Each spring Hangman Creek fills with sediment, spewing tons of dirt into the Spokane River. This cloudy water is bad for fish, macroinvertebrates, and all who depend on them. The Spokane Riverkeeper, with help from Spokane Fall Trout Unlimited, leads a citizen science monitoring project to study water transparency (turbidity) in Hangman Creek and the Spokane River.
You can volunteer for this study! What do volunteers do? After going through training with Waterkeeper Jule Schultz, you'll collect water samples and measure turbidity levels to help us better understand sediment pollution from the Hangman basin. Each sampling run has 4 sampling locations (about a 9 mile loop) where you will use a transparency tube to measure water clarity (turbidity) levels at each spot. We will use these data to determine the intensity and duration of degraded water quality in Hangman Creek and its effect on the Spokane River.
2025 Study Now Open! Our Sediment Study Sampling Starts December 20th, so please sign up for sampling dates and a training, if you haven’t done this yet. But if you’d like to sample, the dates fill up fast, so choose your date even if you haven’t completed the training. If you can’t make it, please cancel your sampling date. Learn more about the study, including reports and videos, below.
Sign Up for a Training!
Before sampling, you are required to complete a training. If you can’t make either of the dates below work, please contact me at [email protected] and I’ll set up a short training for you.
Hangman Creek pollutes the Spokane River with tons of sediment each day in the spring, choking sensitive native redband trout and burying their nests.
STUDY RESULTS
Turbidity and Sediment BACKGROUND
Watch our series of videos from Cutboard Studio explaining some of the issues we have in the Hangman Creek watershed.
Learn more about why this work is important and what we are doing to address sediment pollution.