything in a long time, and he's right - nearly three months since my last post - oops! As for my wander today up Tintwistle Knarr and across to Arnfield Moor with Bob, I have nothing much to report other than it was overcast, grey, chilly and dark very early - oh, and the eight hares we saw were all getting their snowy white winter coats. Speaking of seasonal things, I was downloading photos from by camera and I found this rather nice wintry scene which I've added a touch of soft focus - fame and glory to anyone who identifies the location :-)