BATTLE OF THE ANTS

In the post below, I said there's only one tree I ever wanted to see in Mariposa Grove, and that's the one called Samoset.

From the parking lot at the Mariposa Grove trailhead, if you walk 2.5mi and 1200 feet up, you get to the upper grove. At the top of the mountain, after passing a few other named trees on the way up (Faithful Couple, Clothespin, etc), you get to the area of the (toilets and) "museum." The "museum" is really just a little cabin with a fireplace and a few posters on the ecology and history of the big trees. Check out the size of the trees next to the cabin. That's not some little lego cabin—it's probably 500 square feet and has a lovely porch. Those are just some really freaking big trees (their names are General Grant and General Sherman—but they are not the Generals Grant and Sherman in Kings Canyon National Park and Sequoia National Park, respectively.).

The cabin you see here was built in 1930 and restored in 1983. It sits on the site of Galen Clark's cabin, which he built in 1861. Here's a photo of the original cabin, taken before 1907, which is found in Clark's The Big Trees of California.

In the upper grove, the "famous" trees to see are the Galen Clark Tree (named for the man, duh) and the Fallen Wawona Tunnel Tree. But I didn't want to see the trees that everyone knows about. I wanted to see Samoset.

Samoset is not marked in the popular guidebooks or the 50-cent pamphlet you pick up at the trailhead, and it doesn't have a sign in front of it. You can't find Samoset listed even in the better maps/guides/descriptions of trees, such as James W. McFarland's A Guide to the Giant Sequoias of Yosemite National Park from 1949, which includes this great "tour" with descriptions as well as this lovely map of the groves. All I really knew was that it was close to Galen Clark's camp/the museum and looked something like this sketch made 108 years ago (ha ha).

You'd think there'd be no way in hell I could find an unmarked tree in a grove of big trees, and you'd be right—except the keeper of the museum, who had just built the fire and was sweeping the porch, was a kindly and talkative fellow. I honestly don't remember how the conversation started, because I was too busy being entirely emotionally overwhelmed by the whole thing (as I am wont to do), but when I said "I don't suppose you know where Samoset is?" and he turned around and pointed directly at it.

"You know who named it?" he said.

As if anyone who explicitly asked about this tree wouldn't know who named it? I thought to myself. "Emerson!" I said.

At the request of Galen Clark, our host at Mariposa, & who is by State appointment the Protector of the trees, & who went with us to the Mammoth Groves, I selected a Sequoia Gigantea, near Galen's Hospice, in the presence of our party, & named it Samoset, in memory of the first Indian ally of the Plymouth Colony, and I gave Mr. Clark directions to procure a tin plate, & have the inscription painted thereon in the usual form of the named trees;
Samoset—
12 May
1871
& paid him its cost. The tree was a strong healthy one, girth at 2.5 feet from the ground, 50 feet.—The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume XVI (1866-1882), p. 239

If you study Emerson and Muir, it's one of those things you know, since they only met once and the story has been retold from various points of view and it's important to know them all. At the end of Muir's "The Forests of the Yosemite Park", from the April 1900 Atlantic, you can read his account of the event.

If I had been thinking, I would have brought Muir's sketch and recreated it in the photograph. I'm only slightly off, as you can see the pine tree to the right and another sequioia in the background. Since I screwed up the photo, I can't match up the burn scars to the sketch, to see if the burn happened before or after May 1871. But I know one thing—that tree isn't much different since the time Emerson and Muir stood in front of it and RWE named it—just nine more feet in diameter. Ha: "just."

Labels: outdoorsy

It used to be a running joke that I hadn't been to Mariposa Grove in Yosemite. You see, I kept meaning to go, but in each trip that I made prior to this one we just ran out of time/spent more time elsewhere in the woods/got really tired.

Truth be told, there was only one tree I ever wanted to see in Mariposa Grove, and that's the subject of a forthcoming post.

For now, let's just look at some of the touristy trees of Mariposa Grove, like Fallen Tree and the Grizzly Giant. Bear in mind that while I had my camera, I didn't use it all that much. I'm kind of lame when it comes to photos—I forget I have a camera because I have my own eyes and memory. My lack of focus on a camera can be seen by the fact that I forgot my own camera, and when I got to my friends' house on Wednesday of my trip I said, "Crap, I'm going to Yosemite and forgot my camera," at which time I borrowed their old Nikon Coolpix E2000. Thanks, guys! But having a camera didn't mean I used it a lot. You have been warned.

The plan was to get to Mariposa Grove early in the morning, so as to get a place in the actual parking lot and not have to walk in from the auxiliary parking lot (2mi away) or take the shuttle in from Wawona. "Early" meant 8am or so, which means we had to leave San Jose at 4:30 or 5, which we did. Michelle was such a trouper! We got to the park, I showed my little National Parks Annual Pass to the ranger at the gate, and onward we drove into the primary parking lot at Mariposa Grove. At that time, there were only ten or fifteen other cars in the lot. Score!

In the Lower Grove (where most people confine their trip), the first tree you see is actually a dead one: the Fallen Monarch. As you can see, the upturned base of the tree is huge—some 15 or so feet across. By the time we passed this tree at the end of our hike, there were a billion people clamoring around it for a photo.

Next up were the Bachelor and the Three Graces; the description at the ever-hilarious Yosemite Hikes site says:

The Bachelor and Three Graces are a quartet of sequoias you'll pass just after crossing the tram road. The roots of giant sequoias are shallow, usually less than six feet deep, but spread over a large area - half an acre or more for a mature tree. This means that right under your feet, the roots of the graces and their bachelor are intertwining in ways that would easily earn a mature rating in much of the country. But no one seems to mind here; Yosemite visitors are a broadminded lot.

Come on, that's funny!

Here we have the approach to the Grizzly Giant. The Grizzly Giant is perhaps the most popular of the Mariposa Grove trees, owing to the fact that it's in the lower grove, which is a considerably easier walk. For reference, the lower grove loop is only 2.2 miles with an elevation change of less than 400 feet at the highest point in the loop. The lower and upper grove loop, which we did most of, is 6 miles with an elevation change of 1200 feet at the highest point in the loop.

Anyway, the Grizzly Giant is popular, as you can see by the people at its base in the picture above. Remember the Fallen Monarch from the beginning of the story? Well, the base of the Grizzly Giant is twice the size of that one—over 30 feet across; the circumference is more than 90 feet, and (according to the Yosemite Hikes folks again, "it has a single limb a hundred feet up that's bigger around by itself than the trunk of nearly any other species of tree." Not "any other species of tree in Yosemite," but any other species of tree PERIOD. This is a hell of a big tree, over 2700 years old. Boy am I glad that Sequoia wood isn't any good for construction. That's the only reason we still have the big trees: you can't build anything out of them. Hooray!

The last of the touristy trees in the lower grove is the California Tunnel Tree. You can see the man-made tunnel cut through it, but unlike the Fallen Wawona Tunnel Tree in the upper grove, this tree is still alive. The tunnel is wide enough for a stagecoach to pass through it (the original intention) or for 15 or 20 people to huddle under it in the rain.

At this point, people usually take a left turn and wander back down to the parking lot, having seen the big trees in the lower grove. We pressed on to the upper grove, passing the Faithful Couple, the Clothespin Tree, the Columbia Tree, the Telescope Tree, ten or so mule deer, and a raven who kept flying ahead of us and waiting. The raven was a little freaky. We also saw (and Michelle stalked with her camera) a White-headed Woodpecker. We did not see many people; we saw more people on the way back down than on the way up. We saw perhaps five others on the way up, but 15 or so on the way down—a couple from the South (Arkansas sounded right to me), a family of four from what sounded like Australia or New Zealand, a South Asian couple pushing their toddler in a very flimsy stroller, and eight or ten other random folks.

Although I called these posts part 1 and part 2, the upper grove pictures/info post will be all its own. I'll call it post 0, even though it should really be post 1.5 if we were going chronologically.

Oh hell. I'll just call it "Samoset."

Labels: outdoorsy

As we were walking through Mariposa Grove, we kept seeing these little plants—gnawed on, mostly—and Michelle (and I) kept wondering what they were. She came up with a name for them, something like "snack plant," which wasn't that far off.

When I came home and looked it up, I was mortified that I forgot this passage from Chapter V, "The Wild Gardens of the Yosemite Park" from Muir's Our National Parks:

To tourists the most attractive of all the flowers of the forest is the snow plant ( Sarcodes sanguinea ). It is a bright red, fleshy, succulent pillar that pushes up through the dead needles in the pine and fir woods like a gigantic asparagus shoot. The first intimation of its coming is a loosening and upbulging of the brown stratum of decomposed needles on the forest floor, in the cracks of which you notice fiery gleams; presently a blunt dome-shaped head an inch or two in diameter appears, covered with closely imbricated scales and bracts. In a week or so it grows to a height of six to twelve inches. Then the long fringed bracts spread and curl aside, allowing the twenty or thirty five-lobed bell-shaped flowers to open and look straight out from the fleshy axis. It is said to grow up through the snow; on the contrary it always waits until the ground is warm, though with other early flowers it is occasionally buried or half buried for a day or two by spring storms. The entire plant-flowers, bracts, stem, scales, and roots-is red. But notwithstanding its glowing color and beautiful flowers, it is singularly unsympathetic and cold. Everybody admires it as a wonderful curiosity, but nobody loves it. Without fragrance, rooted in decaying vegetable matter, it stands beneath the pines and firs lonely, silent, and about as rigid as a graveyard monument.

(bold emphasis mine)

So there you have it, Michelle: the Snow Plant.

[Snow Plant image by Flickr user Ken-ichi]

Labels: outdoorsy

When I planned this day trip to Yosemite at the end of our conference-going time in San Francisco, I failed to notice that Sunday, May 25th was Memorial Day. I knew that the high price of gas would deter some people from making the trek to the park, but that in reality it would still be pretty insane. However, since the primary reason for going to Yosemite this time was to go to Mariposa Grove, I figured there would be some time that was relatively people-free. That was true. But as soon as we left the Grove and made the drive into the Valley, it got a little crazy.

Poor Michelle, who had to deal with me changing the plans all along the way. First, I figured we would potentially have time to do the walk up to the base of Bridalveil Falls and the walk up to the base of Lower Yosemite Falls. That was the initial plan—it was going to be a driving tour of the valley with two major stops. But that didn't materialize.

We were basically the epitome of Muir's "sticks of condensed filth," the travelers who descend on the mountains but are not of the mountains. I felt bad about that.

The drive from Mariposa Grove to Yosemite Valley is a little over thirty miles. Along the way you pass Wawona, which is a good place to take a potty break and stock up on water and food. We tried to do that, but the parking lot was full and we were on a tight schedule, so we pushed ahead. The next stop would be Tunnel View because Glacier Point Road was closed. It had been open, but it was very foggy and chilly and I don't doubt for a moment that closing Glacier Point had more to do with the tons of people who were in the park than the actual road conditions. I can't imagine the hordes of cars going down to the point, in the fog. I almost ran us off a cliff last time I was there, and it was sunny and bright and no one else was on the road. Good call, National Park Service.

When we hit Tunnel View, I was surprised to see the parking lot all closed off due to construction. This was going to make the Tunnel View photo pretty difficult to get. But there were a bazillion cars parked on the side of the road, and we became one of them. I managed to get decent shots of Bridalveil and El Capitan—but note a few things: it was crazy foggy, as evidenced by the fact that at 1 o'clock in the afternoon you can't even see Half Dome, and I'm standing behind and below a bunch of trees. Still, it's difficult to take a really bad picture in Yosemite. Seriously.

We started the loop drive, and I'm thinking to myself that there's going to be no way in hell any of the lots will have spaces in them, so the walks up to the bottom of Bridalveil and Lower Yosemite Falls are going to be out. No worries, I said, as there are plenty of stopping points for picture-taking—Ahwahnee Meadow, El Capitan Meadow, etc. True, except for the insane amount of people paying no attention to rules of the road or parking.

In brief, we didn't stop. Michelle has a bunch of photos of the wonders of Yosemite Valley as taken out of the car window. For my part, I was having an existential crisis the entire time—how could I do Yosemite that way when I work on Muir?!? I was in such a state that I totally screwed up (partially because of a construction-obscured sign) the route out of the valley. I intended to go out the top route (120 to Manteca) but ended up going the middle route (140 to Merced). Let's just say that if we had done the Bridalveil and Lower Yosemite Falls walks, and I screwed up the route out of the park, we would not have landed in Spokane at 10pm as we did, and arrived at our respective houses at midnight.

But I do love Yosemite.

Labels: outdoorsy

I really enjoy watching birds (in general) and identifying birds when they fly into my yard. This (crappy) photo is of a Black-headed Grosbeak who came to visit/get a snack yesterday morning. The same bird was back again this morning.

I never get good pictures of my yard birds because they can see the movement when I reach for my camera, and then they fly away.

Usually I just have the same small flock of Pygmy Nuthatches and Red-breasted Nuthatches, plus the family of California Quail. In the last few days, a small flock of European Starlings has been hanging out, as well as a group of five or six Red-winged Blackbirds.

Occasionally, a Magpie or Common Raven will swoop in and take a drink from the faux birdbath. "Faux" because it's not really a birdbath proper—it's the bottom of one of those big plastic planters, and it's just sitting on the ground. The birds like to sit around the edge, and the squirrels and the rabbits and the occasional neighborhood cat take sips out of it. The only bird I've ever seen use it as a birdbath is the Robin. Everyone else just drinks out of it.

Yesterday we [my friends Jim and Karen are here] drove all over the region and we saw a ton of hawks (very common), a bunch of White-throated Swifts at Palouse Falls, and then when we were back in town we nearly ran over a Pheasant that ran across the road. Exciting times indeed.

Labels: outdoorsy

I am now the proud owner of a John Muir doodle tattoo. Good thing I like the guy.

The tattoo —no photo because it's difficult to take a photo of your own right arm with a cameraphone when you're right-handed— looks pretty much like the doodle shown here.

It was pretty funny when I handed the image to the tattoo artist and said "it needs to retain its crappy-doodle-ness," and he just sort of looked at me like "are you sure?" and I said just go with it. He was a really good sport and did a good job. At one point, after starting, he did that nice customer service thing where he asked if I was ok, and I said "yeah, this isn't my first rodeo" and he had to stop because he was laughing. I get on well with tattoo guys.

I never did the transcription of the letter in which the doodle was found, but I've done part of it below. I say "part of it" because I didn't need all of the letter—it had nothing to do with my research, so I didn't scan all of it from the microfilm...I just liked the doodle and the doodle was on the first page. So, you get the first page.

The letter (dated July 23, 1888) is from John Muir to his daughter, Annie Wanda Muir, who was 7 years old at the time. He wrote the letter while in Victoria, BC, but was talking about the California mountains.

My Dear Wanda,
When I was at Mount Shasta on my way up here I was walking along thinking about the changes that had been made since I last climbed the old mountain—the railroad and the cars and the sawmills and the lots of new houses. I was thinking how different everything about the foot of the mountain looked when all of a sudden I saw a bear. A brown hairy muzzle with long teeth and a wet black nose. I was startled at first and said hulou old fellow what are you doing here. Then up he jumped like a man and looked at me with his cunning eyes and held out his arms and spread his claws and big paws. Then I saw that he was chained and I gave him an apple and he ate it up then I ventured to walk close up to him and pat him on the head as if he were a dog. Then he took my hand in his mouth—as if he might bite it off and he did bite it a little. But I yanked it away before he could get a good hold...

I really think the man should have written children's stories. His letters to his kids are really great.

Labels: misc life, outdoorsy

This image goes with this blog post. I finally cleaned up the scan.

The text of the letter in which the bear-doodle can be found is actually funny and poignant, and if I didn't have 104 essays to grade for Friday I would transcribe it.

Labels: misc life, outdoorsy

Labels: misc life, outdoorsy

Although I was thwarted in my attempt yesterday, with one day remaining in the weekend I decided to try again. Apparently, we're in the "winter hours" time and so Kamiak Butte County Park is not open until 8am (instead of 7am). Now I know.

As you can see in this photo, it was a beautiful autumn morning. Contrast this with the first time I went there, when it was a beautiful summer morning, and you'll see that, well, it's just pretty all the time.

I didn't do the full 3.5 mile loop; I just did a quick trip up and back down, so only a mile. I was going to do the loop but when I was sitting at the top (thank you, providers-of-benches!) I thought of a bunch of scholarly stuff and wanted to get back home so I could get it all out on paper before I forgot. No, I didn't have a notebook. That would have been too easy.

Note to self: you always have good scholarly thoughts when you go out into nature. Bring a damn notebook!

Labels: outdoorsy

Labels: misc life, outdoorsy

Labels: outdoorsy

First, sorry for the through-the-screen-door photo. Any movement would have freaked them all out.

At this very moment, I am looking out my screen door and I have in my yard:

* NINE California Quail
* approx FIFTEEN little brown sparrowy birds
* TWO Red-Breasted Nuthatches
* TWO Black-Capped Chickadees
* TWO squirrels

It's AWESOME! I haven't seen quail in town before, and here I have NINE in my yard. A few of them are smaller, like youngsters. I think there might have been a nest or two in the trees/pine needles surrounding my yard.

As a point of reference, my yard is only 200 sq. feet or so. I just happen to have really good stuff—all the best seeds, critter food, suet, and, as you can see in this photo, a makeshift birdbath. Although no birds are using it in the picture I linked to, I've seen upwards of ten little birds hanging out on the edges. They mostly drink out of it rather than splash around. The squirrel uses it too.

The reason I saw the quail this morning was because one of the mini-flock was sitting on the edge of the bird pool, just drinking. The quail are so much larger than the little sparrows that the movement really caught my eye. I'm glad it did! I believe I said "holy crap! is that a quail?" to no one in particular. Max, my cat who was sitting next to me, looked up at me like "quail? whatev. It's not like I can go outside." Deuce was sitting on the ottoman, snoring away. So much for sharing the joy of quail.

[The garbage truck just drove by and scared them all off, but they'll be back. Once the wildlife finds my yard, they tend to stay.]

Labels: misc life, outdoorsy

Could be worse...this squirrel could be a bear. My folks, for instance, have a neighborhood bear that eats from the birdfeeders. I consider myself lucky that I just have this squirrel.

Actually, I have two squirrels. But they are respectful of the birds, the birds don't seem to care when the squirrels are around, and I'd feed the squirrels anyway.

Incidentally, I took this picture after I sprayed canola oil on the pole. The squirrel jumped and slid three times (it was hilarious) and then said fuck it (or the squirrel equivalent) and jumped higher. At that point, I decided I didn't care. Let him have his fun.

Labels: misc life, outdoorsy

After visiting Steptoe Butte, I kept on driving north to Cheney (45 more miles or so) and Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge. The primary inhabitants of the refuge are birds, specifically waterfowl. I do not possess the skills or patience to photograph birds (and I didn't try), but I saw and heard many different types.

My love of duckies has been documented before. At Turnbull, there were several different kinds of ducks, geese, and swans. Most of them were hanging out in the Pine Creek area; there's a short loop trail that goes around the area and as I walked around it, the waterfowl would shift to a different part of the lake. A gaggle of geese was so offended by my presence that they just got up and flew off and didn't return until I left the trail. I did see a lovely bluebird in a tree, though.

On the trail, I saw a lot of mammal poop. However, the only mammals I saw were the eight million or so chipmunks that appear to be the official park guides. The lack of large mammal sighting was not unexpected; the trail was paved, after all, so it wasn't like I was in the deep forest. There are three longer trails that go along the outskirts of the refuge, away from the paved area and away from the gravel (loud) road. I'm sure there are mammals back there, and I'll see them when I go back to Turnbull in a couple weeks and drag my buddy Mary along with me—she's dumping her husband for a few days and coming up to hang out before school starts and she has to teach a bunch of freshmen. But I digress.

The bulk of visitors to Turnbull follow the 5.5 mile gravel "auto tour," and I did the same. Along the way, there are little stops with short little walks out toward ponds and what not. I took advantage of the ones at Pine Lake, the Kepple Lake overlook, and Blackhorse Lake. When I go back, we'll do the 30-Acre Lake trail through the middle of the auto tour area, but also the Headquarters Trail to the end of Cheever Lake and the Bluebird Trail which I believe houses a ton of bluebirds.

Although I didn't see any large mammals in Turnbull, it really is a lovely place for a walk or three. I got my mammal fix in on the drive home. Somewhere between Plaza and Rosalia on the drive back down 195, two deer were walking through the fields just twenty or thirty feet from the highway. Then, just after the llama farm in Colfax, I looked over to the left at a bunch of trees on the hillside and thought of the shade and cover they provided and thought, "If I were a deer, that would be a lovely place to hang out." No joke, a deer then walked out from under the trees.

Labels: outdoorsy

         

I did not climb to the top of Steptoe Butte. I think I could have, using the "mad scramble" method, but I am not mad and I don't really like to scramble. Instead, I took the winding road all the way to the top.

Steptoe Butte has an elevation of 3612 feet and is 1000 feet higher than the surrounding fields, making it the highest point in the area; there are plenty of antennae on top of it to attest to that fact. The views, as you can see if you embiggen the pictures above or look at the entire set, are spectacular (trust me on that...my little digital camera doesn't do them justice). In this photo, you can see Mt. Spokane in the distance—a 75+ miles away distance.

The road to the top winds around the butte, and it lacks a guardrail on the outer edge. I was already going slowly because of all the birds and chipmunks on the road, but even if the road lacked wildlife I would have been going slowly because roads without guardrails freak me out a little bit. When I got to the top, I gave a little sigh of relief and took these pictures. Going back down was not as freaky as going up, because I could hug the inside with no fear of falling off the outside. I coasted the entire way down the butte.

The coolest bird I saw was a black-headed grosbeak. Very colorful! As far as mammals go, I saw approximately one million chipmunks and two yellow-bellied marmots.

Labels: outdoorsy

Labels: misc life, outdoorsy

Most of the localish state parks and hiking areas are more in the north and central parts of the state (and then of course there's the entire western side), which means a lot of driving. This morning I went for a drive to see just how long it takes to go x number of miles on these country roads—I knew it would take less time than Google Maps said it would, but I wanted to check it out for myself. True enough, when I went off to the Palouse Falls overlook (84 miles away), it took just over an 75 minutes and not the 120 minutes that Google Maps said.

Palouse Falls is a state park but it's really just a grassy area for picnics and not-very-rough camping. The overlook is fenced off, but I read of some unofficial trails that you can scramble down to get to the bottom of the falls. Although I wanted to go to the bottom, I did not want to scramble down rocks filled with rattlesnakes. Not only are there rattlesnakes, but then there's the climbing back up. I'm not an idiot; I took my photos from the fence around the parking lot.

The Palouse River flows over this 200-foot waterfall and through the Palouse River Canyon on its way to the Snake River (just a few miles south). To get there, you have drive a few miles through a wilderness range. I didn't see any mammals in the range, but I did see two wild turkeys.

Once you arrive at the little park, you see signs about rattlesnakes. Given my incredible fear of snakes [childhood incidents], I always wondered what I'd do when actually faced with one [calmly step aside? run screaming like a little girl?]. Didn't know today would be the day I would find out! The answer is: I swear and quickly step away. Hey! No screaming like a little girl!

So that was kind of cool.

Labels: outdoorsy

This is a Yellow-Bellied Marmot. It was hanging out in the rocks at Palouse Falls.

The marmot was part of a can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees lesson. As I was looking at the falls, I almost missed this little furry creature right in front of me [was probably ten feet away].

After I took this picture and walked away toward my car, I thought "there's a lesson here about not being distracted by the bigger things, and enjoying the little things too."

At that very moment, a loud rattle sounded and I swore and took a quick step away...away from the western rattlesnake in the grass a foot away from me.

There is no photo of the rattlesnake, sorry.

Labels: outdoorsy

It was just a few days ago, in a post about waking up early, that I said "The day before our comprehensive exam in the English Dept. as undergrads, a few of us drove from Staunton to Charlotte and back [274mi each way]." The next day, and unrelated to reading that line, one of the people on that drive friended me on Facebook! Totally out of the blue, and really cool. At least I think she was one of the four people on the trip. If she wasn't, it doesn't matter, because she's someone I randomly think about every so often. She was one of my best school chums for awhile.

And now that I think about it, it wasn't the day before our exams. It was darn close to it though. [Cut me some slack. It was 15 years ago!] The day before our exams, we went to 20 Minute Cliff. During Spring semester, a bunch of us would go up to 20 Minute Cliff, aka milepost 19 of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and just hang out and read. Here's a 360-degree virtual tour, and over the wall, which you can't see in this photo or the virtual tour, is a large white rock (the top of the cliff). The cliff face itself is a straight drop down. It's not terribly high. I've walked to the bottom and looked up (not being a climber, I've never climbed up the cliff, but people do). The cliff is so named because in the summertime, the setting sun hits the cliff 20 minutes before it goes down behind the mountains. So, back in the olden days the farmers in the valley below would know when to start packing it up and heading back to the homestead. Most people think spots in the mountains + college kids = drinking, but we didn't do anything of the sort. We read. So, the day before the comprehensive exam, a few of us took our Shakespeare/Chaucer/Milton and hung out all day on the cliff. I don't think we actually read all that much, but it was less stressful than sitting in the library.

The Blue Ridge Parkway parallels the Appalachian Trail. One thing we all knew about our friend Nina was that her goal was to hike the AT. As years passed and I fell out of touch with everyone (that happened almost immediately, actually), there were just a few people I wondered about and Nina was one of them. I wondered if she ever hiked the AT. She sure did, in 2000. Here's her trail journal; it's a good read.

It's not a surprise that her trail journal's a good read, as she was the best of the English majors at our wee school. She was the only one who achieved super-special honors on her comprehensive exam, and all the faculty loved her. Me? I did not achieve super-special honors and only half the faculty loved me. I think they were all disappointed when I was the one to go to a PhD program (which I immediately quit) and not Nina. But hey, I'm in one now...I just needed those 15 years to get my head on straight.

Anyway, Nina went off and wrote a book, too: 50 Hikes in Louisiana. And she seems to have married a totally swell fellow who, oh, just freaking walked across America.

I am happy to have found my old friend Nina. She has a blog which I know several of you will like, so go check it out.

Labels: misc life, outdoorsy

One of the best things about being an early riser is that you can easily do fun things while avoiding the hottest part of the day. This morning, for instance, I was the first person at Kamiak Butte County Park when the ranger opened the gate at 7am.

I knew it would be a good hike when three deer turned to look at me as I drove into the park. They were big deer, too: mule deer. I thought they might be mule deer since they sure looked like the ones we saw in Yosemite (and, of course, they had big ears) in March, but these were brown. The interwebs later told me that mule deer are tan/brown in summer and grey in the winter/spring. I also narrowly avoided running over what I believe was a pheasant sitting by the road having a meal.

The Pine Ridge Trail is a 3.5 mile loop trail with approximately 1300 feet of elevation gain over the first 1.5 miles. You first head up a lovely trail to the top of the butte. Along the way, you can see grasslands below you, getting smaller and smaller as you head on up to the top.

Once at the top you have a great view of Steptoe Butte in the distance, and even Pullman if you squint—Pullman is approximately 11 miles away and today visibility was supposed to be 10 miles, but it was a little hazy due to some lightning strikes last night that turned into grass fires.

After spending time with the lovely views, you continue on along the ridge for 1.2 miles and then descend through a dense pine forest (with well-maintained trails, I might add) to the trailhead.

I met three people on my little saunter, all very nice folks. Not only are people nice in general up here, but I've found hikers to be friendly in general. Sure, I have a really small sample size, but it seems to me that people out for a saunter are more likely to say howdy than if you met those same people in the middle of their urban habitant.

I was back to my car by 8:45 (I'm slow and I'm ok with that). I drove home, took a shower, and headed off to the Moscow Farmer's Market. I bought a bunch of stuff, including some awesome red potatoes "just out of the ground this morning!" I do love me some potatoes; moving next to Idaho is going to work out just fine!

Tomorrow I might go to Steptoe Butte—it's really close. I think next weekend I'm going to take a long drive over to the Ginkgo Petrified Forest.

Labels: outdoorsy