Manastash Ridge

Sick of gloomy gray skies, I and older son headed over the Pass to the wide open spaces and maybe a little sunshine.  We chose the Westberg Trail, number 9 in the Best Desert Hikes book (Bauer & Nelson), for its nearness and the promise of great views, flowers, and birds.  Geoff, the newly minted driver, got great practice driving freeway for a long distance while I kicked back and enjoyed the scenery.  Obligatory stop in Cle Elum at Pioneer Coffee for a wakeup and Safeway for their signature sandwiches for later lunch on the trail.

The Westberg Trail (aka Ridge Trail) wastes no time in heading directly up 1800 feet to the crest of Monastash Ridge, mostly in open country with generous views over the Kittitas Valley to the cloud-shrouded Stuart Range.  Only the earliest of spring flowers were out; grass widows, gold fields, yellow bells, sagebrush buttercups, and sagebrush violets.  Thankfully no ticks and somewhat disappointingly no rattlesnakes for I love the heightened sense of one’s surroundings that the specter of encountering a rattlesnake brings.

At the top of the ridge, the trail ends at the Westberg Memorial.  The wind was gusting to 22 mph giving a wind chill factor of 33 degrees according to a fancy new toy I bought off Amazon, a Kestrel 2500 pocket weather meter.  We considered following the dirt road that snakes along the ridge to the UW Observatory but first we had to find a sheltered place out of the wind for lunch.  I spied a lone Ponderosa to the lee south out on a side ridge about a quarter mile away.  It was a young tree with branches almost touching the ground offering the promise of a sheltered area out of the wind and so it was.  We enjoyed our lunch there under the tree with the wind rustling the branches overhead and a floor cushioned by pine needles and a few token owl pellets.

From our lunch vantage, we spied a stock pond a little further south down a draw between us and the opposite side ridge.  The power of the pond compelled us and so we packed up and headed to the pond across the open country that offered little resistance to foot travel.  The pond in and of itself wasn’t too exciting except for the large thatch mound of a wood ant colony (Formica rufa) on top of the earthen dam that forms the pond.

Leaving the pond, we followed the trace of a four-wheel drive road back to the main ridge and connecting again with the trail.  Just below the ridge crest, the trail forks near an old broken Ponderosa pine marking the junction to an alternative trail to the bottom.  This trail enters a wooded area of Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir at the head of a side canyon.  Here we flushed a grouse.   The trail follows the canyon all the way down to the irrigation ditch service road and then back to the trailhead.  Near the bottom of the canyon we found a deer skull among the new spring grass, a testimony to the callousness of winter and the promise of spring.

Bird Boxes

We have two bird boxes around our house.  The ideal time to clean them out is about August or September, right after nesting season.  At work I'm very focused on deadlines and schedules.  At home I downshift into a slower, less frenzied pace.  Because of that, the bird boxes usually don't get cleaned until January or February, just before nesting season.

Here's the location of bird box #1, about 12 feet up on the trunk of a large Douglas fir just on the other side of our back fence (photo in May 2010).

Bird box #1 has been used by chestnut-backed chickadees for almost 20 years, except for one year when I didn't clean it out and it was colonized by bumblebees.

Bird box #2 was moved out by our back door last year and black-capped chickadees nested here for the first time.  Before I moved it by the back door it was hanging in an old camellia bush and was used only once by house wrens.

This year's clean out shows the chickadee's nests constructed of moss and lined with soft fuzz and dog hair, no doubt from our dog.

Doing yard work, trimming back western sword ferns that create a fern grotto in a corner of the backyard, I found a couple nests.  These are probably spotted towhee nests, who keep their nests low.  The outer foundation layer is shredded cedar bark then lined with woven grass.

Driving 99

My interest in old roads goes back to my childhood when I would pack up into the backseat of the 57 Chevy and we'd travel US 66, the Mother Road, from LA to Detroit.  Those trips were epic multi-day journeys on mostly two-lane highways across an ever-changing landscape.  The gas stations were full service.  Stops at Stuckey's yielded their famous pecan logs to enjoy in bits and pieces passed back to me by my mother from the front seat.

On a recent family trip across the western US, we drove the section of Route 66 westward from Seligman to Kingman, Arizona. Once past the kitsch and overly restored Route 66 nostalgia of Seligman, the trip did bring back fond memories of wide open desert valleys and distant mountain ranges as the passing telephone poles counted the way.

Old Highway 99 is the north-south version of the east-west Route 66.   Before Interstate 5, US 99 was the principal north-south highway between Los Angeles on up past Seattle to the Canadian border.  This was the other highway of my youth for our family camping trips to Oregon and Washington.

I get down to Portland occasionally which entails driving Interstate 5 from my homebase in Pugetopolis.  Given time, I'll try to drive a segment of Old 99.  Recently I drove a section of the Old Pacific Highway (99) northward from Kelso to just past the Toutle River reconnecting to I-5 at Exit 52.  The route follows the Cowlitz River and passes through the small town of Castle Rock.

I paused and made a stop where the road crosses the Toutle River to indulge my other interests, bridges and rivers.  The bridge here was constructed in 1935 and was the main route of US 99 until Interstate 5 was completed here in 1969.   With that, the US 99 designation was abandoned in Washington State.

The 1935 bridge is a classic "camelback" truss bridge, specifically a riveted, 10-panel Pennsylvania through truss, a modification of the basic Pratt truss structure.  Evidence of an earlier bridge includes a large piece of concrete pier visible to the left and a stone masonry bridge abutment on the right bank, both in front of the 1935 bridge.  I have been unable, so far, to find any information on an older bridge.

DudeDiligence

 Cowlitz County GIS

When Mount St. Helens erupted on Sunday morning, May 18, 1980, it sent a surge of steaming mud and debris down the Toutle River.  Our 1935 bridge was spared but another road bridge upstream on the North Fork Toutle River was taken out by the mudflow.  The following photo (USGS) was taken from our 1935 bridge shortly after the eruption and looks downstream to the Interstate 5 bridges constructed in 1969.  A mudline left behind on trees shows depths reached by the mud.

USGS

Before heading home, I picked up a few nice, rounded, river rocks for the home landscape.  The rocks are beautiful porphyritic volcanic rocks washed down from Mount St. Helens.

Glacial Erratics

I'm inspired to share my experience with glacial erratics from reading Dan McShane's blogpost A Really Big Erratic White Rock in Jefferson County (1/20/2011) and Dave Tucker's blogpost Appeal to Citizen Scientists: Do you know of any Jackass conglomerate erratics? I could probably safely say that I've known some erratic jackasses during my lifetime but have yet to find any Jackass conglomerate erratics.

For the layman, a glacial erratic is a large rock transported some distance by a glacier from the rock's point of origin to the point where the glacier leaves it.  The erratic is usually composed of  a different type of rock than the rock or geologic conditions at its resting place.  It often looks out of character with it's surroundings.  Identifying the erratic's rock type provides clues to its point of origin and the sense of the glacier's movement (i.e. direction, distance).


My first sighting of glacial erratics was during numerous hikes through the Sierra Nevada in my formative years when I lived in southern California.  The Sierra provide many opportunities to view alpine glacial landforms.  The photo below shows a glacial erratic near Carson Pass.

In spite of the dense tree cover and dense development, glacial landforms are much in evidence in the Puget Sound region, and this includes large glacial erratics.  I live within spitting distance of the Puget Sound shoreline along Browns Bay north of Edmonds.  My favorite erratic is found along the shoreline here.  Call it the "home erratic" if you will.  At the highest tide it is almost covered providing a safe perch for herons and gulls.  At the lowest of the spring tides the entire rock is exposed.  I'm told by a diving friend that similar large rocks exist just offshore here.  I'm inspired now this coming spring to chip off a piece to see what type of rock it is.

Bering Glacier

After many years in my career as an environmental consultant I finally made it to Alaska. Opportunities came but then went with project cancellations or over-commitment to some other project. With good fortune I found myself on an early morning flight to Anchorage skirting the western Canadian coast and southeastern Alaska (the “panhandle"). It was mid-September and the weather would turn out fantastic for the week I was there in Anchorage. This post focuses on one small aspect of the trip and maybe on future posts I will talk about other trip details.

I have to admit that I have a big picture idea of Alaska’s geography but the details and native Alaskan names for places leave me dazed and confused in a similar fashion like place names in Hawaii. Whereas native Alaskan words seem heavy in consonants, Hawaiian names seem heavy in vowels. The words all sound the same in the respective languages.

The plane was very light and so we were allowed to change seats once we were at cruising altitude. The good stuff was all to the right side of the plane as we flew up the coast. One feature that really caught my eye was a huge glacier flowing from an icefield, terminating in an iceberg-filled lake separated from the Gulf of Alaska by a thin spit. The lake itself was drained by short river that paralleled the spit and eventually found an exit to the Gulf. The spit and the river that aligned with it indicated the direction of the longshore current; in this case from east to west (or, in the photo, from right to left).

DudeDiligence

USGS

It turns out that the glacier was the Bering Glacier, the largest glacier in North America. The iceberg-filled lake at its terminus is Vitus Lake. And the short river is the Seal River. The Bering Glacier is fed by the Bagley Icefield, the largest nonpolar icefield in North America.

Bering Glacier and Vitus Lake were named after Vitus Jonassen Bering, a Danish navigator who served in the Russian Navy. Bering was credited with being the first European to discover Alaska and its Aleutian Islands as well as the Bering Glacier that bears his name. These discoveries were made during what is known as the Great Northern Expedition. In 1741, the expedition anchored off Kayak Island, just a little to the west and out of the picture to the left. It was here that the ship’s naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, would explore and take notes on the plants and animals he observed. Here Stellar was the first to record the raucous blue bird that bears his name, the Stellar’s Jay, one of my favorite birds who kept me company in the upper elevations of southern California’s mountains and now feasts at our bird feeder in the Puget Sound lowlands.

A fascinating read on Stellar is “Stellar’s Island” by Dean Littlepage.

STELLER'S ISLAND: Adventures of a Pioneer Naturalist in Alaska

NASA

Talking Points

Just got back from dinner at the Martin Hotel here in Winnemucca, probably the most famous Basque restaurant for a hundred miles. Of course, a hundred miles from here puts you in the middle of nowhere with yet another hundred miles to get to someplace else.

At a Basque restaurant, it’s country style seating so you get to sit with people you’ve never met.  Naturally, I was at a table sitting between two retired couples and the conversation touched on politics. There is quite a heated Senate race here between Harry Reid and the batshit crazy Sharron Angle. It’s more intense than even the Murray – Rossi race (my Starbucks pseudonymn is “Dino” for now; “Dino, your grande nonfat latte is up”).  The old folks don’t like Reid and one of the men said the incumbents aren’t following the Constitution. So “what part of the Constitution” I ask. Oh, gun rights. So “can you name any recent gun control legislation?” I ask. “Oh, they’re trying, they’re trying.” Look old man, try giving me some facts instead of barfing up Tea Party talking points. I didn't really say that.

Fortunately, we got on to other conversation and they were really genuinely nice people.  Both couples were touring around the west.  One of the couples just got back from hunting deer in Idaho.  Wolves are eating all the deer and elk because that's what wolves did before white people killed all the wolves.  I didn't jump on that topic.  At least there's more vegetation now that wolves are eating the herbivores.  We ended up talking about dogs and stuff, much more pleasant. 

Did I say the food was delicious at the Martin Hotel?  Chicken noodle soup, salad that comes with beans (the Basque way is to top your salad with beans), tender beef tongue slices in gravy, mashed potatoes, and corn.  I had pork chops, three of them, breaded and boneless.  I chased it all down with two Ruby Mountain ales, although the meal included some red wine in carafes.  Dessert was bread pudding with whipped cream.  It was Monday and the place was packed.  Lots of cowboy hats, laughter, and conversation.

Wood Recycling

I learn a lot about the natural world just hanging out on the patio grilling burgers and drinking beer. This time of the year, the great Pacific dampwood termites swarm, the fertile winged ones rising into the skies to start new homes in the fallen trees and branches rotting in the deep forest beyond our back fence. Their flight seems strained and clumsy on oversized wings.

I watch a dragonfly dart through the air along a straight path then suddenly switch direction looping back and doing it again along the same path. In one instant it deviates slightly from its chosen path, grabbing a hapless flying termite in midair, and then continuing along the same flight path. A few seconds later, the dragonfly drops the termite, which flutters downward slowly at the pace of a downy feather onto the patio, the gossamer wings no longer beating a struggling flight. I examine the fallen termite and observe that it seems generally intact but is missing its abdomen. This leads me to believe that the dragonfly simply eats the tender abdomen and casts away the remaining hard parts that include the head, thorax, legs, and wings.

Trees fall in the forest; they rot in place, broken down by fungi and termites. Termites swarm and take flight, most ending up trapped in spider webs or snagged in midair by the colorful and graceful dragonflies. This is how wood gets recycled in the natural world. Sure, I’ll have another beer. Barley and hops get recycled, too.