Going with — and learning from — the flow

Anastazja Krostenko (she/her) 
Hometown: South Bend, Indiana
Major: Earth Systems, BA '25, MS '26
Internship: California Trout

Anastazja Krostenko learned about more than just hydrology and restoration during her summer in Mt. Shasta with CalTrout. Her internship also showed her how fish, water, and people heal together.

A goal I’ve held throughout college is to become intimately familiar with a place — to know its geology, hydrology, ecology, and history. Northern Indiana, where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, I am not deeply, intellectually familiar with, only because it's home. I certainly know Northern Indiana. I know what its dirt smells like, how its mid-summer air feels, and the direction and pace of pre-rain cloud movement. But I never studied Northern Indiana quite formally enough.

By contrast, formal studying has defined my experience at Stanford, but the breadth of my study has been vast and global — not place-based. Collegiate life is busy, and campus is manicured. Stanford, while I adore it, has not, in my experience, lent itself to intimate, place-based knowing either. Ten weeks of an internship isn’t enough to intimately know a place (I’m not sure a lifetime is even enough), but through my summer in Mt. Shasta, I’m getting as close as I can.

I work at my desk in the twelve-person office in Mount Shasta about 50% of the time. Here, I pick the brains of scientists, project managers, tribal leaders, and engineers. They explain the location- and project-specific challenges of habitat restoration, the methodology and applications of isotopic research, and the rationale employed in the design of side-channel sloughs. I adapt their insights into material that is useful for them: presentations, explainer documents, and animations. My work is a lived-learning exercise: readapting, translating, and teaching.

I am in the field 20% of the time, my feet constantly adjusting to steady my stance on the streambed’s stones. When I stand still enough with the flow meter, baby trout dance around my waders. Some days I carry buckets of sand and water around project sites to assist construction; other days I record water quality data — like temperature and dissolved oxygen — for scientists. It's observational learning. I couldn’t distinguish a coho from a rainbow trout before this internship, nor could I watch a stream and estimate its cubic feet per second of flow. Experiencing springs, rivers, creeks, and streams with my own five senses has endowed me with those faculties. Before this internship, a project manager could have explained to me how an engineered log-structure slows flow to create fish habitat and reconnect the channel to its floodplain; but I remember the processes and relationships more clearly because I’ve crouched over a slow pool formed behind one of those log structures, watching calm, happy, cold-water fish flit about.

In my free time – the remaining 30% — I’m outside. I’m hiking the mountain and its surrounding peaks. I’ve read about Mt. Shasta’s geology at my desk, asked questions about it to experts on field visits, and then I hike to a peak and run my hands along that very geology. I stumble across the streams I’m studying and each time I confirm to myself, spring-fed streams are cold! I allow waterfalls to run over my body and cool me from a hike. I refill and rehydrate from the stream, all the while listening to CalTrout’s Fish, Water, People podcast and learning even more about the wide-reaching interdisciplinary efforts of this organization.

All the time — at my desk, in the field, in the wild — I’m learning. I learn year-round at school, of course, but not with this time split — 50/20/30 — of mind, body, and spirit. My major, Earth Systems, is wonderfully interdisciplinary. It gave me a broad foundation that prepared me for this job to begin with. But learning in this role as a summer intern is more focused — on rivers in California. “Rivers in California” is still a massive topic, but it’s a more niche intellectual scope than I’ve known before. Within that scope I can focus my mind, body, and spirit. This position has invigorated me for a more specialization-driven intellectual experience in my master’s program, back at Stanford this fall.

I have learned so much working at CalTrout, but more than anything, I cherish that this role has given me hope. Hope can be a rare commodity in the increasingly bleak realm of environmental restoration. But nestled here between the McCloud, Shasta, and Upper Sacramento watersheds, what I’ve seen has given me hope.

I’ve seen a stretch of the Klamath River which was undammed just eleven months ago from the vantage point of a raft. I felt the river water lap on my toes and yet had to search for signs that this place was buried by tons of that very water, forced into the form of a reservoir by a wall of cement, less than a calendar year ago. You wouldn’t know it, save for the bathtub ring on the rock formations, marking what was the reservoir’s water level. I was a guest in a habitat that generations of salmonids had been denied access to, but that in the coming seasons, their runs will reclaim. The efforts of carefully engineered removal and the handplanting of native species didn’t just cover the scars left by the dams, they healed them.

I’ve seen the massive yellow excavators move off of a restoration site on the South Fork Scott River after a decade of work. I’ve seen—and safely caught, held, and examined — the slippery, glistening, year-old coho, resting in the spring-fed pools restored especially for them. I felt awe watching their ink-blotted bodies wiggle up the riffles, knowing they spawned there, knowing they’ve become the first generation of what will become an ancestral run of salmon. It felt like being in the Garden of Eden.

I’ve found respite in the shade of riparian corridors along the Klamath’s tributaries—shade that returned when the water, once shunted and channelized for mining and ranching, was intentionally slowed, spread, and reconnected to the fertile soils it once claimed as floodplain. I’ve stood atop the surrounding peaks and gazed down at the ribbons of deep green flanking the tributaries’ banks, splicing through fields of dry, golden grass—signs of the life-giving force of water, visible from 9000 ft up.

I’ve seen how hard the people in the Mt. Shasta office work every day — and how eager they are to share that work with me. I’ve been the recipient of such grace and kindness that I cannot help but overflow with reciprocity. I cannot believe how quickly fish, water, nature, and people heal. But I’ve seen it, and that gives me hope.

Human beings have scarred, scorned, and scorched the Earth in countless ways. But CalTrout has shown me that when we offer her localized, scientifically grounded, traditional-ecological-knowledge-informed, targeted intervention, she licks her own wounds. She gathers herself and her creatures, and with no vengeance at all, she procreates wilderness.