Pics of the Day 34-35: Jasper Provincial Park, Canada

{Pic-34}: A waterfall in Jasper Provincial Park. I climbed up its slope in July 2008, and we camped at the head of the lake behind it. © 2008 DeLene Beeland

{Pic-35}: Lake behind the waterfall in pic-34. © 2008 DeLene Beeland

Read Full Post »

Pic of the Day: 27; Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Pic-27: Flame azalea, Great Smoky Mountains National Park. © 2010 DeLene Beeland

Read Full Post »

Pic of the Day: 25; Pea Island Nat. Wildlife Ref., N.C.

(Pic 25): Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, North Carolina. © 2010 DeLene Beeland

This image was taken in late April 2010 when I visited Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge on the NC Outer Banks (map). There’s not much I’d rather do on an early summer day than kick around on the coast.  Pea Island is part of the ribbon of sand that makes up North Carolina’s famed Outer Banks.  These coastal barrier islands jut out into the Atlantic like a V. I spotted some marbled godwits foraging in the shallow estuary on the western side of the refuge, and what I think was a loggerhead shrike near to these trees. The wind was blowing so hard that the shrike would seem to hover in mid-air, trying to land on the terminal end of a branch but then it would get blown further away. It finally gave in to the wind and let the airy forces carry it far away.

Read Full Post »

Stinkers the Porcupine

I found this YouTube video of a domesticated porcupine on Twitter yesterday:

It flashed me back to a backpacking trip in Jasper National Park in Canada summer of 2008. Matt and I inadvertently set our tent up on a lightly used animal trail, and we learned the hard way to *always* search your camp area for any sign of an animal trail and avoid pitching your tent near it. And especially not on it.  A few hours after sundown, we were awoken to a weird huffing sound. Startled, I counted the huffs and realized that they always came in sets of 3, 5 or 7, always an odd count. It also sounded as if the animal was near to the ground or had a low center of gravity. It seemed to wander off, after three or four huffing sessions right outside our tent fly.

We drifted back to sleep. We’d been on the road for three weeks, driving from Portland, Oregon to Alaska, then back down to Jasper. We were going to drive all the way east to Ottawa, then back down south to North Carolina. And we were camping almost the entire way. (I think we spent four nights in hotel out of four weeks on the road.) In Alaska, we’d become hyper sensitive to being on the lookout for brown bears. The morning before we went to Denali, we awoke in a campground where we’d pitched our tent the night before in the dark. I realized somberly that we’d pitched our tent literally in a patch of blueberries and soapberries. While it was nice to have blueberries in our oatmeal, I couldn’t help but to feel sketchy because soapberries are a bear’s favorite summer food, according to a few rangers we’d met. So we’d become attuned to worrying about animal activity at night, especially since we were often the only tent-campers at most of the campgrounds we checked into. Everyone else was in bear-proof tin-can RVs.

Read Full Post »

Missing Florida, part 1

Since moving to N.C. from Florida, I’ve gone through a few painful adjustments and bouts of homesickness. I’m accustomed to “winter” lasting only six to eight weeks (usually mid-Dec to mid-February), and I’m used to very strong sun. I miss both these things, plus the big water birds I used to see so easily. I love Florida’s rare natural spaces with a passion. Before meeting my significant other, I would often throw my kayak on my car, pick a river and print off a map using my father’s chart software, and spend all day exploring the crooks and crannies of dark tannin-landed rivers hemmed by swamp cypress or crystal clear waterways bordered by bottomland forests. I’d bring my binoculars and watch snowy egrets, juvenile little blue herons, belted kingfishers — and once, even a reddish egret and a glossy ibis. Something about watching these big birds stalk prey or groom near the water while I floated silently by in my yak made me feel that “complete” natural Florida feeling. Sun on my face, nature doing its thing, and water and trees all around. Here are some of the pictures I’ve taken from my kayak:

Sunrise at Bivens Arm, Gainesville, Florida. (© DeLene Beeland 2005)

Read Full Post »

Picture of the Day: 14-21; Manaus, Brazil

Pic-14: Three-toed sloth, near Manaus, Brazil on the Amazon River. © 2004 DeLene Beeland

Rivers are the highways of the Amazon basin. In this photo, a Brazilian guide named Angelo who I’d hired for a boat trip to the “Meeting of the Waters” near Manaus, Brazil, takes a three-toed sloth from two sisters in a dugout canoe. The girls captured the sloth from the rain forest and they paddle around with it all day on the river, waiting for tourists to come by. They paddle up to water taxis like the one I was aboard in 2004 and “lend” it to tourists to hold for picture opportunities in exchange for a few reals (Brazilian money). I think it is either a brown-throated three-toed sloth, or

Read Full Post »

Pic of the Day: 11-13; Crater Lake, Oregon

Pic-11: A crayfish found in Discovery Bay and held gently by Matt Ertl, on Wizard Island inside Crater Lake, Oregon. Native American legends from this area include a giant crayfish spirit that plucked humans from the lake's rim and carried them beneath the waters. © 2009 DeLene Beeland

Readers may have guessed that I’ve been flipping through old vacation photos from September when we were on the road for 18 days,  exploring Oregon and British Columbia. These three photos will be the last from our trip to Crater Lake National Park that I’ll post here (at least for awhile). My previous post described the white pine rust pathogen we saw evidence of while touring Wizard Island in the extinct caldera of former Mt. Mazama, an ancient super-stratovolcano. On this trip, we also learned a little oral history about the caldera. Turns out that Native Americans in this area have a myth that interprets the geological rumblings of Mt. Mazama (before it blew out its magma chamber to form the caldera we know today as Crater Lake, my posts about that are here and here) as a power struggle between two gods — Llao and Skell.  Llao was the chief spirit who ruled a mystical area called Gaywas which encompassed Crater Lake. Skell ruled a nearby area that included the great Klamath Marsh. Llao could call upon other spirits in his control who were shape-shifters and switched forms with ease. One of these spirits could take the form of a giant crayfish which would pluck humans off the cliffs rimming crater lake in a split instant.

Read Full Post »

Pics of the Day: 7-10; Crater Lake, Oregon

Pic-7: Whitebark pines at Crater Lake National Park. © 2009 DeLene Beeland

View of Crater Lake National Park from the rim and framed on the left by whitebark pine branches and needles. Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) trees are in trouble. Some species, like Clark’s nutcrackers, red squirrels and  grizzly bears, depend upon the trees for fatty seeds. But a blister rust is killing the conifers at an exceptional rate. Whitebark pines live at high elevations in the western U.S. and Canada; click here for a detailed distribution map. In Crater Lake, they are one of four dominant forest zones: ponderosa pine forest, lodgepole pine forest, mountain hemlocks, and whitebark pine woodlands. White pine blister rust was accidentally introduced to the U.S. from Europe around 1910, and it is contributing to large declines of the whitebark pine tree which is now thought to be functionally extinct in about one-third of its historic range. In Crater Lake, whitebark pine is succumbing to the rust, which is the number-one killer of this tree in the park. {1} A large, healthy and wind-gnarled stand of them can be found at the park’s Cloudgap lookout on Rim Drive.  For some background on white pine rust and how it kills trees, watch this video:

Read Full Post »

Pic of the Day-6; Crater Lake, Oregon

Pumice desert near the northern entry to Crater Lake National Park, Oregon. © 2009 DeLene Beeland

The “desert” was formed about 7,700 years ago when a massive stratovolcano, Mt. Mazama, errupted in central Oregon. (For a brief history of Mt. Mazama, see my previous post, Vacation in a Volcano.) The pumice shown here is said to be up to 200 feet deep in places, and the surface has some grasses beginning to take hold. Only a few lodgepole pines have managed to eek out a living in this nutritiously-void soil. To visualize how this deposit came to settle on Mt. Mazama’s lower flank, imagine a debris-cloud of gas, dust and light-weight rocks blowing out of its crater and then rolling down the volcano’s slope where it then settled. You can infer the limits of the pumice deposition by interpreting the heavy tree line as its boundary — beyond the tree line, fertile soil supports an entire pine forest that lies at the volcano’s base, encircling it. Even further in the distance, you can see the southern exposure of Mt. Thielsen. On our visit, we spent the first night camped outside the Park proper, at Diamond Lake, which has a magnificent view of Mt. Thielsen’s western flank at sunset. This “mountain” is really the congealed 250,000-year old innards of an extinct shield volcano that was carved and re-worked by the craggy artistry of advancing glaciers. Of course, some people today have different ideas about its usefulness.

Read Full Post »

Pic of the Day: 2-5; Strathcona Provincial Park, Vancouver Island, Canada

(2) Lower Myra Falls; Strathcona Provincial Park, B.C., Canada. © 2009 DeLene Beeland

This is a continuation from my earlier post on travels in British Columbia last summer… Picture-2 is the view from Lower Myra Falls at the southern tip of Buttle Lake in Strathcona Provincial Park on Vancouver Island. Informational signs at the trail head alert visitors to the fact that the falls were formed by a series of earthquakes acting on faults which systematically displaced sections of bedrock so that the bed of Myra Creek was cracked and lowered in six to eight places. Over time, these cracks lowered the creek like a staircase into Buttle Lake’s aqueous hold.

Read Full Post »