WatershedEvents

Calamity Creek

 

Calamity Creek - the streamlined leads off to the left, a less strenuous route lies to the right.

There are a half dozen major drainages along the northern perimeter of the Sutton Mountain Wilderness Area (WSA). They all cross a well-maintained gravel road that runs generally east-west between Twickenham and the Bridge Creek Road. This is one of the first you encounter after you enter the WSA from the east. I've passed it by a dozen times, but this trip I stopped and took little hike up its dried out stream bed.

 A quarter mile in. Note the heavily incised stream bank on the left and the path on the right.

Generally I try not to hike up the middle of any stream bed, wet or dry. Partly that's to protect the bed of the stream, particularly if it is still carrying any water; but I also like to avoid the treacherous footing typically encountered when navigating the torn up bottom of a stream. This stream bed came with a well-worn pathway that ran along one bank or the other all the way to my intended destination - a spring.

There are perhaps a dozen springs along the northern flanks of Sutton Mountain, most of them classified as "intermittent." The few perennial ones typically sit at an elevation of roughly 2150 feet. Thats just 200 feet higher up the mountain than the elevation of the trailhead. The one I was on my way to visit sits at an elevation of 2240. I was curious to see if it was truly perennial. 

Less than a half mile up the creek I encountered the first of four big surprises - a  relatively new stock tank.

Looking downhill toward the location of the trailhead; stream bed is on the left.

I hadn't seen any sign of cattle in the area, so I was a little surprised to see such a clearly valuable piece of equipment just sitting there. I was also puzzled to find a good third of it was filled with a very fine, sandy clay. The 3" diameter pipe led uphill, and I began to follow it. I didn't get far, however, before I had my second surprise.

The first of many trees purposely dropped into and/or across the wetland.

Just as the creek bed freshened, it's flourishing wetland had been covered by large trees, most probably junipers. These had been old trees, some of them 14 to 16 inches in diameter. Almost certainly they had been dropped there on purpose. But why?

Looking downstream from the heart of the drop zone, watering trough in the distance.

A short further distance up the creek I got my third surprise of the outing. Perched on the rim of the embankment was an entire stand of pampas grass.

Pampas grass (Cortaderia sellona) along the rim of the embankment.

I could not have been more puzzled - or more dismayed. This is a terribly invasive plant, particularly in semiarid climates. It is also prone to going up in flames whenever there's a good wind and a little fire around. Absolutely not a good plant for this part of the world. So, what's it doing here? It almost certainly had to have been introduced. Perhaps it was put there in an attempt to stabilize the very steep and heavily incised walls of the creek bed?

Thistle plants climb part of the 20 ft. high bank opposite the stand of Pampas grass.

A pathway of sorts led down to the stream bed. I slid-hopped down to the bottom and ran into my fourth and final surprise: The spring was gone - either dried up or buried under the dirt - apparently replaced by a metal post. 

More thistle and a post, but what happened to the spring?

My GPS and the contour lines on my map all told me I was standing on, or very near to the spring. Was it buried in the ground, and was the post an "X" marking the spot? I was tempted to start digging, but common sense overruled the impulse. Better to make inquiries of some folks familiar with the area, I decided. 

The skies were lowering fast and there were raindrops on the wind. More significantly, the seconds between flashes of lightning and the subsequent rumbling reports had dropped down to five seconds or less. Ever since I witnessed a cow get blown up by a bolt of lightning, I've been very leery of getting caught in the open during a serious lightning storm. I cut short my trek further up the creek and headed back to the truck. Along the way I reflected on all I'd seen in the last hour. Then a question struck me like a ton of bricks: how the heck do you get something like a spring to flow, in any sort of controlled way, into a 3" pipe? What does that technology look like? Maybe a little research will shed light on that topic and help me make a little more sense out of my trip up what I've decided to call "Calamity Creek." 

 

 

Buddy and the Beaver

Evenings at Mule Shoe, after dinner, Buddy and I meander down to the boat launch, his favorite drinking hole. I had a telephoto on this particular evening and hoped to get a shot of a beaver I'd seen working the opposite bank the night before. The shot of Buddy was basically an exposure test, so once I saw that I was on target, I redirected the lens up stream for a longer shot. Almost the instant I turned away, however, I heard a racket at water's edge. As I turned to look I caught a glimpse of buddy scrambling way up the bank; frightened half to death by a beaver that apparently swam up to him while he was drinking, and then slapped his tail on the water right next to his head.

The Beaver seemed oblivious to my presence and swam around for a minute or two, before finally coming to rest in the shallows.

After a few minutes of sitting and grooming, Mr. Beaver slid back into the water and headed off to attend to other business.

 

 

Quixote Complex

On my right....

I first made the run from The Dalles to Condon, Oregon, in 1992. I was on a motorcycle that first time and found the experience of riding through mile after mile of wheat fields both exhilarating and awe inspiring. Since then I've made well over a dozen trips down that highway, and every time it is a little less exhilarating, thanks mostly to the intrusion of the windmills.

...and to my left.

I forget what year it was when I saw the first of the wind farms being set up along the banks of the Gorge, but I distinctly remember feeling a little unnerved by their massive size and the sweep of their blades. At the time they seemed like a quaint idea, but I never gave them much of a chance at becoming a success. I didn't buy Starbucks when it came out in 1992, either, so I am accustomed to being on the wrong end of bonanzas.

Over the years I've watched them proliferate like bull thistle, first congregating mostly along the walls of the gorge and the uplands nearby, then spilling out onto the great, rolling bosom of the Columbia River Plateau. This last trip they dogged my heels until I dropped down into Cottonwood Canyon. God, I hate the sight of 'em.

When I've complained out loud about the relentless expansion of this technology, some of my critics have taken me to task for being so negative about "such a great renewable." "What," some have asked me, "are you saying you'd rather see us stay with fossil fuels?" They do not see the great irony of this latest corporate, federally subsidized, scourge upon the land, no matter how much I protest about it. But this technology is backfiring, to some extent, because it is not replacing our dependency upon fossil fuels so much as it is augmenting our seemingly insatiable thirst for power. We aren't conserving energy, we are wallowing in it. 

The laws that govern the conservation of energy - any kind of energy - are hard and fast. When you remove massive amounts of energy from a system - any system - there are consequences, usually nasty ones, so far as the system itself is concerned. Mark my words.

Meanwhile, Rocinante and I will continue to joust with the inevitable. Next up, the Nukes.

Sutton Mountain Surprises

I was able to get away to the John Day River Basin last week - five days/four nights. I pitched camp at Mule Shoe, my usual preference. Much of my hiking was in that immediate area (more on those hikes in a later post). But I drove over to the Sutton Mountain WSA twice and crawled up a couple creek beds that meander out of the north slopes of the site. Cougar Creek was first on my list. I almost never go over to the Basin without stopping by that creek. This trip in the weather wasn't all that pretty, but I managed to get a shot or two I'm happy with. 

Along toward the end of the hike I came across a strange material occurring in considerable quantity all along the face of one of the lighter colored ash deposits. I'll keep working on the details associated with this post so that someday I may provide more specific information regarding which John Day ash group this particular formation is most closely related to. But, for the time being I'd like some help on figuring out just what the heck this blue stuff is. at 1:1 the diameter of the assemblage on the left is about 20mm. Note the tiny specks of blue all over the surface of the ash.

My best guess is the blue material is a type of lichen that is very common in this area. The white material that appears to be embedded in the surface is most likely specs of the silicates that are so prevalent in the ash itself. But I am not sure of any of that, so input would be deeply appreciated.

Wasp Ways

For days now a procession of wasps have been landing on the top railing of our cedar deck and poking around for three or four minutes at time. Finally, this afternoon I figured out what they are up to.

If you look very carefully at the photo above you may be able to see that the area in front of the wasp is a lighter color. The wood is not painted. That grayish-white color is actually the color of fresh cedar that is just beginning to weather. What's happening is the wasps are chewing off this weathered, oxidized layer. In the process they leave behind areas of raw wood that shows up in this photo as a blond color.

They are doing this all over the surface of the railing, but they tend to focus most on the curved edge, probably because they can get their mandibles around that contour more easily. As they move along they roll up a little gray ball out of the stuff and then fly off. I'll keep trying to get a shot of that. Presumably they are using this material to manufacture nests. I've never seen this behavior before, so if someone has a different take on it, please post it here as a comment.

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