Lookout Creek foams over boulders and swirls around huge jumbles of fallen limbs and logs as it rushes through Oregon’s Cascade Mountains toward the Pacific. The stream is wild and rugged, not the sort one would normally look forward to navigating without benefit of kayak or rubber raft. It is certainly not the sort of stream to negotiate with only mask and snorkel while in the field of a 1,000-volt electric current.
Yet on a sunny summer day in 1990, biologist Stan Gregory pulled himself crablike along the creek bottom, his elbows and knees and belly scraping and pounding against the rocks and gravel. Nearby in the shallows, a technician in rubber boots waded, a ground wire draped into the stream from the battery pack on his back, an electrode held ahead of him in the water like a droopy fishing pole.
The electric current, Gregory reported afterward, is unpleasant ...
