botanizing

Snow Still

At the edge of the Rocky Mountains, among the first rumples in the western land from low, round hills to high, steep hills that lie not in isolation, but in continuous ranges, we enter the woods. I want to walk in snow. We came here, only an hour’s drive from home, through the round hills and isolated mountains, where the land is high enough to have snow to take a short walk.

We walk uphill through one draw, then follow the trail southward to the next draw, where we are high enough above the bottom that we cannot see it through the trees. Others have been here before us, and they have compacted the snow on the trail. The walking is easy, although I feel the uphill steps and breathe deeply when we stop.

The woods are still. We hear no birds or other sounds. There is no wind, not even the slightest breeze. This stillness is possible only when the world chills and the woods become insulated by snow. Normally the slight sway of trees would cause them to creak, but the heavy weight of eight inches of snow stills them. This is a rare quiet. As we walk we hear only the crunch of our boots against the crust of snow and the depths of our breaths.

The trail forks at the ridge. Those who walked here before us went eastward, over ridge, and down to the bottom of the next drainage. The tracked trail goes that direction. We turn north to follow the ridge. Our trail is untracked, except for the prints of a solitary elk that preceded us up the trail, and our steps sink in the snow, which is here about ten inches deep. The fan-ends of cedar branches, weighted by snow, hang low over the trail—we must duck under these, and I inevitably brush against them, knocking back my fleece stocking cap or catching my shoulder on a limb, and loose snow from the branches falls down my neck. Shrub branches—many of ninebark that dangle frozen brown clusters of dried flowers—also hang low over the trail, and these I knock two or three times with my hiking pole to jar loose the snow, which falls in clumps, and the branches spring upward, allowing my easier passage. Old snags, mostly branchless, have fallen under the weight of snow or the wind of an earlier storm, and we must step over these. Another snag, weighted by the snow forms an arch over the trail—its top and bottom are set in snow and the top of the arch is higher than my nine-foot reach.

We walk back to the trailhead through a draw of cedar and western white pine. I look up from the trail to the passage ahead to see the brown butt and tail of an owl, low among the trees, fly into the forest. The owl, about 25 yards ahead of us, is completely silent. There is no sound of wind pushed beneath its wings or the flap of the wings. In two or three minutes we reach the place where owl had been. A ring of feathers lies on the trail arrayed, much like a target, with soft, gray down feathers in the middle and semiplumes at the edge of these. Now flightless, a few flight feathers lie among the others, where contour feathers—these banded in brown and black and edged in white—make up the margin of the ring. Amid the concentric rings of feathers there is a single red spot—an inch wide—of blood on the crust of snow. At the edge a stem-like smear of greenish yellow marks the spot where an intestine must have been ripped open. The body of the grouse is absent—held most likely in the unseen leading edge of the owl.

The draw is not as quiet as the deeper woods. Ravens kraak among the trees, and I hear wind whoosh through their wings, although I don’t see the birds. My stocking cap is pulled low over my eyes and the late afternoon light is growing dim. I hear the highway through the woods below us, although I cannot yet see it through the forest. The narrow highway is a passage through the woods and high hills at the edge of the mountains. It connects one logging town to another. They are small towns with few people. Few are travelling today, and the whir of a car is an infrequent break in the stillness of the woods.

 

Smoke and rain

The rains have begun.  Through this fall of fires and smoke, we have waited for the rains.  Those rains came last weekend as I sat with friends around a campfire—a controlled fire unlike those that burned in the mountains to the south, east, and west of us—and we let the rain fall upon us.

The smoke of forest fires drifted to us in the middle of August, and for two full months the sky held a smoke haze.  I could feel the smoke’s acrid thickness as I breathed, and it burned my eyes.  One of my colleagues told me that she had put in 30-day disposable contacts just before the smoke arrived in August, but she had not changed the contacts at 30 days because the smoke adhered to the lenses.  She did not want to change lenses only to have the new lenses fogged by smoke—she expected the rain within the 30 days of her disposable lenses—and that rain, she and all of the rest of us anticipated, would end the forest fires and clear the smoke.  But the rains were late.  Weeks late.  When my colleague told me about her 30-day disposable contact lenses, they had already been on her eyes for over 50 days.  The rains came when the 30-day disposable lenses had been on her eyes for 59 days.

I was with friends in the Lostine Valley of the Wallowa Mountains when the rains began.  We had planned to go to a favorite spot in the Bitterroot Mountains, but that spot and the river valleys we would travel to get there were filled with smoke.  One of us talked on the phone to a forest ranger, who told us there was no smoke in the Wallowa Mountains, and there was no fire ban in campsites so we could have a campfire to stay the evening chill.  Our direction for the weekend was changed, and we went to the Lostine Valley.

We arrived at the edge of darkness and set up our camp.  A few rain drops fell as we gathered wood for the fire.  Darkness and the night chill came quicker than the rain.  We put on layers of fleece, raincoats, and wore fleece hats.  The campfire blazed, and the rain came.  Our fire sizzled in the wet and made dense smoke that drifted eastward in the breeze of the cold, wet front.  We sat in chairs in a semicircle around the fire ring.  When the fire smoke coughed, catching us in its recoil, we leaned from the smoke—closing our eyes against its acrid burn.  Sometimes we had to move a chair to avoid the pooling of smoke.  We built the fire against smoke pools, and when the smoke behaved it blew steadily eastward, angling upward to the spruce canopy.  We could not control the rain as easily as fire or smoke.  We sat in the rain, letting it fall upon us, the fire keeping us comfortable in the combined chill of rain and night—it was a pleasure to think that this rain was ending the forest fires, ending the season of smoke.

A Year

A year.  A friend told me in an email that it had been a year since I had posted at Botanizing.  It has been a year of talking and cooking rather than writing.  Stories seemed never as easily at hand as a frying pan.

A year ago, we had just returned from a collecting trip in Arizona and Utah.  The monsoon rains had chased us from Arizona, and we spent our last few days of the trip looking for rock art in canyons of southern Utah.  From there we had a long drive home—through mountains, over passes, up intermountain valleys, through rain, and we stopped at Mollie’s in Snowville for breakfast.  Then we bolted across the plains, crossing and recrossing the Snake River, and then climbing into the mountains of Idaho, which we exited to meet the hills of the Palouse.  At home, young hawks were screaming in the nest behind the house.

Soon after returning from the desert we were in the Clearwater Mountains of Idaho, where a blocked road prevented us from reaching a trailhead we wanted to use for a backpack.  We retreated down the mountains to the

Selway River and to its tributary, Meadow Creek, where we camped.  We walked up Meadow Creek, where the dew wet leaves of grasses slapped against my shins.   The winged stems of Lathyrus hung like the weighted beams of balances over the trail.  The slope above us was an old burn, where snags of cedars stood.  The burnt cedars had trunks of black charcoal that shone bluish in the sun from the burnishing of wind and weather.  Adrian harvested thimbleberries and serviceberries as we walked. 

At the beginning of October, we made a backpack up the Selway River.  There was a wildfire—by then under control—in the river valley, where a scrim of white smoke covered the hills, and we stopped only a short distance beyond Race Creek.  Smoke was our gauge.    We camped on a sand shelf above a point bar, and in the evening, when breezes began to move upriver, the scent of smoke cleared.

It was also in October that I was asked to help lead the development of a new arts and sciences college at our university.  It had been decided a few weeks earlier that our then colleges of sciences and liberal arts would be merged to form a single college.  My next eight months were focused on merger planning and formulating recommendations for the structures and procedures of the new college.  This was an incredible opportunity—how often does one get to create a new college?

The first frost of the season came on 25 October to place briefly a light white coat on the roof of the house behind us.  I was reading V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, which began:  “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”  The arrogance was shocking.

We saw Carmen at Seattle Opera.  This was thoroughly enjoyable.

 

In early November, I went to an informal session on ‘Ecopoetics on the Palouse.’  One of the participants said that a “poem is an ecosystem.”  I wondered about this. It was unclear to me what the speaker may have meant:  was it meant as a simile or as a description of a poem’s complexity and function?   Most poems, especially any short of long, narrative verses, are too simple to stand in comparison to ecosystems.  What is the simile for a poem in the ecology of place?  A bunch grass, perhaps?  Maybe a lyrical poem is just a blade of grass?

I delighted in reading Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.  The book had a lovely shadowy tone, a slight tinge of melancholy.  The story looked back to a journey to ask what had there been before and what was there after that event—“this voyage would be a great education,” one of characters told the young protagonist.

November was a brown season.  The hills of the Palouse showed dark soil or lighter crop stubble.   In the conifer forest where we walked on the north side of a tall butte, the woods were nearly a cave of brown tree trunks, and the trail was coated by a thick thatch of golden brown needles.  A brown Varied Thrush sat quietly on the shadowed branch of a Douglas Fir.  I looked to find the greens of the season:  dark canopy, stringy networks of lichens, and mosses.

In late December and early January, we traveled to Costa Rica for several days on the Osa Peninsula and then in Monteverde.  On the Osa Peninsula, our cabin overlooking the ocean was surrounded by forest.  Blackhooded Antshrikes pecked about the shrubby shadows while Riverside Wrens built a nest in the shrubs.  Amid their vital activities, I read on the deck.  We botanized and birded and spent a few minutes on the beach.  At Monteverde, we walked in the clouds while continuing to bird and botanize.  At the end of the trip, we visited the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San Jose.  The old building occupied by the Museum was wonderful—it was barn-like in its first gallery and had rough, unfinished walls in a gallery of photographs.

Mid January:  Atop a red buoy, numbered 44, anchored in the middle of the former Snake River, now the Lower Granite Lake, which backs behind Lower Granite Dam, there stood a Great Blue Heron.  It seemed like a poem.

The dammed Snake, once

a river that slithered

among stone scaled hills,

lies in flat water

navigated by grain barges.

Red buoys mark channel.

A hunter watches,

still in evening shadows—

a Great Blue Heron

atop buoy 44—

awaits any movement—

a fish, a river.

At Seattle Opera, we see Verdi’s Attila, which I do not enjoy.  There was lovely choral singing, and there were a few beautiful arias, but the story and its violent themes were unappealing.  In contrast to the opera, we saw a fabulous performance only a few days earlier by the Ying Quartet at the University of Idaho.  They played two contemporary pieces and then Beethoven’s final string quartet.  The concert was absolutely energizing, and I spent days afterward looking around the web to hear other pieces related to the music that was performed.

“Ha . . . Ha . . .”  A Great Horned Owl called sharply as I approached home in the dark of a cold evening.   From another tall conifer its companion answered, “Hoo Hoo Hoo.”  The conversation warmed me.

We saw Glück’s Orpheus and Eurydice at Seattle Opera in late February.  It was lovely—the music, the singing, the ballet, and Amour portrayed as a woman on a bicycle.  We also went to the exhibit Gauguin and Polynesia at Seattle Art Museum.  This was a great chance to see not only many paintings by Gauguin from his time in Polynesia but also to see his carvings and material collections.

In March, we traveled to Indianapolis, where I had much of a day in the art museum.  One of the first paintings I saw was Gauguin’s “Landscape near Arles,” which was one of the first paintings he made after joining Van Gogh in the ‘studio in the south.’  The painting is a tight composition of a haystack framed by a building on the left, a house in the back, and by trees.  The haystack is colorful—in yellow and oranges done in narrow, short brush strokes—Van Gogh’s colors and Van Gogh’s brush strokes.  Whistler’s “Harmony in Pink and Gray:  Lady Meux” was exceptional.  I especially enjoyed the collection of work by Indiana painters and American impressionists from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries—many of these were artists that had gone to Paris for training and came home with lighter colors and bolder brush strokes.  There were wonderful pieces by the American modernists Sloan, Hartley, and O’Keeffe, and among these I discovered an artist unknown to be before:  Victor Higgins.  Higgins was originally from Indiana, but he had gone to Europe for training, and later moved to Taos, where he painted mostly landscapes.  His painting of barren hills in New Mexico made me want to take brushes and tubes of paint to the Southwest.

In April, the tributaries of the Selway River were in flood so we stopped our hike at Packer Creek and clambered to the top of a large boulder a few feet out in the river’s channel.  We watched dippers.  One jumped repeatedly in and out of the breaking white water from a steep stone in the river’s splash zone.  Fast and regular like the ratchet action of a machine, the bird was in and out, in and out, and in and out of the river.  After feeding, the dipper flew up the cliff face to land on a steep slab of stone just below a clump of dried moss.  It stood there—but did not stand still for a dipper is seldom still—it did kneebends and pecked at soil in the cracks of the cliff until it slipped into a hole at the base of the moss clump.  Soon anther dipper flew across the river to the same moss clump.  It, too, stood for a few moments and then slipped beneath the moss.

I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in early May.  Before this trip I had read Patricia Vigderman’s The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner, which was marvelously quirky, much like the museum itself.  The book’s short chapters each had a title taken from a work of art in the museum, but they were less about art in the galleries than the art of making a life.  Vigderman does not tell a straight-forward biographical story about Gardner; instead, she writes around the life of Gardner, who had burned all of her personal letters, attempted to maintain the privacy of her life, even to remain elusive, and the book becomes a circumscription—bounding Gardner by stories about her home, her collections, and the painters, writers and friends that were close to her.  I enjoyed the museum as well, especially as the collection of one individual, which we rarely have the chance to see.

We see Madame Butterfly at Seattle Opera.  It’s too shallow despite some good music.

In late May, I left the northwest for several weeks of fieldwork on the Colorado Plateau.  We are exploring how the complex topography of the Colorado Plateau has shaped plant migration patterns, provided glacial refugia, and influenced the evolution of new species using Cronquist’s blazing star (Mentzelia cronquistii) and a few of its closest relatives.  I looked for populations to sample and spent days driving rough roads, walking hills, and clambering up cliffs—my favorite kind of travel.  Mostly I found dead individuals in populations that should have been thriving—possibly an adverse effect of the persistent drought in this region and certainly a detriment to our research.  After a week in Utah, I moved on to the Grand Canyon, which is the southernmost and lowest elevation reach of Cronquist’s blazing star, making this area a likely candidate as a glacial refuge that could have played a role in the repopulation of the Colorado Plateau following the Pleistocene glaciation.  With friends and others involved in the project, I backpacked through the canyon for a week.  Once we emerged from the Grand Canyon, I returned to Utah for another week of collecting.

In early July, I attended the annual professional conference for botanists, which was held this year in Columbus, Ohio, where recent high temperatures and violent storms had impacted the city’s environment.  During the three days I was at the conference, I went outside only once to have dinner a few blocks from my hotel; otherwise, I ate and spend my days in talks and meetings in the hotel and convention center complex.  My schedule and environment were entirely contained for days.  On my flight to Ohio, I read Frank Waters’s Pumpkin Seed Point and on my return flight read Gary Nabhan’s The Desert Smells Like Rain—two books centered on Native American life in Arizona.  While my body was contained in aircraft and hotels, my mind wandered the western landscape.

In the middle of July we were still having rain.  It had been a cool, wet spring and summer.  Snow and cold persisted through much of the spring and then rain and cool days through June.  Usually, by the beginning of July our days in the inland Northwest have turned dry—arid provides a better sense of those days—in which there can be a sharp heat and intense dryness.  This year, in contrast, we have been having regular thunderstorms, which in the past were exceptionally rare in this region.

We backpacked among the headwaters of Gedney Creek, which drains to the Selway River, in the Bitterroot Mountains.  The huckleberries were ripe, and Adrian ate as she walked.  We crossed Canteen Creek on stones.  Its shallow water, rippled by flow over the stones, projected shadows on the bedding stones that made the creek appear to be coated in yellow scales like the back of a showy, dryland lizard.  On the backpack, I read Maureen McLane's new book My Poets and was fascinated by its collage style that melded criticism, poetry and personal narrative.  It was quite beautiful.  I especially enjoyed the chapter on Elizabeth Bishop (Gertrude Stein) that was written in the style of Stein.

 

In the basement of the campus library, where seldom read books are kept (mostly untended and often in disarray) in compactors—one of my favorite places to gather reading material—I picked-up Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos.  It’s an odd book about Dodge Luhan’s interactions with D. H. Lawrence during the time he was in Taos.  Dodge Luhan addresses the book to the poet Robinson Jeffers, which she begins by saying:  “You know Jeffers, after I met you, I felt that you and Lawrence ought to know each other, that you would have liked and understood each other . . .”  I wondered if I should be in on this conversation, which seemed a personal triangulation that didn’t really involve me—after all, I have never really liked or understood Lawrence.  One wanted to ask Dodge Luhan why the distraction of Robinson Jeffers was introduced—while reading about Lawrence and Taos, I kept thinking about Jeffers in his Tor on the coast of California.  Yet, the trope of a private conversation—making the reader an eavesdropper—has its uniqueness and interest.  There was in the book (on page 4) this lovely description of the way Taos infiltrated one’s life:   “The mountain and the fields were not separate from one’s life.  One did not go out to things, one was part of them.  The mountain, if anything, came to one, came into the house; one ate it with the cake.”

I have been buying a piece of cake with the groceries each week.  We have our cake, our music, our art, and our mountains.

Photographs

1. Selway River; 2. Bisbee Antiques in Bisbee, Arizona; 3. Mollie’s Café in Snowville, Utah; 4. Cayuse Lake, Clearwater Mountains; 5. Meadow Creek, a tributary of the Selway; 6. Selway River; 7. Cloud above ridge along the Selway River; 8. Selway River; 9. Deleted; 10. Lower Ribbon Falls, Grand Canyon; 11. Petroglyphs in Buckhorn Wash, Utah; 12. View from our cabin on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica; 13. “Elvis 3D” by Juliana Barquero in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San Jose, Costa Rica; 14. Capuchin monkey, Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica; 15. Indianapolis Museum of Art; 16. Rock clematis (Clematis columbiana); 17. Selway River; 18. Selway River; 19. The Green River in Utah on a moonlit night with lightning; 20. Grand Canyon; 21. Backpacking in Grand Canyon; 22. In the vicinity of Last Chance Wash, San Rafael Swell, Utah; 23. Hotel room, Columbus, Ohio; 24. Stones in Canteen Creek, Bitterroot Mountains; 25. Leaning teacup in our campsite at Gedney Creek in Nez Perce National Forest; 26. Deleted; 27. Colorado River in Grand Canyon.

Amado

It’s Sunday morning, but there are no people at the Universal Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, Inc in Amado, Arizona.  The Church’s empty parking lot is still moist from rain in the night.

The heat of the southern Arizona morning is intensifying.  Humidity amplifies the heat.  Despite the heat and humidity, I would like a cup of tea.

We have stopped in Amado for tea.  At a rustic minimart, the kind of community store that predates well the current craze of interstate exit minimarts which blaze neon and sport many islands of gas pumps.  The pair of pumps here are old.  I don’t see any tea water in the store and ask the cashier whether he has any.  “We have coffee,” he tells me.  “There’s hot water in the tap,” he says, “but it’s probably not good enough for tea.”  I pass on the hot tap tea but buy ice for our cooler.  From the cooler, I fish a cool can of sparkling water to drink instead of tea.

From Amado, we drive across a desert plain of ocotillo and scrub where birds sing.  Rabbits start among the cholla as we approach.  We catch a glimpse of a javelina, and then we are into mountains. 

In a lush wash bordered by oaks and poison ivy, young seedlings of a Mentzelia stand about two inches tall.  These may be Mentzelia isolata, a species that reaches its northernmost distribution in the mountains of southern Arizona.  We also find a lovely cloak fern, perhaps Notholaena lemmoni, tucked among the thick layers of dried oak leaves and strands of club moss on the shaded higher banks of the wash.

Butterflies at Gedney Creek

Thousands of bright yellow and black swallowtail butterflies stream from water puddles.  They are massed in the roadside gutter and alight at our approach.  I can’t help hitting a few as we drive up the Selway River, but most move in fractured waves from the roadside to the edge of the forest until we pass.

At the mouth of Gedney Creek, checkerspot butterflies flutter around us as we have lunch.  These are perhaps northern checkerspots—I have only a quick look and no guide at hand. After lunch, we load our daypacks for a walk up Gedney Creek.

The creek is loud.  The sound dominates.  As we walk, I try to shift my focus from my ears to my eyes.  I can see the creek only through drooping, lichenized branches of the cedars and around the brighter green of the small willows and cascara.  The creek is a rush of white, churning water.  Darker water, which can has lines of Prussian blue, holds to a few stretches on the opposite side of the creek, where a cliff face constrains the channel.

My eyes adjust to the cedar forest.  Where we begin the ground is relatively open, except for fallen logs, wiry stems of snowberry, trailing Linnaea, and clumps of miner’s lettuce that have dimpled petals.  A few weathered bead lilies, their leaves hanging like the tongues of tired dogs and their flowers worn-out, sit in the cedar debris.

For about two miles, the trail parallels the creek, and it holds largely to the riparian zone.   This moist place is lush.  Thimbleberries stand taller than our shoulders, and, at their branch tips, cupped white flowers look directly into our eyes.  The tips of tall bracken fern fronds brush our biceps as we pass.  Slender stalks of valerian, which have delicate white flowers, stand from the lower, leafy vegetation, including clumps maidenhair ferns.

In sunny openings, blue butterflies jangle in flight above blue flowers of penstemons that have a hold among rock outcrops.

The trail climbs abruptly in switchbacks that take us up the slope and away from the creek.  The water’s rushing noise recedes.  The temperature warms. 

In a moist niche, where we stop in shady woods to gather our breath, we see a small, brown skipper caught in a spider’s web.  The butterfly’s wings flutter rapidly.  A small spider treads the web toward the butterfly.  Suddenly, the butterfly pulls away from the web.  We are surprised.  It flies upward—just inches—and then goes downward—we inhale deeply, expecting the butterfly to catch again in the spider’s web—but it veers right and lands on the rounded shoulder of a mossy stone that anchors a corner of the web.  The moment feels perilous. We back away, leaving uncertain the butterfly’s story.

Collecting the new Mentzelia

I stay close behind Melissa.  She walks up the desert wash in Chaco sandals and a skirt.  Her steps are swift and balanced.  It is difficult for me to match her pace. She walks through the creek.  I plant one huge hiking boot at the creek’s edge and look for a stepping stone at midstream—which I don’t see—then stretch my stride to reach as far across the creek as possible.  Melissa, who works for the National Park Service on vegetation management, found last fall a new population of our likely new species of Mentzelia.  Today, she’s taking us to the population.  Melissa had been working with her vegetation survey crew to gather data on the effects of tamarisk removal.  We arrived as she and her crew were finishing lunch.  Melissa put down her lunch box to lead Wendy, Max, Heidi, and I the half mile or so up the side canyon to the location where she found the new population of the new Mentzelia. 

Seeing the population will provide me with important details about the kinds of environments used by this unusual subshrubby lineage of mentzelias.  I want also to collect some additional individuals so that we can understand better the variation characteristic of this new species.

“It’s along here,” Melissa says and slows to look at the gravelly hump along the spine of the creek’s channel  “There it is,” she says a moment later and points to the plant.  The Mentzelia is growing in compacted gravel and sand in a shallow bank along the creek.  It’s an odd place for a Mentzelia of this sort—we usually find relatives of this species growing on steep slopes of loose rocks or on knolls that have gypsum crusts.  “There’s another one along here,” Melissa says.  I look up the creek and then see the other, smaller plant a few feet from the first one.  

Wendy, Max, and Heidi arrive, and we all admire the new mentzelias.  “We should expect them on these slopes,” I say, and we disperse to climb the loose, mud-colored stone of Muav limestone.  Wendy is above me on a steep slope when I begin to find additional plants.  She climbs to one of the plants that is growing on a stack-like outcrop of stone, and here she finds a single open flower.  We had not expected open flowers in this population, which we expect to flower later in the summer like other closely related subshrubby mentzelias.

As I walk along the slope above the creek, I find more individuals of the Mentzelia.  They appear to be most frequent in the angles where stone outcrops meet the talus slope, which probably offers some advantage in increasing the amount of water available.

Wendy sits in the wash to press our collections of the Mentzelia.  We talk about the oddness of finding the plants growing in the unstable wash, which has the advantage of offering more water than the steep, talus slopes but would be prone to scouring floods that could wash the plants away.  As we talk about the possibilities of the plant’s seeds to germinate and establish themselves in the wash, I look down and see five young seedlings of the Mentzelia.  These are young plants that probably germinated earlier in the spring.

Finding the Mentzelia population has given me a huge energy boost—which I need because we are soon expected at the rafts to continue our trip downriver this afternoon.  I fill my hat with water and put it on my head.  We begin swiftly to walk down the wash.

[this essay dates to 4 May]

On the water

I am not easy on water, having never learned to swim, flunking even the lessons in floating that I had as a small child at the swimming pool in Ft. Madison.  The thought of being on water makes me apprehensive. 

As the boatmen finish rigging the gear on our rafts, the rest of us find life vests.  We don and attempt to fasten the vests, which are too tight or too loose.  We adjust for each other the various straps until each of us, taking a deep breath, is able to snap our plastic buckles in place, and, then, breathing out, we feel our chests and ribs constricted by the now snug vests.  Just before we board the rafts, the boatmen give us instructions on what to do if we are thrown in a rapid into the water and how they will rescue us.   I waddle toward my assigned raft.  I feel Frankensteinian—that is, like that man’s constructed monster—made of cast-off and miscast parts—my arms are propped outward acutely by the life vest, and both arms and legs are enclosed in hobbling layers of stiff, synthetic fabrics and raingear.

We motor down the cool morning river.  The first small rapid splashes us with cold water.  I shiver and wonder at the cold ahead.  We stop soon—only a mile or so from the put-in at Lee’s Ferry.  

This trip through the Grand Canyon with the National Park Service is to conduct vegetation surveys and make collections of plants.  Lori, one of our leaders, introduced us yesterday to the projects for the trip, which are centered on the invasive shrub known as tamarisk or salt cedar.  Tamarisk was introduced to North America from its native range in Eurasia and Africa in the 19^th century.  During the dust bowl years on the Great Plains, tamarisk were planted to create windbreaks to limit soil erosion.  Since then, tamarisk have spread to the rivers of the southwestern US, where they form thick bands along the edges of rivers and washes, out-competing native trees, such as cottonwoods, and changing dramatically the vegetation of riparian zones.  Tamarisk are common along the Colorado River, and they became especially prevalent in the Grand Canyon after the Glen Canyon Dam was built upriver.  The dam regulated water flow, eliminating seasonal flooding of riparian zones in the Grand Canyon, which allowed the proliferation of tamarisk and various other changes in canyon ecology.  Lori tells us that the Park Service has not attempted to manage tamarisk along the Colorado River, but they are working to control its spread in side canyons (see this link).  Our trip is devoted partly to surveys of side canyons where tamarisk has been removed to determine the consequences of the removal efforts—whether tamarisk or native vegetation is returning—and monitor for the spread of tamarisk. 

A second facet of our trip is to survey for the presence and spread of tamarisk beetles.  A few years ago, biologists in Utah began to experiment with a natural predator of tamarisk—a beetle (Diorhabda carinulata) that forages and reproduces only on tamarisk—as a means of controlling population spread of the invasive plant.  The tamarisk beetles have moved south from their release points and have settled on tamarisk populations in the Grand Canyon.  The Park Service is interested in studying the spread of the tamarisk beetles and whether they can help limit the tamarisk invasion.  Our crew has been armed with insect nets and instructed on sampling for tamarisk beetles and beetle eggs.  At our first stop along the river, a team from our rafts samples for beetles using the insect nets, which they sweep across the branches of the tamarisk.

My mission on this trip is to collect plants, and I am joined by colleagues, Wendy and Max.  Wendy has been studying the flora of the Grand Canyon for many years, and she knows intimately the place and the plants.  Max, too, knows the plants of the region exceptionally well.  While much of my research involves plants of the Colorado Plateau and more generally the intermountain western US, I do not know the flora of this region like Wendy and Max.  I feel like an amateur in the face of their floristic knowledge.  While Wendy and Max marvel at a sedge that grows near the water’s edge, I wander the gravelly bar.  I find a lovely Orobanche (broomrape), which Wendy tells me is unusual this far northeast in the Grand Canyon.  I find also a population of Cronquist’s blazing star (Mentzelia cronquistii).  The blazing stars are my reason for being here.  I have been studying the evolution of blazing stars for several years, and Wendy and I believe that we have discovered a new species of blazing star in the Grand Canyon.  This trip through the Grand Canyon will give us a chance to explore for additional populations of the new blazing star and give me the opportunity to sample the diversity of the various mentzelias that are here.

We stop next at Cathedral Wash, where Apache’s plume and prince’s plume are in bloom, and a hackberry in bright leaf has fruits.  As the day edges onward, our stops to survey for tamarisk beetles become quicker, and there is little time to botanize.

The raft moves calmly on smooth water.  I grow comfortable with the boat and the water.  We are quiet in the afternoon, after shade descends on the channel.   The shaded river has a wiggly blue path at midstream where sky and water, in a way, meet.   Our course down the blue path is bordered by deep, rufous browns and viridian.   Where the river manages a reflection of a sunlit cliff face, the water shimmers with orange. 

We enter evening with a series of rapids.  I grab a firm hold on a rope that secures our gear (and hopefully me).  Each rapid begins with rolling arcs of shiny water—I am enamoured by the curve of water, and I would stay here on the rapid’s tongue where the water bends and shines like metal—and then we plunge into the holes where white, shattered water curves high, rising over the front of the raft, and back at us.  The frigid splatter hits like shots, and we twist away, recoiling tensely, at each strike.

In the mid day heat, I had taken off my rain gear, allowing the rest of my clothes to become soaked.  In late afternoon, when shade descended on the river, I grew cold and put on again my rain gear, which served to keep the cool air and chilling spray of water away from my skin, but the rain gear held a clammy cold from the wet clothes tightly against me.  Is this a pleasure?—I wonder to myself.  I am anxious to reach camp.

*

Sun shines on our camp.  When we arrive the rafts must first be unloaded.  We then receive instructions on how to set-up the kitchen and toilet.  I shiver through the instructions—my shoulders are tensed against my chill, and I can hardly move in my drenched, cold clothing.  When we are released, I take my gear to a pair of large boulders that will serve as the head of my bed for the night.  Fleece pants, a dry, cotton shirt, and a fleece pullover are readily at hand in my pack, and I walk upslope behind the boulders to change clothes among the shrubs.  In dry clothes, I warm quickly, and the pleasure of the place returns.

[this essay dates to 2 May]

In the Wenaha River canyon

In the canyon of the Wenaha River, distance is sufficient to make the sable slopes seem like fur.  At foot, however, the volcanic stone is rough.  This stone, where it outcrops, is matte umber, and, yet, I can think that and then see a cleanly split stone with sun sheen and a glaze of yellow ochre dotted with bright yellow.   At hand, when we stop for a moment, I find retted rock banded in red that looks as if it had been held together by rubber bands.  Another stone might have had cans first of pink paint and then green paint dumped on it.

The first blush of fresh green is on the slopes.  We find biscuit roots with their balls of flowers tucked inconspicuously among crispate leaves, pale leaves of waterleaf waiting for their flowers to emerge, star-like leaves of lithophragmas, and one little, leaning bluebell with a line of pendant, open flowers.  A few shiny buttercups sit among the rocks.  In nearly barren patches of moist soil, where thin vegetation lies matted, where I imagine snow must have lain until recently, fritillaries stand, their flowers nodding.  In the thatch of last year’s dried grasses are threadlike stems of spring whitlow grass, which is actually a tiny mustard, that bears small white flowers—these are now like white dots, closed today, atop the thin stems.

The flush of buds gives a rufous cap to the still leafless cottonwoods.  The silvery gray cottonwoods stand on the river’s beaches, and we see them largely from above.  The trail, except for a short traverse through a moist meadow on muddy path, holds to the slope well above the river.

A helicopter flies up the canyon and then back about fifteen minutes later.  Soon it returns upriver, but holds short of us, sitting over a side canyon before moving up to the next side canyon, which is opposite us.  We scan the slope below the helicopter for animals for which we assume they are searching.  Three bighorn sheep burst from a rock outcrop, but they run only a few years—stop—then run again, going up slope toward the protective cover of conifer forest. The helicopter remains.  Its motor drones, and its blades chop the sky.  Twacktwacktwack.

The available seat

Our studies of blazing stars, plants of the genus Mentzelia, revealed a new species a few years ago.  The new species, which we called Mentzelia hualapaiensis, was known from a few populations scattered along the bottom of the Grand Canyon.   During our studies, we had found several herbarium specimens of this then unknown species, which composed a small pile of material that we used to prepare the formal taxonomic description of the species.  Most of the specimens in that pile were consistent with each other, but one was a little odd.   We set the odd one aside.

New collections later sent to us by our collaborator in Arizona matched the odd one that we had set aside.  We began to wonder seriously whether we had another new species.  DNA sequencing had already revealed to us that the odd one was a little different from M. hualapaiensis and other close relatives.

Last winter—in November!—we received another batch of fresh collections that the National Park Service had made in a remote branch of the Grand Canyon, and they, too, matched the form of our odd specimen.  This led us to begin scrutinizing the differences between the few populations of the odd specimen and the similar M. hualapaiensis.  We have wanted more material of the odd one to understand better its characteristics, ecology, and distribution, but it’s not an easy task to get more samples of uncommon plants that grow on the loose stones of steep cliffs near the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

To help search for those samples, I was offered last week an available seat on a boat in the Grand Canyon as part of a National Park Service vegetation survey.  I filled out the requisite forms and bought an airplane ticket to Arizona.  I’ve gone through the equipment list and begun to make a pile of my gear.  Headlamp, rain gear, broad-brimmed hat, fleece sweater, pants that convert to shorts, and I am just started.  I put a new sketchpad notebook on the gear pile and then, late last night, turned to my bookshelves.  What do I want to read during the trip?  What should I read before the trip?   I pulled Joseph Wood Krutch’s 1957 Grand Canyon and Ann Zwinger’s 1995 Downcanyon.  I know, too, that it’s now time to get a copy of Clarence Dutton’s Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District.  My preparation to make the most of the available seat begins.

Bighorn Mountains

We have camped in a matted opening in forest.  It’s a hunters’ camp.  The fire ring is the size of a volcano.  Smashed cans and other debris litter the thin grass.  Deer bones are strewn at the margin of the opening. 

The early morning is bright and calm.  The pines that circle our campsite appear yellowish in the morning light.  They release yellowness.  The truck accumulated overnight a film of yellow pine pollen.  I sweep an index finger along the truck’s fender to gather a thick, scythe-like ridge of yellow pollen and gray dust on my fingertip.

I disturb the calm morning by opening and closing the truck door, setting up the stove, sloshing water, and then start the stove to roar.  After a few minutes the roar loses power—the gas fuel canister is depleted.  I change canisters.   Soon, hot water spews from the tea kettle, which begins to whistle.  I pull on a black, fleece pullover to sit facing the sun, tea in hand and book in my lap.

*

The shadows of mosquitoes dapple my photographs.  Thousands of mosquitoes swarm my head when I stop, and, when I lie on the ground to make a photograph, the insect cloud shimmers as shadows in the camera’s viewfinder.

I sweep my hand around my head to clear the cloud.  There are only moments now—to focus the camera, take a deep breath as I steady it, and then depress the shutter—before the swarm lands on my face and hair, which will shiver me, and I will feel the insect bites.  Through all of that, the mosquitoes have been landing on my legs.  After I snap the shutter, I slap and kill several.  I must walk to avoid insect insanity. 

We walk up a broad alpine slope near Powder River Pass.  The fellfield blooms.  As I walk, I write the names of the flowers.  Pygmy bitterroot.  Pussytoe.  Sky pilot.  Sandwort and its cousin, the moss campion. Shooting star.  Two plants commonly called alpine forget-me-not, Myosotis alpestris and Eritrichium nanum, are here.  Alpine aven.  A paintbrush and a saxifrage.  Wyoming kittentail, an old friend that has been included in several of my publications over the years.  False dandelion.  Rockcress.  Larkspur.  Lousewort.  Western bistort. 

A deer vertebra lies nested in grass blades and mountain phlox.  The tableau should incite a story of the living and the dead, but I can think only of texture as I look.  The bone, weather bleached, is minutely scabrous, where fissures and pores catch my fingerprint, unlike the velvety petals of the phlox.  The petals flex and deform under my fingers, but my fingers are no match for the hardness of bone.  To get a response from bone, I must use a fingernail to raise a dull scrape.

*

As we drive down the east slope of the Bighorn Mountains, I regret our departure. I dislike leaving mountains.  The walking, botanizing, slow evenings warmed by a fire, dusk calls of birds and coyotes, the morning shivers of trees in a breeze, and the warmth of tea in the early sun will be missed—at least for a few days.  If only there were more time to botanize.