Mountains out of Molehills

It happens. A nice weekend, with splendid weather [the exception and not the rule], comes about and it’s overrun with work.

Sometimes, I get jealous of people’s grand weekend plans. All the elaborate adventures they take part in, filling their conversations for the next week or so. Two days never seems like enough to have an adventure. When do you catch your breath??

While my weekends are a little on the bland side at times, I feel a twitch of embarrassment when I work all the way through them.  Why yes, I did happen to get up at 6:45 am on my weekend to catch a webinar on social media and am trying to write up a training on how to give interpretive walks.  In the grand scheme of it all it, it’s all molehills, not mountains. As long as I don’t let work overrun *every* weekend, and as long as I don’t “NEED” to have an adventure every weekend to feel like I am validating my life, either, I suppose keeping a good sense of perspective and loosing my weekend to work is a decent trade-off.  Come the end of summer, I’ll be wondering where all the work went to anyway.

Wake Up, Sleepy!

Found this Yellow-faced bumble bee snoozing while I gardened today. Tried to place the species, but it turns out there are two virtually identical species here along the coast, Pyrobombus caliginosus or vosnesenskii. What a handful of names right? I really get a kick out of the Pyrobombus part!

I decided not to pass up the chance to shoot the flowers themselves, too, so I started snapping and dropped the camera strap right into the floral bed of the bumble bee.

She was sluggish enough she didn’t fly off, but instead looked like she remembered what she was doing.

…Oh yea…pollen.

Good Heavens, Slow Down!

In between the general hubbub of getting ready in the morning with 6 pets who are doing their best theatrical representations of starving to death, coupled with a broken water heater, trying to straighten out plans for an upcoming trip back home, and writing 7 emails, I had in fact sat down originally to edit photos from the previous evening and I saw this quote scroll by on Facebook:

“You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day–unless you are too busy; then you should sit for an hour.”

So with that, I am going to write a blog post. About nothing. I feel like every time I sit to expound some grand idea into a post, it never gets finished, mostly because it leads to other tangents. My latest attempt, for example, is to pictorially represent the California Coast from peak to ocean, but it cascaded into my fight with Lightroom catalogs [turns out, my backup drives weren't copying the lightroom edits!].

So, instead of doing all that for the time being, I present to you two sunset shots for your meditative pleasure. I feel better now.

Flower Flurries

Nothing marks Spring’s arrival like flowers do!

Here in this part of California, even though we are not warm, we see a long growing season, like that of the Deep[er] South. Flowering starts in February and doesn’t often end until November or some such month, but it is possible to find flowers all year long, especially since we have a huge selection of non-natives that love this area. Out of the native group, the trilliums, currants, and Cardamines [toothworts] are the first to pop up.

Below are some of the current bloomers around the redwood area: [Click to enlarge]

California poppy, My Front Yard

Currant, Hiller Park, McKinleyville, CA

Trillium, Arcata Community Forest

Colt’s Foot, Arcata Community Forest

Some ornamental tree, my neighborhood

Redwood violet, Redwood National Park

Milkmaids, or Coast toothwort, Lyon’s Ranch, Redwood National Park

Wild strawberry, Lyon’s Ranch, Redwood National Park

Milkmaids, or Coast toothwort, Lyon’s Ranch, Redwood National Park

Candy flower, Lyon’s Ranch, Redwood National Park

Young Lupine, Lyons Ranch, Redwood National Park

Likely a plum, Lyon’s Ranch, Redwood National Park

Anchored for A Spell: Ode to My Dog

My husband and I have been thinking about the process of moving lately–or to be more specific, NOT moving. It would seem, with the way our offices are shaping up, we might be sitting tight for a while [until his office closes, perhaps].  Oddly, this is almost a relief: I hate the application process, the waiting, the research and “what ifs”. California is our seventh state [not counting home states or natal states], I guess moving is less enticing the 12th time around [if you count trips to and from parks at the beginning and end of each season]. While I don’t find this area to be a perfect fit for us, it is beautiful, dramatic, and entertaining. On top of that, something is different this time around.

We were walking the dog the other day and spoke about the fact that I’ve been a little more content, in a sense, here. It seems that in the past, if I felt that I wasn’t being productive job-wise, I threw my frustrations at the location [Kansas got a lot of hate from me, even though, looking back, it really wasn't Kansas, it was me]. Unemployment doesn’t sit well with me, I guess. But it was also more than that. Reading Richard Louv’s book, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder, it seems that perhaps I had nature-deficit disorder!

We had a park close by, a pond near our apartment, and we took little trips around the area [not to mention, tornado chased], but it was like I was not getting enough nature somehow. Or perhaps, I just felt out of place, a self-conscious shadow following me as I poked plants and frogs. Moving to South Carolina, we went to the beach a lot, watched alligators, and even tried to take up running. Still, something felt off. While I have yet to test my theory in other locations, I hypothesize that having a dog was what was missing.

Happy in the Park

I don’t mean to suggest that the dog equals nature, but that the dog forces me outside at least a couple times a day and offers an excuse to poke at a plant or bug for a while. Instead of “What is that crazy girl looking at?”, I feel more like it’s “She must be bored waiting for her dog to finish sniffing.” And while this dog is not the ideal athletic partner [getting her to run? Ha! I'd have better luck winning the lottery! She's bred to sit with sheep, not herd them.], I lost all the weight I was trying to run off in South Carolina just milling around with her.

Haha, it’s funny, I didn’t set out to write a post about my dog, but I guess she’s got a spell on me! I look forward to our future walks, and if we move anytime in the next few years, exploring a new place with her. Eventually, I know we’ll have children to share our love of nature with, but for now, an old ranch dog does just fine.

Being Bashful

Sequestering Souls

Monetary Value of the National Park System

In a report released by the National Park Service and Michigan State University this month, the monetary worth of National Park Service units to our national economy highlighted the fact that what happens in national parks does not stay in national parks. The year 2011 saw 278.9 million visits to 398 units under the protection of the Service. Of those choosing to spend their vacations at NPS units, they spent 12.95 billion dollars in gateway communities [defined as areas within 60 miles of park boundaries] sustaining 251,600 jobs outside the units.

That’s a lot of large numbers to digest. For a private industry comparison, Walt Disney resorts in central Florida contributes 6%, or 160,000, of the jobs in that area and generates 1.7 billion dollars in money spent outside the resort for lodging, food and the like.

Seems fairly close, but then again, I’ve never been good with numbers. The jobs generated in park gateway communities could employ a city the size of Saint Petersburg, Florida or Fort Wayne, Indiana. If you look at the employment numbers within, Walt Disney outhires the Park Service 3 to 1.  But the Park Service, operating as a nonprofit, relies heavily on 221,000 volunteers as well. If you can do math better than I can, it wouldn’t take you long to realize that both Disney World [just in central Florida] and the National Park Service are about equal in terms of people they rely on both inside and outside the gates to supply their visitors with services and goods. The real difference, number wise, is land. The Park Service oversees 84,000,000 acres that pertain to our national heritage, both natural and cultural.

Intrinsic Value of the National Park System

Assigning a monetary value to the cultural value of those 84,000,000 acres of NPS land is almost equivalent to pricing the best moment of your life. It just doesn’t translate well into numbers. The thousands of stories told in those lands are a unique part of our national fabric, threads tying nature, culture, history, and those who proved themselves to be shapers of our national identity together into a tapestry that is the foundation of our country. All of this serves as the backdrop of our family vacations and adventurous expeditions, our areas of refuge and solitude, where we unwind and escape from our urban creations, and perhaps where we quite often find what we seek. Hidden in the “Are we there yet?”s and official national park maps is our national identity and perhaps even a new-found aspect of our personal identity. More than just a balanced national budget is at stake in the halls of Congress.

 

 

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” –John Muir

A saguaro, maybe around 150 years old, has seen many a family vacation spent. Saguaro National Park, Arizona.

More Than One Way to Carve a Canyon

…or is there?

Water is known to be an amazing force. It sustains life, takes life, removes and deposits rock. Yet, with all this power, sometimes the artist behind the work is hidden to us, our perception working like a snapshot of an incredibly dynamic, drawn-out scene.

Fern Canyon is usually brimming with water in the winter. By summer, the creek that spans from wall to wall withers down to a trickle, allowing for foot bridges and less of a wet walk thanks to our Marine West Coast climate [or "Csbn" (Mediterranean/summer fog) if you want a more technical Köppen classification. Don't be fooled, by the way, by the Mediterranean part!! I'm not sure what part of the actual Mediterranean is this chilly; the only part I've been to was really, really hot! None of that here.].

The interesting thing about Fern Canyon, as small as it is, is the fact that the walls are vertical [and covered in ferns, although brown this time of year]. Of course, these walls lend themselves to all sorts of ‘myths’ about their creation, the most pervasive being that they are man-made [!]. Again [!][!!!]. According to such generalist sites like Trails.com, Fern Canyon was a result of the frenzied California gold rush and miners using hydraulic rock removal methods [I see a future post on how it's not wise to fully trust major travel guides [no endorsements from them here, eh?]]. Au contraire!

While there were miners present at Fern Canyon and Gold Bluffs Beach, they were never capable of hydraulically mining the canyon due to the lack of dams [they tried and failed]. Oddly, they occasionally focused their efforts on sucking the gold dust off the sea floor, at times thinking its origins were ocean-based and not from the bluffs themselves.

Indeed, the tool of choice to sculpt Fern Canyon was water, but by the hand of nature, not man. If you ever get the chance to go, *cautiously* check out the walls, or even the bluffs as you drive out there. They are nothing but pebbles! Sand and pebbles, lightly cemented together, ready to crumble at the first rain shower, or prying finger. Couple this soft ‘rock’, laid down by the ancestral Klamath River, with Home Creek [and perhaps a dammed ancient river that broke through?], and you get an easily carved canyon. Again, lots of water + soft ‘rock’ = natural canyon!

Speaking of water, we were lucky to see some in Sabino Canyon in Tucson, Arizona. Only 12 inches of rain falls a year.  Much like Fern Canyon, Sabino Canyon is amazing in that water is the sculptor, but unlike Fern Canyon, Sabino doesn’t have water year round. When it’s time to remove some rock, nature does it violently and quickly, almost like a woodworker wielding a chainsaw, hacking off bits and sending them flying.  Walking on the canyon floor, the drama of flash flooding is hinted at by the new restroom facilities [made of stone, replacing the old ones that were washed out--also made of stone!], broken bits of bridges, and boulders the size of small houses strewn about.

Water is an amazing artist, even when only present a few times a year. Much like a museum that houses the works of great artists for the rest of us to admire, it is important for us to recognize the correct artist of our natural works, be it rain, wind, or ice, so that we may better understand the natural processes that occur around us. And much like a museum that asks you not to touch the works so they are preserved for future generations, it’s becoming critical that we work to preserve our natural places and allow the natural processes to continue uninhibited, creating the marvellous and mysterious works that they do. /soapbox