HAVE YOU EVER HAD stage one frostbite? Shannon Babb asks. Your skin tingles and turns white and then you lose all sensation. “Try getting it on the bottom of your feet sometime. It feels like you’re walking on blocks of ice.” Frostbite is one of the risks of trudging up and down a river bank in knee-deep snow at 4 a.m., collecting water samples. The iced cobblestones beneath the snow could be frozen willows for all you know until you’ve lost your footing and offered your porous right wader as a sacrifice to the River Gods of humility.

The treacherous dunking occurred on an outing on the Diamond Fork River around the mountainous bend from her Highland, Utah, childhood home in the American Fork River bed. Shannon Babb knows her rivers like other girls her age know their horses and their temperaments, talents and idiosyncrasies. She’s surveyed four of the rivers that flow into and out of Utah Lake, the largest freshwater lake in the state—playground for native boaters and motherland of the endangered June sucker. According to Babb’s research, every river in her study shows signs of pollution. “The Spanish Fork is in the worst shape, which surprised me at first because only 12 miles upstream from my monitoring site, the river appears healthy as it travels through Spanish Fork Canyon.”

Her commentary would rivet the listener even if lecture notes had to be consulted. Not that she would need them if she were a guest science class speaker, like she has been in the recent past. Instead of teaching youngsters about water quality protection, she is walking across campus, assessing the logic and feel of an unfamiliar place. At the moment she’s the only student staying in the Greaves Hall wing for natural resource college majors. The upperclassmen haven’t arrived yet. They don’t have to be back on campus until later in the week.

Although she’s just a freshman, and it’s too soon to declare her major yet, Shannon Babb sounds like she’s ready to defend her thesis in watershed science. After volunteering for USU Extension’s Stream Team in 8th grade and attending USU Professor Nancy Mesner’s workshop for Utah County teachers in water quality monitoring, she started the first of four studies. She was 13 years old. Four-and-a-half years, 120 water tests before sunrise, 3,994 surveyed macroinvertebrates and 7,407 collected samples later, she was competing in the 2006 Intel Science Talent Search in Washington, D.C., the junior nationals of research for high school seniors.          

During the final round, Babb fielded questions from reporters and U.S. Senators in between grilling sessions with Nobel laureates and National Academy of Science members. She was the first Utahn since 1994 to make the finals, and she had to outperform 1,518 other teens to get there.           

The 40 finalists included such Ivy League-bound prodigies as inventor of a lightweight handheld electronic camera stabilizer that was far superior to the cumbersome mechanical ones in use today and the presenter of a paper at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on the dust formation findings that influenced the design of one of NASA’s Mars rovers.
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