Walk One Way But Look Both Ways

-y- The Corner Jungle

2009-08-25T07:20:00.001-07:00

-y- The Corner Jungle

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Morningtime after getting caught in urban Bangalore's April rains, on
a train crossing over the mountains in the southwest corner of India.
Sitting at the door at sunrise, steep green gorges spilling hundreds
of metres away just beneath my feet. There is fog swirling throughout.
I am traveling with two French and four Indian scientists into some of
Asia's lushest and best-preserved jungles, the Subramanya Forest
Reserve. They are hoping to get some 3-dimensional structural maps of
their study trees; I'm hoping to get a chance to climb into the canopy
of the dipterocarp trees in India's Western Ghats rainforests.

Only days before, I had said farewell to my parents in Brussels. Time
slips away from the smiles and sunshine of a birthday in Amsterdam,
and I keep thinking about all of those stories- seeing my parents,
meeting Jemma again, exploring the canals, the midnight blue art show,
the carnivals throughout the night, the croissants and coffee,
climbing ancient oak trees with Simon in the rain just outside of
Brussels...and finally decide they are stories that will serve just as
well in the keeping, as in the sharing.

But back to work in India, using the landmark trees project as a way
to approach a more science-based research opportunity. Our fieldwork,
over four days, was sweaty, dirty, shady, and constantly in the
companion of leeches and mosquitoes. There are more tree species in a
small study plot than in all of Canada. The scientists, all at the
French Institute in Pondicherry, were familiar with the place and knew
it intimately, but to me the amount of living activity was an
epiphany. The temperate forests I had worked in before seem quiet
cathedrals by comparison to these tropical forests. We managed to
climb and measure two trees, more to prove it could be done than to
actually process the information, and following this novel fieldwork
experience, I parted paths and headed down to the Karnataka coast in
Mangalore.

I met up with Varsha, another Fulbrighter, and we traveled together
south into Kerala, where we found Ashok from Delhi. It was a perfect
tropical windy day, to arrive to the city of Kannanore. Ashok, one of
the social cornerstones of my life in Delhi, was a student at the
Ayurvedic medicine school, and we arrived just in time to catch them
in their final exams and the revelry that provoked. I never knew they
could make such strong alcohol from coconuts. Kannanore, and by
extension Kerala, was indeed a place with a different feel from the
rest of India. Tucked into the corner, these lush and fertile jungles
of the coastal strip felt more oxygenated, more living, than the dry
monsoonal woodlands throughout the subcontinent. It was therefore with
great anticipation that Varsha and I headed up into the hills, to
explore the mountains and forests of the Wayanad region.

We succeeded in our first goal, to visit the Gurukala Botanical
Sanctuary, where a small team of dedicated gardener-scientists have
created an ecological ark. This sanctuary is a green, lovingly
restored patch of functional forest in a rapidly changing landscape of
exotic tea plantations and urbanization. Their efforts to catalogue
and preserve the unique ecosystems of the corner jungles are
commendable; they manage to be an educational, research, archival, and
activist institution in complementary ways.

Our other plans, to see the prairie mountaintops and giant teak trees,
had to be abandoned because of poor timing. It was May Day, a holiday,
and that weekend we found every sort of tourist facility overflowing
and completely full. Rather than fight it, Varsha and I decided to
save it for another day and went over the mountains (too quick!) to
Mysore.

Mysore is famous for its cuisine, its yoga, and its warrior-king Tipu
Sultan. He fought the British like a tiger, and his memory is
treasured today in independent India. Another Fulbrighter, Katherine,
hosted us and showed us this attractive, quiet city, from the city
palaces to the top of the hills. Her specialty is in the temple
sculpture artwork of the Hoysala kings; they are now long gone but
their buildings remain in the countryside nearby. On a long driving
tour day, we managed to visit a few of these elaborate stonework
temples- some forgotten in the corners of rice paddies, and some
lovingly maintained in the center of town. Along the sides,
intricately carved figures hold their positions still; the best
evidence I can give to their attraction is that Katherine chose as a
historian to specialize in their details.

And then, alone, I closed the loop and returned to Bangalore. This
city had always figured high in my plans for India, as it is home to
several highly effective ecology research institutions. One of them,
Ashoka Trust for Research on Ecology and Environment (ATREE) warranted
a few days visit. I had spent much of the last year as an educator and
outreach scientist, and to meet the scientists here (and to work with
the French Institute) was to reconnect with my technical science
background. ATREE has a canopy science program, and will be hosting a
international conference this October. I managed to spend almost two
weeks working with them, and besides the excitement of networking,
began to organize the data and techniques to share the Landmark Trees
work.

In Bangalore, I was fortunate enought to stay with Stefan, from
Hamburg, Germany, and with him, Nandini, and Chandan, embarked on a
good collection of adventures in the granite mountains surrounding
Bangalore. Two of these monoliths, Savanadurga and Shivganga, are
truly massive, granitic monstrosities, forested and green at the base,
and steep and craggy above, making for excellent dayhiking and
rockscrambling. These new friends, and others, were all delighted at
the newfound motivation to explore the area, and in my turn, I was
delighted at the adventuring companions. Bangalore, once known as the
Garden City, now seems a bit overexcited with its newfound status, and
to get out onto these rock faces was a huge change. Both mountains
were ancient historical sites, but with only the slightest alteration
in our route and we had the granite sweeps to ourselves.

Near Savanadurga Mountain, Bangalore's famous roadside Giant Banyan
offered a reminder of just how quickly development, and motor car
abundance, was changing the landscape. The forest within the trees
branches had been made amenable to tourists, and now surrounded by a
fence this tree was being loved to death by overenthusiastic
construction nearby. The charm of the place seemed long gone, or, just
as likely, the natural beauty of the tree's interior didn't compare to
the sunny, windswept granite slopes.

Within the city, however, at Lal Bagh, an excellent botanical garden
offered a good exposure to a wide range of tropical trees. Thanks to
Vijay at Bangalore Heritage Walks, Nandini and I were able to get an
insider's tour of the vast park, certainly one of India's finest urban
parks. Giant trees from around the world made for great stories from
Vijay, and I was delighted to see his just-published book-with a map-
on these heritage organisms. Vijay also mentioned one more tree, just
out of Bangalore, the ancient Tamarind at Nallur Grove. Just a few
days before I flew back to Delhi, Chandan and I headed out there and
found this gnarled, lightning twisted tree, witness to perhaps a
thousand years of weather and changes. It was a 'botanical marvel' as
Vijay put it, like no other tamarind known. It had twisted itself and
planted its own branches, which were resprouting from the earth, and
inversely, new trunks were coming up from the edge of its rootstock.
This was only the most impressive of several dozen ancient tamarinds
in the grove. Unfortunately, this sacred grove was strewn with trash
and plastic wrappers; an old shepherd told me and Chandan that few of
the young people there notice or care for the place. He thanked us for
coming, and caring.

-y-
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-y- Amongst the Gearmakers

2009-07-14T11:38:00.001-07:00

-y- Amongst the Gearmakers

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There is a famous legend, authentic and important but not universally
known. I've known it my whole life, and maybe you have heard it
yourself. In this story, the forces of industry and national pride
turn malignant in a powerful kingdom, and this cancer begins to
spread. It seems that this cancer, linked with other tumors, will take
over the world and the place from which it came. Only a hero can find
the medicine- the weapons to kill this cancer. That hero, you,
marshalls the resources of a vast slice of a fertile continent,
gathers a team of diverse companions and then, after great trials,
carves this monstrosity out at its heart. Amongst the companions would
be one rival, from the snowy forests, another great hero now fated to
tragically turn malignant itself. Amidst the bloody mess in the centre
of the cancer are found insane factories of death, where humans are
pulled apart alive by machines, and then thrown into the furnace, for
no gain, no purpose. The ghastly few pulled from the gears are
unrecognizable, scraps of flesh crushed and gouged by the machines.
The companions, and the smashed gearmakers around them, look around
and realize that carving out the cancer was only the first, most
dramatic trial. The hero- gifted with the lightning rays of the sun's
heat- and the rival, and the companions, and the gearmakers all had
different ideas of how to rebuild it. The real challenge was to rescue
the future from despair and learn some lesson from the experience.
But what lesson? How?
....................

A cold sunny day at a small sheltered beach, in the earliest days of
the European spring of 2009. Four friends are sitting on a blanket
near the gentle waves. Around the corner is Denmark, and upstream on
the canal is the lowland of Germany, or Deutschland. The day was
special not just for the companionship, and the sunshine, but also the
novel (to me) concept that it is wise and good to start the day with a
bottle of red wine. My companions had opened the first of the bottles
before the train had left red-brick Hamburg Station, and our midway
stop in the medieval island-fortress of Leubeck was made in a sunny
midmorning. Smiles were seen and giggles were lost on the wind; there
was a stillness to the beach that was reassuring. There was nothing to
worry about; the gears had been smashed long before we were born.

--------------------

To cross into Germany from Denmark, in April 2009, it was a simple
matter of catching a train. This train was rather strange in that
mid-way, it would leave the rails and enter a large boat (complete
with souvenir shops and cafes), and upon arrival in Germany join the
rails and continue on to Hamburg. It was warmer then Denmark, the
sunshine was out and people were absolutely glowing. The city is
compact, busy, wealthy, organized, and apparently happy and healthy.
The river Elbe groans through the city, and a pleasant waterfront with
ferry boats, underwater tunnels, and countless bars and cafes
counterweights the massive industrial presence across the way. My
first guide and host was Ronan, from the far isle of Ireland. He had
lived and traveled extensively in India, and as outsiders both in
Germany, we walked across the western portion of the city studying the
Deutschlanders- (have you noticed that everyone here has a day-planner
calendar?)- and talking elaborate schemes of mindmapping and
speedreading.

And there was Cynthia, cute as a button, smiley as a happy-face
emoticon. We had met in Delhi the year before, and by good timing were
both in Hamburg at the same time. I had met many Germans, worked
closely with several, and had hoped to see them in their home country
one day. But despite our relatively short past, as it came time to
visit the country I had made plans with her to visit Neuengamme, a
Nazi concentration camp near the city. Nobody was forcing me to visit
the place, but I felt a vague compulsion. I have no idea why she
agreed to come with me, since these places are nightmares.

To a Jewish person born anytime in the modern day, and especially one
growing up in America, there is a special mythology about Germany.
It's a dream of symbols as well, turned into a nightmare. The cancer
was Nazi Germany. The hero is the United States of America. The
lightning ray is an atomic weapon. The companions are the Allies of
World War II, and that rival companion is Russia. The gearmakers are
the Germans. The factories are the concentration camps. Those scraps
of flesh are now tough as nails- maybe too tough- and now there is
absolutely nothing on Earth that can intimidate Jews as a nation. And
maybe there is something fundamentally different about this particular
case of genocide- because it involves machines, industry, and
factories in a way that no other atrocity has since.

But that mythology can only go so far. Each character, of course, has
their own version of the story. And its easy enough to find the ways
that that mythology has caused its own future troubles. In the USA, we
barely remember a time when we weren't supposed to be the heroes, and
for Jews, we are easily forgetful of our own gearmaker tendencies; in
our remembrance of our ancient past, punctuated by those factories.
Those atomic weapons are not granted by the divine sun, and the
gearmakers were often victims themselves. The very first I had ever
heard of Germany was this myth- its a place where you go to die, and
those train tickets are one-way only. The gearmakers were embedded in
my mind amongst the very first things. (Yet several times I've been
surprised at that wizardly country of a billion, India, where few
people know any of these stories, but are curiously pro-Hitler. Of
course- he was a strong leader, he loved the Aryan people and adopted
their Swastika sacred symbol, and most importantly, he fought the
accursed British). In my life, and in the stories of my parents and
grandparents, so much World War II history had been sent my direction
that it was in danger of overwhelming other important stories.

So two generations later, what good would it really do me, and
Cynthia, to go to place filled with despair and guilt? Why bring that
into our friendship? So many of the Deutschlanders I've met overseas
are doing good works for the world, with a humanitarian and
Euro-intellectual sensibility that many others in the colonies of the
West fail to develop. They've dealt with their own national past their
whole lives. We all know what happened. For me, it was great to
realize that I didn't have to go see the death camp factories. Why
would I trade her smiles into tears? We won't forget. Although we
might be descended from them, we are neither scraps of flesh or makers
of gears.

...............................

Berlin: A sprawling, sultry, elaborate, damaged, cleareyed city... as
I edged closer to it, people would always say "you MUST see Berlin."
Who was I to argue with this positive enthusiastic compulsion? The
metro rail system is extensive, there are more city districts and
enclaves than I had time to visit, and there is grand history lesson
amongst the government buildings and along the remants of the Wall.

My perceptions of the Berlin Wall were hazy; I had never realized how
the delicate balance of those two rivals were leaning against each
other, forehead to forehead, allies and atomic weapons adding mass to
the scrum. I also had never realized that the Wall was built by the
East German government to keep people -in-, the East Berliners were
prisoners. But now, East Berlin, where I spent most of my stay, is
filled with the young Deutschlanders coming in to find their own
paths, and to make out what the reunified city will look like in the
future.

But what does it look like now, what did it look like to me? There is
a museum district, with giant buildings of the sort one expects in
European capitols. There are tourists, and international student
groups on tour. There are several canals and several inviting
restaurants situated in the most dramatically pleasant places on these
waterways. There are green parks, with one including a small organic
farm where kids can meet the animals that they will grow up to be so
fond of eating. There are some old trees, and a relatively large
forest park in the center of the city. There are memorials to the
victims of the Nazis, and countless posters for concerts, dance clubs,
and art shows. There are bombed-out churches left as reminders, and a
few shiny glass buildings. There's a giant needle-tower in the middle,
visible down the street from the huge Soviet-style apartment blocks in
East Berlin. There are people on the streets, with an obvious level of
health and wealth. There's Angela, dressed in white and biking around
town putting up flyers for her Thai massage business. There's Thomas,
back at home and typing hard away at his master's thesis on
solar-powered transport after just completing an around-the world trip
powered by solar energy. There's Gordon and Lydia and Oliver, a
triplet of friends who fondly reminisce about their Tasmanian Overland
track while staring at the Lonely Planet books on the massive
bookshelf. There's Starbucks Coffee, reminding me of that my last
golden sunset at Pike Place in Seattle before leaving for Asia.
There's the picnic on top of a hill in a park.

There's the line of people eight deep at the bicycle repair shop.
There's the amazing graffiti culture- an obvious thing considering the
presence of the world's greatest painting wall- culminating in giant
octopus arms reaching out. There's the random public art, some
disturbing (pathetic human figures being gobbled by giants) and some
interactive (the structure of iron gridwork and fences at skewed
angles, perfect for climbing). There's the German history museum,
expensive sure, but educational and easier to approach than the art
museums. There's Jemma, my old mate from Tassie, longlost for five
years now, blinking her way off the overnight bus from Paris to a hug
and a smile and a few days adventuring down to the lowlands together.
There's the afternoon drink in the giant Sony plaza amongst the
screens and waterfountains. There's the collection of people to be
seen on the trains, usually impeccably mannered but sometimes drunk
and best avoided. There are the bakeries that seem to provide good
healthy food even in the most obscure subway stations. There's the
faint memory of banyan trees under a hot sun on the other side of the
world. There are the distant craggy mountains of the German Alps, to
be savoured in photographs but not visited this time around. There's
the warm sunshine, leaves and flowers on the trees, which means spring
must have arrived. And there's the fast approach of the tenth of
April, which adds a strange whistfulness to the air... because these
must be the final days of my twenties.

-y-

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-y- Scoured Flat

2009-06-25T06:56:00.001-07:00

-y- Scoured Flat

......................
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......................

This was, by far, the furthest I had been from the equator.

What to say about arriving to Sweden, sunshine on the snow? The
airport struck me like a space station...through the chilly, empty,
hallway to the immigration section, there were several signs saying-
"Beware of pickpockets." There was not a single other person in the
hallway. There were wooden rails on the staircase, unexpectedly novel.
The passport control officer seemed bemused by my monsoon-molded
passport, but quite soon I was riding the buses and trains towards
Stockholm city. For the moment, shiny kronors replaced rupees, and
empty forests of birch and spruce stood in place of endless cement
construction and farmfields.

More than anything, the landscape screamed "ice!" There must have been
kilometers of ice piled above where the train now sped, and it had
left only just a short while ago. Everything was scoured out flat, and
the forests were just again getting established. As the earth warms,
they'll continue their march north, but it certainly struck me how
that these trees and plants were merely one wave in an army on the
move towards the poles.

The public transport system reincarnated me in the middle of
Stockholm, on my way to find Gustav and Kinga, friends from India,
newlywed and living in the southern outskirts of town. In the city,
there were many strange sights. Clean sidewalks. Quiet. Space. Civil,
not communal, society. Counterculture clothing. Unonstentatious
wealth. Construction workers wearing safety equipment- reflective
stripes, helmets, glasses. Why were their lives so valuable? Business
suits. Automobiles stopping, at pedestrian crossings, for hopelessly
immodest ladies in skirts and winter coats... Kids, in punk regalia,
displaying they were not in with the system. Obviously not willing to
accept their duties to their families. Rubbish bins. A nice concept,
but so naive as to think they'd be used. People hurring to and fro,
without stopping to just appreciate where they were. And so much
activity midday, shouldn't people be relaxing when the day is at it's
warmest? Astonishingly, women were out on the streets, making the city
a far more feminine place than anywhere back in India. This was a
fundamental difference. Most distressing was the fact that nobody
cared who I was, nobody looked at my funny skin or light coloured
hair. Nobody looked at me with any mix of curiousity, desire, or
preconception. For the first time in more than a year, I was
invisible. I was no longer special.

But I'm lying to you, these things were no surprises, it was all
expected, and it was all eerily familiar.

Soon enough I was standing in the sunshine, crunching ice beneath my
feets, and entering a brick apartment building. Kinga greeted me, all
smiles and music as ever, and thus began a wonderful sequence of
hospitalities that would stretch across Northern Europa down into the
nether lands, beneath the sea. I had met these two Swedes trekking in
the Himalaya, and at that point had no idea that I would be visiting
them within a few months. They had grown up in the forested, flat open
lands of this scoured country, and my time with them in the steep
peaks and crowded cities of India was far removed from our quiet
surroundings. They treated me well.

It was in the first days of spring, and the glow was pulsing through
the city. While the days were still cold, the sunlight was coming, and
people were ready to turn a corner in their metabolic cycle and play
outside. Leaves were just about to bud on some of the trees, and the
light-eyed Swedes were just beginning to look around their well
decorated, nicely furnished, cozy apartments with the giddy bubble of
claustrophobia. Their-my- fair hair and light skins, attested to an
intrinsic seasonal rhythm, and there was a a giddy exhilaration as
metabolisms geared up for the sunshine. I had had an overdose of
sunlight over the last year, but was glad for the reminder of
springtime cheer.

Stockholm is tidy, and abundant with bridges and waterways. On the
spring equinox, Gustav walked me through the old city, where dense
stone walls hid steamy cafes, into the forested parks, where snow
slowly melted underneath the uniform pines, and across the bridges to
the new city, where shiny glass punctuated the stonework. He told me
about growing up in the northern Swedish woods, in a a quiet place
with few others around, and a few years before technology
interconnected the isolated homes in the snowy winter. So far from
Delhi where we had last met! But that day, people enjoyed the
sunshine, eating ice cream cones whilst sitting next to the frozen
harbour. I was content and happy to walk around, mostly aimlessly,
with my city-subway pass good for a few days of spontaneity. I had
been making too many decisions, about plans, health, safety,
destinations, motivations, for me and others during the last year.
What a delight to abandon that mindset and just say "sure!" When
Gustav asked if I wanted to see the museum of the Vasa, a four hundred
year old flagship brought up from the harbour floor- sure! When Kinga
wanted to show me the walking paths to the shore, where the ice still
crisped up against the land- sure! When they suggested we watch a
critically acclaimed (yet pretty awful) vampire movie- sure!

Kinga invited me to join her on a quick trip out of Stockholm to visit
her mother in Uppsalla. Sure! It's a famous university town, but also
notable for being home to Linnaeus' botanical gardens. The place was
closed for the winter, but I could peek through the gates and see the
location where a cornerstone of modern biology was put into place. In
Linnean taxonomy, every organism is arranged on a branching pattern
and identified in a standard Latinized way. In every aspect of my
professional life as a scientist, this model of organization has been
absolutely essential. We returned to Stockholm, and somehow it was
already my fifth or sixth day in Sweden. I wasn't keeping track really
well of the days, and enjoying that greatly. The snow had begun
falling again, dampening my hopes that I'd see the flowers would bring
out the ecstatic smile of the Swedes. But to see a blanket of white
cover Sweden added to the exotic experience- only a few days before I
had been under the diamond-sun of Jharkhand.

A train, sleek and hi-tech and far removed from my much beloved
sleeper class (upper berth), brought me to Sweden's southwestern edge.
After 10 minutes running around the town of Malmo, I was on another
train which brought me into Denmark, and Copenhagen.

It's impossible to understand my relationship to Denmark without two
critical elements, which are intrinsically inconsequential yet have
somehow become close to mythological. First, 6th grade, Hollenbeck
Elementary school, Sunnyvale, California: my school paper on a foreign
country was on [randomly chosen] Denmark. So visiting was the
culmination of almost twenty years of anticipation. Second, Mary, now
Princess Mary. Our first Royal!, as the Tasmanian newspapers declared
proudly. She had married the crown prince of Denmark and thus
fulfilled the fantasies of many an Australian tabloid magazine. My
connection to her was precisely zero, but my enthusiasm multiplies
that connection a thousand times over!

I don't know many Danes, and despite that school report I don't know
much about their country. One of them, Liv, was living in Copenhagen
and graciously hosted me for a few days. She treated me well. We had
met some years back, at the start of New Year, on the edge of Canada's
evergreen stormcoast. She set me up with a map, and a bike, and sent
me off into the chill sunny days to explore (sure!) Immediately, of
course, was the Little Mermaid, the sad girl with the fish tail and
the blue heart. She could never be part of our world. She is, as they
say, a small statue, but certainly she is amongst the world's
treasures.

To prove to myself that I was indeed a tourist, I spent three days in
a row visiting the Danish National Museum. This sprawling place is a
gem- no admission fees, free lockers, warm corridors safe from the icy
rain outside, and several days worth of exhibits. There, you can see
such curiosities as prehistoric amber carvings, runestones, 10,000
year old plaits of women's golden hair found in a peat bog, Viking
weapons, church statuary, 1980's stereo equipment, old executioner's
swords, ancient bones, old artwork, and treasures and trinkets from
around the globe. But outside the museum there were other sights, all
deliciously touristic. The Danske Geologiske Museum, for rock nerds
only, the Botanical Gardens, for tree nerds only, the pedestrian
malls, for shopping fiends, and the Roundhouse tower, the castle and
courtyards, the canals and streetways. The bicycle was key to the
whole affair. I could pretend that I was one of the illustrious,
incredibly fast and focused bicycle commuters of Copenhagen. And when
I was done with that, I could go back to my locker, lock up the bike,
and visit Liv, working literally across the lane from the Museum's
entrance.

Like Stockholm, Copenhagen is incredibly expensive city to spend
evenings out in, and in both cities this made for pleasant warm
at-home dinners during cold outside nights (you can even drink the tap
water). Inevitably, India and my experiences there came up with my
hosts and their friends. But it's too complicated to analyse easily,
and the comparison deals with global issues of the present day. I
think I've adapted pretty well to India, I can keep myself happy and
healthy there, but I'm not sure that everyone in Scandinavia, or the
US, or Australia, could do the same- or would want to do the same. I
couldn't have arranged a stronger contrast between two regions of the
world. Only an blind person could fail to be moved by the
differences. Few in Scandinavia starve to death, people are happy and
healthy, and they live a good life. People live good lives in India,
and are often happy, and often healthy, but what a reality check to
wee what refined conditions in which the Swedes and the Danes are
living. They've figured out a great many things- how to build a
pleasant city, how to take care of each other- that we still deny in
the USA and Australia, and that India simply can't be bothered with as
it hurtles to live the unsustainable dream of a Western lifestyle. The
culture shock- the poverty shock, the gender shock, the street shock-
was far stronger for me coming out of India for this brief vacation in
Northern Europe than it was when I entered India. In one afternoon in
Delhi, I can go into a 5 star hotel and be fawned over by a dozen
waiters in a fancy restaurant, and I can walk past the irredeemably
messy and crowded areas that are tucked out of sight of India's
aspiring middle class. There are Sony hi-fi stereo shops, and lepers
on the streets. This type of variability simply doesn't exist in
these two icy countries, and I think the core of the matter is that
they are nation-states, Danes and Swedes, and they will take care of
their small populations in a way that crowded and communally
fragmented India can accomplish only with massive changes. These
changes might come, but I think there will be ecological limits to
growth too soon. I am simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic about
India, and America, and Australia-this balance swings back and forth-
you've got to love the good and hate the bad- but the best thing I can
say about Denmark and Sweden is that... I'm mosly optimistic.

Also, like Stockholm, I wasn't keeping track of the days very well.
From Copenhagen, lovely Liv helped me to arrange a train to Hamburg,
Germany (sure!). I had learnt a great deal about Germany at a very
young age, almost entirely dealing with death and genocide and war.
But I woudn't let that shadow my trip. Ten days passed in Scandinavia
had brought forth those bright little leaves, and as I entered into
Deutschland the winter had fled- spring had arrived.

-y-
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sure!

-y-No Rocks Only Dirt --

2009-06-14T22:28:00.000-07:00

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--
Upon arriving from the warm oceanside tropics of Tamil Nadu back into Delhi's foggy winter chill, the usual whirlwind of city life ensued. This culminated in me spun out of the city, 1st day of March 2009 on an airplane to Calcutta, one of India's most legendary, intimidating, and curious cities. The US-India Educational Foundation was holding a conference for the Fulbright scholars in-country at that time, and thus I visited my fifth of India's big six metropolises.

Like so many other visitors, my first impression of Calcutta, or Kolkata, was atmospheric; as we exited the plane, the humid, swampy air of the lowest parts of the Ganges River wrapped around us new arrivals like a rotting paper bag. It's a cliched observation, I know, but what a change from Delhi's midnight sunken air pollution. All the usual air particulates were there, but there was a vegetative thread to the smells that was new. But the next few days was spent in the air-conditioned halls of a the Hotel Hindustan International, five stars of downtown luxury fortress in the midst of the expected chaos of urban India just outside. The conference offered a chance to reacquaint with several other scholars and administrators. There's a stunning array of themes being studied: deodorant marketing campaigns, technology in rural schools, forced-labor repatriation, air pollution exposure in police officers, ancient temple statuary, genetic modification of food, to remember a few. All of these subjects pursued with conviction form one element in current dayIndo-American ties, and many of the scholars there would certainly continue future work within India. My presentation went well, and the conference was just grande fun. It seemed a bit of a shame to be traveling so much; hearing others' stories of civic, rural, and institutional involvement gave me a bit of thought to the amount of time I've spent on the move, by myself but not alone.

The luxury hotel, air conditioning, exciting colleagues, and humid weather all conspired to keep us in the fortress. I remember clearly how exultant it felt to skip out of the conference one evening and have a quick walk through the streets of downtown Calcutta...it was a heady rush of noise, smells, and activity, and I kept walking faster and faster and faster amongst the pedestrians and cars and buses and hand-rickshaws past the planetarium and the Victoria Memorial and the giant sportsfields and the theatre and the fountain and under the trees and bridges and buildings and back into the hotel. What they say is true- much of the city's British-era capitol grandeur is literally decaying. But the people are vibrant, and the oppressive orderliness of the imperial British Raj is becoming masked under the relaxation of grime, soot, and algae. I wouldn't go so far as to insist its the dirtiest of the Indian cities, but the other metropolises have the austerity of the desert, or the proximity to the ocean, that mask the generally high level of public mess. At the Victoria Memorial, a stunning white marble building complete with pillars, arches, domes, and sprawling gardens filled with wonderful exotic trees, I was told that the brilliant golden winged angel on the dome spire no longer spun to face the wind. It had rusted, grimed into place years ago and never fixed. But who noticed, who cared? There was a functioning subway, there were cricket games at the sportsfields, and there were people strolling through the gardens.

More food for thought, of the less palatable sort: during the conference, the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked in neighbouring Pakistan. It was supposed to be the Indian team in their place, but they pulled out at the last minute. This event must be understood in the context of cricket as an informal state religion (for all three countries involved), a key pivot of culture and pride. For all the excitement of the India story in the late 200x's, it's worrisome to read the sad editorials about the 'neighbour unhinging.' Over the next few weeks Pakistan would go from signing a peace submission with Taliban-allied movements in the north, and then shortly thereafter muster forth and kick them out of those regions. Indian media, always shrill, started using the phrase, "Talibanistan" in reference to southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. It is hard to tell what is truly going on over there. But these things seem distant, down in the swampy city at the bottom of the Ganga, where the branching pattern of tributary streams flips itself into the coastal delta of distributaries.

One of India's most famous trees is in Calcutta, at the Botanical Gardens across the river in Howrah. The Great Banyan was planted in the flagship English botanical institute, and just continued to grow outwards, sprouting new trunks from the bottom of its branches, and it got bigger, and bigger, and bigger...it is now one of Earth's largest trees(depending on how you measure it, of course). It simply sprawls in a corner of the Gardens, and dominates the visitor's attention in a way that nothing else in the Gardens can. It's a kilometer in circumference, although its network of interlinked stems is more like a small forest than a solid mass of wood. This tree, like the Bodhi Tree in Bihar, was mentioned in the first paragraph of in my original proposal to come to India, and to see it finally was the culmination of almost three years of planning. I first went there with a collection of other Fulbright scholars, and then, on my second visit to the tree, met up with a scientist from the Botanical Survey of India. He graciously arranged the key that let us into the fenced off interior, and we had a chance to visit the vacant space in the middle where the original trunk had died away. It was like being behind the scenes in a museum, but this museum was living.

When the conference was over, I walked out into the city to meet my friend Tom, with notebooks filled with other scholars' emails and phone numbers, and plans for collaborations and adventures throughout India. As far as I know, I was the only one to leave the conference to travel on overland back home, and I'll confess I felt a little more at home getting out of the air conditioned luxury hotel and into the flow outside. Tom is a Britisher, through and through, and his experience working as an intern at the Statesman newspaper has been a classic case of cultural exposure. The paper, unfortunately, is going down, undermined by predatory competition and changing media landscapes. So his internship experience involves a strange work life,writing articles for a publication in its final days, and staying in company housing embedded in massive, dusty factory building just on the edge of downtown. We Through Tom, I met Shreya, a young writer at University and we all explored Calcutta, so changed in 150 years since its British capitol heyday. We stumbled upon the old Scottish cemetary-overgrown but still appreciated, visited the locked gates of the houses at Tangra-Chinatown, sampled the cafes and bars on Park St, stepped into the famous student coffee house with the lazy fans and dusty high ceilings, walked along the murky docks at the boat ferries, and observed the crowded temples at the city's namesake Kalighat. There was little to engage the landscape enthusiast. There are no rocks to be seen in Calcutta, only dirt carried down from the Himalaya towards the sea.

My return to Delhi was overland, via two cities in the mineral-rich state of Jharkhand. I had given up a return flight trip- 2 hours back to Delhi- for what would turn into 35 hours of arduous train journeys. The weather in Jamshedpur was more typical for North India- hot and dry and sunny. First, a midnight train to Jamshedpur, where I was a bit worried to arrive on the holiday of Holi. This, you may recall, is the psychedelic hashish-fueled color waterfight holiday, when the joy is joyous rainbow and the foreigners do their best to get off the streets. It's a beautiful event, but to arrive in a new town, the only foreigner around, made it a bit of a worry. I had gotten in touch with a second hand acquaintance, Badshah, who not only rescued me from the train station on a motorbike, but helped me avoid the revelry in the streets. Jamshedpur is truly a company town, entirely a Tata Steel phenomenon. It's named after Jamshed Tata, an industrialist whose empire thrives still, and is a clean, friendly, attractive town...although perhaps I didn't choose the best day to go out. We not only found a famous tree, upon which countless passport and work-visa hopefuls had nailed their applications for good luck, but also managed to visit a zoo and a viewpoint just outside of town. Jharkhand literally means "jungles", but my ability to get out into them was limited. The rock outcrops scattered throughout town and forming nearby hills, however were a nice reminder of distant shores and years past. It was dolerite (!), which in its more crystalline form is responsible for the surreally striated and impressively sheer pillared landforms of Tasmania. How strange to be surrounded by a billion people and to be so much more excited and connected with a darkish, blocky rock.

From there, to Ranchi, Jharkhand's capital. Poor timing meant a long wait through the night at the train station, but during the days, visits around town to see the African baobab trees at Doranda college, and to climb up onto Tagore Hill, where the famous Bengali literary star supposedly wrote some of his works. Stone hills rose up from the plain, and somehow beneath the earth were hidden a country's trove of metal treasures.

The dolerite was familiar, but I was all upside down in the wrong hemisphere; the sun was bright like a diamond, but too striking to enjoy its rays; the surroundings were pleasant and intriguing, but my mind was already off in the corner of Eurasia...one train ride and seventy-two hours later, I was back in Delhi and again buzzing in an autorickshaw through the cold midnight mist of air pollution. There was a plane to catch to Sweden, inexplicably, and a month in Europe meeting family and friends. It had been more than a year of learning, working, and adapting to India, and I suppose I had weathered out the changes as well, or better, than I had expected. Soon, at sixty degrees north, I could see the sea ice clustering in the waterways of the Baltic Sea.

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-y- On The Rocks

2009-03-26T15:02:00.001-07:00

-y- On The Rocks
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++The Silicon Sorcerers ++

Hyderabad, capital of Andhra Pradesh, is one of the two capitals of
the Indian computer industry, and nowhere else can you better see that
age old cliche- the contrast of new and old. Its a gnarled mess in
standard India fashion. The traffic is bad. The air is horrible. There
are very very poor areas and very very rich areas. Some areas have
hundreds of years of history, and some were built just last year. But
let's not forget the very very old. Hyderabad is built on ancient,
weathered, twisted boulders of granite. These wondrously shaped rocks
form the eastern side of the Deccan plateau and are amongst the
worlds oldest rocks, two and half billion, or 2500000000, or 2.5x10^9
years old. This is comparable to the age at which photosynthesis
first began. But now, these rocks are eaten up and turned into
building materials by machines burning fossil fuels. The granite is
the foundation, literally, for that most modern and ephemeral of
pursuits, conjuring demons of pure logic and ensnaring them in silicon
mazes. The city's famous and vibrant computer Information Technology
industry sector (IT) is built on ancient rocks

The city was still in shock and confusion. Much of modern India's
confidence in the world economic stage had come directly from the IT
sector here and in Bangalore, and these billions (hundreds of crores)
of rupees had manifested in uncontrolled city growth. At New Years,
there was the unexpected confession from the CEO of one of the premier
IT companies, Satyam, that he had been regularly and massively
embezzling from the company on a massive scale. The brashness and
confidence of India's premier industrial sector has been shaken to its
core. But for all the worries of economic meltdown, and loss of faith
in Indian industry, there were some things that would stay with
certainty- the fancy new homes, the shiny office buildings, the air
pollution, the gridlock of traffic, and all the other things that came
with the high tech modernity dropped on top of an ancient city.

I arrived in Hyderabad sometime in the first month of 2009, without
too much in the way of plans. I spent the days there staying with
Prasad, who is a dynamo of practical energy and one of the most
coherently industrious men I had yet met. Prasad invited me to stay
with his family at his quite luxurious apartment. Its filled to excess
with books (hundreds of them), artwork (dozens of pieces), bottles of
alcohol (hundreds), trinkets (countless), and furniture (well chosen).
He and his wife run a reproduction clinic, to help couples conceive.
This has spun off into several other business investments, but he
maintains his office in the clinic building. Rather than call it an
'infertility clinic', they invented a new positive Telugu word. It
translates as 'marriage-success clinic'. Prasad is living the dream,
happy in his financial success but still engaged in charitable works
and connecting with foreign travelers such as myself.

There was a fruitful excursion, with Frauke Qader, a German woman
living in India. She is one of the more active members of the Societyt
o Save Rocks, a conservation organization that blends geoconservation
with habitat conservation. If the rocks are turned into roads and
buildings, they can never be replaced. While their mission at first
seems entirely an aesthetic concern, there's a critical element of
wildlife habitat. I was immediately excited by their work, and loved
their listings of remarkably scenic boulders. She took the time to
show me a magical 'fairy tale' banyan tree, growing from a crack in a
giant boulder on a hilltop, with its roots spilling over and wedging
open the crack. While the arguments to conserve biological resources
are well developed, it is generally the case that arguments to
conserve geological heritage are less so. Itwas educational to see the
enthusiasm and dedication they've devoted to saving the living rocks
of Hyderabad. They are a treasure.

With Prasad, there was an escapade in the city was to Golconda Fort,
yet another fantastical Indian fort with a bloody history, perched on
the summit of a rising hill of boulders. Within the outer walls of the
citadel, the huge Hathion ka Ped, the Elephant Baobab tree squatted in
an obscene splendour. This tree was rotund, obese, a simple parody of
what we expect a tree to look like. We went there with our newfound
friend Marie and clambered up into the branches of the tree. Inside,
over its five hundred years, the center had rotted and burned out, and
we dropped in to a small cave inside. This, perhaps, is one of the
most exciting trees I had yet visited. It combines history, giant
size, wierd growth, exotic lineage, climbing, caving, and
photogeniality in one individual. We could experience being under the
tree, in the tree, near the tree, with the tree, on the tree, beside
the tree.

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++ The Gravity Monks ++

Southwards to the state of Karnataka, to Hampi on a midnight bus,
desperately trying to shut out the sound of an overloud
Telugu-language movie. It's significant that my mobile phone's clock
seemed to go awry upon arrival. It seems that there's a timewarp in
this amazing town. Surrounded by strikingly picturesque granite
mountains, and with the thousand year old ruins of the Vijay Empire
capital city crumbling slowly around it, Hampi is one of India's
backpacker havens. Foreign backpackers, with their fancy rucksacks,
wild clothing, taste for banana pancakes, decadent morals, and
enthusiastic pursuits, converge on the place with devotion and
excitement. Hampi is truly a fantastic place. and like so many others
i found it to be a timewarp. I met up with Johnno, my rockclimbing
ropegun from a decade past, and Ritik, emergency room doctor on a
yatra around India, and Ashok, a good friend and laptop warrior from
Delhi. There's nothing like finding your friends in a foreign place,
knocking on some hotel room door in a strange location and walking
into a friendly surrounding. We stayed in the tropical ideal idyllic
scene; sunset views over the nobbly rock peaks, past the palm trees
and the rice paddies, drinking coconut juice while lying in hammocks.

Hampi is known amongst the foreigners now for the strange new breed of
gravity monks. There is a group of dedicated priests, humble and
patient, who can most easily be found at the Goa Corner Hotel, in the
back right corner of the rice paddies on the 'other side' of the River
from Hampi town. Their yoga, bouldering, is an intense, low altitude
form of rock climbing, with no ropes. The routes, or problems, tend to
be insanely difficult and require intense concentration. And once you
get on top of some big, curvy, rock, how do you get down? The same way
you got up- carefully. John and I went out a bit and tried out these
disciplines on the rocks. Between the two of us we've probably spent
twenty years fighting gravity, but we found these boulders to require
skills and strength beyond our expectations. We did, though, get on
top of some of them. But, unlike the joyful, tense, reassurance of a
safe rope descent, and like the bottom point in a cave, the top of
these boulders requires a mirrorimage challenge to get down to safety.

The days in Hampi blend. There are fantastical temples and ruins, from
the Vijaynagar kingdom, which in its day (1300s to 1600s) was a Hindu
city to rival Rome. The location is stunning, the weather grand. Like
all the other travelers, we'd wander around on the rocks and each day
was the best day ever.

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++ Challengers in Chennai ++

But soon it was time to hit the road, and almost at random, John and
selected the southeast coast metropole, Chennai, formerly Madras, in
Tamil Nadu as our next direction. This turned out to be a more magic
and fruitful adventure than I had expected.

The two stage train ride was miserable, but with an lovely chance
meeting with an Israeli man named Yossi and a French Reunion Islander
woman named Yohanna. So, at one strange moment, we had three 'Yo's in
one train compartment. Curious. We arrived in Chennai exhausted,in a
non airconditioned sleeper car growing hotter and hotter in the
tropical sun. Chennai is India's #4 city, and in so prominent a city,
the visiting foreigner is surprised at how difficult it is to get a
feel for it. Tamil Nadu is more organized, and more conservative, than
many places in North India. And the city does indeed seem more
functional than other places Ive been. But it's not very user
friendly, and there are few tourist attractions...but not to worry, we
made friends and found many things of interest. One of the first on
the list is the Great Banyan at the Theosophical Society grounds. I
can't tell you too much about these seekers of Truth, but one
noteworthy fact is that they maintain a sizable, forested campus in
the heart of Chennai. In the middle, a famous, landmark banyan trees
sprawls out. It's one of Indias more famous trees, and it did not
disappoint. John and I monkeyed around in its slender aerial
branch-roots, and hurried on to explore more of the city with Kavitha,
Yatan, McKay and Katherine. Like Delhi, Chennai is a city where you
need to know people. Connecting with these locals and foreigners made
all the difference to us in enjoying the place.

Out of Chennai, we passed through the temple town of Kanchipuram,
spotting a mango tree around which a giant temple had been built. The
original tree had died a few years ago, but this being an important
temple, they just replanted a new one and things continue as usual.
Following this, we stopped in Mamalapuram and enjoyed the beach life.
Just a short time back the ocean had spilled over in a deadly
tsunami-don't forget- and smashed apart much of the city, but it had
been restored well and was one of the most pleasant places I had yet
been in India. Warm water, fish curries, coconut juice, palm trees,
lighthouse beacons, more granite, Pallava ruins, more temples- this
town occupies a nice niche on the South India tourist track between
Chennai and Pondicherry, and was a nice place to soak in the sunshine
and let the fact we were in the tropics sink in. Johno had been living
the beach bum life around India, and California, in the recent past,
but it was a much anticipated experience for me.

Across an ocean, far away, a new president took office in the United
States. But just over the horizon from Tamil Nadu, a war was grinding
to a bloody end in Sri Lanka. The Tamil civilians in the north, were
reaping the bitter harvest of the Tamil Tiger's ruthless battle
against the Sinhalese majority, in the south. India, too recently the
victim of terror, would not interfere with the annihilation of the
Tiger terrorist group, and the Indian people of Tamil Nadu were
horrified at the situation just kilometers away across the water- the
Sinhalese forces had cornered the Tigers, with their communities, in
their last holdout towns. Blood would spill, blood is spilling.

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++ The Aurora Dreamers ++

We headed a bit south to Auroville and Pondicherry, and it was in the
latter, formerly a French colony, that I reached my closest point yet
to the equator. Pondicherry is a treat, a slow window out of time,
with excellent croissants and coffee to be had. The colonial heritage
is there, and so are the French tourists. I had never yet seen such a
coherent Francophone scene in India, and I was surprised that the
colony's history would be such a draw to this foreign contingent.

Auroville, 'a universal city in the making' just north, was perhaps
the more remarkable and strange place. It must be one of the largest
intentional community collections in the world, a product of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother's inspired vision of peace and harmony. The
energy of all these people has helped to reforest a dry tropical
landscape, and it has become an amazing convergence for seekers and
practicioners from near and far. It's tempting to dismiss the place as
a dreamer's playground, but dreaming and playing are grand things both
worthy of respect. The city is like an unexpected aurora that shimmers
with interesting colours.

Auroville, more than any place I can think of in recent past, defies a
simple and quick interpretation. But I can start with Arseny, my host,
and one of the first generation of Aurovillians. He is twenty years
old, smiles easily, is fantastically fit, and has been educated well
and carefully. His mother, a Russian woman, came to Auroville in the
seventies, and like many foreigners, decided to stay and raise her
child there. Arseny, in his stature and charisma, is the product of
conscious love and community, and like all the other young people of
Auroville, an impressive person to meet. I met up with him at the
Solar Kitchen, where the huge community kitchen stove is powered by
the focused sunlight. Auroville has forty years of tree plantings and
is a green and shady place, in contrast to the active farming
landscape surrounding it. Old tamarind trees predating the place pop
up on the roadside. The friendliness, and also the tensions, between
the locals and the (mostly?) foreigner Aurovillian contingent can be
sensed in many places: in the storefronts along the entrance road, at
the waterbodies where people fish and relax, along the East Coast
Highway heading to Pondicherry, and at the beaches where the Bay of
Bengal tickles the land.

Johno and I stayed at Sadhana Forest, a six-year-old
forestregeneration project begun by Aviram and Yorit, two Israelis who
have commited their lives to Auroville. Sadhana Forest had been on my
mind for a long time now, as many backpackers had told me about the
place by word of mouth. I did not expect our stay there to be so
productive or exciting, but each day got better and better. Sadhana is
hosting more than one hundred international residents, and has as much
an emphasis on sustainable conscious living as it does on forest
planting. There was a class on sustainable land
management--permaculture-taking place at the time and it was a delight
to find there my friend Pankhuri, from Delhi.The area is surrounded by
rampant runaway forest of Australian wattle, and that is surrounded by
farmlands and development. Aviram and Yorit have been restoring the
landscape with a combination of water irrigation techniques and native
forest plantings. There´s an emphasis on reforestation using the
heart, more than the head. I'll acknowledge that that is a strength
and an unfamiliar direction for me as a forest ecologist. Sadhana has
had thousands of volunteers put in backbreaking labour to dig
waterpools and wells, plant seedlings, and build the infrastructure
for an incredibly cosy community. But when I asked about the maps and
the forest, I discovered that there were pretty much no maps or forest
measurements available.

With all the energy and enthusiasm surrounding the Sadhana Forest
project, I figured it was a good opportunity to invest some of those
technical skills that I had learned in a formal forestry setting. I
was also empathizing with some future ecologist trying to produce some
report on Sadhana, and their frustration at the lack of any baseline
data. Equally importantly, it gave Johno and I a chance to stay and
work on the positive connections with the international group there. A
Canadian fellow, Kelly, had worked in the remote wild forests of
British Columbia, and we spoke the same language and had overlapping
skills. So we tracked down a GPS unit and walked all over the Sadhana
Forest property, taking photos and performing a tree measurement
survey. It was great fun, simple work for us, and provided a good
resource to the project. We took a few days writing it up and
producing aerial maps, data, photopoints. You can take a quick look at
the simplest version at
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=F.88a3ed84-0faf-4ee2-bfb7-4d5422e71c6b

And besides this fun work, the living there was good. Yummy vegan
pools, swimming in the mudpools, climbing in the banyan trees, jumping
in the beach, the Valentine's Day party at the Auroville childrens
playground, and the pirate ship treehouse...it was a interlude from
the other concerns in India. But a chance encounter by the beach
snapped me out of any illusions of relaxation. I encountered Pascal, a
French scientist at the branch of the French Institute, in
Pondicherry. I had heard of their ecology group already, and the more
I spoke to Pascal the more exciting their work sounded. I joined him
on a visit there the next day, and it went better than I could ever
have imagined. They are working on several projects, all of which are
things I am very fond of: paleobotany (ancient plant life),
computer-aided tree identification guides, forest mapping in India's
superlatively biodiverse Western Ghats mountain range, tree structure
and measurement, and forest growth dynamics. These are all coming
together in one building with a small, intensive group of scientists.
It's not a teaching university, so they are focused in a different way
than educational academics. And it turns out they are just putting
together a project to help the Indian Space Research Organization
interpret its satellite data in regards to how much biomass, or carbon
dioxide, is stored in these forests. The French Institute has the
maps, the study locations, and the statistical expertise- but they are
lacking someone who can climb trees and measure them in detail. I
think I know who can help them out; the result is that in late April
I'll be heading south to the Karnataka rainforest to help them with
their annual measurement session, and start talking about more
concrete research relationships for future.

This last encounter, really was too much excitement. John and I had
set up plans to meet Ashok, Lily, and Ritik in Kerala, in the
southwest corner of India, to head off trekking into the too much
information to process, and a conference coming up in a few weeks, and
it was simply time to go home to Delhi. I said my farewells to Johnno,
backtracked from Auroville and Pondy to Mamalapuram, then Chennai,
smiled at the ocean, and a short time later was fighting off the cold
as the Delhi autorickshaw walla sped through the dark night smog.

-y-
in Copenhagen, Denmark
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-y- A Spike of Energy

2009-03-07T01:24:00.000-08:00

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-y- A Spike of Energy

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____________________

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Sixty-seven million years ago, in the last days of the dinosaurs, a spike of energy, from the inside, split a hole in the Earth's surface. The insides of the planet spilled out and flowed across the lonely piece of floating continent, cooling in such a way that crystals did not form. The fateful meeting with Asia had not yet happened- there were no Himalaya, and there was a sandy and windy north coast to India- and the reptilian kings munched leaves and tore flesh. The planetary interior rock changed the landscape entirely, and after burning and scouring everything, it finally gave up its energy and stopped.

Time passed. And then, just an instant ago, a star fell from the sky.

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Mahrashtra! The New Year 2009, I had escaped Mumbai!

Somehow I managed to connect two different trains to make it there only minutes before the Toy Train to Matheran hill station was to leave. Matheran is a dramatic plateau of the Western Ghats, famous for its promontories and holiday atmosphere. I knew of course, how tacky and depressing domestic Indian tourist destinations could be, but there was one famous overlook, One Tree Hill, that appealed to me for profesional reasons. The Toy Train is, indeed, tiny, with the distance between the tracks only one meter. A sign on the inside warns passengers to distribute their weight evenly across the sides of the car, and to open the windows during high winds so the train doesn't fall over. The path is counted amongst the most curving and spectacular train journeys in the world, looping back on itself constantly and tracking up next to fantastic slabcliffs of crystalized basalt oceanrock. At the top, the expected mess of hotels and restaurants and carnival amusements sprawled hospitably, and it wasn't long before I found a map and walked south to the plateau's edge, camping just in the quiet forest near One Tree Hill.

Morning time confirmed my decision not to try to make it to sleep under the One Tree. It turns out the Hill was actually a spire glommed onto the end of the block and accessible only by an appallingly risky path. But the photos were grand, and I skirted the edge of the plateau for a nice long walk back to the Toy Train. At the bottom, another train brought me to Karjat, where the flow simply stopped as the sunset. No buses to the next trekking trail at Kotligad fort, and no hotels anywhere near the railstation. So, no worries, I curled up on a bench in front of the police station on the rail platform, and slept quite well, thanks for asking.

First bus of the next day gets me deeper into the mountains, to Kotligad Fort. Set above a horseshoe valley of cliffs, it's far from the business or tourist track, dusty, nestled amongst the cliffs, and its a spectacular place. There is a spire of hard volcanic rock sticking up from the basalt, at the base of which some small Buddhist meditation caves are weathering away. Carved out of its center is a steep staircase leading through the heart to the summit, where a few trees eke out a dry existence. A scrappy dog had followed me from the village to the top, and when it was time to go down, decided to lay down and scratch itself in the middle of the stairs. Stepping over it was not an option without risking a tumble, it didn't seem to speak English or Hindi, and it wouldn't move when I nudged it with my foot...so passed a strange ten minutes as I was held hostage by a lazy dog on top of a pinnacle.

It had been enough sweating to drive the decadence of Mumbai from my system, so I made it over the mountains to Pune, erstwhile capitol of the Marathi empire. Pune was definitely a more standard Indian city- overflowing with that uniform chaotic urbania.

The thing about Pune, though, is that it's consistently overshadowed for glam and excitement by the big metropolois of Mumbai just below. The Britishers took the old Marathi capitol city- a thorn in the side of the Mughals- and established it as a military, transport, education, and administrative hub. The military aspect seemed obvious to me- it offers a strategic haven for troops to swoop down and retake critical Bombay. But now its finding a newer, identity, filled with young and enthusiastic students forming a well-educated army.

Two Fulbrighters, Thomas the ecophilosopher and Ted the Sanskritologist, hosted me in the city. Pune is home to the Osho Ashram, a meditation and spiritual retreat centre that is easily locatable by the large numbers of maroon-robed foreigners. Osho, the guru, has passed on from this world; after some interesting controversies in the 1970s, his followers relocated here from the USA. Pune is also home to one Mr. Ingalhelikar, an excellent flower botanist who took a morning to show Tom and I some of the sacred trees in shrines just out of the city- the tree under which Gyanesar took Samadhi, and the tree from which Tukaram ascended to heaven. Religiously important, and famous amongst some circles, these trees are reminders of just how many more there are to track down around this vast country. He also pointed me and Ted towards the outskirts of the city, where Sinhagad fort rose up in a big blocky basaltic mess. This fort, like so many others in the region, was the location of a great deal of bloody resistance and conquering. While its military history is interesting to the scholar, the history was truly brought alive by the fact that it was only conquered with the help of a monitor lizard, trained to climb up the cliff walls with a rope.

In another case of nice timing, the Indian Youth Climate Tour was passing through Pune the day I left. This group of friends from Delhi had arranged an amazing level of support and exposure for an electric-car road tour of India, giving environmental education lectures in schools. And for the scene of university students here, they threw a dance party at one of Pune's nightclubs. This was an excellent end to the stint in the city, and early in a mid-January morning it was time for long bus into the north of Mahrashtra, away from the escarpments and deeper onto the Deccan Plateau.

In the holy city of Nashik, I caught the red evening sunlight on the 5 Banyans at Ram & Sita's cave, conveniently numbered with large signs, and in the pilgrim town of Shirdhi, I snapped a photo of the incredibly popular Sai Baba guru's favourite neem tree through the gate of his Ashram. Sai Baba. in the early 1900s, taught a fusion of Hindu and Muslim wisdom that resonates in an amazing way still. A famous photograph of him crosslegged, with a cane and headscarf, is reproduced in the gazilions in countless autorickshaws, shrines, and households throughout India. The tree is inside a compound with thousands of people waiting for their turn to pay their respects and prayers, and by some good fortune they put a iron gate just there, perfect to peek in and see it.

And a little farther east, in Aurangabad, travelers converge to visit the sublime Ellora Caves and the horrific fort of Daulatabad. Theres a band of granite here, perfect for sculptures, meditation chambers, and fort ramparts. One of the caves at Ellora have been chipped away in elaborate tidbits until a massive fairytale castle of a temple stands where once was solid stone. The decorative instinct went stratospheric here, and the masterpiece temple here is a stunning piece of art. But it's an unfortunate word choice, because I'll never see a sculpted granite cave anywhere as interesting or complex as the slow-water-drop-work of a limestone cavern.

Daulatabad though, is as bloody as Ellora is ethereal. There is an airy citadel at the summit of this fortress on a granite slab....and to get there you must cross three gates, a narrow bridge, over a moat once filled with crocodiles, a dark maze with several blind alleys and ambush points, a sharp steep ridge, a few more gates, and some nasty staircases. The nice thing is nowadays you don't have to deal with the hot oil, boulders, elephants, cannons, rain of arrows, or any of those pesky soldiers running at you with spears.

A strange little geo-pilgrimage had been fascinating me for a while, and it was finally time. From Aurangabad, a five hour bus ride combined with a dark, cold autorickshaw ride reaching ten hours in duration, got me to Lonar Meteorite Crater. It pops up in those omnipresent backpacker tourguide books with its attendant platitude- the only hypervelocity meteorite crater in basaltic flows in the world. But really, what does that mean? Where's the wonder in that description? Why is it important? Why would any of these readers care? What is basalt? A meteorite is a rock, sure, and basalt is a rock, sure, but what's there is actually far more interesting: a small jungle clinging to the side of a salty water-trap lake, in the midst of a circular amphitheatre of cliffs, gouged out of an ancient waveof crystallized ocean-rock lava from the hot deep center of earth by a incandescent needle of energy----- a falling star.

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-y-

-y- Flow With The Go

2009-01-28T21:56:00.000-08:00

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-y- Flow With The Go
-Maharashtra State, India

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::::People flow towards opportunities, towards each other, to lovely
places, downstream, to the ocean, to the buzz, to the glamour.But you can decide to choose your path, and that's the go.::::
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In the very last days of 2008,the Ocean and I met each other for the
first time in many months, at Juhu Beach in Bombay. The contrast with
the flat and insular colonies of Delhi was terrifying, here were
people in a public space making a relation with their geography. The
air was cleaner. In
Delhi, we make our own insular landmarks, but here, I could walk to
the beach and experience what civic spaces provide to society. The waves
flowed onto the beach, and all visitors were free to greet them
There were few fences here.

So the sun set bright red through the haze, and I had spent the day
stuck on an airplane at Delhi airport, waiting for the thick white
soup of cold-sinking-air-pollutions to clear enough for us to fly. Like
so many others in India, arriving to Mumbai was filled with the
iresistable buzz of opportunity and potential. Rickshaws used the
meters, the streets were straight. Women walked without fear. A breeze
came off the ocean and I wondered why I lived in Delhi. The answer,
essentially, though, is by default- I simply hadn't known enough about
Indian cities to have any preferences between the two.

But damn, Mumbai is a city on fire.

The bulletholes from 26/11 were still fresh in the landmarks, and the
sense of insecurity was still there as New Year's approached. But on
the surface, little could be seen of the trauma. The flow of business
and the go of It was there, though.

The meetings with many trees and many people were all of the most
excellent sort. Most refreshing was the sense that foreigners had
integrated well into communities, and that young women often lived
lives independently from their families without fear of judgment or
danger. In Delhi, both of these groups, and so many others, have turned inwards
into communal insularity, but here there was a sense of
civility-rather than factionality- that glowed throughout the city,
unlike anywhere else I had seen in India. And, additionally, there was
a go of sexuality, and honesty, internationality, and hard work...
Civil society, as I see it, meaning that strangers meet as equals, far
away from the
crushing molten lead casting of Delhi's administrative society.

I met up quickly with a cast of friends new and old who made the city
come alive. Miller, volcano-climber-ropemate from wayback Seattle,
traveling with Laurel, hoping to return to Sri Lanka to revisit
friends, despite the upcoming bloody ending with the Tamil Tigers. Other
scholars, Karin, a H20 geographer, within a day a close friend
and confidante (mapmaking and landmarking being nearly identical pursuits),
Tayiba writing a novel -a-story- in a totally different style than my own book,
Zakir describing the magic of filming in the industry with the camera
before his eyes, and Dr. Latoo, a tree-loving botanist at Mumbai Uni.
I crashed on the floor at Eddie's place and learned about the life of
an aspiring Bollywood actor, inevitably and always typecast as the
white guy, Meenu, teaching me about the simplicity of a Jain life,
Saurav, living at the top of an apartment block, Nidhi, staying up
late for drinks after her workday at the bank, Amy, with whom a brief
meeting was recalled later when we magically bumped into each
other on the street downtown. (You haven't arrived in a city until you
bump into someone you know on the street). It's horrific to write such
tiny
statements about so many people, but together they populate and
illustrate a sense
of place, hopefully.

A spell was being formed around me, a glamour of ocean views, parks,
fine cafes, wonderful conversations, parties, huge rain trees
spreading out over the streets, European architecture amazingly
maintained well and respected, and an accessible excess of ocean
sunset conversations with Karin. It appeared that to go with the flow was
for me to engage with all this glamour and see what could form.

Though I knew the strange basaltic plateau of the Deccan was waiting
for me, spilling off the subcontinent in dramatic escarpments just
east of town, I found myself repeatedly jamming into the overcrowded
railways to return to the buzz and excitement of downtown Colaba
district. Every day coming in from the jammed moshpit train, crowded
beyond comprehension, was like a rebirth as I hopped out onto the
platform downtown to a lovely pedestrian city.

Remember that there are more than a billion people in this vast land,
but then also that one in evry three Indian tax dollars comes from
Mumbai. But the foundations are truly weak. Grand areas of slums,
which I did not experience or visit, spill out of the city and keep
the privileged residents alive.
The city centre, is a terminating peninsula built on reclaimed
land, and from the promenade of Marine Drive, there are strangely
shaped cement blocks piled up to break the energy of the waves. But
the image I have of octopuses exploring Florida's cities transmits
here as well. One day
soon, it will be underwater.

The eleven days in the city flow into each other, punctuated strongly
by a perfect triplet of parties at 2009. There were periods
of time. I know that I spent one day scouting trees with Dr. Latoo,
one morning jogging past the mangroves,
one night crashed on John and Laurel's hotel floor, one afternoon
locating trees with Karin on aerial photos, one night introduced to
Bengali cuisine by Saurav, two nights out for
dinner with Tayiba and Zak two breakfasts sitting by the AK-47
bulletholes at Leopolds, two days unsuccessfully trying to find an
ancient Urdu manuscript for Walt back in Delhi, two nights at Prithvi
Theatre Cafe, two nights at Nidhi's, two nights at Meenu's, three
nights at
Eddie's, five days happily exploring the city core through Karin's landmarks,
seven days of sunsets, eight days of train rides, eleven days of
magic. I learned several new
tree species and got a slight forewarning of the biodiversity waiting
for me farther south...

And then, after dark on a Friday evening, I knew I had to escape. The
days flowed, I had to go!
The last train of the full moon night left from the Victoria Terminus
rail station, where only a few weeks before, dozens of innocent
victims were gunned down. Two hours from the city centre found me
standing by the open train door with one of the ticket
collectors, watching the strange cliffs pass by in the moonlight. They
let me off one stop early, at a small town asleep for the evening.
Above, Nagphani, the Cobra's Hood, was a tapered point at the end of a
long basaltic
step-ridge., and I had learned about a simple climbing
trail on the backside. Attaining the ridge involved clambering up the
messy boulders of a steep drainage, and crossing under a aqueduct
leading to a small lake. Once on the ridge, the steepness and distinct
stratigraphic layering of the basaltic flow was obvious and familiar.
Peaks, from harder rocks or volcanic plugs, poked out as zigguratic
pyramids, and the whole landscape flowed down under the moonlight to
the ocean, and the city, and the friends I had just left. There was a
glow of electric lights visible to the west. I slept on the ridge
huddled coldin only a few layered shirts, but woke to that crystal
clear sunrise and the ecstacy of open mountains to explore on foot. In
the sunshine, I found there were
three still peaks to traverse to get to the summit. So it was down the
steep grasslands and slopes into desert valleys, and up again, past
pockets of jungle, in
blazing morning tropical sunlight, and eventually onto the back of the
Cobra's Hood, a topographical singularity. All around the clear solar
rays battered down, and I trudged down to meet the train.

-y-
Hampi, Karnataka

-y- The Strength of The Dots

2008-12-24T04:26:00.001-08:00

-The Midlands of India: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, & Madhya Pradesh
-Nov-Dec 2008
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"My subject matter was still inevitably myself: my life, my experiences, my hopes, my disappointments, and my loves...To deal with myself I had to treat myself with greater objectivity, to examine myself in the way a protagonist is examined in a novel. A described life is not the same as a real one. Living is not an art, but to write of life is...Life is disorganized, lacks shape...lacks story." --Christopher Priest, The Affirmation

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http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-The_Strength_of_the_Dots/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-The_Strength_of_the_Dots/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-The_Strength_of_the_Dots/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/india/TreesOlderThanMountains/TreesOlderThanMountains.html
http://www.treeoctopus.net/india/GEOMagazineInterviewDec08_cover.JPG
http://www.treeoctopus.net/india/GEOmagazineInterviewDec08_low.jpg (Photo by Andrew Larson)
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It's in chronological order. But every paragraph has a Dot.
Dots struggle, and Dots grow stronger.
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It has been far too long since I have seen the ocean. Nowadays in India, people fear the coast. I can hear the waves drifting to me on the clouds...But the grand valley, the heart of India, sings a song, in Hindi, and the first days of November 2008 found backpack and sneakers back on the tree-trail. For six weeks I traveled in the Midlands, by train, bus, car, wagon, tractor, pushbike, motorbike, foot. Eastwards from Delhi to Patna, the Capitol of Bihar, where strange rounded buildings, Shiva banyans, and sprawling museums add interest to a city renowned for it's negative qualities. The city is less unpleasant than its reputation, and although the air is horrendously polluted, there are smiles everywhere we go. A morning train brings us to Rajgir, and into the history of the Jains and the Buddhists.

A huge Ficus tree muscularly reposes beneath the unexpected white mountain ridges of southern Bihar. Ages ago, on the modest rocky heights, both Siddhartha the Buddha and Mahavira the Jain Tirthankara developed new philosophies that still resonate today. In my ridiculously simplistic word triplets: The first- clear your mind! The second- Every soul's divine! Both a rejection of Brahmin Hindu caste divisions, and both still aapplicable today. With Walt & Jin-hee, I arrange lodging at a Burmese monastery and clamber onto the mass of parallel hills. Nearby, at Nalanda, the site of an ancient Buddhist University 1800 years ago, I find an oddity: an 8-branched dwarf date palm. Long ago, the students would study books as well as the blankness of their interior minds- the struggle to sit still and clear themselves of their desires and distractions. Every one of the Burmese monks had a quiet glow radiating from them.

Splitting from my friends, I travel to the most sacred of all Buddhist pilgrimage sites, and India's Landmark Tree, the Bodhi Tree at Bodh Gaya. At this very site, under the immediate ancestor of the Ficus religiosa tree standing there now, Buddha attained enlightenment. Buddhists and Hindus from around the world come to pay their respects to the tree and the location, and in a lovely garden temple complex, this Very Old Tree marks the Big Event. Siddhartha denied all desires for 49 days, and then Something Clicked. It's a sprawling Peepal tree, and certainly one of the most remarkable specimens I've seen. But like any holy site, there's a strange feeling for those who are not believers or practitioners. Visiting this tree had been foremost in my plans from the beginning of my project, and yet I could only bring myself to stay for a day. A very peaceful tourist and monastery town, countless souls clear their minds of desires for the past and future here; while I, contrary as could be, hurried on to Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, to see the Ganga and get lost in the famous maze of alleys and avenues.

Waranasi, as it's pronounced, is a legend, for its age, its atmosphere, its importance, and its relationship with the Ganga River. The truth of the legend was a pleasantly intense mix of religious piety, backpacker comforts, filthy alleys, inspiring riverside locations, and a constant hum of activity. Smoke in the air from burning bodies, where devout Hindus aspire to have their funereal rites performed. Inevitably, one must inhale some wisps of this smoke, inspiration of a different type! A handful of fantastic old trees landmark the long walk up and down the river along the cement Ghats (steps). If you are a foreigner, you will be constantly approached by hardworking young men, who like many others are selling saab kuch (everything)...clothes, train tickets, hotels, music lessons, drugs, whatever you desire. At first, like all other tourists, I felt a bit threatened by the attention, and certainly these fellows didn't appreciate the don't-bother-me-hostility radiated back at them from the foreigners. But this is soul-destroying. I wanted to step through that shadow and come out on the other side with a healthier way of interacting with them. A certain portion of their interest in me was obviously financial, but I tried my utmost to recognize the other portion, that of friendly interest in the visiting foreigner. Once I acknowledged that, I could attempt a friendly conversation. Clearly, Varanasi is a holy city, and this permeates the atmosphere, but I was constantly reminded that it is also a working town, and tourism is a major industry.

I encounter many other foreigners, and amongst us Americans, something is different...When asked "Your country name?", that tragic millisecond of hesitation is shrinking, as the rest of the world blinks away tears of frustration with our government. With a Korean Christian traveler, I made it to Sarnath on the outskirts, the site of Buddha's first sermon, and the location of Ashoka's iconic 4-sided lion statue, the emblem of India's government. Ashoka's reign is still recalled as enlightened and prosperous...after all of the trials that this region of the subcontinent has been through over the 23 centuries, surely we can hope to say things are still enlightened, and prosperous...can't we?

Allahabad, on Children's Day, Jawaharlal Nehru's birthday, and his hometown. Harit, a Delhi friend studying at the Agricultural School, provided the perfect tour guide, from the orchards of the School to the Immortal Tree at the Fort, to the confluence of the Yamuna and Ganga Rivers. At Anand Bhavan, JN's home, cultural celebrations marked the event, and the presence of a Angrezi (Britisher, as people assumed me to be) was an minor event all of its own. Harit and I entered into the museumized house. To give you an idea of the reverence Pandit Nehru is held in: we saw several labeled items and places of importance from his life: 'British Driver's License', 'Tennis Racket' 'Shaving Brush' 'Umbrella Handle' 'Travel Electric Iron' and my favorite- 'Spare Button'. And Gandhi-ji was also there in those days- 'Here the Congress Working Committee Took Momentous Decisions', 'Here Mahatma Gandhi Worked', and 'Mahatma Gandhi Often Stayed Here'. Like Emperor Ashoka long before, these two men are still held up as paragons. It was the British Driver's License that offered me the most insight into their motivations. Both JN and MG had studied and lived in London, and undoubtedly had Britisher friends, intimates, classmates, and neighbours. And yet these young friends of theirs would be assigned to a British India government position, and hold the fate of crores and lakhs of JN's and MG's contemporaries in their hands. It was these two men who took the concept of India as a single nation from the British, and they were the most keenly despairing of the Partition. And fortunately, when these momentous, world-defining events were occurring, Nehru had at least one coat-button in reserve.

An afternoon train to Lucknow, (the city with the most optimistic name) delayed far into the night. An ancient chair car, with dirt clinging to the walls, was my conveyance. The chair before me reclined too close, and asymmetrically, and there was at least one cockroach exploring its surface. I don't know what it's living off of in the train car, but like all roaches it was a surely tougher than nails, and perhaps more content with its surroundings than I was. I closed my eyes and at midnight I arrived in Lucknow, to attend a conference on "Plant Life Through The Ages" at Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany. They had offered me a University hostel room, and I expected to quietly disappear and go to sleep. But no, it was also Birbal Sahni's birthday, and in honour of their founding paleobotanist, there was a big party in progress. I finally pulled myself away, and went to sleep remembering that I had a presentation I needed to write in the next 48 hours. But for me, deadlines are best when they are tight, and in inspiring surroundings. I had both- The Institute is the world's largest collection of fossil plant experts, and their much-anticipated conference was soon enough. Amongst the museum displays, library, and experts located here, it was an excellent chance to brush off such lovely sounding words as Cenozoic, Phanerozoic, Mississipian, Dadoxylon, paraphyletic, and to work on some sort of synthesis in my own mind between plant branching patterns and taxonomy.

The conference was a magical experience. I met a handful of scientists who knew Estella Leopold and her pollen lab (my introduction and inspiration in paleobotany), and learned about some fantastic research going on. There are too many interesting things, and too many research directions. It seems that most every ecology scientist is suffering from almost-crippling curiousity and overenthusiasm and never enough time to satisfy it. There were business cards handed out, telephone magazine interviews, frantic typing and presentation-building sessions, tea breaks, international and Indian scientists, and of course research presentations. If you are interested in life on Earth- and at some level that means green plants- then this was a fascinating crowd. All these ancient producers of energy- photosynthesizers- evolving through countless stresses to form such strange things as roses, gaarlic, strangler banyan figs. A distressing number of the paleobotanists' sessions were textbook examples of poor communication skills- powerpoint slides completely filled with small text, constant allusions to esoterica that the viewer was assumed to know, and general lack of narrative. Sitting through some of them was arduous. But entirely educational, and I was happy to share my own esoteric contribution. (Link below to the presentation, 'Trees Older Than Mountains'.)

Exploring Lucknow with Amy, another Fulbright Scholar, and Mr. Kim, a Korean backpacker. We had to bluff, cajole, and plead our way into the Botanical Gardens, which surprisingly are not generally open to the public. Following the classic tourist route, we took rental bikes to the Bara and Chota Imambara (Big and Small Palaces), opulent structures built by the Nawab-Kings and maintained as the city's premiere attractions. The Martiniere, on the other side of town, was a bit more of an architectural mash-up, with funny statues, Muppetesque lion sculptures, and empty rooms to sneak through and imagine when India's richest man used to reside here. Despite many similarities with Delhi, Lucknow seems a more functional and pleasant town than the Capitol. Riding a bicycle in the motortraffic was horrible, but we soon learned the hang of it. Driving or biking or walking on Indian roads requires fatalism, and far less active concentration. When a truck with forty-six people and two cows piled on it is sneaking up behind you while blasting a horn that maxes out your ears, you do whatever it takes to move through.

Out of Lucknow, two excellent adventures to visit two wonderful trees: The Giant Akshayvat Vriksh Banyan at Majhi, only twenty kilometers away but generally unknown, and Kaleemullah's Masterpiece Mango. The Giant Banyan is insanely large, one of the world's most fantastic multi-stemmed banyan figs. it's surrounded by mango orchards now, but has obviously stood there for many centuries. In those years, the surrounding forest must have changed beyond recognition. For some reasons of reverence or prudence, people let it stand and it's now a last reminder of jungle long gone. (Later, I would burn out my eyes on Google Earth aerial photos trying to locate it amongst the checkerwork of orchards.) Not far away, at Abdullah Nursery, Kaleemullah Khan is an elderly Urdu gentleman renowned for his mango crops. As an experiment, or amusement, he began grafting different mango varieties onto a single tree, cutting a sprig from a separate tree and binding it to a cut on the target tree. Over twenty years, he has succeeded in grafting 312 flavours. While his English was nonexistent, and my Urdu/Hindi halting, we still managed to have a satisfying afternoon visiting this tree, and my only regret was that I wasn’t there for the fruiting or flowering season.

Escape from Uttar Pradesh ("North State") into Madhya Pradesh, ("Middle State"). MP is vast and central, and I had been told of some rugged jungley mountainous areas in the central highlands. Arriving into MP I had the simultaneous experiences of spending an entire night at the rail station (Sleeping on concrete isn't as uncomfortable as one would expect) and finding that Lucknow interview published in glossy GEO magazine. (Article linked below) I arrived to Khajuraho in the north. This town, surrounded by farmfields and not much else, is famous for its temple sculptures, which one brochure describes as "uncompromisingly erotic." The temples are impressive, and without much work you can find some charmingly sexual stonework. Indeed, the sculptors ingeniously captured the sly smiles, twinkling looks and sideways glances of the mating Homo sapiens. But equally educational was the gauntlet out in the tourist town, where, like Varanasi, dozens of young men worked at meeting foreign tourists to sell whatever services were desired. While the initial thought might be that they are all trying to cheat foreigners, I think it's more accurate to say that it's mostly manipulation by politeness. The storekeepers and prospecting tour guides are keenly aware of Western social mores, and the innate inability of backpackers to simply say "no" to a friendly person. But like I had been thinking in Varanasi, there’s another portion of their interest beyond the ambition, and since I was utterly in control of the financial relationship, I could have the space I needed to make a friendly relationship. I made two friends, Sumit & Baba, and we explored the older parts of town and beyond. A set of dramatic rocky ridges beckoned nearby, but these two had never climbed onto the mountain. Without much convincing required, we started across the fields and up through the thorny plants. We soon crested the ridge, and rambled along above the small cliffs across a series of summits. Both of my new friends were amazed and pleased at the experience of climbing a mountain, and I did everything I could to convince them to take an ecotourism angle to distinguish themselves from all the other a young men working hard. The landscape was punctuated dramatically by these ridges, and up above we could forget the twin desires clinging to Khajuraho- the sexual desires trapped in stonework, and the opportunistic desires that foreigners trigger by the strength of dollars, Euros and yen.

East of Khajuraho is Panna Tiger Reserve. Just near this National Park, I was acquainted with Raghu, a tiger-specialist and acquaintance through other ecologists. Millions of years of evolution and struggle, and somehow is the cat of fearful symmetry, an iconic, deadly, and enchanting survivor. Lifetimes of valiant efforts by biologists like Raghu have only slowed the demise of the cat to the rifle and axe. He graciously hosted me, despite a busy schedule preparing a hotel business, and was able to take a morning ride through the Reserve with me. It’s a large area of healthy jungle, and even though I paid the horrific foreigners price of 2,000 rupees, that wasn't enough for a tiger sighting. In fact, this high ticket price (far beyond the Indian prices), even when combined with the town nearby, and the ecotourism resorts, and the vehicle safari fees, and the mandatory guides, and the government regulations, and the layers of bureaucrats, and the prestige of being a Tiger Project Sanctuary, and our open-top jeep, and my host's decades of expertise and experience, wasn’t enough to provide a view of those wonderful, threatened cats. Can you guess the reason? ...There may be, at most, a single tiger remaining there, and I suspect this is only so because you can never prove a negative statement.

To the northern MP town of Gwalior, where the Fort dominates the skyline, and where Emperor Akhbar's famous gem, Tansen the musician is buried next to a famous but deceased jujube tree. It was here, on Election Day, that the news reached me of ongoing events in Bombay, far away on the coast. A chill descended on the country. But the blood and tears may make Nehru's vision stronger in reality: as Indians of all religions and communities are targeted not for their fractured identities but for their Indian identity. I can think of no stronger way to create a national identity than to hurt people enough to make them contemplate what they've been clinging to. We shall see how India reacts...is the USA a model to emulate? Unfortunately, the audacity and lethality of those ten demons in Mumbai was forged in the heat of the pursuit, as the USA, India, and allies tries to chase them down in the mountains just above.

Gwalior, though, is an interesting town, with the Fort to remind you of the periodic fighting between prospective kings, and the strength of their empires finally submitting to the Britisher's rifles, and then ultimately to Gandhi-ji. It’s a massive block of sandstone with elaborate fortifications, with no approach not guarded securely. On top are several landmarks- a Sikh Gurudwara, a massive antenna, a museum, an old palace, and a peepal tree perched right on the edge of the block. From all of east Gwalior, a glance back at the Fort and this young tree is prominent like a flag- a perfect landmark! At the Gurudwara, Kristiana, an Italian woman, and I accepted an invitation to join them to see the prayer hall and eat a meal. Picture this if you will: hundreds of people sitting on the floor, and members of the community coming past with giant cookpots of dal (lentils), rice, and chapati (flatbreads). No matter your station in life- whether a scientist or tour guide or beggar- you put out your hands in supplication and get the fuel for life. Setting aside the spiritual and historical aspects of the Sikh religion for a moment, and looking at it minimally as a social community- consider what it would mean in your life if you knew you would *never* starve. All visitors are welcome to be fed at a Gurudwara (for work exchange, though). For two Western visitors from wealthy countries with few people in grinding starvation, the experience was striking. We fight for human rights, and consumer rights, with our cultural mechanisms, but the Sikh people need not this help. Through starvation and armies spilling over their homeland, they've integrated many wise practices, and it shows in confidence and stature.

In the railway junction town of Jhansi, I met up with my colleague Emma, from Finland, and we spent a weekend in the palace towns of Orchha and Dhatia. First, an interminable bus ride to Dhatia, where almost no tourists visit. A seven-storied palace, shaped as a swastika, was perhaps the most exquisite piece of architecture we had yet seen in India. Then, we returned to Orchha, where a handful of massive palaces sprawled on a river-island. We explored the buildings, which that famous Australian travel guidebook brilliantly describes as 'an assault course of steep staircases, precipitous walkways, bamboo scaffolding, and rubble-filled rooms'. Coincidentally, we met four more Finns, and a young local girl named Hirdesh working as a guide. We were, I confess, charmed by her perfect English and forthright manner. She was the only girl working as a prospecting guide, and as we learned later was sending herself and her brother to school. This teenage girl had far more responsibilities than Emma or I had at the same age, and her ability to do so translated into confidence. We hired her to conduct a tree tour of town, and first to take us just south of town. I had spotted, in the cold morning fog, a giant Baobab tree, and we made our way there to take photos and interviews at sunset. Baobabs, with their grotesquely fat trunks and undersized branches, are amongst the world's most remarkable trees, and though I had seen many picture books of them in their native Africa, this was the first baobab of any size I had ever seen. A landmark tree of distinction and wonder! The kids playing there told us it was named Mallanimli, and it was sheer delight to dance around the tree.... sorry, I mean, to get some work done, as the sun set.

Crossing the Line of Cancer and arriving into the Earth's tropics, I arrived in Bhopal on the first days of December, not realizing the significance of the date. At midnight Dec 2-3rd, 1984, in a spasm of death, Bhopal joined Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the history books. A cloud of toxic methyl isocyanate leaked from the Union Carbide Factory in the NW part of town, and more than 20,000 people died immediately, died later, or are dying from their exposure. With my friend Vinod, we went to the gates of the factory on the 24th anniversary, where a handful of somber events marked the occasion. I wish I could write that the people were stronger for their experience, and that India and industry had learned and accepted the lessons from the event. Undoubtedly, there are some survivors who have become eloquent campaigners and activists for environmental justice. Amidst the euphoria of wealth creation and industrial growth, we must listen carefully to hear them.

Near Bhopal, a quick trip to see the Great Buddhist Stupa at Sanchi, the ancient Pillar of Heliodorus, and the Udaigiri caves carved into a rocky hill. All are steeped in ancient mysteries, and remind one of the long histories of civilization in the Midlands. But next- to Pachmarhi, the land of the Gonds, and a highland area of great scenic beauty and wild jungles. I suppose one nice thing about living in noisy, polluted, dangerous cities is the absolute joy triggered by exploring a wild place. I had heard of MP's jungles from Delhi tree guru Pradip Krishen, and his expertise and connections in this small hill station were invaluable. Pachmarhi is set in a valley perched in a craggy sandstone plateau, with jagged peaks, slot canyons, and strange formations abounding. This, officially, was tropical jungle!

Over five days, I explored forest trails, along carved sandstone reminiscent of the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. A pushbike rented allowed for easy access to many locations, and I think after a few hard pedals up slopes I managed to knock the rust out. On top of Chaurigarh Peak, a small stunted but living semal tree is adorned by countless tridents that pilgrims carry up in honour of Shiva; at Mahadeo a shrine is ensconced far back in a cave; at the lake a giant Semal makes for a good sunset point; ancient Buddhist Caves at Pandav are decorated by gardens; a small limestone layer exposed by a very deep slot canyon inspires a shrine in a small dissolved cave, and scattered remnants of the Britishers brings a colonial ring to the place. This foray into scrubby tropical jungle made a great impression on me, not least as it was the original home of the Gond people. I can't exactly say I met any Gonds during my trip, but historically this region was inhabited by a people with ancestry older than the later Hindu arrivals. In Tasmania, any biogeographer can spin you a tale of the vast land Gondwanaland...when Australia, South America, Africa, New Zealand, and those two rogues Antarctica and India were all one cozy supercontinent. But things have changed, and they've all split apart. Antarctica sulked off to its frosty solitude, and India, more sociable by far, went screaming north to embrace Asia. The Himalaya is their offspring, and all of these landmasses retain strong biological evidence of Gondwanaland. As it went northwards through the latitudes, the plants and animals and everything else adapted to the difficult changes in conditions -or died- but they certainly couldn't change their ancestry. So after years of talking about Gondwanaland, to finally be in the namesake locality was a happy achievement.

Two more destinations finished off six weeks of travel, and by this point the overstimulation and excess of experiences was already causing me to think of my quiet apartment in Delhi. In Western Madhya Pradesh- Mandu, on a dramatic basaltic (?) plateau, home of elaborate Mughal palaces, and adorned with many baobabs. These trees (and Mallanimli) were all brought over from Africa as exotic decorations, and though none approached Mallanimli for scale or sheer drama, they added a strange and magical feel to the place. While far from their home, and likely far from their coevolved pollinators, they seemed relatively healthy and happy trees. Mandu was filled with Indian tourists, glad the quiet fields and cliff lines of the plateau.

Lastly, Ujjain, the center of the Universe. A sacred city to Hindus, and officially the center of the Universe according to Indian astrology. My Delhi neighbour Addy, a native of the city, got me in touch with his friends and family, and the hospitality was absolutely optimal. Abhay, his friend from childhood, took me around town to see Siddhavat, a tree pointing the pathway straight to heaven. At the ghats along the river, and a second time at the Mahakaleshwar temple marking the centre of the Universe, we found trident trees- three tree species growing out of a single fused base. Wonderful. It was in Ujjain that I finally saw my first elephant in India! And then, a final destination, the Jantar Mantar, an astronomical observatory hundreds of years old reminded me about Indian astrology and its differences from Western astronomy. The first was founded in religion, and the difficulties of human existence. The second was founded in ocean waters, and the difficulties of navigation. Both are still practiced today, and Ujjain's line of longitude is still used as the basis for all calculations.

So, through the midlands, from the heart of Buddha's history, to the center of the Hindu Universe, I had collected experiences and adventures in excess, and I knew it was time to leave for a safe and familiar place. For all the travails it was a sublime expedition, fully awash in ancient history, lovely people, spiritual roots, magnificent cultures, and about sixty landmark trees. It was time to put some sort of mental definition to it, and turn, only forward toward the next field trip...

...Of course, I arrived back to Delhi to more excitement: a quartet of houseguests, long lost friends from Seattle finishing a disastrous near-fatal Himalayan climbing trip, a rose garden picnic, a high tea with US diplomats, an eco-art festival with a tour to Delhi's sewage plant along the Yamuna River, two more elephants, and, best of all, on the Winter Solstice, the 25 km walk from Qtub Minar to the Red Fort. So much to do in Delhi, and amidst the chaos, a great place for exploring and making friends. But when your stories turn into mere listings of events, separated by commas, it is time to finish off your tales, forget the chronology, and focus on the Dots.

-y-

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http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-The_Strength_of_the_Dots/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-The_Strength_of_the_Dots/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-The_Strength_of_the_Dots/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/india/TreesOlderThanMountains/TreesOlderThanMountains.html
http://www.treeoctopus.net/india/GEOMagazineInterviewDec08_cover.JPG
http://www.treeoctopus.net/india/GEOmagazineInterviewDec08_low.jpg (Photo by Andrew Larson)

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Dots struggle, and Dots grow stronger.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashoka
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nawab
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banyan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodh_Gaya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwalior
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khajuraho
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tansen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Akbar_and_Tansen_visit_Haridas.jpg
http://www.vsaint.com/prince/ch5.html

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-y- Below the Ice

2008-11-02T05:20:00.000-08:00

www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-_Above_The_Jungle
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"Do we walk in legends, or on the green earth in the daylight?"
"A man may do both. For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighy matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!" --JR Tolkien, The Two Towers

October 2008:
Uttarakhand, land of legends and earth clad in green forests:

From the summit of Panguchila, the clouds swirled and the snow shone brightly... And it was literally all downhill from there...
...Simon and I returned to Joshimath, drank the celebratory beer on the balcony, and that was the point of inflection, midway through a beautiful odyssey within and above the jungle. I continued on to the Kumaon, the eastern half of Uttarakhand State....

I continued on to the Kumaon, the eastern half of Uttarakhand State. Through the holiday of town of Kasauni, to the Almore, the old Chandragupta capital. Almora rambles along a ridge amongst pine forests, and mercifully, wonderfully, has a pedestrian marketplace with no vehicles at all. A massive toon tree crowns the marketplace, offering a literal landmark. Following the rumortrail, I went to the nearby backpacker haven of Kasar Devi, a place filled to the brim with Israelis on tour of India. I came just in time for a fantastic little Jewish New Years Party __57???, which brought back some old memories. It was good practice for my lopsided trilingualarity- Hebrew to Hindi to English.

Near to Almora, though, is the temple town of Jageshwar, noted for its dense collection of small Shiva temples...and the massive deodar cedars growing in the valley. Arriving in Jageshwar was truly the culmination of 10 years of anticipation, since I had first spotted the deodar cedars in Seattle and wondered about far-away India. The valley is filled with solemn deodar forest, and some were reliably guesstimated at 900 years of age. These monarchs stood like guardians above the stonework temples, and offered me a new view of old cedar-growth. Unlike the gnarly old monster cedar at Landour, these only barely expressed a candelabra growth pattern of branches-turned-vertical. On the slopes above the cedar valley, pines continued off into the distance. The valley reminded me of nothing more than a redwood grove, tucked beneath more modern and vigorous conifers.

After several hours walking repeated pathways through the old, well maintained temples, I started up the slopes behind looking for the village of Old Jageshwar and thence the trail to Binsal Top Mountain...but as it turned out, I missed the trail and found myself several kilometers into the far backroads of the Middle Kumaon. But above me, the heavily groomed pine forest offered a new landscape. The trudge was expected but the forest curious; every pine was being tapped for resin, with a ribbed pattern of slashes leading to a conical metal collector cup. There was not a twig of deadwood on the ground, as it had all been harvested for firewood. On a ridgetop overlooking endless pine forests, with the deodar valley lost amongst the slopes, I cooked over a pine-resiny campfire, and watched the stars careen up into the sky.

Then, to the Sunderdhunga Basin for a fourth and final trek, on the south side of Nanda Devi massif. I spent one night in Bageshwar, searching for the ever elusive trekers' groceries, and met up with a group going to the same trailhead to visit the Pindari glacier: Kinga and Gustav were honeymooning from Sweden, Guy and Naama honeymooning from Israel, and Yaron spending a holiday in India. We combined forces to hire a share taxi up to the trailhead, and in the late afternoon, as it began raining, I said my farewells and started walking up again into the mountains.

The Sunderdhunga River joins the Pindar River near the village of Kathi, and I arrived at this confluence after spending a night at Dhakuri Pass. The impossibly steep watercarved valleys were too sheer to offer many views when you were by the water, and only before descending to the joining rivers I could gain a clear view of the basin.

Remember the Earth is warming, and that ice has scoured places where it no longer exists. Traveling up this valley was a textbook demonstration of glacial carving. Imagine you are standing on the horrible, railless bridge 15 meters above the confluence of the Pindar and Sunderdhunga Rivers. They are both racing along in V-shaped gorges, with steep valleysides dropping to their banks. These were carved by water. Upstream on the Sunderdhunga, you continue upstream on forest trails, off which one would drop away to the water with alarming rapidity. At some point, after you pass the village of Jathi, splash across several creeks, and pass through a grove of ancient, collosal rhododendrons, you reach an inflection point. This is a place where the river, still raging, seems underfit to the valley. A flat floodplain of boulders forms the riverbanks, and small islands and mounds testify that the river braids its way through different tracks at different times. At the edges of the floodplain, jumble avalanched boulders resst below sheer cliff walls. This is a U-shaped valley, and it was carved out by ice. But that mass of frozen water is now gone, and now there is just a ribbon of liquid, underfit to the valley.

As you continue up the creek, you climb up past a waterfall to a basin, an area raised above. The Sunderdungha spills down, amazingly bridged completely by a massve rock fallen from the heights above. One you are higher than the rim of the waterfall, you are in the basin. Its a large plain of tumbled rocks, with two fantastic steep-walled gorges spilling out a tiny, roaring stream. These two streams meet and then flow under the bridge to head down towards the Indian Ocean. But if you look carefully, you might realize that this basin was the meeting point of two glaciers, which came out of those gorges, and met in a rock-crushing embrace here. The water confluence is just a shade of the massive ice confluence that used to be here. They ground together, and then spilled over in an icefall to continue below. But now its just those quicksilver ribbons of water, and maybe if you think hard, you can imagine that in one future era, it will be just vapour. Two masses of mist just spilling down with gravity, retracing the sharp carves of the water and the smudging knife of the ice.

In the basin, I camped at the base of the slopes with two dogs that had followed me up from Jathi village. I explored up one of the side-gorges, crossing the rock bridge to do so, and rather than scramble along in the gorge, headed up the meadows on a side slope. I caught only the barest glimpse of the ice, an isolated patch of snow that may indeed make it to the winter- but an orphan nonetheless. The glaciers are melting, fast, and nowhere more so that the Himalaya.

On the exit trek, I fortuitiously encountered the five Pindari trekkers, and we walked out together. We headed back to Almora, and a day later I followed Gustav, Kinga, and Yaron to the lake-resort town of Nainital. This was Jim Corbett's home, and is a popular destination for tourists. The lake is overloved, filled with boats, and the famed Mall road is unfortunately, like Mussoorie, ruined by far too many vehicles (driven by maniacs). But its a pleasant place, and the lake is truly attractive beneath lofty hills. There's an excellent zoo there, worth a visit to see some Himalayan predators: snow leopards, bears, tigers, wolves. This is also where I found my first taste of Indian limestone; broken ridgetops with airy caverns beneath, showing the distinct dripping-rock decoration of ancient-calcium-rock. We first went to a "Eco-Cave-Park" which was the expected horrorshow of litterbug Indians, unforgivably secreting plastic rubbish in every possible, creative crevice. But from the park I could see an nearby hilltop with similar rocks, and bushwacked to a wilder part of Nainital, were I found a few more cave formations and several thorny plants. After walking to the rim of Nainital's ring of hills, I took the cable car ropeway back town just in time for an evening of drinks and pingpong at the very British, pseudo-exclusive boat club. That evening found me on a dreaded night bus back home to Delhi, mercifully I slept all the way.

And, back in the mad city, glad to finally know some remote and wild mountain slopes, the overstimulation resumes: India launches a mission to the moon, I send in my US election ballot, a Indian wins the world chess championship, every light source in Delhi is swarmed by countless illions of little brown bhussadi bugs (Hemipterans, 'Brown Leaf Hopper'), and the Diwali holiday is celebrated with countless candles and far too many fireworks. They are exploding outside my window as I type this, and with those peaceful blasts of celebration ringing in my airs, I thank you for reading about my little adventures above the jungle.

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-y- Above the Jungle

2008-11-02T05:19:00.000-08:00

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"Do we walk in legends, or on the green earth in the daylight?"
"A man may do both. For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighy matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!" --JR Tolkien, The Two Towers

September 2008:
Uttarakhand, land of legends and earth clad in green forests:

It was finally time to stop studying and planning and map-gazing, and time to begin treescouting and traveling and landscape-gazing. All of vast India somehow in my reach, and my first and biggest challenge- to prioritize! So, ironically enough, I returned to Uttarakhand State, to see the forests and mountains of the middle Himalaya.

To the foot of the mountains:I needed no more excuse to travel to Dehra Dun than the Wildlife Institute of India's Annual Research Conference. Another Fulbrighter, Jennie Miller, was there studying the monal pheasant. It was a perfect time to visit this premiere school, as a few dozen of India's top wildlife and zoology professor and students were presenting the findings of their research. It was, unsurprisingly, tilted toward the big mammals and the birds- many presentations on tigers, and only a single on the invertebrates. The critical status of the tiger in India has brought a wave of resources towards their conservation...and hopefully this means landscape conservation beyond just kitty-conservation. The plants and the mushrooms are wild life too, aren't they? The students there were a fantastic bunch, filled with stories and ideas and enthusiasm. Also in Dehra Dun, the Forest Research Institute garnered a day's visit. Another premiere location, spread out over a vast green campus, with far too many excellent botanists and foresters to ever visit in a single trip. But I made some acquaintances, and asked around about Uttarakhand's finest jungles and most interesting trees. With new friend and advice from so many animal and tree specialists, I traveled into the mountains one day before dawn with far more ideas than I had time to explore.

From Dehra Dun to Rishikesh, and upstream on the Ganga, coming from the lowlands and quickly entering the forested canyons of the Garwhal region. Upstream, five towns are placed at the junctions of major rivers- "prayag". At Rudraprayag, I hopped off the bus and spent an hour there, glad that I was not being stalked by a leopard: I was tracking down an old mango tree, from which Jim Corbett shot a man-eating leopard that had been terrorizing the region. Corbett remains a legendary name and a touchstone for environmental conservation in north India. A British man born in India, he was both a famous hunter and conservationist, saving many villagers' lives by stalking man-eating tigers and leopards, and saving forests by sharing his love for the jungle with pen and camera. The mango tree has a small memorial nearby to the event, and 70-odd years later, Rudraprayag is no longer haunted. It is worth mentioning, though, that Corbett soon realized than the entirety of the dozens of man-eaters he killed were cats that had suffered some injury and could no longer hunt their accustomed four-legged prey...so they had to settle for the easier, two-legged variety.

Next, a bus up the Ganga-tributary of the Alakananda River, clinging to the steep hills on bending roads. As good fortune would have it...I found that I was sharing a bus bench with one Dr. Bebni, a young botany teacher from the town of Gopeshwar, specializing in sacred plants of Uttarakhand. A splendid coincidence, and though neither his English nor my Hindi were perfect, I hopped off in Gopeshwar and spent a nice night in town. Dr. Bebni, as it turned out, was getting married in just a few days. We talked at length about the numerous sacred plants of the region, and Dr. Bebni mentioned a novel ambition: "I hope one day to stop being a botanist and to become an astrologer." He showed me around Gopeshwar, a town I immediately took a liking to. There was, for the lovers of old and curious things, a very old Shiva temple in town, 2000 years at least, and a very old and gnarly Cypress tree, perhaps 300 years old.

Near Gopeshwar, a mountain called Chandrashila, Moon Crescent, reached for the stars. On its slopes, a temple called Tungnath is placed amongst rock clefts. One of the five "Kedar" temples, this spot marks where Shiva's torso fell to our world after an epic battle. Far below alongst a river valley, I arrived at a town called Mandal. Scientists at the Forest Research Institute had told me that some of the finest Himalayan jungle was to be found above Mandal, and an excellent, steep uphill trek could be made from there to to Tungnath and on to Chandrashila. The forest was indeed lush and eerily familiar. As throughout the rest of Uttarakhand, genera well-known from North America (and my dim cultural memory of Europe's forests) were to found in abundance: oaks, horsechestnuts (buckeyes!), alders firs, spruces, rhododendrons, walnuts, and, of course, pines. The forests I walked through were, in some ways, far less uniquely Indian than Delhi's monsoonal greens, and far closer to those of Oregon, Siberia, or Wales. Conversely, to me they are also reminder of how strangely fractured and rare the Southern Hemisphere's flora is.

Carrying a backpack and camping gear, and being somewhere worth using them, is a valued dream to some living in Delhi, and there were countless lovely spots- open grassy areas and heavily wooded slopes above fast streams- where I could imagine staying. All had some traces of human activity, but it was still a jungle wild and untamed. But onward, until above the jungle, to see it as it tapered off on the rocky cliffs and meadows of Chandrashila. That night was the first of several in the mountains I camped underneath a rock shelter, formed by a massive boulder tumbling off the heights. Hail and lightning gave way to a warm cloudy day, and I passed through the town of Chopta and up onto the very well-paced, well-trodden pilgrims path to Tungnath temple. This left the final oak forests and passed by a grove of spruces before coming onto well-grazed meadows, and arrived at a group of small hotels clustered by the temple.

Above, to Chandrashila, up meadows on a fast steep path to a rocky summit. A small building housed a shrine, and on this sacred mountain was a vast collection of plastic litter. One day in the distant past the moon, Chandra, had spent the night in meditation here. Here was the perfect place to set up a long-hauled tent, to spend the night on this, my first Himalayan topographical singularity...but before midnight I raced off the summit by torchlight, in a thunderstorm. The metal central pole of the tent was too perfect a beacon for the lightning bolts splashing down.

But at sunrise, I crept back up to the summit and saw my first staggering view of those icy points scraping the sky. These are young and energetic mountains, proof of India's love affair crush with Asia, as the subcontinent smashes northwards.

Upwards by fantastic roadways along the Alakananda River, Joshimath, deep in a valley. Here, a gargantuan, ancient mulberry tree stands in a small shrine, where the sage Ancharakarya meditated 1,800 years ago. It was an old tree in his day, and various sources peg its age as high as 5,000 years. While this number seems unlikely to me, it's undoubtedly the oldest tree of record in the Indian Himalaya, and likely the world's oldest mulberry. Joshimath also serves as a hub for pilgrims of flavours old and new: Sikh pilgrims to Hemkund Sahib temple, botanical ecotourists heading to Valley of Flowers, Hindu pilgrims to Badrinath shrine, and mountaineers exploring near the forbidden summit of Nanda Devi. I somehow utterly failed to make it to Valley of Flowers, daunted by the awkward timeframes dictated by a no-camping policy and distant bus rides. But I met Simon, a Kiwi, a New Zealander, and we motivated out on a trek to Kuari Pass and Panguchila Peak.

Regulations unequivocally demanded a local guide to enter the Nanda Devi National Park. Like so many other Westerners before us, we balked at the concept but didn't actually have the ability to do otherwise. Our guide, Umrao Singh, was a medicinal plant specialist, and he showed up at the trekking agency with naught but the clothes on his back. They gave him a pack, a sleeping bag, a coat, and some stove parts, and that was his kit in its entirety. His stoic endurance impressed us as much as his carelessness baffled and disgusted us. But he was a good natured and knowledgable guide, not only showing us the path but also demonstrating an incredibly passive strategy for surviving the mountains. Our track began at the Auli ski area, far above Joshimath. In the very first days of autumn, it was snowless and busy with construction vehicles tearing up the vegetation for a new ski run. Unlike our concept of ski runs on mountain slopes, here the run was nestled in a relatively gentler gully. It was from here we gained our only clear view of Nanda Devi's vast sky-pyramid, truly a queen amongst mountains. We trudged through the mess and above in to khorsu oak forest. This soon gave way to a large meadow, Gorson Top, where sheep (and their shepherds) created a distinct ecology by grazing. We traversed a wonderfully steep mountainside into a thick forest of khorsu and fir, with boulderfields and groves that eerily resembled the Trinity Mountains of California.

The first night we were pounded with hail- we discovered that the tent we had rented wasn't in the best shape. I had unwisely left my own behind (stupid stupid stupid!) but gladly slept underneath yet another convenient rock shelter, and stayed completely dry. Simon and Umrao toughed it out in the tent, and the next, sunny day was much appreciated. We ran the tops of steep meadowed ridges, heavily overgrazed, and trekked on to the rocky gap of Kuari Pass. This afforded us a view southwards that was far less magnificent than that north and eastwards. The rock and ice scraped upwards in a gleeful sweep, and we found ourselves a meadow campsite, again tucked under a boulder.

Morningtime, Simon and I said farewell to Umrao and began our ascent of Panguchila Peak. Somehow quite geologically distinct from the more terrifying heights nearby, Panguchila was a collection of boulders piled steeply upon one another, and above the meadows we soon found ourselves scrambling over snowclad rocks and hoping not to fall in between. Sunshine blasted us and the temperature was balmy above the too-bright snow. The ridge on the summit pyramid was long, and while simple in theory, it was complicated in practice moving between the boulders. No large rock walls on this mountain, just countless cracks and gaps. Soon enough, though, there we were, above the jungle on the summit of some lovely Himalaya mountain. As chance would have it, a cloud moved in as we arrived and we were granted no views of our surroundings. Our descent was far faster and safer, due to Simon's insistence that we scuttle down a snowgully rather than fight the boulders again. We lost altitude fast and happily, and before long were bushwhacking through the rhododendron to finally make it to Umrao and our campfire, just as the sunsets played orange and pink tricks with the clouds.

We returned to Joshimath, drank the celebratory beer on the balcony, and that was the point of inflection, midway through a beautiful odyssey below the ice. I continued on to the Kumaon, the eastern half of Uttarakhand State....

More soon...

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-y- Before The Blasts

2008-09-16T05:05:00.000-07:00

-y-
Before the Blasts
August-September 2008
Delhi, India!

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Back into the Delhi, where the energies of future work must mingle with the solid realities of city life. What love and loathing this Capitol brings out of its visitors and residents!

Eight bombs exploded in Delhi three days ago, killing a score of people at several familiar and crowded points. In such a porous, fractured, disorganized country, everything is so insecure... but how can we stay scared of jihaddi bombs when crossing the road is so much more immediately dangerous?

In the first days of August 2008, it was a nice return to Delhi...except for the tectonic fever which put me in the hospital for six days, and removed any trace of productivity from half the month of August. It warrants no further description; it is in the past.

In Delhi as the monsoon finishes, the haze is so bad the Qutb Minar fades into nothingness. There are sultry days where the dirt collects on your skin. I've continued to explore the complexities of the city, radiating out from my apartment in Katwaria Sarai, and on each trip find new areas. Just south, discovering a new entrance to the Sanjay Van forest brought me past a well-maintained garden and running track, and through a quiet institutional district onto the jungle trails. There's been a mostly-regular morning run into the forest. As you run on the trails, you can regularly spot deer, peacocks, ants, mynahs, beetles as you run through the invading mesquite trees and onto the thousand-year old crumbling rampart walls of Qila Lal Kot. Hiding inside, you can find the occasional caretaker at the dargah-grave of a Sufi saint, Baba Haji Rozbih. One said: "You are welcome to pray." Clambering up onto the venerable, carefully organized boulders, you can see over to the Minar, and the Lotus Temple, and the academic buildings at IIT and JNU. The sun shines, and you cannot hear a single noise from the roads and people of the city.

This is my favourite spot in Delhi, quiet, green, and ancient, and that's where I was on Saturday the 13th when bombs exploded across Delhi.

--

Meetings abounded in the last four weeks. Once out of the hospital, and after a handful of down days, I overfilled each day's schedule meeting with agencies and people. Theres a stack of environmental NGO's, and I've managed to make and connect with people at each of several acronymic institutions: TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute), CSE (Centre for Science and Environment), ATREE (Ashoka Trust for Research and Environment), and WWF (WorldWide Fund for Nature). The most important development, though, was starting a new field notebook, with each entry organized not by trees, but around people. It is fast seeming that information management will be a greater challenge then travel arrangements.

--

The Cyber-greens of Gurgaon: Unfortunately, my much used, much appreciated, Canon G9 camera developed both an image flaw and a lens closure problem, requiring two repairs (one inexpensive, the other not). Fortunately, Canon's repair office was relatively nearby in the hightech satellite town of Gurgaon- playing the role of Bellevue to Delhi's Seattle. My neighbour Rajiv gave me a ride on the back of a motorcycle through one of India's most notorious morning commutes, and dropped me off at Tower A, Cyber-Greens DLF Phase III.

This supershiny office building and its dozen or so companions seem like strange spaceships docked amongst remarkably unremarkable surroundings. Standard Delhi apartment blocks huddle behind them, but the roads between them lack even the most basic amenities like footpaths. Each tower is like a little island of corporate and engineering offices and lunchtime restaurants. Tower A hosts, among other MNCs (Multi-national corporations), Canon and Microsoft. Getting the camera repaired was a simple matter, but the waiting time exploring Gurgaon was a strangely empty time, It is a strange and uninviting place, catering only to the whitecollar warriors that ride in on motorcycles and officecars each morning from Delhi's residential areas. I promised myself I would not return, and when my camera broke AGAIN just two days later, I talked Rajiv into kindly taking a moment to drop it off at the shop for me. Its a strange, strange citygrowing at Gurgaon there; who would expect such quiet green spaces like Sanjay Van to exist between such metropoli?

--

Several visitors coming through Delhi after my return from Mussoorie: Hwei Ling from Malaysia finishing her photo-essay on the Ganga, Julian from Australia arriving in Delhi for studies at Delhi Uni, Sophie from Tasmania finishing a year's travel in India, and Carmen from Florida investing in a visit to see me in Delhi. With each of them, we explored new sites, reconnected with old ones, and tracked down longlost friends- fantastic ruins, rooftop parties, greenspace hunting, and treescouting have all abounded in the last few weeks.

But now it's time to get on with the real fieldwork, and conduct this maniacal project I've gotten myself into. Tonight I take a sleeper train from this terrorized, ancient, hazy, bleeding, magical city, into the Himalayan mountain states of Uttarakhand and Himachal. The trekking gear is packed, the weather looks fine, and I'll look forward to hearing from you next time I dive into the emails.

-yo

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-y- We Live in A Cloud

2008-08-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

-y- We Live in A Cloud

"We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last."
—Gene Wolfe

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*In The Cloud:

The Himalaya rise in 5 waves above the Indian plains, marking the crests of Earth pushed up as India smashes into Asia. This rogue little piece of Gondwanaland has made quite the mashup of the region. You can encounter the mountains just northeast of Delhi. The first, southernmost, wave is the Shivalik Hills, filled with fossils and sal forests. Just behind is a broad Valley, the Doon, where the Uttarakhand state capitol of Dehra Dun sprawls restlessly. The second wave, much more abrupt, rises 2000 metres as fast as it can- jaldi jaldi. On top is perched Mussoorie, founded by the British not so long ago and famous holiday destination. And then just a little higher, the utmost point of this long forested ridge, is one last, uppermost hill. This is Landour, and that's where I lived, in a cloud, for the monsoon season.

The Place: I had sealed up my apartment as best as possible against Delhi's Dust, and moved up in May 2008 for the second 3 months of my Hindi studies. Landour Language School, formerly a missionary training facility, is famous for being the most experienced and organized Hindi program in the country, and was for me, a great location to live amongst the trees and decompress from Delhi. A strange little colony of transient foreigners had sprouted there, radiating around the school and adding to the already foreign presence of the Woodstock International School. This was formerly an American missionary school, and now a premiere, partially secularized, boarding school. With the missionary presence still strong, and many of Delhi's elite escaping the heat in lovely old British estates perched on the hill, the demographic mix was vastly different from the rest of India. One small cluster of Char Dukan, or "Four Stores", offered Western comfort food (waffles?) and one classic convenience store (with topnotch peanut butter and cheese) , but the real business was forty minutes walk steeply down into Mussoorie past all the bazaars. On the Mussoorie Mall, a carnival feeling prevailed on what had used to be a pedestrian mall (now the usual sad honking mess), and in high tourist season the throngs poured up to escape the monsoon heat on the plains.

Woodside: I fortunately arranged lodgings at a lovely old house called Woodside, only accessible by walking trail. During the days, we had a lovely southward view of clouds, but occasionally it would clear for us to see the glimmer of Dehra Dun below, and the Shivaliks modestly bumping up. My landlords, Zarina and Idrak were economists of some renown, Dehli-wallas, and retiring graciously from some illustrious careers (BBC correspondent, UNAID representative, women's rights NGO founder, etc.). It was their first season with multiple students living in the house; me and a handful of others had an entire wing of the house to ourselves, but they never quite worked out all of the kinks and details of their new business relationship.

Fever: Almost immediately upon arrival, I caught a fever. It destroyed me, as fevers do, but several visits to the local hospital and two rounds of antibiotics later, it was gone. A terrifying and educational experience. My landlords were the best hosts I could have imagined, and the locality to recover in was optimal.

The School: From the steps of the school, you could see all the way to the high Himalaya, if there wasn't a cloud in the way. I saw the mountains precisely once. Classes were one-on-one and scattered throughout the building of an old and well built church. Each teacher had their own little teaching nook, and the feel of working with them invariably included the details of their spot- under the stairs, in a partitioned room, up in the tower. There was a Book. The Landour textbook was well-refined but a bit ponderous, very grammar heavy and filled with some obscure vocabulary. I had been craving some organization during my studies in Delhi, but this was too much. I was never able to drop into the rhythm of the book, and this made the whole experience much more interesting. This meant I had to show up with some sort of subject for my hourly sessions with each teacher. So one session for tree parts vocabulary, one for weather, one for geography...and steadily we skimmed the textbook for grammar lessons. It was a delightful surprise to learn some of the grammatical structure, because it somehow made sense, and will make learning future languages that much easier.

The Forest: Years ago, the first tree I learned to identify was the Deodar Cedar. Taking the Tree Tour at the University campus in Seattle, I promised myself that one day I'd see these forests in the far away Himalaya. And this season, that's where I was. But in truth, Landour's lush, dark, tall Cedrus forests were in fact planted by the British only a few generations back. The real natives were higher up into the mountains still. They were still strikingly beautiful, eerily like Western Hemlock, dark and cool. A few monsters had developed, often lightning-struck and now resembling old, decadent trees with many trunks. Interspersed, and struggling for dominance, were the original banj oak trees, often muscled spreading beauties covered in bright ferns. Daily, the mists would roll up through these forests and form a backdrop to the green shrubs, to the extent you could see water droplets dancing in the sky.

The Monsoon: Cold, wet torrents were a common occurence, far beyond raincoats and straight to the umbrellas! Everyone's clothing molded! My passport molded!

*Above The Cloud:

Dodital: In mid-spring, a trip into the mountains brought me onto the trails of the Garwhal Himalaya. After many iterations in planning a route with Ric, another Fulbrighter, a group of five formed and we headed up into the mountains to Dodital. This lake, perched at 3300 metres, was not our original destination, but was well worth the effort to reach. We walked through forests of oak, colored with large flowering rhododendron trees, occasionally through fir forests jabbing at the sky. In the distances and across the valleys we saw large boulders and cliffs, glimpses of icy wastelands clawing at the sky... Our trails were, for the start, well worn villagers' paths, and unfortunately we didnt have the time to climb above into the wilder canyons leading to Darwhal Top peak. At no point did we ever climb above treeline, or leave human habitations far behind. So future adventures must come soon.

*Below the Cloud:

Before, after, during my time in Mussoorie, I managed a handful of trips to Rishikesh and Haridwar, two sacred cities on the Ganges River. Rishikesh lines the River where it leaves that second wave of mountains, and Hardiwar is where the River crosses the Shivaliks. Thus, Rishikesh is upstream of Haridwar. First, Rishikesh, famous amongst both Hindus and foreign travelers as a pilgrimage site. The backpackers all cluster upstream in the canyon, at Laxman Bridge, and almost unanimously are studying yoga. Being there was my first exposure to the backpacker circuit in India: yummy food, trinketry, classes for the taking and cafes for the hanging. And foreigners, lots of foreigners. That added a bit of claustrophobia, but a pleasant enough atmosphere. The canyon walls of the Ganga rise abruptly, abundantly blessed with jungle (a Hindi word, that). Upstream from town several sandy beaches and boulder piles offer spots to sit and contemplate the river. With great fortune and delight, I was able to meet with a handful of Tasmanian friends - Sophie, Sonja, Tyler, Abby & Ben. These last two and I had shared many adventures climbing trees in the forest and then later exploring caves throughout the Island; they had just completed a dream-year of seahorse at a coreal research field station in New Guinea. Abundant stories were passed around, but never enough. We clambered up a side canyon from the River to a set of waterfalls dripping green moss in the dry jungle, and behind the falls found the porous limestone with a handful of small caves. It had been years since we had last been underground together, and there we were inside of the Himalaya...

Haridwar is a busier pilgrimage site, and I arrived at the beginning of the Kanwari pilgrimage into the mountains. Haridwar is already a bustling, overexuberant Hindu dynamo, and the addition of the mostly young and male Kanwaris added to the press. The city stretched right along the river, with a large promenade area stretched across several artifical nearshore islands. Vast open areas of steps and shade trees surround the worshippers, invariably wetting themselves with the sacred water. Long rows of chains and nets are set up to rescue the inevitable involuntary drifters in the strong current. Behind the town, steep jungly hills rise up to hilltop temples. I met a Malaysian friend, Hwei-Ling, in town, and with a bit of good fortune, we found an abandoned staircase leading into the jungle and to an abandoned brick road. We followed this overgrown road on a long ramble up to the temple; it had been the primary route but no longer. It took us past through the forest, to some sandstone pools and sharp vistas down to the river, and eventually to the hypercrowded temple, far too busy for us. We pounded down the main stairs to the town, for a sultry sunset on the Ganga River...people swirled around us like a current of the River.

*After the Cloud:

Back in Delhi now, having completed 6 months (!) of Hindi study and Indian survival. That puts me at the beginning of my project- a year with no schedules! This is a bit of a challenge, perhaps too much freedom placed before me? We shall see what results...until then....write me back and let me know how you are!

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http://landourlanguageschool.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mussoorie
http://www.washington.edu/home/treetour/
http://www.washington.edu/home/treetour/dcedar.html
http://haridwar.nic.in/
http://gov.ua.nic.in/uttaranchaltourism/Dodital.htm
http://www.geocities.com/shirish_w/reports/dodital.htm
http://wikitravel.org/en/Rishikesh

-y-Before The Monsoon

2008-06-22T07:49:00.001-07:00

-y-Before The Monsoon

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Oh, Delhi, layers upon layers of cities stacked upon layers, countless
lives dancing through the streets and buildings. What can I say about
a season spent in a city so easy to hate and so enchanting in its
complexity? How can I explain the overstimulation, the excitement, the
culture shock, the friendliness, the noise, the quiet spaces? The 5
millennia of history and ten previous cities buried under the garbage
of just yesterday? It's a hard place to love, and one of the most
fascinating places I've experienced. Three months in Delhi:

2008: It was the second day of February I arrived, a midnight flight
from shiny Hong Kong dropping me in Delhi and India. A driver, with my
name on a card, was there to fetch me and bring me into to USEFI's-
the US Educational Foundation in India- guesthouse, closer to the
sprawling heart of the city. Arrival on a weekend, unfortunately, was
not quite so optimal. Unlike the attentive and engaging reception I
had expected, hoped for, I awoke my first day in India- a Sunday- to
an empty building save for a handful of guards at the gate. Thus, my
first exploration of the city was solo, with no map to guide me and no
commitments to meet. In retrospect, maybe this WAS the best way to
discover Delhi, but I didn't feel that at the time.

The city was, however, just as I had imagined. Our sun an unfamiliar,
tropical, baleful red eye peering through the hazy air. A smoke taste
to the breath. Dirt, dirt dirt of all descriptions. The treelined
avenues of British New Delhi carried horrendous traffic- autorickshaw
tricycles weaving between cars and buses, motorcycles weaving between
autorickshaws, buses lurching and everyone flowing away. Market places
strangely cobbled together, and people everywhere. At India Gate,
grassy lawns flowed into Rajpath, the King's Way, a seemingly endless
dusty promenade of litter-strewn grass leading to blocky, ornate
government buildings. Cool springtime air to keep the airdust at
ground level. A walking tour was indeed a good introduction to this
part of the city; I would soon learn that few people explore any
distant lengths of the city on foot. As the weather became more and
more assertive I quickly learned why.

Unfortunately, I found the well-meaning USEFI to be less than optimal
in their arrangements for my orientation. Amongst other missteps, the
local facilitator guide (whose help in this crazy city I had been
eagerly awaiting) had not been scheduled, and there was great but
untimely pressure to find a residence and settle down immediately,
i.e. 2 days after arriving. This was pretty much impossible, as my
city skills were barely developed. At that point I could not find
Connaught Place, Qtub Minar, Lal Qilat, or even Tughlukubad on a map.
As expected, my visit to the Foreigners Registration office was a
queuing adventure of the most frustrating kind- Indian government
bureaucrats have a reputation as being most challenging- I found this
to be true. My arrival was not quite as unstressful as I could have
hoped.

But before too long I made some friends, and that, beyond a doubt, is
the secret to survival in Delhi. Akhil, my facilitor, Jason, another
Fulbright scholar, and especially Walt, an Urdu linguistics scholar,
showed me how to move in the city, how to cross the street, where to
buy this and that, and simply how to live there. Quickly enough, the
social circle grew and with it the accumulated wisdom of these Delhi
residents and travelers. 2 weeks of catsitting for Jason took the
sting out of the househunting, and a visit with Walt to his old
neighbourhood of Katwaria Sarai yielded an excellent apartment rental.

Delhi: Sprawling, tucked between the brown scunge of the sacred Yamuna
River and an almost flat ridge of extensively quarried rock. No
skyline to speak of, no place at the true heart of the city. It is
actually eight, or eleven cities, built atop another, stretching into
the distant past. The two most prominent: the old Mughal city, built
around the now empty Red Fort Palace, holding twisting markets and
crumbling buildings, offering density and mystery. And New Delhi,
drawn on paper and laid down in straight lines and roundabouts, lined
with trees and monuments and placements around ruins, offering green
views, gardens, and horizontal sprawl. Surrounding all are countless
markets, villages and colonies now morphed into the swarm; for the
most part residential neighbourhoods encircling distinct commercial
areas. By visiting these nuclei- Jangpura, Lajpat Nagar, Rohini,
Friends Colony Greater Kailash 1, Hauz Khas, Anandan Niketan- you can
catch the flavour of each marketplace. For the hungry, there are
street vendors, fast food, fancy restaurants, and all categories in
between. Everywhere is crumbling infrastructure. Public space
maintenance seems perpetually at a minimum. Walking between these
destinations is possible but never simple. It requires constant
attention to motorcycles and other vehicles that follow few rules. In
South Delhi, where I live, the subway Metro is still under
construction and the auto-rickshaw drivers in their green tricycles
are the key links. Arguing with them over prices is a constant
struggle and a constant necessity. They drive fast and they drive
dangerously. Between these neighbourhoods, slums built of temporary
materials have developed. The haves travel past the have-nots on the
roads and we are a world apart. Throughout the entire region, stone
monuments and ruins stand in various states of disrepair. With other
interested friends, I soon found the premier exploration activity in
Delhi to be archeology hunting- finding the old buildings amidst the
new sprawl. It makes a great companion to treespotting, and connects
the current metropolis to its historical and natural roots.

Katwaria Sarai is a student neighbourhood, tucked just south of the
ambitious engineers at the Indian Institute of Technology, just east
of the left-wing students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, just north
of the Sanjay Van forest leading to the tall spire at Qtub Minar, and
just west of my Hindi school in Malviya Nagar. Somehow this means
there is greenery in almost all directions, although not immediately
nearby. Rents are nice and low, the area is relatively quiet, there is
a nightly volleytyball game in the park, and in the 5th floor
apartment I have one of Delhi's finest balcony views of the forest
leading to the Minar. This 72m spire was the world's tallest building
in 1386 when it was built, and stands alone in the south of the city.
A massive victory monument spire, I find myself often visualizing some
familiar Eucalypts and spruce trees against its height. Delhi would
appear fantastical with a tree that tall leaping out of the low
sprawling buildings.

Each morning, a student again, on a grant studying Hindi for several
months, I walked along the busy main street, across cracked pavement,
gaping sewer holes, several species of trees, past the stores into the
market area, into the residential neighbourhood, and into a basement-
HindiGuru! This small school, recently founded, was both the backbone
of a routine and my introduction to an entirely new language. Hindi is
an orderly language, with only a handful of sounds foreign to English
ears, but until recently very few foreigners studied it. Subsequently,
few teachers have experience teaching the language to foreigners, and
there are few study materials available. Despite this, and despite any
other frustrations, within a few weeks I was reading Devanagri letters
and putting together sentences that helped indeed on the streets of
Delhi. The writing script is filled with letters that look hauntingly
familiar. there are squiggles like 3, 5, 2, P, U all in
abundance...but, like clothes hangers on a rail, these letters hang
from the notebook line rather than rest on top of them. Learning a new
language is a lovely experience.

Landmark trees in Delhi are abundant and interesting, if you take the
effort to find them. In line with my project goals, there I was
navigating by trees, using them as landmarks and through them learning
about the monsoonal forests of India. Mostly thorny, scrubby, with a
short season of bright flowers that I was fortunate to catch, the
trees of Delhi are diverse and interesting. Exploring throughout
Delhi, it's been a treat finding interesting individual trees and
giving them names- there's the 4:30 Fig Tree at Connaught Place, the
Shatter Palm in Malviya Nagar, the sacred Ashoka Fig at the Ashoka
Buddhist Monastery, and countless others waiting to be found. Luckily,
a wonderful field guide has been published for Delhi's trees by one
Mr. Pradip Krishen. It's one of the best books I've encountered
anywhere, and before long I had met and befriended the author. Not
desert, not rainforest, but something in the middle, a few
surprisingly large pockets of forest remain in Delhi to explore.
Ironically, these remaining and critical reserves are mostly taken
over by an exotic Acacia from Central America- the Dehli residents
reconnecting with nature in these forests are actually amidst a
terrible crisis.

People in Delhi are almost invariably friendly-unless they are trying
to make money off of you- and truly the small effort to smile reaps
great rewards. In truth though, there's been some interesting culture
shock observations, insurmountable realities distinct from my previous
homes. Three of these have caused me more thought than others. There
is an attention shock: Personal space and privacy is at a premium
here, and people innocently watch whatever you are doing. Just being a
Westerner is cause for outright staring. While I realise there is no
harm intended, this is a difficult thing to adapt to. There is the
gender shock: India has an highly skewed sex ratio, partially caused
by a strong Hindu preference for sons, leading to infanticide and
malnourishment for daughters. The ratio throughout India is something
like 91 F: 100 M, and in Delhi, 83 F: 100 M. This is, demographically,
unsustainable, and will inevitably cause huge problems in the future.
For the expatriate just arriving in Delhi, there's quite the element
of gender shock. And there's the infrastructure shock. Public spaces,
streets, markets, crumbling ruins, are invariably degrading. This is
not only a fact of a developing nation, it is combined with cultural
and population pressures.

Three celebrations:
The holiday of Holi in mid March, is a festival of colours, and
throughout Hindu India a waterfight with brightly coloured dyes
commences in grand fashion. Coloured powders (almost invariably toxic
and difficult to clean off) are thrown around with an excess of water,
and bottles of bhang lassi- hashish yogurt- are passed around. Jason
and I mobilized a group and went to J. Nehru Uni, where hundreds of
students were dancing to music, throwing colourful dyes, and running
around in rainbow-stoned fashion. Undoubtedly, we would do well to
adopt this holiday in Western countries. The culturally sanctioned
abandonment of reserve was refreshing and beautiful...but it took me
several days to scrub off the green dye.

An Iranian New Year's party, on the spring equinox, again at JNU, with
Reza and Omid. I had met Reza in the glacially slow queue of the
Foreigners Registration Office, and as we waited to sort out my
arrival papers and his visa crisis, there was much time to make
friends. I was invited to a modern celebration, a newer Muslim take on
an ancient Zoroastrian celebration. There was a bonfire...and to move
on through to the next year...you must jump through the bonfire.
Someone was throwing firecrackers- loud ones- another was pouring
kerosene on the fire in alarming quantitites. But what could I do? I
needed to move through into the year 1385....or be forever stuck in
the past...I jumped through the fire!

Another celebratory event, with a darker shadow, arrived in mid April.
The Olympic Torch ran through the central promenade of New Delhi,
Rajpath, with not a public eye upon it. Throughout the city, Tibetan
protests were heating up as Beijing sent the torch to their country of
exile, while troubled times took place in Tibet. Elaborate plans were
plotted and deflected to disturb the torch rally. The city of Delhi
arranged for 17,000 police and soldiers (!!!) to be on hand. Early in
the day, my Thai friend Nin and I walked around the area asking the
security where the public viewing area was to see this sort-of
historic event. In all good faith, they invariably thought a moment
before telling us that there was no public viewing area; the torch
would run in a security vaccuum and only media cameras would see it.
The event was hidden from the people, it aroused no sense of human
kinship, the Tibetan protesters were deflected and arrested , and the
traffic on the roads was even worse that evening.

The Heat arrived with the month of April, with a long string of days
above 40 degrees C and touching 46. A defining characteristic of the
city, it knew no mercy. Autorickshaw rides in late afternoon, stuck
in traffic at the height of bus exhaust pipes, were heady and hot
experiences, but with some strange enthusiasm I tried to keep walking
around and exploring the city on foot. I was glad to discover that I
could tolerate the Heat relatively well. This is not to imply that it
was not a force to be reckoned with. Adopting the afternoon siesta nap
is a difficult thing for Westerners; we have spent our whole lives on
a different daily schedule. Delhi was the first place I experienced
such intense heat combined with such pollution on a major scale, and
it was a sobering thought to think of the world's rising temperature
...such heat may be commonplace throughout our world soon enough.

Delhi is an easy city to hate, but its a hard city to love. I'm
working at it, though, and I think I've managed to succeed in many
ways. It's a strange thing to call such a massive and complicated
place, filled to the brim with humanity, my home for any length of
time, but its been a good spring. I did escape for a spell, though,
and I'm now in the foothills of the Mountains at another language
school. This is a story for another day, and as for now, I hope that
I've given you some sense of what my three months in Delhi were like.

And how was your springtime?

=>Look: www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-BeforeTheMonsoon/
=>Read: http://treeoctopus.blogspot.com/
=>Look: www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-BeforeTheMonsoon/

=>Learn: http://utopianvision.co.uk/hindi/alphabet/
=>Visit: http://wikitravel.org/en/Delhi
=>XY>XX: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7466916.stm
=>Shade: http://www.bharatonline.com/delhi/gardens/index.html
=>Zoom: http://images.google.co.in/images?q=delhi+autorickshaw&btnG=Search+Images
=>Zoroastrian: http://www.iranchamber.com/culture/articles/calendar_systems_origins.php
=>1385: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esfand
=>BirdEye: http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&hl=en&q=delhi&ie=UTF8&ll=28.541779,77.193804&spn=0.033553,0.075188&z=14
=>Relay: http://www.google.co.in/search?q=delhi+olympic+torch+2008

-y- Stone Teeth

2008-06-05T08:44:00.001-07:00

In Late January 2008: Before Delhi, before the heat, before the Olympic Torch, before the Mughal ruins, before Indian botany, before learning Hindi, before the Colour holiday of Holi, before the Deodar Cedars, before the fever, before India!...I was traveling southwards into Yunnan Province of China.

http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-StoneTeeth/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-StoneTeeth/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-StoneTeeth/
http://treeoctopus.blogspot.com/

I had just said farewells to ZZ, somehow navigated purchasing a train ticket in Huihua, and was on my way to the lovely city of Kunming, Yunnan's capital and a city famous for its friendly lifestyle. The sleeper train was a pleasant experience- clean beds, the single friendly English speaker nearby, the bored Red Army soldiers on leave, a linear experience of China outside the window. I discovered that my mangling of my phrasebook's two Chinese tongue twisters was an effective icebreaker ("sishisi zhi shishizi shi side"- with full tonal complexities) and could quickly make my neighbours at ease with the Foreigner in their midst. A law student from Beijing, Liu Jingzu befriended me and we talked at length of life in the capital. He at one point borrowed a guidebook I was carrying and read through the 30 pages of Chinese history written there. In the morning, as we arriving in Kunming, he says to me, "What I read in your book, that is not what we learned in school." I wonder...?

Kunming was psychically far healthier than Chongqing. Yunnan province was sunny, subtropical, friendly, and transforming itself fast into a residential and backpacker destination of the highest quality. There was clean air, an aura of relaxation, pedestrian friendly urban planning, and smiles all around. There seemed to be little of the repetitive Han urbania that characterized the recently developed towns, and much of the urbane sophistication that invites the traveler to linger and the expatriate to settle. A quintessential backpacker's hostel, The Hump, was situated directly over a cluster of bars and across from the massive pedestrian mall and commercial hub. Staying there was just the antidote required from the isolated snowy adventures with at Wulingyuan. A Yunnanese dinner with other travelers, working for China's biggest outdoor guiding service, offered a glimpse into the new opportunities in ecotourism and how that was feeding back into landscape management.

The sunshine was lovely, and in fact my week in Yunnan was the only respite from the cold while in China. Number 2 on my limestone dissolved rock tour: There was a famous attraction nearby, Shi-Lin, or the Stone Forest, where a globally rare and regionally common rock formation of limestone sheets and pinnacles was placed on display. I went there with a Quebecois, Maxime, and after an intense search for the correct bus in downtown Kunming, made it to the gates of this famous place. It was all manicured to an extent just on this side of tasteless. While the admission fee was ludicrously steep, and the overdevelopment of the place glaring, inside we discovered countless nooks and crannies amidst the sharp walls of rock. The blind alleys and steep drops, mostly safely accessible by a mass of staircases and rails- reminded me distinctly of a cave system open to the sky. On each formation, the waterflow pathways were very clear, obviously showing how these slices of sharp rock were formed by dissolution. The ridgetops were too sharp too walk on, and the areas below exhibited the dissolved shafts and clearings formed by pooled water. If these were teeth of stone, these were the incisors.

Early morning found me on a bus with two Danes, Dorothea and Miette, towards the Naxi city of Lijiang, at the eastern edge of the Himalaya. The bus ride, luxurious as the seats were, was an all-day affair marred mainly by the excessivly loud-and exceedingly bad- vampire kung-fu movies forced upon us. The city, a justifiably famous tourist destination, is the capital of the Dongba Naxi people, who are a recognized Minority and maintain a one of the last living pictoglyphic writing languages. We arrived after dark to this labyrinthine city of decorated wooden buildings, countless alleys and bubbling canals, and spent a mildly torturous two hours searching for the famed Mama Naxi's guesthouse. (In the daylight, we would see just how closely we had wandered past it in the dark.) Mama Naxi and her husband host a series of three guesthouses just offset from the tourist core of Lijiang, and have finetuned their services to cover exactly what the Foreigner backpacker is seeking: smiling hospitality, banana pancakes, and each house with a friendly courtyard in the middle.

Exploring Lijiang was truly a delight. A friend in Kunming had said tourism had "imploded the core of this city," and was largely correct. Outside of the old city, the usual Han Chinese urbania dominated in its many familiar forms. Inside the old city, the wonderfully dense buildings were lined with tourist shops and cafes and restaurants. Motor vehicles were excluded from the narrow streets. Carved decoration abounded; numerous plazas beckoned; staircases led up to vistas; corridors followed singing canals to secret places; twisting junctions offered challenges to disoriented pedestrians. Eveningtime offered bars and discos for the weary travelers, paper boats bearing candles drifting down the canals, a difficult search through softly lit streets for your accommodations- all things perfectly measured for the tourist. A daytrip with the Danes to Tiger Leaping Gorge was at once spectacular and disappointing. This canyon flowing from the Himalaya, the deepest in the world, was only briefly and wonderfully experienced in the two hours given for walking its paths; but by day's end, five hours had been spent driving against those two. Despite my enthusiasms for all landforms, I felt like I saw too little of this one to say much of it.

After Lijiang, the old city of Dali, another backpacker haven at the base of the mountains. I found Dali to be seemingly much more authentic, if less tourist-optimized, than Lijiang. Here, the old city was laid out within city walls, on a rectangular grid surrounding ancient stone guard towers. Despite the strong tourist presence, and unexpectedly home to a growing population of Chinese hippies, Dali also displayed more with the daily life of people living, learning, working, or otherwising. As for the backpacker scene, it seemed to be a modern reflection of 1970s India. It was here that I met Jaja, a young Chinese woman obsessed with reggae and wearing a wonderfully multicolored outfit; she was a symbol of modern Chinese youth culture if ever I had met one, and showed a seemingly safe pathway for counterculture in the present day.

Too soon, back to Kunming, and onto a plane eastwards to Guilin, or "Ozomanthus Forest." This was the third and final stop on my limestone tour. It was here that I returned to the reality of the winter weighing down most of China. It was cold, cold in a way that shut down cities and froze people to death. Guilin is the famous city and region that you may have seen in a postcard- countless triangular mountains arising from a flat plain, crowded stone cuspids. The scenery is justly famous and there is a well-established tourist presence there and in Yanshuo an hour's drive south. I had arranged to meet a caver named Ian, an expatriate from California and an exceptionally pivotal fellow as he was fluent in Chinese. Through him, and an Australian named Diane, I managed to not only somewhat stay warm in GuiLin but also explore some of these amazing mountains.

These strange hills are all made of limestone, and almost all have caves within. Within Guilin city, we climbed the footpath to the summit of one, and along the way could see the vertical shafts formed by collected rainwater dissolving down. Halfway down the mountain, a large cave extended directly through the mountain, forming a giant window. Some locals had built several stone chairs and tables, and within sight were dozens more sharp mountains, with arched cave entrances winking at you like giant, lidded eyes.

A caving trip with Ian and his Dutch friend Martin had to be radically reassessed due to the icy rain and dastardly cold wind. We found ourselves, after a bumpy cold bus ride, in a village inexplicably called "Ocean" (and far from it). With our plans to go farther into the hills scrapped (likely a good thing in retrospect), we walked around until we found ourselves at a small Buddhist temple at the base of one of the limestone teeth. After exploring some monuments placed nearby, we wandered into the monastery, where through Ian's translation we made friends with several nuns. They showed us around the temple, read our fortunes, and served us the most delicious steamed dumplings around a toasty fire. As the capstone to this serendipity, one of the nuns walks us around the corner and shows us the entrance to a cave extending into the mountain. So, a success after all- only a single short passage but nonetheless another underground experience in China!

Yuzi Paradise: Ian invited me to check out the sculpture park/art hotel that he worked out, just south of Guilin on the road to Yangshuo. "It's too wierd not to come see," he said. Yuzi Paradise, or Fool's Paradise, is at once the world's largest sculpture park, an absolutely lovely but bizarre hotel, a large area of undeveloped mountain teeth landscape, and simply put one the strangest places I have been. The place has its beginnings in Taiwanese cemetaries, in which one individual family somehow made an excessive fortune. The patriarch of the family decided to create a sculpture park, and has been continually collecting and sponsoring amazing sculptures, all semi-crowded into a large campus with Fool's Mountain right in the middle. There are some brilliantly strangely designed residences, offices, and a hotel there. Ian's role as marketing director allowed him some time and freedom to be a most gracious host, and through his generosity I experienced to magic days at a magical place. I checked into the austere but warm hotel for two strange days. This included a lovely breakfast each day, and an icy climb of Fool's Mountain in the centre, and ample time for contemplation of the vast variety of sculpture scattered throughout, much of it commissioned, much of it excellent, much of it not.

I was fortunate to arrive at the same time as a delegation from Outward Bound, an American-now international- company providing outdoor training and teambuilding exercises. A group of five had arrived in hopes of arranging access to the undeveloped land in just outside the sculpture park. Unfortunately, the fear was that the place would be developed soon enough and they were having difficulty in setting it up. Ian and I joined this group, including one of the founders of Outward Bound, the Singapore director, the Taiwan director, and staff from Beijing, in exploring the backcountry of Fool's Paradise.

Truly, the terrain there is strange and magical. This is how I interpreted it: Imagine a flat landscape of soluble rock. Overtime, and generally evenly spaced, drainage channels form. These little grooves dissolve the rock and turn into larger channels, which become gorges. The flat landscape is now gridded with streams. As the process continues, eventually there is more stream than rock, and now in between the remaining islands of rock is a flat floodplain. These islands are tall and sharp like stone teeth. Each one has a cave entrance. We explored a handful of these caves, more complex than the one at the monastery. Our lack of torches kept us out of trouble, and we scrambled around the entrances, explored an abandoned shepherd's building, looked at the strange scenery.

I visited a language school just to the south in Yangshuo, a pleasant town firmly on the backpacker circuit, and gave a brief lecture on tree biology to English students. I had been intending to stay longer, but the weather was building up in an intimidating fashion. Better to head back to Guilin and be early for my train to Hong Kong.

Thus, towards the end of January, began my entry into China's horrible transportation crunch of the Lunar New Year. Gong Hay Fat Choy! The bus ride to Guilin was through a torrential rainstorm, luckily on a flat road. In Guilin city, the train station was filled with people obviously waiting. With a bit of work, I discovered from the single English-speaking railway staff that my train was delayed, probably until the morning. Other foreigners there told me horror stories that seemed corroborated by the television broadcasts- friends stuck for 36 hours on trains with no water, no food, no exit...

The world's largest migration of people occurs in midwinter as millions of Chinese workers are granted what is often their only vacation and join their families for the Lunar New Year. This is admirably fostered by the railways- except when ice and snow conspire to make a mess of things. Televisions scattered throughout town showed amazing pictures of crowded train stations (Guilin was barely a disaster yet); there was a sense that things were about to break down. The cities electricity turned off several times for hour-long stretches. I wondered if I'd make my airplane to India. Morningtime brought an alternative that I was privileged to afford- without too much trouble I walked into a travel agent and arranged a plane ticket to Shenzhen, just outside Hong Kong. Soon enough I was at the airport, just in time to wait for 7 hours. Scheduled flights were delayed across the board, especially northwards, and it seemed a close thing that I'd be making it to the coast at all. Television screens showed us Army soldiers shoveling roads for heating fuel supplies to relieve trapped villages from frosty deaths.

But good fortune [for me] prevailed, the flight took off, and that evening I was near enough to the Pacific, in Hong Kong's industrial twin Shenzhen. Good fortune to encounter Jaja there, and spend a rainy day with her exploring the city. Not much for the tourist actually, although many people set foot over from Hong Kong for the experience of having entered China. We didn't see the true wonders of the city, though, the manufacturing warehouses, huge factories capable of unearthly outputs of things. I wonder how many of my beloved childhood plastic toys came from Shenzhen?

And then it was back to Hong Kong, delightful shiny city of islands. Unlike millions of others throughout the country, I had made it to my destination. I caught up with the handful of friends I had made there before, retrieved my backpack with all its warm clothes, and mentally prepared to go to India. South of Hong Kong Island, Lamma Island offered a wonderful retreat for gearing up- no cars, just walking trails and boats. Tramping along the crest of the island was a good, relatively sunny, farewell to Hong Kong, farewell to China.

I loved my travels in Taiwan and Mainland China; in some ways it was just what I expected but the quality and friendliness of what I was able to access continually surprised me. Its an amazing country; the world's eyes are upon it, and now I have some friends there to bring some humanity to the mass of the Middle Kindgom.

And then, on the 2nd of February, 2008, I headed to India to begin my Fulbright Scholarship. I'm there now. Its overstimulating and overwhelming, and staying alive, motivated, and happy takes a good dose of energy. I'm generally succeeding at it. Apologies for the four months delay in sending this, but there are many more stories to come.....

Please write me back!

::Eyes::
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-StoneTeeth/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-StoneTeeth/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-StoneTeeth/
http://treeoctopus.blogspot.com/

::Ideas::
http://www.terragalleria.com/asia/china/shilin/shilin.html
http://www.gokunming.com/
http://wikitravel.org/en/Lijiang
http://wikitravel.org/en/Dali
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/811
http://www.world-heritage-tour.org/visitSite.php?siteID=811
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilin
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/parksdir/p&g/yuzi-para/yuzi.shtml
http://www.yuzile.com/
http://wikitravel.org/en/Shenzhen
http://www.12hk.com/area/Lamma/LammaIsland.shtml
http://www.12hk.com/area/Lamma/What2do_Lamma.shtml

Thanks!

-y- Disintegrating Landscapes

2008-04-12T22:16:00.000-07:00

-y- Disintegrating Landscapes
January 2008...Chongqing, Sichuan...Yangtze...Hubei...Hunan

[http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-DisintegratingLandscapes/]
[http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-DisintegratingLandscapes/]
[http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-DisintegratingLandscapes/]
[http://treeoctopus.blogspot.com/]

Click your teeth. Thats calcium. It dissolves ever so slowly, slightly acidic, when exposed to water. From your skull to your toebones, its the same stuff that seashells and chalk are from. Those ancient dead seashells and coral reefs are now China's major bedrock, forming some of the most spectacular terrain on Earth. The limestone lands that underly China are literally disintegrating as rainwater runs down it towards the ocean. The natural values of these places are, like so many other places, disintegrating as China develops its economy. Some of the world's absolutely iconic rock formations are in China, and what better goals for travels in China then to see the wondrous spires and needles and mountains? ... And what better time to go than in the absolute middle of winter...?

Cliches, certainly, and scarce perceptions, likely, fail when describing a country so vast and prominent. Suffice to say that while I had adequately planned my trip, I didn't have much of a mental image of what was in store.

My arrival in Chongqing was midnight and cold. I had an orange from Hong Kong, which was not allowed past the customs desk, so I stood well behind the line and munched it down. The two security guards laughed at me, the passport fellow stamped me in promptly, and that's how I entered China.

Chongqing Shi: It's a sprawling city, one of the world's largest, in Sichuan Province, somewhat in the middle of China. The air is bright white with smog and haze. Everywhere was cement, construction, and people. I had never been to a city so vast and incomprehensible, and while I recognized tourist zones and market alleys and pedestrian malls, I maintained a sense of disorientation. Like Taipei, it was stylistically familiar from Chinatown of San Francisco, but growing too fast too allow any rational conception of the place. I explored the place with Marie, a Quebecois, my guide and stabilizer in Chongqing. From the top of a market zone we could see over to the Yangzte, appearing slow and muddy past on its developed floodplain. Despite the disorientation and overstimulation, a plan began to form.

Rather than going westwards to the mountains deeper into Sichuan, I followed a ten year dream down the Yangtze River. Just downriver, above the recently flooded Three Gorges Dam, this superlative river slices through the dissolving rock just north of the plateau of Wulingyuan, or Zhangjiajie, where sandstones (river dirt) and quartz (tetrahedral silicon dioxide) and limestone (those calcium seashells) combine to form a fantasyland of spires and towers. Even more intriguing was the presence of a certain tree..the Metasequoia, or Dawn Redwood. Somewhere in this National Park was this most famous tree, and it would be a singular honour to see it in its native habitat.

The Metasequoia's story is well known to any fossil nerd. A few dozen million years ago, it covered the world; I have cracked open rocks in the Northwestern USA's Okanagan desert territory and seen the feathery leaves well preserved. But it is long gone from these regions, and though its cousins the Redwoods and Giant Sequoias live on in grand fashion in California...the Dawn Redwood was just a forgotten dream.... In 1948, though, it was found again, alive and well in a small area in China, and with great excitement was planted around the world as an ornamental tree. As a flagship species for relict plant species anywhere, the Dawn Redwood is an interesting tree worthy of any pilgrimage.

The fast boat down the Yangtze left before sunrise. Marie bundled me onto a bus, and somehow I managed to make it to the hydrofoil boat just before it left the docks. As we raced downstream towards Yichang city in Hubei Province, the sun rose and revealed the rock cliffs and sweeps of the Three Gorges. After years of reading about the construction of the world's largest dam, there we were zooming through the famous Gorges. Terraced farms crept to the waters edge between arrogant cliffs of limestone, and frequently strange eyes and spots on the walls attested to the caves riddling the landscape. Shipping traffic chugged upstream and made waves that splashed against the walls. For several hours I stood on a small side deck and watched the mist dance along the rocks. Somewhere underwater was the old streambed of the canyon. But despite the new lake, the rock will continue to dissolve for countless epochs, and the giant dam will dissolve, and the river will keep falling and keep carving.

Yichang was a lovely town, prosperous and shiny with its proximity to the dam and the pull of the Gorge's tourism. Amongst the department stores and cafes and clothing shops, a sense of optimism prevailed. The city spills down to the River and looks across to the steep hills. It was here I met Fan Zao Zao- "Morning morning", a Yichang native with dreams of foreign places, a deep love of China, and my much appreciated travel companion to Wulingyuan. At 28 years, she was to my eyes a clever young woman with years of adventures ahead. But she offered me an important cultural insight as she explained how, to her family and friends, she was actually an aging unmarried, eccentric woman. She described herself as 'thinking differently from all of her friends'... Living through China's dramatic cultural changes of the day, Zao Zao offers to me a clear reminder of how conducive my good fortune- gender and culture and family- has been to a non-traditional life path. She had traveled through China and was ready to scout around the world, a familiar sentiment. ZZ spoke English with, inexplicably, a Swedish accent, which she claims she learned from backpackers in hostels. My trip to Wulingyuan would have been inconceivably more difficult without her, and she offered countless insights into life for our generation in China.

Our train journey onto the plateau was crowded, lowest class fare and a great opportunity to observe. The thing that struck me first- and continues to astound me- was that the passengers on this train had a vastly different relationship with the floor. Litter, trash, spit, junk, snot, earwax, rubbish- all of it went onto the train floor, and periodically a worker would come and sweep away the giant mass of it. Different but undesirable. Even more tragic, vile, and uncondonable was the littering out the window. No matter the attempts at cultural relativity, this defouling of the landscape is absolutely wrong. China, visible through the train window, appeared to me to be a trashed place.

We arrived in Hunan Province to a discover everything iced over. I thought of my lovely warm sleeping bag and coat hidden away in a backpack in a dorm room in Hong Kong. The scale of the park entrance hinted at the numbers of tourists that came in warmer weather; we slid our way across the icy ground and hopped on a bus which brought us into the heart of the pinnacles.

Inside China's first National Park...a magic place! Limestone, quartz, sandstone sandwiched togther in countless vertical shapes. Let me count the ways of describing vertical rocks: acme, apex, apogee, climax, cone, crest, crown, culmination, eminence, needle, obelisk, peak, pyramid, spire, steeple, summit, tower, zenith! All of these were there, iced over and slowly crumbling, with trees twisted to their flanks. We arrived to the lowest level, where the river floods and the forest is lush and subtropical. Wulingyuan, astonishingly biodiverse, has in the realm of 850 species of trees, and pleasantly many of them were labelled with wooden signs. It was here I saw Gingko biloba...and Pinus roxburghii...and the list goes on and on. But no Metasequoia! It was in another section of the park...we'd have to take a bus there.

We purchased snowshoes- woven grass shoes to tie to our boots- and trundled our way up steep staircases past the boarded up tea-stalls towards the plateau. Countless plants, planes of rock with swallow's nests, strange vistas of a forest of cliffs, my first sight of monkeys in the wild! As we went higher and higher, it became icier and icier- the guard rails and leaves covered in perfect casts of ice. The landscape was hung about with cold dark clouds, but the collection of strange mountains matched every dream I had of China's wonderful landscapes.

On the plateau, roads led off to a small village where we had arranged a stay at a small farmland hotel. After trudging for an hour we found the place, nestled in a chilly valley and utterly covered in snow. Inside, a friendly family hosted us for two nights and set us up with a guide-their teenage daughter- for exploring the overlooks at the plateau edge. There were precisely four activities available to me: Watching TV in Mandarin with the family and ZZ while sitting around a blanket-covered kerosene heater, eating the simple but nourishing food, huddling upstairs under three blankets, or watching the snow come down. All were limited in their entertainment value.

Exploring the overlooks, we saw a huge natural bridge, countless pinnacles that vaguely resembled faces or animals, and an interesting area where countless padlocks were secured to the rails. After a bit of inquiry, I learned that lovers came here and left the locks as symbols of their undying love....after securing the padlocks I suspect the key is thrown over the cliff. In fine fashion, of course, a little shop nearby sells padlocks.

As the day progressed and the snow came down, it came to pass that the buses stopped running, and that we would have to walk out of the park in a different direction. More devastatingly, there was no way to get to the Metasequoia, far on the other side of the park. Back at our lodgings, I huddled under the stack of blankets and tried desperately to scheme some sort of pathway to see these trees, but to no avail. My entire connection to the human world around me was through Zao Zao's translation, and my ability to manifest any ideas was pretty minimal. As we tried to keep from freezing solid, watching surprisingly engaging and colourful TV shows, it became apparent that the Metasequoia would not be seen on this trip to Wulingyuan. Despite the surreal disintegrating landscape, and ZZ's excellent company, I had to fight the feeling of failure. But it wouldn't have been worth tracking down if it was going to be easy....

Our walk out was cold but safe, and our bus rides back to the train lines uneventfully arduous. ZZ and I said our farewells at the train station, and I headed south towards Kunming and sunny Yunnan Province. I did not know then what this winter's snow held in store for China. It was the first wave of what turn out to being China's worst snowstorm in living history, and it precipated a transport crunch of unprecedented proportions.

And, it is worth mentioning: unlike most other coniferous trees, the Metasequoia is deciduous. For all that energy we would have spent to see this famous tree...we would have found it a wooden skeleton, with not a single green leaf upon it!

[http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-DisintegratingLandscapes/]
[http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-DisintegratingLandscapes/]
[http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-DisintegratingLandscapes/]
[http://treeoctopus.blogspot.com/]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/spire
http://images.google.co.in/images?q=three+gorges
http://www.metasequoia.org/
http://www.china.org.cn/english/kuaixun/74936.htm
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/hunan/zhangjiajie/
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-132086131.html

-Katwaria Sarai, Delhi

-y- Secret Dreams of Taiwan

2008-03-13T06:42:00.001-07:00

-y- Secret Dreams of Taiwan

==

Lookables:
www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-secretdreamsoftaiwan/
www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-secretdreamsoftaiwan/
www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-secretdreamsoftaiwan/

Another prelude to entering Asia: Taiwan is carving out its own identity between its longings for the East and West. With the sword above their heads, Taiwan is both natural wonder and urban buzz. I arrived on the first day of 2008, only hours after watching the fireworks in Hong Kong.

I actually knew next to nothing about Taiwan, but the more I learned of it the more interesting it seemed. The short lived Nationalist's Republic of China entering into exile, the magnificent forests and peaks soaring 4000 meters, the density of humanity, the patronage of the USA, the identity crises with China. It was a secret dream in many ways, one that I was intensely curious about but could only get one fleeting glimpse.

Through some strange circumstance of electricity, I had reestablished contact with my neighbours Jody and Oliver from Colorado- now married and teaching English in TaiChung City. Without much forethought, I had decided to visit them. In addition, there was the discovery that up in the mountains...there were giant Chamaecyparis trees that had been standing for three millenia. You can call them junipers, cedars, cypresses, no matter what, they must be worth seeing.

The delight of seeing Oliver and Jody was matched by my relief to have their help navigating our way into Taipei, a sprawling city. There wasn't much English spoken or written anywhere. We found ourselves at the Lonsheng temple, crowded with people praying, burning incense, and leaving offerings to the ghosts of their ancestors. We continued Danshui Beach, a carnival spot filled with strolling citizens and unhealthy food. There was a festive atmosphere that was infectious and it was exciting to be amongst new people and new landscapes. It was educational to watch how Oliver, Jody, and I absolutely failed to blend in. Like many of the other foreigners I met in Taiwan and China, they were teaching English (in a city called TaiChung, to the south). In Taiwan, a combination of high wages, low costs, and helpful government services made it a sweet deal for them. But the sense of alienation was definitely there, and although happy, there was a very small social scene for the foreigners in Taichung.

We navigated onto the high speed train south, and to their lovely home. Taichung is a relatively quiet Taiwanese city, still agog with countless two-wheel scooterbikes and with a perpetual haze. There is lots of fast food, convenience stores, stuff for sale, just like America! There were pretty girls selling betel nut, countless scooter shops, bubble tea, and occasionally narrow alleys filled with vendors. As a practical reminder, they gave me a card, upon which was written in Chinese something like - "I am lost, please help me return to this address." The intricate lines blur in front of our eyes. Navigating through the city was an exercise in learning some Chinese syllables- distinguishing zheng and zhong, for example. The best way to see the city, of course, was as a passenger on a scooter. At a barren, slatey, sunny city park, Oliver gestured out to the horizon. "On a clear day you can see that we're surrounded by mountains."

After two pleasant days, I headed northwards to rendezvous with a group of forestry students for a splendid adventure. Through correspondence I had acquainted with Ya-hui Lin (Olive) and Liu Chun-I (Jason), two students at Taiwan National University. All credit goes to Ya-hui for setting up an expedition to the mountain aboriginal villages of Jenshibao and Smangus. We were off to see the elders of the forest.

Taiwan is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, but in the ultra-steep highlands there are huge forested areas. Above the coastal plain, which is industrialized to a presumably maximal extent, there are several villages of Taiwanese aboriginals. These people, possibly the ancestors of the Melanesians, were here before the Nationalist Chinese arrived to found a country, and have been displaced to the highlands. Unexpectedly, many of them have converted to Christianity, but still respect these trees as sacred. Smangus, the last town in Taiwan to connect to the electrical grid, has put energy into developing a hiking trail and tourist infrastructure based around their giant trees. Jenshibao, on the other hand, has only a poorly marked trail to bring you to them.

To reach these towns, we rented a car and joined their classmates Tai-Koh-Shu and Ying. The highways soon gave way to dirt roads, and before long Jason confessed he had never driven on gravel before. The slopes were appallingly steep, far taller and steeper than I had imagined. Roads heading upward were stacked into switchbacks like ropes piled on a dockside. We passed farms carved out of the forest, and looked down immense watercarved valleys down the river gorges. (Watercarving, subtropical rains, soft rocks- the recipe for ultrasteep slopes.) Strangely familiar conifers appeared...after a few wrong turns and a few tiny villages, we found the trails at Jenshibao. We hiked into the forest, an absolutely wonderful experience marred mostly by the huge amounts of litter alongside the trail. The subtropical rainforests of Taiwan felt similar to those of New South Wales, with a distinctly northern coniferous element. There were the very notable conifers Cunninghammia, Taiwania, which I had previously only seen in botanical gardens. There was also the eminent and familiar Tsuga, or hemlock, which only a few weeks earlier and an ocean away I had been climbing into the branches of. Soon we found ourselves beneath massive, muscled, fire-scarred cypresses, the object of our quest. The giant trees had all the character and gnarled grace of a western redcedar, with a bit more tendency towards big branches. They were decorated lavishly with ferns and a handful had firescorched caves at their base. They looked almost exactly like their cousins across the Pacific.

We camped in a large flat area created by the roadworks. It was a cold night and those familiar stars danced in the sky. In the middle of the night I awoke suddenly. To break the chill, I went outside for a walk and to look at the stars. A bright meteor raced overhead. Back in the tent, I told Ying about this sight, and told him how in the West we make a wish whenever we see a shooting star. "We also do this ," he said. "But you have to say your wish fast while it is in the sky. So when I see one I think 'moneymoneymoneymoney!'"

An early start and then a long twisted drive across the valley to Smangus. An obviously more affluent village, we parked by a little museum and began walking on a trail scraped into the side of the mountain. It took us past steep waterfalls, clicking groves of bamboo- a novel but familiar sight- old groves of Taiwania with massive ferns, dangerous rockslides, scaffold precarious ladders and bridges, and soon to a interesting open woodland of alder trees, looking exactly like their boreal cousins. Here we were pleasantly surprised to find a small little conifer, with characteristic red buds and whiskered cones- Pseudotsuga, or Douglas-fir! Oh wow! I hadn't expected to see this truly iconic tree of the Pacific Northwest here. What a treat!

Hiking on, we reached a flat area between two steep and powerful rivers. It was here that we found the sacred grove of monsters, truly massive trees of the temperate rainforest type. The cypresses were all leaning slightly downslope, and all were armed with large branches forming secondary trunks, far lower than the equivalent branchings on other conifers. The matron tree f the grove was named Ya Ya Qprang (in the local aboriginal language), a friendly and eerily familiar giant maybe three thousands years old. We danced around and posed for photos, picked up what little bit of rubbish we could, and headed back. How can people litter in a wild, sacred area?

Taipei was an enchanting city, if a bit sprawling. The excellent subway system literally made it all come together, and one early morning I found myself walking near Taipei 101, until very recently the tallest structure in the world. It is a skyscraper without a skyline, alone in the city's east. My first view of was absolute magic- I turned the corner and saw the tower in perfect eclipse of the sun, with the haze of air pollution scattering the rays in all directions. Fantastic! The view from the top was only just barely worth the elevator price; with so much smog you could barely see the city center only a half hour walk away. But the experience was priceless.

Taipei: The Chiang Kai Shek Memorial plaza, recently renamed to Independence Plaza. With national pride at its epicenter here, it was hard not to think about China just over the horizon. I knew next to nothing about their history and conflicts, but undoubtedly recognized this as the location where this current of history ran strongest. The Daan Forest Park in the city center would have just barely qualified as even a wooded lot elsewhere, but there was a wonderful atmosphere and thousands of people enjoying the day. A strange contrast to the mountain forests. And the botanical gardens, a good place to encounter new plants and familiar forms.

I had the good fortune to explore Taipei's Ximending area with a young woman named "Stand Modest", or Hung Li-Chen. Ximending Plaza is a pulsing pedestrian hub, where you can buy all sorts of fancy things, drink many a bubble tea, and watch the youth culture pass on by. As in Hong Kong, the sheer quantity of young people and their mass of consumer goods stunned me. This was The Place for young Taiwanese, and it was quite the nice place for evening out. At Lonsheng temple, we also visited the night markets, an after-dark Chinese specialty. It was here that I tried some of the horrific 'stinky tofu', which as far as I understand is tofu soaked in duck's blood. "Don't try it!" Oliver and Jody had warned!

One final observation about Taipei. There are trucks moving through the city regularly with a pleasant, simple song playing through speakers. To any American, this elicits a smile because this must be the ice cream truck. But, here in Taipei, the same song means that the rubbish collection truck is making the rounds. Run to it gleefully at your own peril.

Too soon, it was time to leave this magic island. But I left with some fine memories and knowledge of the way forward and of course, the secret password to get me through. An early morning flight brought me from Taipei through HK over into the China Dragon's belly. Chongqing, Sichuan was the most populous, polluted, alien city I had ever traveled to. I knew less than three words of Chinese.

-y-
Katwaria Sarai, New Delhi, India

Lookables:
www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-secretdreamsoftaiwan/
www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-secretdreamsoftaiwan/
www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-secretdreamsoftaiwan/

Learnables:
http://www.tacp.gov.tw/tacpeng/home02_3.aspx?ID=$3001&IDK=2&EXEC=L
http://taipei-101.info/taipei-101.gif
http://architecture.about.com/library/bltall.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_aborigines
http://smangus.blogspot.com/
http://eng.taiwan.net.tw/lan/Cht/attractions/scenic_spots.asp?id=6880&sid=
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsuga_chinensis
http://www.conifers.org/cu/tai/index.htm
http://www.conifers.org/cu/ch/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alder
http://www.conifers.org/cu/tai/cryptomerioides.htm

-y- ~Kiss of the Dragon~

2008-03-08T08:34:00.001-08:00

~~Kiss of the Dragon

~A New Start Via Hong Kong

Optics:
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-KissOfTheDragon/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-KissOfTheDragon/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-KissOfTheDragon/

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[I am in New Delhi now! Telephone: +91 98714 07336. Skype: yoavdanielbarness]
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Hong Kong, December 2007:

The first words ever spoken to me in Asia: The immigration officer at Hong Kong looked incredulously at my passport photo, from eight years ago. The beard was gone and the hair was cropped short. Somehow I managed to make a more respectable appearance than my previous incarnation. He looked at me, then the photo, then me, then the photo. "A new start," he said, smiling, pounding the entry stamp and granting entry.

It was the shortest day of the year, midwinter solstice late 2007. Only hours before I had left Seattle and North America, and as a prelude to the Dragon of China, I was now in Hong Kong.

My brother Gabriel, on a University exchange program, picked me up at the airport and bundled me off to the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Within a day my parents Jack and Laurie arrived from Florida, on vacation for my mother's 60th birthday, their anniversary, and of course, New Years Eve. I had seen them just days before back in Florida, but this was out first rendezvous in Asia. My sister Maya, unfortunately, could not make it from Nevada. Through careful planning and collecting frequent flyer points, they had arranged to stay at the 5-star Conrad hotel in Central HK at zero cost ("a business hotel among the world's finest"). It was a delight to join them. From the 57th floor we could see along the skyscrapers, across the water, and up the mountain.

Hong Kong has been placed on an island, an arrogant cluster of office towers. Central district has been slumped down at the bottom of a mountain side far too steep to be useful. Somehow the entire city manages to feel wealthy and slick, green and lush. A short ferry ride or subway trip away, the more realistic district of Kowloon offers the markets and alleyways of a busy Asian city. Central district was markedly Westernized, almost a twin of San Francisco or New York- only HK is less scuzzy, less casual, and more prosperous. Bridges lead from subway stations to shopping malls to escalators up the mountainside; you can travel for miles without touching the ground or being exposed to the sky. The vegetation of the hillsides is lush and fertile, but on the higher slopes obviously burnt out to a chapparal, with rocky cliff bands only on the summit ridges. Perhaps, like the hills just across from San Francisco's Golden Gate, there used to be an intact forest, but now it is a cleared, steep, and brushy.

The overall feel of the Chinese culture throughout a somewhat British town was surprisingly familiar- I knew the architecture and civic style from Chinatowns of Seattle, Melbourne, and San Francisco. The skyscrapers gleaming and the snappy Western business suits everywhere showed the devotion and interest of these ultramodern Chinese to adopt and excel at Britain's game. "Go west, or go home," as my brother put it. It seemed that there was more interest in American culture then in even America itself. The sheer classiness of the place was almost intimidating, and made me realize how much of fashion sinkholes Seattle, and Tasmania, really are.

Gabriel had been living in HK for several months and was getting ready to head home to South Carolina. He guided us around the city and offered me a good introduction to the nightlife of a foreigner there. Living large is done easily in HK, it is the name of the game and it seems to be most peoples' major pursuit. It was my mother's first time in Asia and a much needed vacation for her.

We had a wonderful few days running through some of the standard tourist routines- the train up Victoria Peak, the beaches and markets at Stanley, the floating village at Aberdeen, the Jade Market and Temple Markets of Kowloon. I was pleased to find that Hong Kong Park had a map detailing the ancient and valuable trees planted within, a foreshadowing of the project I hope to accomplish in India. At each tree was a plaque indicating the species and the name of a charitable donor. Surrounding the park were, of course, skyscrapers and highways.

I made an amazing discovery at the base of the Conrad tower, which was perched on top of a very fancy shopping mall (Nothing says style like walking past Prada and Gucci stores wearing your hotel slippers). A medium sized banyan fig stood by its lonesome self in a cement park. A bright metal sign informs one that this tree, planted by the British in the 1870's, is the most expensive in the world. How? When building the shopping mall, for a cost of 24 million HK dollars (~3 million US), they encapsulated the soil and roots of this individual tree. It now stands dwarved by the nearby glass towers, but there it was, still growing strong. Admirable, yes, and exactly the sort of notable landmark tree I am searching for..but perhaps several hectares could be forested for the same expense?

A day trip to Macao, a former Portuguese colony, reclaimed in 1999 and now thriving as China's only gambling location. A fast hydrofoil ferry brings you there within an hour, and it offers a markedly different experience than Hk. The small city is, in the residential areas, jampacked. On the hilltop, the fortifications and tunnels of the Portuguese army are maintained for tourists to overlook the city. The casinos are grandly, soberly psychedelic and ostentatiously neon. The cemeteries are overgrown and mercifully quiet. The ruin of a grand Catholic cathedral is visited by crowds snapping photos. It was my first exposure to Portuguese culture, and its unfortunately but inevitably relegated to a daytrip from HK.

A day on my own to Lantau Island, reachable by subway and home to such notable sites as the airport, Disneyland, and a monastery with a monster-sized Buddha statue. However, just behind this statue-apparently the world's largest outdoor bronze- is a tantalizingly steep trail which brings one up into the rocky heights of Fun Wong Shan, or Lantau Peak. One could take the subway to the island's north coast and then a cable car to the Big Buddha. When I was there, however, the cablecar was closed because one of them -empty- had managed to fall off the cable and crash to the mountainside. The summit ridge of the island is surprisingly craggy and cliffy, and the wind whips up from the ocean. In steepness and general vegetative feel, it could be a low altitude quartzite mountain in Tasmania. I descended off the east side and walked down down down the ridge between it and Sunset Peak, eventually finding a steep pathway down to the south coast. Throughout the lower part of the walk were countless slope sections covered in cement and leading to large aqueducting channels. Fairly drastic landslides must be a large worry here; the slopes were steep enough that such dramatic efforts made sense. Down at the beach, I said my hello to the Pacific Ocean, made my way to the ferry station, and shortly was docking below the skyscrapers in Central HK.

How to explain Hong Kong? Such a fusion, but obviously the competing snouts of two much larger beasts- the colonists and the mainland. I truly think Hong Kong is more excited about Western culture than most Westerners, but there is undoubtedly something new and different in the midst of the two giants. Perhaps I don't do it justice, in that HK has always been an island territory with its own identity from mainland China. But as a first glimpse into Asia, HK is a truly delightful destination, familiar and strange together.

New Year's Eve, 2008. A lovely dinner with our parents, and then Gabe and I were off to find whatever trouble we could in HK. To get the postcard view of Central HK across the water, we went to the Kowloon ferry terminal at Tim Sha Tsui and staked out territory in the crowds by the clock tower. Our neighbours were stylish youngsters, invariably engaged in some sort of telephoning or portable videogaming. There was barely a beer in sight, and the crowd was remarkably well behaved. At midnight, a spectacular arsenal of fireworks launched off one of HK's tallest buildings, but overall the entire show was shorter than we expected. Afterwards, the only Westerners in sight surrounded by thousands of giggling and sugarcrazed HK kids, we found ourselves the center of an inordinate amount of attention.

That's pretty much how 2008 began- overstimulated and in a totally unexpected milieau. A pleasure to see my brother and parents again, and an excellent prelude to the Dragon. On the first day of the year, I left the mainland of Asia for the island of Taiwan...

Optics:
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-KissOfTheDragon/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-KissOfTheDragon/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-KissOfTheDragon/

Specifics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_wall_trees_in_Hong_Kong
http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock/150783/lantau-peak.html
http://www.discoverhongkong.com/eng/worldwide/medi/ww_medi_feat_dist3.jhtml
http://conradhotels1.hilton.com/en/ch/hotels/index.do?ctyhocn=HKGHCCI
http://www.starferry.com.hk/new/en/index.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macao

-y- Atlantic Tentacles

2007-12-21T05:24:00.000-08:00

-y- Atlantic Tentacles
Nov-Dec, 2007
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"They could easily conquer the earth, but have not tried so far because they have not needed to. They would rather leave things as they are to save bother." - HP Lovecraft, _The Whisperer in the Darkness_

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600031h.html#06
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft
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www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-AtlanticTentacles/
www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-AtlanticTentacles/
www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-AtlanticTentacles/
(Images)
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In St. Petersburg, Florida, just days from heading westwards over North America and over the Pacific to Asia. Its been over a year and half in the preparations but I'll be in India by Febuary. Before that, its Hong Kong to Taiwan to Sichuan to Yunnan to Hubei to GuiLin to Hong Kong to New Delhi. And then I'll be there to spend the summer learning Hindi. I am looking forward to the challenge of the Belly of the Tiger: overcrowded polluted insanely hot cowdung poverty ridden humanitycrush Capitol City. I'll be there for mid summer sweats and monsoon floods. After all this time, its actually happening.
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After leaving Astoria, I spent three weeks in Seattle saying the farewells, reconnecting with life in that city, and having a wonderful party at Mr Spots...On Thanksgiving day I was in Florida to see my family and prepare for Asia. Sandy beaches and subtropical trees, I think I have finally learned to truly appreciate Florida. The place is still a horrorshow in many ways, but posessed of many beauties as well.
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A free airplane ticket, earned months ago for a two hour sacrifice of a seat on an overbooked aircraft, was efficiently traded in for a jaunt to Burlington, Vermont, from Florida. It had been years since I had seen my original treeclimbing pardner Brendan K, and he had just moved to Burlington to begin med school studies. Vermont had always had a bit of a innovative and green reputation, and why not use the excuse to see my first sights of New England. Of course, the difficulties of a midwinter voyage to this snowbound region just added to the excitement. Burlington, somehow, was one of the friendliest places I had ever been. An icey day of walking around the plaza and University offered many opportunities to make friends and visit the teahouses and cafes and bookstores.

In a quick two day trip, I travelled north across the Canadian border to French Quebec and the famed city of Montreal. This was my first time in a Francophone city and to this wonderfully vibrant city. I was struck by how well I could manage reading signs and such in French. I realized how absolutely little I knew about French Canada. Despite the heavy snows- or perhaps in defiance of- Mont Royal in winter is an exciting town and a window into the earlier history of North America. An acquaintance from Tasmania, Anthea, was living in the St Henri neighbourhood and offered me a couch to surf and a Metro subway pass to use while exploring the city. On the 1st day of December 2007, I bundled up and headed out-unfortunately without a beanie to keep me warm- into the city. Through the skyscrapers of downtown, and the forested bulk of Mont Royal, and through McGill Uni, and through the Plateau, and Duluth street- all places of charm and history quite distinct from Yankee cities. A full foot of snow fell that day, a notable amount for the city at such an early date in the winter.At the edge of the Cote de Neige cemetary, I found exactly the beanie I was dreaming off abandoned on a spiked fence far from any thouroughfare, the right sort of way to acquire travel gear. On the Plateau neighborhood I stumbled across Chez Jose cafe, a yummy spot in an area festooned with elaborate murals and graffiti. Later, I'd discover that this place was well-recommended by both Anthea and another friend, and I was glad to find it on my own. There was not enough time for more than a quick taste of Montreal, but I can now at least understand the devotion this city brings from its citizens.

My last days in the region were punctuated by yet more snow- what better way to appreciate the warmth of Florida? Like so many of the Canadian snowbirds, I was soon thereafter at the sunny beaches amongst the mangroves and the city sprawl.
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My very last night in St Pete, Florida, was my last opportunity to see the sunset over the Gulf of Mexico. After days of still, humid weather, the tail of the coldfront blasting the rest of the country treated Florida to some very chilly nights and incredible stormy waves. At the very southern end of the sand islands that form the St. Petersburg coast, the rock jetty at Pas-A-Grille Beach was an rare rock surface on the beach. Between solid waves passing in both directions, the jetty collected the most impressive display of jetsam sea life my friend Laura-Bones and I had yet seen in Florida. There were huge spiral lightning whelk snails, horseshoe crab carapaces, scallops, coquinas...and countless little octopi writhing on the rocks. They rolled and reached and it was impossible to tell- were they reaching for the water, or for the land?

Every day in early December, more news from the Bali summit on global warming.. Each day another dire prediction, scientists pushing the clock orward on the ice caps melting, on coral dying, on walruses vanishing. But here in Florida, its only just barely on the radar. As Holiday Season shopping washes over thre state, there is every thought but the Dread One. And this is:

The coastal cities of Florida will be submerged by rising ocean levels.It may very well happen in our lifetimes.

Some say a comet will fall from the sky, or meteors, or earthquakes. But for the Florida coast, its going to be tidal waves. I can't really accept the fact that most Floridians don't realize this, but all the evidence points that way. This Land of Flowers is one of the most vulnerable places in the world. I never thought I'd actually have this sort of vision- of cities destroyed by a Deluge of Biblical proportions. But here it is. Octopus and shark fighting amongst the drowned banyans.

With all that flashing before our eyes, of course, there is movement. No nation can really deny its happening. The industrial revolution is turning us over. And don't just call me optimist- try and read between the lines. Change counteracts stagnation. Theres actually a big challenge thats going to test us like never before. And the only things that can counteract our CO2 output- from our cars and our factories and our expirations- are the green plants transpiring. And still, even just ten years ago, our governments could at least deny and ignore it. One thing is for sure, is that it will be interesting times ahead.

http://www.geo.arizona.edu/dgesl/research/other/climate_change_and_sea_level/sea_level_rise/florida/slr_usafl_i.htm
http://www.geo.arizona.edu/dgesl/research/other/climate_change_and_sea_level/sea_level_rise/sea_level_rise_old.htm#images
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Well, it has been wonderful times these last two and half years since returning to the USA from Australia. When I had finished my first field job, I felt the dizzy fear of the potentiality of it all...For the first time in my life, I had nothing planned for the future. This trip to India really is an articulation in response to "what do you actually want to do?" So there it goes, I'm off to Asia.

Write me when you can. I'll be settling down in February and trying to maintain whatever correspondence I can.
All the best!
y

www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-AtlanticTentacles/
www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-AtlanticTentacles/

-y- Living Emerald Spires

2007-11-19T17:46:00.000-08:00

-y- Living Emerald Spires

http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-Living_Emerald_Spires/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-Living_Emerald_Spires/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-Living_Emerald_Spires/

The second phase of my research project for The Nature Conservancy was, even more so than the first, amazing, busy, stressful, and brilliant. The task at hand was to climb into some magnificent conifers of the coastal rainforest at Ellsworth Creek- western hemlock, sitka spruce, and western red-cedar- and to conduct an insect biodiversity survey. It was, with one exception, my dream job, exactly what I would love to be doing for a field season. That one exception was that we did not have enough time to do it.

As it turned out, two of my field crew- Cale and Alison- had to leave the project to move on to other pursuits. That left me, Heidi, and Caitlin to begin our long anticipated tasks: gathering our equipment, establishing a collection method, rigging trees, climbing them, and escaping with the data!

We returned from Corvallis to Astoria on the Oregon Coast in September 2007, back at the beach house and ready to climb some trees. We attacked an old growth and 60-year-old post-clearcut forest in each of three topographical positions: valley bottom, hillside, and ridgetop. At each site we climbed one tree of each species present. The regrowth were generally healthy, small, and architecturally simple, and the old-growth trees were generally gnarly, monsterific, and structurally complex.

We truly were racing the clock. The endangered marbled murrelet seabird finished its nesting season in midSeptember, and then we had only a few short weeks to get things done before the season's storms rolled in. The Willapa Coast in that region is notorious for excessive amounts of rain and strong windstorms. Both of these factors were evident- in the ferns and mud of the rainforest, and in the amount of dead wood- aka widowmakers- hanging in the trees after wind had snapped the tops.

Rigging the trees generally went well. Climbing into them felt generally safer than working in old Eucalyptus trees...until we spotted all that dead wood hanging above us. But gingerly we collected our samples- foliage, moss, bark, soil- and escaped down to the ground. There was no time for setting traps (necessitating a return visit) and little time to teach the crew advanced techniques.

Highlights of the season included- finding an earthworm worm high on a spruce branch, sitting at the base of a massive secondary trunk high up in a cedar tree, clear sunny days, gnarly hyperbranching caused by mistletoe parasites, a conversation with a raven nearby, a wonderful view of the Empress Spruce with all of her many aerial trunks, packing up backpacks filled with rope up muddy hills, buying treeclimbing equipment on a corporate credit card,

Lowlights included- being hailed on while aloft, having to inch past nasty widowmakers, dealing with pesky fruitflies contaminating our samples, hearing funny cracking noises while initially testing our rigging, (tiny branches, worrisome but not dangerous), and most unnerving of all- being aloft in a tree, wet ropes, hearing the thunder of a lightning storm pass by a mile away. It passed by, but not without some quick preparations for a quicker descent.

Interludes- My uncle Michael Fox visited from Wisconsin, the first I had seen him as an adult, really. It was a treat to see the only living male relative older than me on my mother's side, and to hear his stories of my grandparents. We climbed a redwood tree in a city park, and it was fantastic to see a 67 year old man reconnect with nature so actively. My cousin Alisa joined us for dinner in the Space Needle, and it was really a special opportunity to see him again.

Another interlude- Julian, one of my earliest friends from Way Back in the Day, stopped on by on his way to begin University studies in his home town of Vancouver BC. We've both come many a mile since our initial connections of endless video games, and now have the opportunity to reconnect as I plan a trip to his recent residence of China.

Another interlude- joining forces with Kevin and Ethan for an attack on the Fisher Chimneys of Mt Shuksan, a most "torturous route on a most complicated mountain. We caught a break in the weather in this Icy Jewel of the North Cascades and strung together so many pieces of route to get onto the summit pyramid- from the Mt. Baker ridge down through the forest and into the valley and up to the lake and around the lake and across the boulderfield and up into chimney 1 and then across into chimney 2 and across to chimney 3 and again and again and onto the ridge and onto the snowfield and up the very steep bit of ice known as Winnie's Slide and to a wonderful campsite high on the peak. We could see the glow as the sunset over Mt Baker volcano, and early morning roped up and continued on- over the ridge and onto the Curtis glacier and across the dome and up the Hell's Highway and up the Sulphide Glacier and to the Summit Pyramid....all this with the clouds playing games with us...High on the pyramid, as an altocumulus cloud turned all into grey, we reached our own summit and as a team were glad to say we had climbed the mountain. Our descent was equally long and only slightly less torturous, but what a climb! Shuksan is a most coveted and noteworth mountain, famous from countless postcards and calendars.

It was a magic, special season, although the stress levels were high and the results perfectly adequate. I feel fortunate enough to have worked in three of the most fantastic temperate forests on earth over three different career phases- as an intern, a postgrad, and now as a professional. Now that there's been a few weeks since we finished, its a different thing to look back and realize how much fun the whole things was. It is strange to write about such an epic, fantastic experience in such a few paragraphs...please, take a look at the photographs!

Afterwards, we motivated over to Corvallis for a much more normally paced round of sorting bugs and archiving material. I had arranged with The Nature Conservancy to hire Heidi for two months extra of sorting bugs, and that took off a fair bit of the stress. We connected with the Arthropod Museum, of course, and worked out quite well at Dave Shaw's lab at Oregon State University. On the weekends I escaped the Williamette Valley for the Oregon Cascades... first to an unsuccessful trip to climb Deathball Mountain (it really exists) which ended up at Cougar Hot Springs, and second to Breitenbush Hot Springs for two days of Officially Ending the Field Season.

Done with Corvallis, and travelling back to Astoria via Eugene and the Oregon Coast on Halloween. The coast is well-endowed with beaches and rocky headlands, and most notably at Cape Meares I visited the Octopus Tree- a sprawling sitka spruce of an exceedingly strange shape. I arrived just after sunset to meet with the Ellsworth Botany Technicians for a drink at the Voodoo Lounge. Astoria is a wonderful town, with a bright future. I've enjoyed working there this year. I spent a day cleaning out the garage space, grabbed a beer with Tom the Reserve Manager, and wonderfully caught up with Adam and Amy and their new family. I had known both as friends from different scenes in Seattle, and over the last few years they had met each other, gotten married, had twin daughters, and moved to Astoria. What a change! Amy told me that she had never held a baby before her own...They are actively exposing the infant girls to the rainforests; we walked up the beautiful trail past the Cathedral Tree to the Tower on the hill overlooking the city....we watched the sunset go down over the Columbia River, complete with the auspicious omen of a "sundog"- a satellite rainbow spot to the side of the sun.

I got an early start on the first Saturday of Nov 2007 and left Astoria with Regina, a local biologist to whom I was selling my car. We had a lovely morning making our way through southwestern Washington State, made even more exciting by the fact that she was learning how to drive a manual transmission for the first time. We made it to Seattle in good time, including the hour-long lesson in hill starts.

Early Saturday afternoon, back in the Emerald City between the icy Cascades and the mossy Olympics! Deliciously unemployed. What a magic field season! It was the most fabulous and best professional project I ever could have dreamt up!

With that project pushed only slight aways onto the back burner, it is now time to think even farther westwards to Asia....

More soon,
y

http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-Living_Emerald_Spires/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-Living_Emerald_Spires/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/yopho/-y-Living_Emerald_Spires/

Ethan and Kevin's photographs are from:

http://picasaweb.google.com/kevinsteffa/07_09_Shuksan
http://www.weltyphotography.com/

The Heart of the Valley

2007-10-02T17:36:00.000-07:00

The Heart of the Valley
--
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-_The_Heart_of_the_Valley/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-_The_Heart_of_the_Valley/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-_The_Heart_of_the_Valley/
----

"The exact perception of wilderness is a matter of scale...A single
tree in a city park, harboring thousands of species, is an island,
complete with miniature mountains, valleys, lakes, and subterranean
caverns. Scientists have only begun to explore these compacted
worlds...Microaesthetics based upon them is still an unexplored
wilderness to the creative mind." E.O. Wilson, _The Future of Life_
--

The months of July and August 2007 were whirlwinds of professional
stress and productivity like no other I had ever really encountered.
During July, my field crew of four and I scrambled our hardest to
collect our insect traps from forest sites in Washington's coastal
Willapa Hills. It wasn't that the work was overly difficult, but more
that the timing of things was intricate. It felt like sometimes we
were threading a needle with the calendar; somehow, we found ourselves
in late summer with all the little animals in all of their little
jars.

A highlight of the fieldwork was travelling to Long Island, where some
of the worlds largest and oldest redcedars stand in a uniquely
undisturbed grove. Getting there was quite a bit of fun. The Island is
run by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and they travel regularly on
the mudflats of Willapa Bay using flatbottomed airboats, of the sort
you would normally see in the bayou of the American South. We were
fortunate to catch a ride on these things, skimming at top speed over
several miles of mud, with the fan screaming like a banshee and often
skidding off in one direction while the fan pushed us another. The
cedar grove itself contains trees with an exceptionally high gnarl
factor- each tree accumulating centuries of experience and
idiosyncracy. The grove is an exceptional place, but would it be so if
the rainforest still stretched unbroken along the entire coast?
http://www.willaparesearch.com/
http://www.thenewstribune.com/front/topphoto/story/165806.html
--

At the beginning of August, we headed southwards to Corvallis (a place
named literally, The Heart of the Valley), Oregon, to the Arthropod
Museum at Oregon State University. Think not of a museum with displays
to look at, but of a reference collection, more like a library. Our
three weeks there were productive, stressful, and educational. We did
our best to classify as many of the organisms as possible, and
inevitably we were able to process a subset of them to a certain
level. We camped at the county fairgrounds, Benton Oaks, beneath a
beautiful grove of Oregon White Oaks. Two acorn woodpeckers were
raising a fledgeling right above our campsite, teaching their little
bird how to fly. The Museum was undoubtedly the best place for us to
work. They were glad for us to contribute all of these specimens, and
we were glad to have a place for them to remain for the long term
future.

http://www.ci.corvallis.or.us/
http://osac.science.oregonstate.edu/default.htm

--

Three trips broke the work cycle nicely: First, three of the crew and
I volunteered with the University of Washington Forestry School to
help measure trees at Mt. Rainier Park. Getting there was a grand
adventure- we rendezvoused near Portland with a team of Forestry grad
students from UW, and with a collection of high school students from
the Olympic Peninsula. We spent two nights at Wind River Research
Station, an important learning and work destination for one hundred
years of forest researchers. We had th opportunity to get a ride
(actually, my third) on the Canopy Crane- literally a construction
crane dropped into the forest. An elevator to the treetops! Much
easier than climbing them. From Wind River, we headed through the
forests of the Southern Washington Cascades- from old cedar
rainforests to high and dry subalpine forests- to the flanks of Mt.
Rainier, Washington State's mountain totem and highpoint.

It had last been to Rainier when working as an intern climbing trees
and measuring branches. It was a special experience to come back to
the place, now running my own similar project. Our fieldwork there
this time was a revisit to a study network set in place
thirty-something years ago, and we checked to see which trees had died
off, how much they had grown, and which had sprouted since the last
measurements. As well as working with many other fine scientists, it
was one of the first reacquaintances I had had with Jerry Franklin, a
pivotal figure in American forest ecology. Truly a delight to have him
excited about the work I was doing for The Nature Conservancy and on
the Fulbright Scholarship. There was also an opportunity to escape on
my own for a bit, and a quick climb of the supremely pointy Pinnacle
Peak brought me into the lovely headspace of solo rockclimbing, high
above the forests with a stupendous view of the Volcano Itself just
across the way.

http://depts.washington.edu/wrccrf/
http://www.nps.gov/mora/
http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock/150918/pinnacle-peak.html

Second, to Breitenbush Hot Springs, where a commune of healers and
thinkers run a retreat and therapy destination. I had been to many a
place in the American West where hot caliente water comes out of the
ground, but this was the first I had been to one established as a
resort. The difference was striking. The people visiting were
specifically there for their wellbeing, and as such the springs had a
feeling of intention, more so than a feeling of serendipity.

Third, an unsuccessful attempt to climb the Three Sisters Volcanoes
with Lindsay. We only had one actual day of nice weather, and we
perhaps were too ambitious with our planning. The Three Sisters-
South, Middle, and North, are a set of stratovolcanoes in Central
Oregon, arranged sequentially by age. South Sister is symmetrical,
accessible, covered in ash and scree making for regular footing. North
Sister is a terrifying, decrepit, and utterly rotten crumble of rock,
with an array of fantastic red and yellow strata. Its also known as
"Ugly Sister", or "The Black Beast of the Cascades." Unwisely, we
chose to attempt this one first in our rather dreamy fantasy of
climbing all three. We should have gone for either or both of the
others- a challenge well within our reach. North Sister? Too rotten,
too nasty, nothing solid. We headed down, lying to each other that the
weather would hold to climb Middle Sister. The next day found us
retreating in the rain to coffee and scones in the nearby city of
Bend. So much for a three peak marathon!

http://www.breitenbush.com/
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Sisters/Images/framework.html\
--
Exiting Corvallis was a relief; we had managed to generate a pretty
decent set of data, and we managed to wrap things up pretty cleanly.
It was definitely time for a vacation....

-y-

http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-_The_Heart_of_the_Valley/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-_The_Heart_of_the_Valley/
http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-_The_Heart_of_the_Valley/

-y- The World's Longest Beach

2007-07-16T16:16:00.000-07:00

Photographs: http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-The_Worlds_Longest_Beach/
Photographs: http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-The_Worlds_Longest_Beach/

-y- The World's Longest Beach

says the sign on the archway. I don't believe it. Long Beach, Washington, on the 4th of July 2007 is the sort of time and place some people dream about.

The beach is quite long...and you can indeed drive on it for many miles. This tourist beach town has been filling up with people all day aniticpating an excellent show of fireworks.The fireworks cavalcade- amateur and municipal- brought some shadow of the terror of a war zone to an otherwise quiet part of the Pacific Coast. It was, beyond the shadow of the doubt, the most overwhelming display of explosions we had ever seen, or ever hope to see.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=261_1183853749&c=1

For several weeks now, my field crew of four and I had been living out of an inexplicably gorgeous beach house, with a rotating cast of field ecologist roommates. We were all working for Astoria office of The Nature Conservancy on biodiversity surveys at Ellsworth Creek Preserve. Amongst the amphibian, bird, vegetation, and fish survey teams, we were Team Arthropod, out to survey insects crawling in the treetops, on downed logs, and on standing dead trees. A friendly professor had made the place available to the organization, and we were all stunned to find how overly furnished the place was- too many chairs, several cheap chandeliers, fake wooden fruit....and also comfortable couches, a laundry machine, running water, and a view of the Pacific.

Unlike the other crews, however, I was still working very hard to get our study all lined upMy crew of four- Cale, Caitlin, Alison, and Heidi- were all admirably biding their time while I worked with the Astoria office to find our study sites on the map, put together a trapping scheme, and get the permits we needed. While we all wished this could have been wrapped up earlier, these things take time. I was certainly glad to recognize that all four of them were top-notch, and it will be hard work to challenge them to their limits.

The Willapa Hills, are indeed, turning out to be an exciting region to spend a season. Just across the Columbia River, the Oregon Coast and the city of Astoria form a dramatic, rocky counterpoint to the sandy spit at Long Beach. Astoria stays busy as a port and as a tourist destination, and from the hill slopes of the town you can see the cargo ships coming up the Columbia River to Portland, in front of the green regrowth of the steep but simple Washington hills.

http://dnr.wa.gov/geology/willapa.htm
http://www.fs.fed.us/land/pubs/ecoregions/ch25.html

Our study locations include some of the last remnants of old-growth spruce and cedar forest in the entire coastal region. These last patches on a heavily impacted mosaic can tell us much about the natural vegetation of the place. Some of the worlds largest and tallest trees grow in these lushest coastal rainforests. The tall, magnificent spruces, once a military commodity back when airplanes were made of wood, stick to the lower slopes and the marshy creeks. The fat, gnarly, spirey red-cedars dominate the slopes and ridges. Western hemlock seems to be happy anywhere and everywhere. We've taken four of these remnant patches, and are comparing them to four roughly equivalent spots, nearby and with the same topography and aspect...with a key difference being that they were clearcut fifty years ago. I think it will be a most excellent season.

---
Before actually beginning this new employment, I made sure to get out and enjoy some of the more geologicaly prominent points in the region. Lindsay, Yana, Carla and I had a big day getting to the summit of the Brothers Peak on the Olympic Skyline. This is the prominent double-peaked mountain you see from the city. The route goes through lovely rainforest and the waterfall sequence known as The Valley of the Silent Men. The summit is craggier and scarier than you'd ever imagine looking at it from the city.

Later,travelling south to Portland, Alison and Blake and I visited some of the classic sites of the Columbia River Gorge- the waterfalls at Eagle Creek, the basaltic spires of Beacon Rock, and the lovely summer evenings in Portland, Oregon. It was at least my third visit to all of these places. Familiar, spectacular stuff, all of it!

http://www.iinet.com/~englishriver/LewisClarkColumbiaRiver/Regions/Places/beacon_rock.html
http://www.splintercat.org/EagleCreek/EagleMainPage.html

---

Mid-summer, some good fortune in timing found me at in the Queets River rainforest valley of Olympic National Park with Bob Van Pelt and Steve Sillett, both scientists whose work I've followed carefully. We ran moss-survey transects in the rain, explored some superlative examples of temperate rainforests, and climbed into a magnificent spruce tree. From the dry mossmats of the uppermost branches, I could see into the snowbound peaks of the Olympics and down to the swiftwater of the Queets.

http://www.humboldt.edu/~sillett/sillett.html
http://www.olympiccoast.org/rainforest.html
---

There is Very Big News: Last summer, in Hayfork, California, I spent the days on a mostly nocturnal spotted owl study thinking about what exactly I would do with my time and future if I had the choice. One thing led to another and in May I was delighted to discover that I've been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to spend a year in India. My project is to visit unique, sacred, and landmark trees throughout the country and write a guidebook, web page, and information cards on how they represent the biodiversity of the nearby forests, the country, and the world. In other words, a Grand Tree Tour of the Indian Subcontinent. So proposal is nearing reality, and my only regret- a not so bittersweet one- is that I'm so busy on the arthropod study that I've barely the time to plan for the trip abroad.

http://www.treeoctopus.net/res/LandmarkTreesofIndiaProposal.pdf

An early benefit of this honour was the orientation trip to Washington DC. I hadn't been to the nation's core city, or 'The Other Washington", in ten years or so. It's a strange city, but I had a wonderful time. Meeting the organization staff and other scholars heading to India was very exciting; I hadnt realized I'd be able to connect with them. Also, I had the chance to stay with Liz and Perry Gayaldo, two friends I had known almost ten years ago, now married and with a lovely three year old daughter. Their switch from Washington State to DC had been several years back and they were doing well. Another Seattle friend, Louis, was now in an successful path as a congressional aide, and was glad to report that with the help of his efforts, Washington State now had the new Wild Sky Wilderness area in the Cascades Mountains. I took a bike ride through the forest ravine of Rock Creek Park, which was a keen reminder of earlier years in the Cleveland Metroparks, similar landforms in Ohio. Oh yes, and the White House, Smithsonian Museums, and Monuments here and there.

--
I'm just now in Seattle for my first in many weeks, a treat to see old friends and think about something besides work for a few days. Sultry hot summer days, bright orange and red sunsets behind the Olympics. A short period of calm, and then back out to the woods...

Write back and tell me how you are going,

Yoav

--

"The world has many edges, and all of us dangle from them by a very delicate thread. The key is not to let go." -Anderson Cooper, _Dispatches from the Edge_

http://www.treeoctopus.net/YoPho/-y-The_Worlds_Longest_Beach/

-y- Between Two Flat Horizons

2007-05-12T19:31:00.000-07:00

Early 2007

--
"Good and evil advance in lockstep, as part of the same movement." -Jean Baudrillard
---
**Pictures at http://tinyurl.com/2wps23

---

The winter has retreated. After such magnificently intense summer and autumn seasons, the relative impact of the snow and rain has been forgotten now, as the rhododendrons are bursting out with a vengeance.

Seattle's springtime is something special, people blossom like flowers. Ladies wear their dresses and sandals, people are smiling, snow is melting, and there's a common feeling that the sunshine is a 'deserved' thing, after all those cloudy months. People somehow lived their lives in the grey and living winter, a period whose essence can be pulled from the meteorologists local phrase *sunbreaks*. No, we've learned that partly sunny is not the same thing as partly cloudy. But we'll take 'completely sunny', please.

Somehow this winter I managed to open several doors into new opportunities. One positive outcome is a new web presence. Finally, all those web links somehow pulled together into a theoretically cohesive and coherent union:

http://www.treeoctopus.net
http://www.treeoctopus.net
http://www.treeoctopus.net
--
To put some perspective on what's keeping me so busy this spring season, I’ve been hired by a large non-profit, The Nature Conservancy (note capital The), to run a field project this summer on the coast. We will be climbing rainforest trees- familiar monstrosities such as Sitka spruce and western red-cedar- and collecting bugs in a survey of the last remnants of coastal old-growth forests. Imagine ten little dots of intact forest in a sea of plantations and youve got an idea of the impact of timber harvest on this corner of the world. The buzz about this project has been going on since December, and Im delighted to have actually begun working on the prep work, assembling a field crew and doing my best to get as many things figured out before we begin. The Seattle office is literally above Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, with the postcard view of the harbour and the Olympic Mountains; in early June I'll be moving operations down to Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River. So this summertime, maybe if you are in Portland, I'll be seeing you there.

http://www.nature.org
http://www.el.com/to/astoria/
---

It was an immensely fortunate thing to have two friends from Tasmania visiting in February. How Lucie-coming from a ski season in the Canadian Rockies- and Angus- coming from geosurveying training in Oklahoma- managed to time their trips to coincide in Seattle on the same day is an amazing feat. But oddly appropriate, the two of them were even housemates at one time in the past, and both a well needed reminder of how wonderful a community Hobart has knit within it. But for Angus and I, perhaps a more wistful reminder with no immediate plans to return. We explored the avenues and alleyways of Seattle, always a treat. There was an excursion to the Olympic Peninsula, to the country's forlorn storm corner at Cape Alava, where the Pacific pounded away in all its fury, to the icy slopes of Storm King Mountain, and the waters at Lake Crescent. The adventures were wonderful, odd how such familiar territory could be such a strange landscape to the travelers from the other side of the planet. It was very good to see them.

http://www2.nature.nps.gov/air/WebCams/parks/olymcam/olymcam.cfm

--

Just across the water from Seattle, on Bainbridge Island, there is an environmental center called Islandwood. The place offers an opportunity for urban schoolchildren to come out to the forest and learn some ecology and nature-appreciation skills. Simultaneously, a group of postgraduate university students guides them through the learning experience, while earning their credentials as teachers. It's an engaging system, and I was delighted to be able to join them as a Scientist-in-Residence in early April 07. They've created a pathway for scientists to join them and share our experiences and expertise, and I was especially keen to gain some experience working with the kids as an educator. I am telling you, the 5th graders are as intimidating as a rotten gum tree in the wind. They will find your weaknesses and know when you are unprepared. My particular efforts with them involved measuring forest variables- dead trees, ferns, stumps- and having them calculate out some simple averages. It was an exceptionally good reminder of how specialized and advanced and obscure these skills can become.

http://www.islandwood.org

---
Later in April, I flew to South Carolina to meet the family for my father's 60th birthday. My brother, Gabriel is at school in Columbia, the state capitol. He introduced me to the eccentric and somehow strangely familiar mix of sophistication and crudity that forms fraternity life in the South. Arriving early, I spent a delightful day at Congaree National Park, only 14 miles away and essentially the last and largest of the hardwood floodvalley forests left. The South is a more fertile and lush place than anywhere out west, a place where ancient soils and steamy climes foster intense levels of biodiversity. The place is an unknown treasure to most, and it’s an important reality check to see how little my brother and his fraternity brothers know or care about the place.

I made the acquaintance of two rangers. Corinne was on her first week at the Park, and Fran was on his 26th year guiding in the valley, predating the National Park. Connecting with their expertise and enthusiasm made the experience that much better, especially when I was able to swap owl stories with Fran, a renowned local expert. Wandered on swampy trails beneath fat bottomed tupelo trees, found huge oak trees and towering champion pines and yellow polka dot fungus, but no Ivory Billed woodpeckers. The earliest leaves were coming out on the baldcypress trees, swampy redwood trees of the east.

http://www.friendsofcongaree.org/

The next day, Jack-Laurie-Maya, my parents and sister drove up from Florida. They are all getting older, of course, and I suppose today I as well am the oldest I've ever been. We spent the weekend together in Columbia, and day tripped down to the coast at Charleston. Like Savannah to the south, it’s retained much of its old architecture and has a twisted alleyways feel that certainly predates the automobile. We explored some of the city downtown, and endured the humidity and occasional rain shower. Only the barest glimpse of the Atlantic, from a promenade facing out towards an estuary. In the coastal plain, the coastline was the flattest part of a flat horizon.

The time with the family was short but sweet, and it was a wonderful thing to be together for my father turning 60. Columbia was a nice place to visit for several days. There was an especially educational visit to the S.C. Museum, where, besides seeing a piece of the moon, we learned about the landscape and ecology, the ancient animals, and more recent events such as the Civil War.
The Union's General Sherman wreaked a horrific vengeance on Columbia, burning most of the city in retribution for being the first state to secede. Sherman is credited with developing the modern strategy known as 'scorched earth', a father of modern warfare.

http://ngeorgia.com/people/shermanwt.html

On my return to the Left Coast I took an extended layover in San Francisco. From the most conservative state in the Union to the most progressive. I stayed several nights at the Playground cooperative in Oakland, visiting Alison the museum-ologist, Mario the bike mechanic medical doctor, Anthony the musical saw playing bread baker, and other wonderful friends. A trip to the Oakland Museum to see the largest jade boulder in the world. Years ago I had read a book about the efforts to pull it from underwater off the California coastline, and there it was, unlabelled in a courtyard.

http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/articles/5910

For the first time in almost seven years, I met with Ilana, my next door neighbour from age 1 to age 12. She and I had literally learned to walk and talk together, and our paths had diverged as she moved to New York, and I to the other direction. And now there we were, many years behind us. There was a pilgrimage to be made, and I was delighted to head southwards with her to the Sierra Nevada mountains, to see the Giant Sequoia Groves at King's Canyon. These trees are the world's largest, each one a thunderous orange column quietly linking earth and sky. It was Ilana's first adventure to the mountains, and we walked through the unexpectedly misty groves. A cloud had descended upon us, literally. We climbed to the top of Moro Rock, and despite our hopes of a vista towards the snowbound high peaks of the Sierra Nevada Range, it looked like the inside of a cloud. And, after years of anticipation, we visited the largest tree in the world, named - General Sherman. A tree 2,200 years old, it appears to be in declining vigour, but nonetheless a satisfying experience for us both.

http://www.terragalleria.com/parks/np.kings-canyon.all.html

On our return to the San Francisco Bay, we detoured to visit her parents. I am glad for the timing; we arrived in time to say farewell to a black cat named Ninja, on his last day of a well-loved 22 years. This was a cat I had met when I was 5 years old, and was in no small part responsible for the cat allergies I'll have forever.

http://messybeast.com/longevity.htm

Back in the city, I motivated out to the coast for my birthday on the 10th of April. Alison and I took a ferry past the Golden Gate and visited Stinson Beach, joining some friends for an evening barbeque at the coast, and hiking up the steep hills above the Ocean. Perched high above the water, the coastline was the flattest part of a flat horizon. Embedded in the earth were metal and concrete bunkers, observation outposts to guard the entrance to the Bay- the Golden Gate, that is-from any invading navy. Now, we could see the Coast Guard vessel patrolling just offshore, and countless other invisible cameras and satellites and submarines. But we were not so safe from invaders: we had already been infiltrated by countless Tasmanian Blue Gums. These familiar Eucalyptus trees are simply biding their time until they burn....

http://www.elkhornsloughctp.org/training/show_train_detail.php?TRAIN_ID=EcoGYZ22

We walked up from the coast over Pantoll Hill and into a steep ravine. Tucked in beneath the oak forests were lush streams with coastal redwoods casting a strong shade. We followed these into the always-impressive Muir Woods Grove, a more sheltered section of valley, filled with giant trees and excited tourists. With the baldcypress and sequoia, I had seen the three remaining Taxodiaceous redwood species in North America, impressive trees that were nonetheless the last survivors- outcompeted on an evolutionary scale and decimated on a timber harvesting scale.

http://www.nps.gov/muwo/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxodiaceae
--

Back to Seattle in April, to begin work at The Nature Conservancy, and to begin housesitting at the corner of the Woodland Park Zoo on Phinney Ridge. It's been busy times. There was a rockclimbing trip to the sagebrush desert on the east side of the mountains where basalt pillars create eerie stands of columns. In the city, I ran into two old friends who are now married and living nearby, and then shortly thereafter learned of another old friend who had just committed suicide.
--

I'll try to write again before heading south to Astoria to begin the season's fieldwork. There has been far too much time in front of a computer these last few weeks.
Take care!

*Pictures at http://tinyurl.com/2wps23

-y-
Yoav Daniel Bar-ness

http://www.treeoctopus.net

Stormforests

2007-03-15T19:14:00.000-07:00

Stormforests
============
I've posted a photo gallery with images from the last ten years at

**http://picasaweb.google.com/treeoctopus
**http://picasaweb.google.com/treeoctopus
**http://picasaweb.google.com/treeoctopus

==============
"Mental state is a constantly negotiated compromise between the poles of waking sanity and dreaming madness."-J. Allan Hobson, _Dreaming: an Introduction to the Science of Sleep_

"Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?" -Phillip Pullman, _The Subtle Knife_
======================

Photos = http://tinyurl.com/3563hm
Photos = http://tinyurl.com/3563hm

===================
The Canadian province of British Columbia terrifies me like no other place. Even though the people are nice, and the scenery magnificent, and the botany familiar, B.C. as a geographic entity is so v as t and so abundantly overflowing with mountains and islands that I can't even begin to grasp it. When I think of Alaska, or the Yukon, my brain just turns off with the immensity of it all. I've only seen the tiniest portion of the province, the city of Vancouver and the mountains at Garibaldi Volcano, and realize there are several lifetimes of exploration in British Columbia. So how best to approach such a monstrosity? In small pieces- in the SW corner is the largest of North America's coastal islands, an evergreen isle that is a best paired with Washington State's Olympic Peninsula to the south. Years ago, I had promised myself a ramble on Vancouver Island. Now, more than five years later in December 2006, I made my way to the north coast of the Olympic and caught the boat across to B.C.'s capitol of Victoria, in the south-eastern corner of the island. The winter's record breaking storms were in full force still, and throughout the trip I found constant reminders of the furious gusts.

http://www.ocs.orst.edu/page_links/whats_new/dec_windstorm.html
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2006/12/15/wind-storm.html

The analogy between Tasmania and Vancouver Island, and between Hobart and Victoria, is so striking it was an unending theme for the entire trip. First, arriving in Victoria by boat into the waterfront harbour is a wonderful entrance - so much like Hobart, only barely a working fleet doc now filled with pleasureboats and cafes and seaplanes and hotels. In both cities, the Parliament and its garden lawns proudly fly Britain's Union Jack and tourists stroll past the museums and restaurants. In Victoria, an incredible view across the Strait of Juan de Fuca displays the snowy and jagged Olympics in all their verticality.

http://images.britishcolumbia.com/images/cities/287.1.jpg
http://www.vancouverisland.com/Regions/

At the arrival dock, the border guards gave me the expected mix of guarded neutral friendliness, and I hopped out of a plain white door to find myself in Canada, steps away from the Parliament. I jumped right into the stream of downtown shoppers, businesspeople, and tourists. The prevalance of US corporate logos throughout downtown- otherwise so distinct from any American city- was a not-too-subtle reminder of how disgusted the Canadians are with the USA's dominance over their culture. Because of this, they will always resist at some level the power equations of dollars and keep a distinct identity. US government representatives may see this ideal- represented by slight barriers to free trade- as a rebellious streak against the inevitability of progress, but thats not really true. It was a good reminder to see signs a la Francais, and even more exciting to encounter the many wonderful French boulangeries around the city.

Before too long I was travelling out of the city and up the east coast of the island. On Christmas Day, I took advantage of wonderful snow conditions and took some cross-country skiing lessons at Mt. Washington, and camped out in the snow for a bit. This was so far my farthest excursion from the equator. Passing through Courtenay, Cunningham, and back south to Nanaimo, it sooned dawned on me that the east coast of Vancouver Island was unfortunately oversuburbanized, and not so simple for a midwinter traveler. Nanaimo, especially, was a difficult place- people there truly do navigate by proximity to the nearest shopping mall. But from Nanaimo, (which resembles Tassie's Launceston) I caught a bus over the island towards the Pacific Rim National Park and Tofino, and then the real fun began...

http://www.mountwashington.ca/conditions/snowcam.cfm
http://www.vancouverisland.com/Regions/towns/?townID=58

Midway, I visited the old Douglas-fir forests of Cathedral Grove, an area intimately familiar to me from experiences in the Olympic Peninsula in similar forests. It was a strange feeling to be in a foreign country but to know the plants and animals better than the locals. The massive trees, and fern-covered riverbanks, were encrusted with ice but the sun was shining. Tourists from other locales gawked and pointed in a pleasant way, enjoying the emerald smell.

http://www.vancouverisland.com/parks/?id=286

Onwards to Tofino, a small surfing town on the end of a peninsula jutting towards the Pacific Ocean at the entrance to Clayoquot Sound. Unlike the steep cliffs dropping off of a coastal plateau as seen on the Olympic coast, here there are flatter beaches rising smoothly up to steep mountains, creating a jagged and intimidating collection of fjords. In every direction there is either cold blue water or thick green temperate rainforests. In Tofino, a backpacker's hostel on the beach offered shelter and a place to drop my pack. The large windows overlooking the ocean offered a fine venue for the second local pastime: Stormwatching (The first is surfing). This wonderful activity- practiced indoors or out- is actually listed officially as a local attraction. The hostel's common room was a pleasant spot to meet other travelers-Katharina, Liv, Peter, Joe, and Jutta- and before long we were planning adventures to explore the coasts and rainforests of the nearby Pacific Rim National Park.

http://www.royhenryvickers.com/galleries/tofino.php
http://www.tofinotime.com/directory/D-SUfrm.htm
http://www.tofinohostel.com/

I joined Katharina, a German girl visiting from Portland Oregon, and we did our best to visit every trailhead on the park's coastal strip...we started before sunrise and encountered tidepools, rock headland canyons, thick cedar forests, massive spruces, and countless ferns. The storms gave us a bit of a break, and arriving back in Tofino it felt like a day well spent. The following day, Katharina and I were joined by our other friends from the backpacker's for another foray- sunset at the beach, where boulders had been wave polished into large spheres stranded on the sands.

Throughout Tofino there are many remnants of the bitter struggle to preserve the remaining old-growth forests of the area, an eerie reminder of the battles raging in Tasmania. Both mountainous islands are endowed with valuable forests, saddened by the treatment of the displaced and murdered natives, and rediscovering their identities as tourist attractions with relatively healthy landscapes. The controversies over land management are all the more bitter in the isolation of the islands, just offshore from a major city (Melbourne, or Vancouver). Tofino, like Geeveston or Strahan in Tassie, is quickly adapting to the economic realities and ecological damages of its logging practices, a process taking place more slowly in towns like Forks just across the water.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2006/2006-08-02-04.asp
http://www.focs.ca/

Later, I would return to Victoria and spend some pleasant days with Liv and Chris and other new friends, but before then I had to make it to 2007. New Years, the end of 2006, I camped out for several nights on the Pacific Rim, weathering out storms in a picnic shelter and eating off those last scraps of food that I had carried for days. No chance of building a fire with the forest so wet, but the sunsets were glorious...

============

Photos = http://www.dotphoto.com/Go.asp?l=treeoctopus&P=&SID=145412&Show=Y
Photos = http://www.dotphoto.com/Go.asp?l=treeoctopus&P=&SID=145412&Show=Y

Below the Cascades Crest (-y-)

2006-12-10T16:30:00.001-08:00

Below the Cascades Crest

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Pictures here:
http://tinyurl.com/yngwe2
Click on "Slideshow"

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Seattle offers several interesting juxtapositions for an ecologist. In
one city there is a convergence of forest industry, land development,
habitats from rocky beaches to marshy wetlands to shady forests to icy
summits, an active recreation industry, productive fisheries, large
universities, high-tech expertise, capital investment wealth, fresh
volcanic activity, and, most importantly, a high proportion of people
who care about their landscape. It is a pleasure to be back.

I moved into an old house in Ballard with my friends Dave and Kendra,
fixed up a nice basement room and now I live within walking distance
of several very lively neighbourhoods. City life is a refreshing
change from mountain life (or Florida life...) and as winter days get
shorter the nightlife gets longer...

Mid September 2006, I was incredibly fortunate enough to be able to
join along on a U of Washington College of Forest Resources field trip
with Jerry Franklin, tagging along with my old friend and the
teacher-for-a-day Mark Swanson. We caught up with the class at the
Wind River Canopy Crane, just east of Portland along the Columbia
River Gorge.
This was some very familiar territory. I had taken the same class six
years earlier, when it was only ten people- it had grown to an almost
overwhelming 40 students. During four years at the Forestry school
there had been several visits here, and my introduction to
treeclimbing as an intern had begun here in 2001. The old arboretum is
still overgrown, the little dammed Hemlock Lake is still shallow and
quiet, and the research Canopy Crane is still in operation. It was a
real treat to meet the new students, and compare their experiences to
mine several years back. We hiked to several creeks, climbed into a
red alder tree, and spilled a bottle of bright green flourescene dye
to illustrate water flows. There was the stellar, familiar, midnight
trip to the hot springs. Mark and I were the only ones in a large
group who had been there, and just like old times we forded the river
and hiked several miles in the dark along the riverbank, happily
arriving at the steamy pools by the Wind River. I had many pleasant,
magic memories of this place, and feel lucky to have joined this group
this year- a sweet reminder of what a special education the College of
Forest Resources offers. Of course, being in the midnight forest by
the stream certainly qualifies as a learning experience- this
experience was earning them university credits.

A sunny autumn day in late September: The idea was to explore Cave
Ridge, a very discreet block of limestone uplifted with the Cascades
and forming some of the very very few caverns in the mostly volcanic
and plutonic mountain range. Josh S. and I spent a day climbing
Snoqualmie Peak, a quick steep trail on the crest of the Cacades just
near the I-90 freeway. From there we'd have a good view onto the crest
of Cave Ridge. I had known about these caves for many years and had
never gone off looking for them. However, these caves were known to be
well hidden, very vertical, and were very much not candidates for a
casual trip. We did not actually make it onto the limestone, but took
a good look from the summit of Snoqualmie Peak…it was a surprisingly
massive and blunt chunk of rock, on full display. Visiting these caves
will have to wait several months- not only will snow cover them soon,
but I will need to track down the right people with which to explore
them. We were treated to stellar views of the rest of the Cacades-
four volcanoes and countless idges and daggerpeaks. Through the most
fortunate gap between two mountains we could just make out the
skyscrapers of Seattle (At the next opportunity after this trip, I
joined the local chapter of the National Speleological Society,..the
connections are now made.)

http://www.cascadegrotto.org/
http://www.summitpost.org/view_object.php?object_id=150668

Once, there was a thriving town called Wellington, near the crest of
the Cascades at Stevens Pass. It was on the railroad line and a centre
for mining activity. Just east of the town was a very audacious
three-mile tunnel through a solid granite mountain. One year, the
winter brought a stupendous amount of snow to the mountains. During
one of these blizzards, trains passed through the east end of the
tunnel, and became trapped at the depot on the avalanches on the west
end. After a change in weather conditions, a slab avalanche swept down
and knocked the trains off the tracks. When they all returned, they
found a hundred passengers dead from the impact. Shortly after this
very public tragedy, the town dwindled away. The tunnel was mostly
forgotten. A physics laboratory set up a research station temporarily
deep in the mountain, probably in a quest to intercept interstellar
neutrinos, but when they left the tunnel was empty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellington_avalanche
http://home1.gte.net/mvmmvm/index.html

In mid October the leaves were changing colours on the mountain-ash
trees, and I was fortunate to catch Alison L. traveling through
Seattletown on her way to a Museum Management conference in Boise. We
caught a ride with Amie B. up into the mountains for a very special
event and helped out with the setup for a very interesting night. When
the guests arrived, well after dark, they approached the dark hole in
the mountainside with a bit of trepidation, and looked at the candles
weakly illuminating a deep entrance into the underworld. The
anticipation built as they walked a quarter-mile in the dark along the
candleway, They were not disappointed when they arrived at the very
crowded, very loud, and very unique electronic dance party, deep into
the heart of the very same Wellington tunnel.

With a handful of others, we had pulled in several cartloads of
speakers, tables, and other goodies down the passageway, placed a few
lights on the walls, and done our best to cordon off the deeper
puddles, In Australia, the slang term for a rave danceparty is "doof",
because the subwoofers bass beats sounds like "doof doof doof doof".
(This is my favourite bit of onomatopoeia) With laser light systems
beaming strange patterns down the tunnel, and clever notes beating
musically through the ground, I could only handle so much mental
stimulation before it was time to escape to a campsite under the open
sky.

http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=5127
http://www.answers.com/topic/onomatopoeia

Next morning, we escaped the madness and hiked north onto the Pacific
Crest trail, towards Lake Valhalla and Lichtenberg Peak. Although the
area is quite well-visited, there were no other campers at the lake.
The mountain thrusts an arrogant tower right over the lake, and sunny
meadows offer pleasant hiking onto the summit ridge, just behind those
vertical cliffs. Searching for a campsite, I made the classic mistake
of pushing through wet vegetation without my waterproofs on, finding
myself soaked and shivering in the afternoon sunlight. Our climb of
Lichtenberg went perfectly, starting out by crossing the river outlet,
hopping the granite boulders beneath the tower, and traversing right
through spotty trees onto a steep huckleberry meadow. The berry bushes
were a dull crimson in the late autumn, and before long we were on top
of the summit shining brightly on a crisp day.

http://www.paulzaretsky.com/newimages/789.htm
http://www.turns-all-year.com/goldhome2/hp75/index.html
http://www.huckleberries.org/page6.html

Back in civilization, I took the opportunity to visit the Canopy Lab
in Olympia, always a nuclear reactor of ideas and enthusiasm. In
Seattle, I finalized the details with Estella to work in the Botany
lab, but had to postpone beginning for a while still. I was treated to
another visitor, this time a young man I had known for nineteen years.
My younger brother Gabriel was taking advantage of a holiday weekend
from studies at the U of South Carolina, and came out to this far
corner of the country for a visit. We toured Seattle a bit, catching
up with a longlost family friend, Adam, and caught a bus northward
across the border to Vancouver, my first time in Canada in over five
years.

Vancouver is every bit the stellar city I remember it, a dense and
exciting place with a similar buzz to Seattle, and even more
incredible natural surroundings. The downtown is packed tightly onto a
peninsula, with a large chunk of ancient forest just next door in
Stanley Park. Pedestrians abound; the center of the city is
residential in a way unlike any American city outside of New York
State. We stayed at a hostel downtown, and walked around non-stop. By
a wonderful coincidence, my long-lost pal Brian aka Gringo was also in
town, visiting family. Gringo had been my guide and partner on almost
every trip I had been to Vancouver previously, and now lives in NYC.
We celebrated around town till the wee hours, and on our last day in
town met up with Melissa (one of my treeclimbers from Tassie) and her
partner Marty, coming in from Bellingham just over the border. After a
day exploring the markets on Granville Island and the forests and
totem poles of Stanley Park, we headed southwards again and arrived in
Seattle late in the night.

More soon,
write back if you can,

y
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-->http://tinyurl.com/yngwe2
-->http://new.photos.yahoo.com/swiftsnail/albums

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"In the intial furnace, hydrogen was transformed into helium, an atom
scarcely more complex. But we can already deduce from this
transformation the firest great rule of our universe: More and More
Complex. This rule seems obvious. But there is nothing to prove that
it applies in other universes. Elsewhere, the rule may be Hotter and
Hotter, Harder and Harder, or Funnier and Funnier." Bernard Werber,
_The Empire of the Ants_

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-y- Return to Flower Swamp

2006-12-06T19:48:00.000-08:00

===========
-y- Return to Flower Swamp
===========
*Pictures! (Album) http://tinyurl.com/2d3z39 (Show) http://tinyurl.com/2yljqb

Like so many others, I traveled to visit family for the Thanksgiving holiday. I don't think Florida will ever be 'home'; it is too strange and unique to ever feel familiar. The ice storms were just about to hit Seattle when I caught the early morning flight in late November. The warm nights in Florida reminded me of how difficult winters in Seattle or Hobart can be. But the warm winter seemed to stifle the sense of activity with a pleasant soporific.

My parents, sister, and brother, were of course, older, wiser, and all doing quite well at their various pursuits. Things with me were still unpredictable but settling in Seattle for the winter offered me a great bit of progress and traction on many different projects.

Downtown St. Petersburg was the same, sleepy place, just beginning with their overly extravagant Christmas decorations. My favorite, of course, was the Christmas tree, a perfect cone of metal rods covered in plastic green fluff. While superficially resembling a young giant sequoia, ironically there was no pleasant embrace beneath it branches- just a metal cage. There were of course a few late night cups of tea on the wonderful balcony of the opulent Vinoy hotel, and several trips to the Gulf for the pinks and golds of the sunset over the water. The alligators were thankfully even more established in the ponds near my parents house, and the planted trees were doing their best to gain a foothold in the recent development. During the next two weeks, I had an opportunity to visit several of the nature parks around Pinellas County- Boyd Hill, Mocassin Lake, Weedon Island each with a collection of hiking trails through cypress swamp, hardwood hammock, and pine woodland, and with hawks and owls in cages, and a museum with live animals, skeletons, displays. Amazingly, no matter how close these preserves are to the road, when you walk into the thick forest you are completely cut off from the overwhelming urban density of Pinellas County surrounding you, a return to the primeval Florida.

=>http://www.stpete.org/fun/parks/ayboyd3.htm
=>http://www.pinellascounty.org/environment/

The big excursion was, delightfully, right across the Florida peninsula from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean at Cape Canaveral. Carmen and I started off early in the morning and we zoomed across the flat highway nightmare that is central Florida. Right past Orlando and with just a wave out the window to the World of Disney, we stopped at random at a town called Celebration. This little town projected an eerie sense of affluent reality, wonderful houses, the shiny clock tower, the lake with a fountain, the green lawns- a filtered and constructed sense of How It Should Be. A small farmer's market was taking place in the center of town, albeit one with very few vegetables and much trinketry for sale.

Of course, there is a story behind the town. Celebration was developed by Disney, on a plot of land they owned where they used to transport adventurous alligators from the amusement park. The place simultaneously reminds one of a progressive, ambitious ideal, and also of a hollow longing in America, a "nostalgia for a time they can't remember."

=>http://www.americansc.org.uk/Online/Celebration.htm
=>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration%2C_FL .

Onwards to a far more progressive, ambitious place, and one that brought on a nostalgia for places we can only imagine. At Cape Canaveral, a large protected section of coastline on the sand barrier islands surrounds our Capital of Space Exploration, a place besieged by the ambitions of other nations and our current distractions. In such a flat landscape, the space shuttle and the various launchpad towers are on full display. The visitors center is a bit of a sprawling complex, and like Celebration it is influenced too much by the amusement parks, with perhaps too much concentration on amusement over engagement. We got the sense that NASA thought they needed to compete with DisneyWorld for visitor dollars, and was most likely losing.

Several buildings at the visitor center extolled NASA's achievements, and there was a brilliant sense of well-earned pride and accomplishment in the photographs, replicas, displays, and exhibits. We went to the Moon! But today, we barely trust our government when they say we will return to the heavenly bodies. Like trees in a forest, we need competition to remind us of the priority to grow tall, and NASA can only secretly pine for the days of the Soviet Empire.

=>http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/home/index.html
=>http://moon.google.com/

I'd only seen the Atlantic once before, on Long Island near New York City, and I was terribly excited by the opportunity to see the Tropical Atlantic in one of its more intact locales. Carmen graciously indulged this side trip and we headed to the Ocean. The whole region was a complicated maze of shallow backwaters, sand islands, and fast highways. The Canaveral Wildlife Preserve protects the coastline and its backswamps from the developers, but the place still scrambled my perception of what makes a beach. A road runs behind the dunes; you park a car and walk over the five metre sand hill to the Ocean. There was a strange energy there, with many people doing beachy things on a very narrow strip of sand at high tide. Behind the parking lots was a collection of tangled scrub, swampy underfoot and absolutely dominated by mosquitoes. There was no shade. The gentle topography, the roadline, and the impenetrable vegetation made the place remarkably lacking for option-each of the 13 parking lots felt exactly the same, and there was no variety in cliffs or forests to invite one away from the sand. Carmen and I did our best to find some sort of hiking trail or distinct location of beach, but there was none of the infinite variety of space and place that you would find in the forest coastlines of the Cascadian coast. As evening fell, we returned back to the west coast, where the dunes are now mostly hotels, having crossed the peninsula and back easily in a day.

=>http://fcit.usf.edu/florida/maps/aerial/aerial01/61500.htm
=> http://fcit.usf.edu/florida/maps/aerial/aerial01/61801.htm
=>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Mexico

Toward the end of my time in Florida, I had a quick visit to the neighbouring city of Clearwater, home of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology Church. I was hoping to have a good talk to one of their ubiquitous recruiters, but managed to miss their main headquarters- in a town two blocks square. Several pedestrians were walking around in the blue uniform of Church employees. I rescued a silver winged butterfly from the sidewalk. Later, I took the opportunities to catch up with Meg Lowman and Bruce Rinker, both well-known canopy scientists that I have the good fortune to have met over the years. Both offer great input and good enthusiasm to many projects, and are great people to know. Through Meg, I met her student Bryson, who set up the ropes for me to climb into one of the older pines in Southern Florida, a magnificent tall tree on the water's edge at New College in Sarasota. Late in the day, I visited the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, a centre of epiphyte botany and formerly, a keystone organization for canopy research.

=>http://www.scientology.org/oca.htm
=>http://www.ncf.edu/
=>http://www.canopymeg.com/
=>http://www.selby.org/

Soon, though, it was time to fly westwards back to Seattle. Farewells to the family and friends, and the warm weather, and a long journey through the sky. The mountains were absolutely buried under snow, and the volcanoes put on a wonderful display as we were landing. I was lucky enough to take some wonderful photographs of Seattle, showing not only my local stomping grounds clearly but also its pleasant valley-glaciated nook in Puget Sound. There was still snow on the ground...

=>http://www.dnr.wa.gov/geology/lowland.htm
=>http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/521083/

That recently retreated ice glacier is a reminder of the changes we are headings towards...how will Florida fare? The place is so low, so flat, and so vulnerable to the atmosphere, what will it be like in fifty years? Will the Flower Swamp be completely drowned?

==========
"We're going back to the Pliocene, and that's too damn bad."
Overheard in the Paleobotany lab at U of Wash, in regards to the potential loss of Arctic ice by mid century:
==========
"The problem is you've begun to expect the unexpected. That kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?"
Horoscope for Aries, 31jan07 in Crestin's Sign Language

==========
=> (Album) Return to Flower Swamp
http://tinyurl.com/2d3z39
http://www.dotphoto.com/go.asp?l=treeoctopus&P=&AID=4287173&IID=148089796&CID=1786598&T=1&E=Y&ILD=3069655

=>(Show) Return to Flower Swamp
http://tinyurl.com/2yljqb
http://www.dotphoto.com/go.asp?l=treeoctopus&P=&SID=139720&CID=1786598&Show=Y&E=Y&ILD=3069661

Storms on the Conifer Coast.

2006-10-31T19:49:00.001-08:00

Storms on the Conifer Coast.
Preparing for Panic.

==>Photos at http://tinyurl.com/yfaahv

Way way back when, at the end of October 2006, I traveled south with Henry to one of the last remaining ancient cedar forests in the state of Oregon. We were slightly different people back then, perhaps a little less sure of ourselves. Several miles behind a locked gate at Opal Creek, the tiny mining town of Jawbone Flats continues on to the present day as an environmental education center, and we were heading there for ten days of medical training to earn a Wilderness First Responder certificate.

==>Jawbone Flats Environmental Education: http://www.opalcreek.org/
==>WFR Courses: http://www.nols.edu/wmi/courses/wildfirstresponder.shtml

But, first, of course, we had to make an adventure out of it. We spent a pleasant afternoon hanging out in Portland with some friends, and hurried off in the morning towards to the spectacular waterfall canyons of the Columbia River Gorge. The short, incredible hike at Horsetail Falls brought us to a huge column of water jumping from the columnar basalt cliffs. The path wound behind the waterfall and we could look down past the next set of cliffs to the mile-wide Columbia River just below. This is the sort of place where rainbows dance, and the forest glows with waterdroplets. We then travelled into the old volcanic highlands of the Oregon Cascades, between the younger high stratovolcano peaks, and entered the steep valley of Opal Creek. From the river to the forest, we joined our class of thirty at some nondescript gates on a forest road, and headed several miles to a wonderful collection of wooden buildings, surrounded by the dark forest.

==>The falls: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/getaways/128183_hike26.html
==> The OR High Cascades: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Oregon/HighCascades/description_high_cascades.html

How to describe ten incredibly intense days? First, the setting. Old cedar forests, towering ridges above, Mt. Jefferson volcano like a dagger nearby. Jawbone Flats, as our little site was called, is in a valley so steep the sun rose and set hours into the day. The lodgings were stellar, beautiful wooden buildings where the fireplace was always lit and the three square meals each day were fantastic. Second, the people- thirty people seeking medical training for remote areas, almost everyone for professional reasons. I was the only field biologist amongs several tour guides, firefighters, trail workers, and emergency personnel. Our eldest was in her 70s and our youngest was 18. Our teachers, Mark and Paul, brought together an excellent set of skills and experiences, combining decades of training as a Special Forces commando, a ski patroller, rier raft guide, and extensive ambulance work. Their performance was spectacular, and it seemed that every ailment or injury we discussed had been properly patched up by one of them. Third, the lessons, all sorts of unfun things: CPR, lightning, hypothermia, bloody wounds, allergies, sucking chest wounds, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, hypernatremia, embolisms, respiratory distress, altitude sickness, fractures, open fractures, toothaches, ectopic pregnancies, brain damage, search and rescue procedures, ankle wrapping, pulse counting, blood pressure emergecies, and more. As important as learning these details were the numerous practice sessions, where lucky students froze on the ground (often in a puddle) playing victim and less luckier students stressed out while playing doctor. And last, the Rain.

You may have heard that the grand old West is being inundated with storms, record breaking rainfall and wind. During this course, we were blasted by the rain, with little respite. Most often, rain in this region is the misty sort, but this time it was the proverbial "buckets" of rain. It seems a typhoon was coming across from SE Asia and flinging itself against our continent. This is after a record-setting cold spring and summer heat wave in California. Our teachers, of course, took pleasure in this wonderful learning experience, and we, of course, took pleasure in the blazing fireplace.

==>The curriculum: http://www.nols.edu/wmi/courses/documents/WFR_Schedule_no_times.pdf
==> The Rain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extratropical_cyclones

Four events stood out: the eighteen mile climb of Battleax Peak on our sole rest day (thankfully, a dry one); the midnight Halloween party with the educational center staff; the mass casualty exercise in which seven victims created enough blood, terror, and difficut triage decisions to test the nerves of the rescuers (what do I do? what do I do?), especially panic-prone with one student offering an incredible two hours of nonstop screaming; and our midnight, rainy, test, in which one member of a small group broke her leg, and another had a seizure.

The whole course was an incredible experience, and a necessary addition to the skill set. My only complaint of the curriculum was the failure to mention, and thereby provide some tools to psychologically handle, the fact that people DIE and can become permanently MANGLED. While they taught us to stabilize several ailments and traumas, too often the treatment consisted of "a. keep the patient calm b. monitor the patient c. evacuate immediately." Most importantly, we've got somewhere to start when it does come down to the "What do I do?" moment.

==>A good place to start: http://www.nols.edu/wmi/pdf/wfr_cheat_sheet.pdf
==> The rocks on Battleax: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/LivingWith/VolcanicPast/Places/volcanic_past_oregon.html

In Portland, by a excellent coincidence in timing, I met with Lucie W., my best friend from Tasmania; now living in British Columbia. Her grandparents lived in the city, and we walked around the city in an almost comical amount of rain. Our raingear, that had kept us dry a few years back on adventures together in Tassie, was no longer waterproof and we were soaked through. It didn't matter, though, it was a wonderful day, and a special opportunity to rekindle an important friendship.

The return trip with Henry to Seattle via Portland was dark, in horrific rain. As we headed north we heard of bridges washing out, and peered out through the windscreen at our headlights showing the mist and spray off of the road. Back in the city, the first of many blackouts and power line failures to come has luckily missed my house in Ballard. It was a tremendous pleasure to throw the wet clothing in the corner and dry out after days of damp. And then it was back to work at the University, training for the pollen work.

The snow was pounding in the mountains, and after a late night organization session in the midst of a party, there was group of a dozen from the University Climbing club snowshoeing up into Mt. Forgotten. An interesting mix, with complete novices and some hardened experts pounding through the snow. I had just seen Kevin S.'s photos of the same mountain from a few weeks back, and it was barely recognizable. With short days and moderately sketchy avalanche conditions, we turned tail and headed down to the marginally warmer valleys, and home to the Emerald City. The next morning, I left the rain and traded it for the sunshine; I headed to Florida to join the family for Thanksgiving holiday. From the far northwest of the country to the far southeast, things could not be more different.

More soon. Write back if you can!

Yo

==>Photos at http://tinyurl.com/yfaahv

Below the Cascades Crest

2006-10-30T19:49:00.000-08:00

Below the Cascades Crest

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Pictures here:
http://tinyurl.com/yngwe2
Click on "Slideshow"

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Seattle offers several interesting juxtapositions for an ecologist. In
one city there is a convergence of forest industry, land development,
habitats from rocky beaches to marshy wetlands to shady forests to icy
summits, an active recreation industry, productive fisheries, large
universities, high-tech expertise, capital investment wealth, fresh
volcanic activity, and, most importantly, a high proportion of people
who care about their landscape. It is a pleasure to be back.

I moved into an old house in Ballard with my friends Dave and Kendra,
fixed up a nice basement room and now I live within walking distance
of several very lively neighbourhoods. City life is a refreshing
change from mountain life (or Florida life...) and as winter days get
shorter the nightlife gets longer...

Mid September 2006, I was incredibly fortunate enough to be able to
join along on a U of Washington College of Forest Resources field trip
with Jerry Franklin, tagging along with my old friend and the
teacher-for-a-day Mark Swanson. We caught up with the class at the
Wind River Canopy Crane, just east of Portland along the Columbia
River Gorge.
This was some very familiar territory. I had taken the same class six
years earlier, when it was only ten people- it had grown to an almost
overwhelming 40 students. During four years at the Forestry school
there had been several visits here, and my introduction to
treeclimbing as an intern had begun here in 2001. The old arboretum is
still overgrown, the little dammed Hemlock Lake is still shallow and
quiet, and the research Canopy Crane is still in operation. It was a
real treat to meet the new students, and compare their experiences to
mine several years back. We hiked to several creeks, climbed into a
red alder tree, and spilled a bottle of bright green flourescene dye
to illustrate water flows. There was the stellar, familiar, midnight
trip to the hot springs. Mark and I were the only ones in a large
group who had been there, and just like old times we forded the river
and hiked several miles in the dark along the riverbank, happily
arriving at the steamy pools by the Wind River. I had many pleasant,
magic memories of this place, and feel lucky to have joined this group
this year- a sweet reminder of what a special education the College of
Forest Resources offers. Of course, being in the midnight forest by
the stream certainly qualifies as a learning experience- this
experience was earning them university credits.

A sunny autumn day in late September: The idea was to explore Cave
Ridge, a very discreet block of limestone uplifted with the Cascades
and forming some of the very very few caverns in the mostly volcanic
and plutonic mountain range. Josh S. and I spent a day climbing
Snoqualmie Peak, a quick steep trail on the crest of the Cacades just
near the I-90 freeway. From there we'd have a good view onto the crest
of Cave Ridge. I had known about these caves for many years and had
never gone off looking for them. However, these caves were known to be
well hidden, very vertical, and were very much not candidates for a
casual trip. We did not actually make it onto the limestone, but took
a good look from the summit of Snoqualmie Peak…it was a surprisingly
massive and blunt chunk of rock, on full display. Visiting these caves
will have to wait several months- not only will snow cover them soon,
but I will need to track down the right people with which to explore
them. We were treated to stellar views of the rest of the Cacades-
four volcanoes and countless idges and daggerpeaks. Through the most
fortunate gap between two mountains we could just make out the
skyscrapers of Seattle (At the next opportunity after this trip, I
joined the local chapter of the National Speleological Society,..the
connections are now made.)

http://www.cascadegrotto.org/
http://www.summitpost.org/view_object.php?object_id=150668

Once, there was a thriving town called Wellington, near the crest of
the Cascades at Stevens Pass. It was on the railroad line and a centre
for mining activity. Just east of the town was a very audacious
three-mile tunnel through a solid granite mountain. One year, the
winter brought a stupendous amount of snow to the mountains. During
one of these blizzards, trains passed through the east end of the
tunnel, and became trapped at the depot on the avalanches on the west
end. After a change in weather conditions, a slab avalanche swept down
and knocked the trains off the tracks. When they all returned, they
found a hundred passengers dead from the impact. Shortly after this
very public tragedy, the town dwindled away. The tunnel was mostly
forgotten. A physics laboratory set up a research station temporarily
deep in the mountain, probably in a quest to intercept interstellar
neutrinos, but when they left the tunnel was empty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellington_avalanche
http://home1.gte.net/mvmmvm/index.html

In mid October the leaves were changing colours on the mountain-ash
trees, and I was fortunate to catch Alison L. traveling through
Seattletown on her way to a Museum Management conference in Boise. We
caught a ride with Amie B. up into the mountains for a very special
event and helped out with the setup for a very interesting night. When
the guests arrived, well after dark, they approached the dark hole in
the mountainside with a bit of trepidation, and looked at the candles
weakly illuminating a deep entrance into the underworld. The
anticipation built as they walked a quarter-mile in the dark along the
candleway, They were not disappointed when they arrived at the very
crowded, very loud, and very unique electronic dance party, deep into
the heart of the very same Wellington tunnel.

With a handful of others, we had pulled in several cartloads of
speakers, tables, and other goodies down the passageway, placed a few
lights on the walls, and done our best to cordon off the deeper
puddles, In Australia, the slang term for a rave danceparty is "doof",
because the subwoofers bass beats sounds like "doof doof doof doof".
(This is my favourite bit of onomatopoeia) With laser light systems
beaming strange patterns down the tunnel, and clever notes beating
musically through the ground, I could only handle so much mental
stimulation before it was time to escape to a campsite under the open
sky.

http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=5127
http://www.answers.com/topic/onomatopoeia

Next morning, we escaped the madness and hiked north onto the Pacific
Crest trail, towards Lake Valhalla and Lichtenberg Peak. Although the
area is quite well-visited, there were no other campers at the lake.
The mountain thrusts an arrogant tower right over the lake, and sunny
meadows offer pleasant hiking onto the summit ridge, just behind those
vertical cliffs. Searching for a campsite, I made the classic mistake
of pushing through wet vegetation without my waterproofs on, finding
myself soaked and shivering in the afternoon sunlight. Our climb of
Lichtenberg went perfectly, starting out by crossing the river outlet,
hopping the granite boulders beneath the tower, and traversing right
through spotty trees onto a steep huckleberry meadow. The berry bushes
were a dull crimson in the late autumn, and before long we were on top
of the summit shining brightly on a crisp day.

http://www.paulzaretsky.com/newimages/789.htm
http://www.turns-all-year.com/goldhome2/hp75/index.html
http://www.huckleberries.org/page6.html

Back in civilization, I took the opportunity to visit the Canopy Lab
in Olympia, always a nuclear reactor of ideas and enthusiasm. In
Seattle, I finalized the details with Estella to work in the Botany
lab, but had to postpone beginning for a while still. I was treated to
another visitor, this time a young man I had known for nineteen years.
My younger brother Gabriel was taking advantage of a holiday weekend
from studies at the U of South Carolina, and came out to this far
corner of the country for a visit. We toured Seattle a bit, catching
up with a longlost family friend, Adam, and caught a bus northward
across the border to Vancouver, my first time in Canada in over five
years.

Vancouver is every bit the stellar city I remember it, a dense and
exciting place with a similar buzz to Seattle, and even more
incredible natural surroundings. The downtown is packed tightly onto a
peninsula, with a large chunk of ancient forest just next door in
Stanley Park. Pedestrians abound; the center of the city is
residential in a way unlike any American city outside of New York
State. We stayed at a hostel downtown, and walked around non-stop. By
a wonderful coincidence, my long-lost pal Brian aka Gringo was also in
town, visiting family. Gringo had been my guide and partner on almost
every trip I had been to Vancouver previously, and now lives in NYC.
We celebrated around town till the wee hours, and on our last day in
town met up with Melissa (one of my treeclimbers from Tassie) and her
partner Marty, coming in from Bellingham just over the border. After a
day exploring the markets on Granville Island and the forests and
totem poles of Stanley Park, we headed southwards again and arrived in
Seattle late in the night.

More soon,
write back if you can,

y
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-->http://new.photos.yahoo.com/swiftsnail/albums

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"In the intial furnace, hydrogen was transformed into helium, an atom
scarcely more complex. But we can already deduce from this
transformation the firest great rule of our universe: More and More
Complex. This rule seems obvious. But there is nothing to prove that
it applies in other universes. Elsewhere, the rule may be Hotter and
Hotter, Harder and Harder, or Funnier and Funnier." Bernard Werber,
_The Empire of the Ants_

Ancient Dust from Trees Long Gone

2006-10-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

Ancient Dust from Trees Long Gone, or..
The Study of the Sprinkling of Dust

This pictures:
http://www.dotphoto.com/CPViewAlbum.asp?AID=4065600&IID=133362389&Page=1

Here in Seattle. Familiar places mingling with unfamiliar times and
ideas. The city has aged a bit but my enthusiasm for the place has
changed only slightly. In the ten weeks since settling in for the
winter the glow is still there; its dark at 4:30 pm and I haven't seen
much of the sun for several days now, but there is a vibrancy here
that I recognize from years past.

I'm working at the University of Washington, again for the Biology
Department, in Estella Leopold's pollen lab. Its a great opportunity
to learn new skills and be part of an active university setting again.
Getting the guided course in pollen identification from Estella
(beginning her sixth decade studying pollen) is a singular honour and
is opening my eyes to a completely different type of plant
identification. Pollen grains can inexplicably last for several
million years, and our lab work is reconstructing the vegetation and
climate from forest that have been gone for eons. Unfortunately, no
field work for this winter, but a good period to reasess and plan for
the spring. So now, slighlty unexpectedly, I get to be a
palynologist, or a pollen scientist....translated from Latin to "the
study of the sprinkling of dust." Once you get into those "-ology"s
you just can't get enough of them. (Palynerdologist?)

=> Dust Sprinkles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palynology
=> Floral Masculinity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollen
=> The Lab: http://protist.biology.washington.edu/eleopold/
~~~~~~~
At the end of August, I spent several days with Evan and I-Kwoan (who
would be happily married a month later), and we caught some of the
sunny late summer breezes sailing on Lake Washington. I suppose I
didnt have much of a plan, or even a clue, as to what I'd do for the
next few months, but it was a beautiful reminder of Seattle's charms-
Mt. Rainier floating in the sapphire skies above the old forests of
Seward Park.

In fine style Kevin Steffa arranged a living situation for me at his
house and without any delay we motivated out to the North Cascades
with Lindsay M. and Jon J. We had a window of clear skies and
hightailed it up the infamous Goodell Creek into the Southern Picket
Range. Our destination was the infamous Terror Basin. The North
Cascades are the most terrifying rugged, wet, and icy national Park in
the lower 48, and consequently the most remote and least visited.
Several years ago I had unsuccessfully navigated through the very same
valley with Dave O.- we kept chanting the mantra from the guidebook:
"routefinding may be problematic."

=> The Range: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picket_Range
=> Moon's Eye View:
http://terraserver-usa.com/map.aspx?t=1&s=14&lon=-121.298&lat=48.774&w=750&h=500
But since then the trail has been upgraded and we tracked steeply up
from the cedar rainforest through the emerald realm of the Moss Elves
and into the sunkissed alpine territory. Landscapes of biotite rock
gneiss. A long traverse was made delicious by an abundance of
huckleberries and the most perfect grassy meadows bounded by granite
blocks. We turned a corner and dropped down a scary scree slope into
the aptly named Terror Basin, where we gained a eyedazzling view of
the Southern Pickets. From then on it was almost entirely rock slabs,
sometimes decorated with moss or lichens, with occasional
heatherfields. Above us the Terror Glacier still dominated the
skyline, but it was on the retreat, having only recently polished the
granites at our campsite.

We spent three nights in quite stellar conditions at a perfect camp
by a pond. The sun set behind the off angle peak of the Chopping Block
several miles away, and the meltoff of another glacier nearby formed a
creek of clear icewater. I reacquainted with the ice, exploring an arm
of the Terror Glacier and observing its pattern of crevasses and
hidden rivers. On a ridgeline traverse we stood at the edge of cliffs
diving a thousand metres to lakes below, and found tiny hand-sized
caves filled with orange crystals. At the base of a snow couloir, a
rivulet of melting water created an deep ice cave of blue curves, a
reminder of how quickly the ice is leaving these latitudes. The vista
of mountains surrounding us were constantly savoured and the company
was topnotch. Jon and I had only met once before but had many friends
in common, and had witnessed the same events in our friends' lives
from different perspectives. Between the two of us and Kevin, we took
several thousand photographs, allowing Lindsay more than enough time
to relax to balance out the frantic demands for "more posing."

=> Some wonderful trip reportage (scroll down for Jon's photoessay):
http://uw.cascadeclimbers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3110&highlight=gouda+goodell\
=> What Jon's Jantz captured: http://jonjantz.com/gallery/gouda
=> What Kevin Steffa captured:
http://picasaweb.google.com/kevinsteffa/06_09_MacMillan

Within two days of returning to Seattle Lindsay and I promptly
returned to the Cascades, this time with Chris Cass, Ben, and Peter
(?). Last I had been out with Chris was our pre-9/11 adventure on
Olympus, and since then he made quite the reputation for himself as a
hiehard alpine Ski Freak. But it was just boots for us this time. Our
original plan to visit Mt. Daniel was abandoned because of forest
fires in the region, so we headed to the serpentine ridges just south
of Mt. Stuart to walk on the the metal mountains.

The serpentine rocks are deep earth metallic, ultramafic,
spectacular. We headed up onto eeries blue gravel slopes and shiny
dark rocks, to spend a windy night in a copse of trees near the
ridgeline. In the morning we went one direction and climbed Navajo
Peak, with a treasure of a view toward Stuart, and in the afternoon we
went the other, a pleasurable scramble along a rocky ridge to the
summit of Earl Peak. The palette of color in the rocks was remarkable,
regions of white and green and cyan in the foreground against the more
standard-issue grey granite.

Back to the city, reconnecting with people and places. I get the news
that there is some labwork available, and it is a delight to be in
such a positive work environment. Walking down the street, I bump into
friends I haven't seen for years, which is one of the best feelings I
know. In late September I travelled across to the Kitap Peninsula
and the Suquamish Indian Reservation to visit Joe the mycologist- only
a short hop away by boat but worlds away from Seattle. Joe is working
at the Bloedel Botanic Gardens and is a constinuing inspiration as he
recovers from a near-fatal auto wreck. We toured the Bloedel Gardens
and he has his eye on every green plant and fungal mushroom in the
place. Eveningtime's entertainment in Kitsap consisted of exploring
the abandoned gun emplacements guarding Puget Sound. Now overgrown by
the ferns and shrubs of the conifer jungle, the tunnels and bunkers
are strange hidden places lined with graffiti. All of this within
sight of the Seattle city lights.

=>Kitsapia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsap_Peninsula
=>The Gardens: http://www.bloedelreserve.org/
=>The Triangle of Fire:
http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=7524

More, soon.
"The quickest way to get several things done is to do one at a time."

Francisco's City, Thompson's Peak, & Oregon's Coast

2006-09-26T19:53:00.000-07:00

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Francisco's City, Thompson's Peak, & Oregon's Coast
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~It's new technology. Please let me know if you have any trouble
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~The City of Saint Francis, or San Francisco, was overwhelming,
expensive, exhilarating, shiningly exhausting. After months in the
mountains, coming down to The City was a foray into a faster life-
this was definitely not the real world, but something more intricate.
To mark the occasion, my first morning in the Bay Area, we experienced
an minor earthquake.

~From the US Geological Survey: 2.9 on the Richter Scale. 2 miles ENE
of Berkeley, CA AUG 17 2006 05:58:20

~http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi

~I spent several days in early August 2006 with Anthony, Alison, and
the handful of other members of a co-op on Shattuck street, on the
border between Berkeley and Oakland. While co-operative housing seems
rare in most other cities, they are plentiful in Berkeley. Unlike a
rental house- this place abounded in creativity and continuity- a
basement filled with art supplies, a costume room, a veggie garden,
bike racks in the hallway, several bookshelves filled to the brim-
all the sort of things that make life in the city more pleasant.

~I had an amazing afternoon catching up with Raj Chetty and his wife
Sundari. Raj and I were best friends in middle school and it had been
13 years since we had last seen each other. He is an economics
professor at Berkeley- after a stellar career at Harvard- at the age
of 27, and is exhibiting the sort of academic career PERFECTION that
is beyond belief. But of course, no matter what, we are still video
game nerds at heart.

~Alison, Johann, Anthony, and I visited the De Young Art Museum in
Golden Gate Park. Anthony was turned away at the door- he was carrying
his musical saw and the guards weren't too excited about it. Alison
and Johann are both students in museology, training to work as
curators, and their company added greatly to the experience. It was
wonderful to catch a dose of that nebulous, amorphous thing- Culture.

~http://www.thinker.org/deyoung/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?exhibitionkey=549

~Eventually, after the farewells, I returned to Eureka in late August
and promptly went up into the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area. While I
had been in the Trinity Mountains all summer, I had only the smallest
glimpse into the crazy granitic world above treeline, and was
determined to visit the cirques and valleys and peaks before exiting
California.

~http://gorp.away.com/gorp/publishers/westcliffe/ca_trini.htm

~Canyon Creek is one of the most popular trails in northern
California, and for good reason. A gentle grade brings you up into
those sparse and picturesque alpine granite forests. I was amazed at
how visually familiar this landscape was- I had spent the preceding
half of a year ogling photographs on the web. While much lower than
the Sierra Nevada, the area is more biodiverse and equally
spectacular. Still, there were relatively few people I encountered on
the trail, and even fewer that made it beyond the lakes. Just over the
mountains to the west, yet another forest fire was raging at full
force.

~http://maps.google.com/maps?q=junction+city,+ca&ie=UTF8&z=13&ll=40.990524,-123.038635&spn=0.050793,0.162392&t=h&om=1

~The forest clinging to the slopes early on the trail is thick,
temperate conifer forest, similar to the study locations we were
searching for the owls. In addition to the coniferous trees, a
distinct community of broadleaved evergreens represents a floral group
with affinities to eastern China. When the ice sheets covered the NW
corners of the USA, many species found refuge in the valleys of the
Trinity Alps and the surrounding Klamath Mountains, and the region is
now the important biodiversity hotspot on the western coast of North
America. There are more conifer species here than anywhere else in the
world.

~http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klamath-Siskiyou_forests
~http://www.worldwildlife.org/wildworld/profiles/terrestrial/na/na0516_full.html

~As the track climbed higher up to the lakes, the ramparts, thousands
of feet above the trail, became closer and more defined. Along the
way, you encounter one of the largest ponderosa pines in the world,
which is exceedingly recognizable if you are looking for it. With a
shining white dead top, it towers above the forest, footsteps away
from both the trail and the creek.

~At the second large waterfall, the granite slabs begin and when you
climb up out of the forest onto a magic landscape of carved, curvy
rock, with jagged peaks hemming you in on all sides. The waterfalls
become more complicated, more rocky, and more scenic, with gentle
pools in the foreground and severe mountains in the background. The
glacial origin of the valley is increasingly apparent as the canyon
turns into a steep sided valley. A flat sheet of granite- surrounded
by the exceedingly rare Brewer's Weeping Spruce- offered a perfect
campsite.

~http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picea_breweriana
~http://www.pinetum.org/cones/PCbreweriana.jpg

~Morningtime, Jake and Dave, two high schoolers from nearby
Weaverville passed by my campsite and we joined forces to climb
Thompson Peak, the highest point in the Alps. Thompson Peak is a
strikingly sharp mountain carved magnificently by the ice, and now a
pinnacle surrounded by curvy slabs. We ascended past a waterfall-
which was easily recognized as what used to be an icefall- and into a
high cirque from which we attained the long stacked procession of
slabs. Clambering up through the maze of slabs brought us to the
boulderfields at the base of a ridge, and then some careful scouting
to find the correct notch to attain the sharp ridge between Wedding
Cake Peak and Thompson. Once on the ridge, it was a pleasant stroll
onto the somewhat more gently sloping backside of Thompson. As we
approached the summit, it became more and more precipitous until we
were scrambling and rock climbing- popping out on a tilted boulder at
the very top! On the north slopes, the last of the once-regal Trinity
Glaciers hung on- it shallow crevasses barely hinting at the slightest
remnant of blue ice beneath the snow. The ice had retreated.

~http://www.ehow.com/how_6974_climb-slab-rock.html
~http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock/150978/thompson-peak.html

~Back in Eureka, I spent a few days packing up and saying farewells.
Mechelle, a long-lost friend, was in Southern Oregon and detoured to
give me a ride back north to Seattle. We took the opportunity to
travel along the coastal road in Oregon, northwards to the Columbia
River.

~http://www.iinet.com/~englishriver/LewisClarkColumbiaRiver/Regions/Places/columbia_river.html

~The coast in Oregon, and, sadly, most all of the mountain ranges, are
more thrashed and historically overexploited than similar locales in
California and Washington. While there are many beautiful things in
western Oregon, enough to fill several lifetimes, I consistently am
more drawn to its neighbours. We visited a giant coastal Monterey
Cypress, walked along a beach with a massive rock pyramid, and paid
the eight dollars to see the somewhat interesting Sea Lion Caves- a
coastal cave (!) which every tourist must visit at least once (and
then never bother again) where sea lions (!) gather for shelter. We
also saw a nice bog filled with carnivorous Darlingtonia pitcher
plants, waited patiently to replace a tire in Coos Bay, and enjoyed a
sunny crisp day talking on the sand at Cannon Beach. Lovely times
along the Pacific. At the town of Astoria along the Columbia River, we
crossed northwards to Washington, saying one last farewell to the
beach at one of Lewis and Clarks' forts, and then driving through the
heavily cut-over forest plantations of SW Washington back to Olympia,
I-5 and Seattle!

~http://www.sealioncaves.com/
~http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darlingtonia_Botanical_Wayside

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~So I am back in Seattle now! Where are you, what is news? Write me
back if you get a chance...

yo
26 Sep 06
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2006-08-23T19:59:00.000-07:00

Landscape Relations: Mendocino-Trinity-Cinder-Lassen-Humboldt.
Early August, 20006.

Images Here --->>>
http://tinyurl.com/nropo
http://tinyurl.com/nropo
http://tinyurl.com/nropo
http://tinyurl.com/nropo
http://tinyurl.com/nropo

<<<---Images There

Spotted owl project- The final round of sampling events was somehow
even more grueling than the first round. In mid-July, we were working
long days in the midst of a record-breaking heatwave, a sharp contrast
and even more deliriously aggravating than the record-breaking rain
and snow back in May.

A great deal of credit must be given to the thirteen interns, who
barrelled through these conditions in fine form, and who will now
hopefully find some of their future challenges simple by comparison.
Similarly to the work in May, we were up at 3:30 and searching for the
owls before sunrise, and then spending the entire period of daylight
observing them. Working in groups, this meant each person had
substantial periods of down time, but how much relaxation can you do
when it is creeping on to 114 degrees F (45 C)? We sweated it out. It
was still, of course, wonderful to spend the day watching owls, often
in mated pairs and frequently with owl babies. Despite the
temperature, and the rampaging overabundance of poison oak, we again
found ourselves far exceeding our initial predictions.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2674.htm

After a few days working in the home turf at Shasta-Trinity National
Forest- the entire group travelled southwards to Mendocino. There
were some slight frictions with the Forest Service (who are dealing
with increasingly difficult times as budgets are slashed), but overall
it was an excellent change in scenery and an equally successful time.
We worked at sites near the (dammned) Lake Pilsbury, a popular fishing
spot, and also in the far corner of the mountains near Kenny Camp. Our
handful of days off was invariably spent at the most wonderful
swimming hole on the Eel River- cool water on scorching days, massive
rocks jammed into the valley forming dams and overhangs and crevices
and caves. You can jump off of a rock and dive deep beneath the water
to escape the heat. You can swim behind this rock and and find a
secret waterfall cave beneath a rock, with a deep pool leading into
the blue beneath.

http://findyourselfincalifornia.com/communities/mendocinocounty/index.html

On the last day of fieldwork, I was leading a triplet of interns to
one of our steepest, most northenly sites. By midmorning we had no
hoots in response and had already criscrossed the valley several
times. And then we came across a flat region- with wonderful old
trees- and found an absolute explosion of spotted owl feathers on the
ground. Our bird, it seemed, was alive no longer. Enigmatically, I was
not so distressed as the interns to find our feathered friend has
passed along. I actually thought it was a fitting end to a field
season that had encompassed their lives from eggs, nestlings,
fledglings, adults..and mortalities.

And then we were done! A handful of days remained sorting gear, and
organizing data. There were some large gaps in our data organization,
and it was slightly terrifying to discover that no one else on the
crew had any experience about database design. So I was the lucky
fellow to spend two days locked into the computer trying- and
partially succeeding- to reconcile those errors. Hooray, indeed. Group
farewells, and elaborate travel plans. I headed back north to Hayfork,
with the Shasta squad, and we cleaned up the two houses we had been
provided with. The last week of July was especially hectic with the
added excitement of an exceptionally large forest fire just to the
north near Weaverville, which closed one of the few highways across
the Trinity Mts. Emil, a jaguar biologist friend from Arcata, arrived
in Hayfork with his parents on a road trip from Colorado, refugees
from their original travel plans due to the forest fire. The interns
dispersed, driving off for their road trips onwards, catching a ride
to Sacramento airport, or meeting up with parents and driving off.

http://users.snowcrest.net/wb6fzh/upjunct1.html

I did also have a chance to climb Monument Peak, in the Trinity Alps,
a few weeks before on the 4th of July. Cara came up from Arcata and we
raced out there in a day. This was before the fires began, so
visibility was good pre-smoke. The Trinity Alps are the glaciated
crest of this incredibly geodiverse area, but most of the ice is gone.
Classic alpine feautures abound: dramatic spires, peaks, ridgelines,
and cirques in all directions. Tenaciously ice patches cling to the
north slopes, desperately holding on to their final crevasses and
solid blue ice. Our livetimes might outlast the glacier ice in the
Trinity Mts. A well maintained road brought us up above treeline to a
lookout tower, and Monument Peak was truly only a ridgeline away. The
bushwhacking was kept to a pleasant minimum, and before we knew it we
were clambering over the granite blocks to the summit. What a magic
place! And so close to Hayfork.... We could see over towards the true
summits at Thompsons Peak and the Sawtooth Ridge, I knew I would have
to return for more....

http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock/173834/monument-peak.html

I was the last one left, bidding farewell to Hayfork and driving a
vehicle to the Fish and Wildlife Service office east in the Sacramento
Valley, and stashing the last of the project gear. It had been an
amazing field season filled with top-notch people, places, and
perspectives. The northern valley was filled with the smoke from the
fire in the Trinities, a consequence of the eastwards wind that kept
the Hayfork valley clear.Early August- I then headed up into the
Southern Cascade Mountains to visit the Roy family- Angel was working
as a volunteer at the Lassen Peak Volcanic National Park. We explored
the northeast corner of the park, visiting the Subway Cave lava tube
(lava + water -> cooled shell of lava around waterway-> tunnel cave)
and the wonderful Cinder Cone. Only 300 years ago, the Cone awoke and
spat out gravelly rubble in all directions, creating a treeless plain
of red ash and a stout, steep cone with a distinct crater. A quick
climb up a powdery path brought us to the summit, and from the crest
we could see the massive snowdome of Lassen Peak, and the array of
lava beds, forests, valleys, and peaks that make up the National Park.
A spiral trail led down deep into the steep centre of the crater,
where only a few centuries ago a volcano spat out its frustrations
with the force of patient anger. A magic place and a powerful geology
lesson, inside the heart of a young fire mountain.

http://virtualguidebooks.com/NorthCalif/MountLassen/PitRiverHatCreek/InsideSubwayCave.html

http://virtualguidebooks.com/NorthCalif/MountLassen/PitRiverHatCreek/SubwayCaveEntrance.html

At the summit of the Cinder Cone, I said farewell to Angel and headed
westwards, intending to walk clear across the Park to the summit of
Lassen Peak two days away. Racing down the powdery ash of the Cone
brought me quickly to the cinderfields, and then along the craggy lava
beds to the edge of the forest. Only some tenacious pines could
survive on such recent ash, and it was an interesting gradient into
more developed soils and forests. I passed Rainbow Lake and the burnt
forests nearby, and joined the Pacific Crest Trail southwards past
Swan Lake.

*From Cinder Cone to Lassen Peak:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=mineral,+california&ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=40.499181,-121.368885&spn=0.102599,0.329933&t=h&om=1

http://www.terragalleria.com/parks/np.lassen-volcanic.all.html
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/LivingWith/VolcanicPast/Places/volcanic_past_lassen.html

A most secret, most special place- hiding in plain sight on the map-
Crater Butte and Crater Pool. If you are looking at a map- just east
of the Crest Trail and just SE of Swan Lake at Lassen Park is a steep
mountain labelled Crater Butte. It is an older twin to Cinder Cone,
similarly shaped and sized. It is not quite so striking visually, as
the years have softened it with a coating of forests and soil. You
could forget its origin and the secrets it holds. But if you zigzag up
the slippery pine needle slopes, or attack it straight on, you will be
delighted to reach the summit and find a shallow pool of water perched
high on the mountain, the filled crater of a volcano. Should you be so
lucky as to arrive at sunset on a hot day of cindercrunchin and
lavatrekkin, you will find it to be a delightful place for swimmin.

Travelling south on the PCT, a chilly fording across the King River at
Corral Valley, and then westwards up the River to the columnar cliffs
and flowery gorge of King's Falls...and then up the drainage, crossing
the road and continuing towards the thermal areas of the park. At Cold
Boiling Lake, gas bubbles arise into the water and create an eerie
appearance. The mosquitoes were excited to see me as I headed upwards
along the basalt cliffs and around the valley into the hotspot thermal
features of Bumpass Hell. An austere sweep of hot springs, mud
geysers, and travertine terraces oozes, boils, and pops in lethally
hot springs. A rickety, somewhat burnt boardwalk takes you over these
features in clouds of brimstone, and signs remind you that several
people have died or lost limbs while walking around the area. I was
absolutely mesmerised by the muddy bubbles, and was surprised to
discover just how wobbly the handrail was.

I camped in the forest near the rocky cliffs at Terrace Lake, and
continued on past the still-frozen Emerald Lakes to the beginning of
the Lassen Peak Trail. Lassen Peak reaches to 10,500 feet and is road
accessible to 8,500 feet. It is also the southernmost of the Cascade
Volcanoes and is quite prominent on the skyline from the Sacramento
Valley. You can also climb to the top on a well maintained trail with
a minimum of exposure. Put these facts together and you can imagine
the numbers of people on the trail. I had never before witnessed such
ill-equipped crowds anywhere else in the Cascades; on Mt. Shasta
people attempting the summit arrive with much more respect and
intimidation for their summit attempts. Lassen Peak trail included the
whole variety- cowboy boots, kids in t-shirts, seniors kitted out,
young women in sneakers and tank tops, toddlers, infants in backpacks.
Few people were carrying their extra clothes, snacks, firstaid kit,
and extra whatnot for the mountain environment, and unlike the
lightweight backpacker trend, these were omissions due to ignorance,
not experience. I felt old and overcautious, not so much burdened as
stabilized by caution.

On the very summit of Lassen Peak, a craggy summit pyramid. Eastwards,
the view was spectacular, back over the country I had justcrossed, but
westwards, the smoke from the fires hid even Shasta. It was crawling
with three dozen hikers, the mountain was subjected to some classic
instances of bad behavior- people shouting loudly on cel phones
("You'll never guess where I'm calling from!") and, more egregiously,
parents watching as their kids fed a ground squirrels. This, despite
the signs warning of their role as plague vectors, and despite what I
thought was a well-known realization that this was a horrible thing to
do to the wildlife. I was amazed-stunned, and it was a strong
reminder that I usually find myself outdoors with a much different
crowd than this. I tried to explain that they were not doing the
squirrels any favors, and was dissapointed to discover that I had to
repeat this twice before the parents passed the message along to the
kids. Moral of the story- Don't feed the animals.

http://www.gettingit.com/article/236

Back down the parking lot, and just there I ran into Wes, one of my
owl interns travelling with his father Roger- I had just said farewell
to them a few days earlier. They were heading across the country
towards Ohio, and it was wonderful for us to see familiar faces in the
park. They gave me a ride back to the Roys' house. Angel and I baked
up chocolate cookies, a warm kitchen a pleasant contrast to the
alpine ash and sunny skies. Farewells, and then travelling across 299,
past the old historical town of Shasta just near Redding, and over to
the Redwood Coast. A quick visit to the LBJ Redwood Grove, which I
had visited years before...it was as misty and quiet as I remembered.
Down from the snowy peak to the Ocean! The Ocean! Even the air was
exhilarating- water vapours and oxygens and cool breezes straight to
the soul.

Fifth day of August, double-oh-six, I arrived at Humboldt Bay, (Eureka
+ Arcata), and helped Cara with the process of moving out of an
apartment and into a little cottage tucked away on Old Arcata Road.
As things worked out, I found myself with more than a week in this
place by myself, with Cara graciously glad to have me there. This
offered space and time to think about the future, and juggle
posessions, and to type some emails. Nice times. The Bay is normally
misty, but the fertile coastal plain was treated to rare abundant
sunshine and cool windy warm days. I joined Cara for two days working
at Redwood National Park as a wildlife technician. Our first night out
we found a spotted owl juvenile in the twilight redwood forest, a
significant event in an otherwise frustrating owl survey season at the
park. It was an excellent opportunity to compare study methods between
projects, and a fun time all around. We also joined the fisheries
squad in relocating some salmon; a local campground had overdrawn
from a creek to the point where it was just a series of separated
pools. This offered a great chance to play in the water with nets and
to have a good look into the rivers. We transported 1209 fish
downstream to the contiguous water, in the process learning a great
deal about the streamway life.

A change in scenery, or maybe just restlessness, and I arranged a ride
down to the San Francisco Bay. After a field season in the remote
andquiet mountains of California's NW, visiting the city offered a
striking contrast....

More stories soon, when time permits. Now back in Seattle for the
winter. Find me at 1-206-999-4495.

Stay in touch,

~yo~
Oakland, California, twenty3rd august 06

Images Here --->>>
http://tinyurl.com/nropo
http://tinyurl.com/nropo
http://tinyurl.com/nropo
http://tinyurl.com/nropo

<<<---Images There

Ice and Electricity

2006-07-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

Ice and Electricity

"Resolution and a plan are better than a sword, because a man whets his own edges on them." Gene Wolfe, _The Citadel of the Autarch_

Look inside for photographs: http://tinyurl.com/n2yqh

This is a story about how I reacquainted with my old self- when I was the centre of my known Universe- and how I later discovered myself to be a tiny speck on a massive mountain. It starts slowly, with ice, which is fluid energy arrested in time, and ends n a whirl with electricity, which is energy flowing through an instant of time.

Slow work days early in June as we were blasted by the heat and the lack of any new leads on owls close to home in Hayfork. As we approached our much anticipated ten-day break in mid June, I had no inkling of the incoming storms. Before I would make it back into the Trinity Mountains, I'd weather through clear skies on Shasta, rainbow bright reunions with friends from way way back, thunderbolts of memory in a familiar landscape, and the dark quick tornado of automotive woes.

My love affair with Mount Shasta continues still: After watching the weather forecast and the snow situations on Shasta with much dedication, perfect conditions prevailed on the 17th of June 06. The original plan was to wait an entire day camping at the base camp to acclimatize for the 12,000 feet of elevation change (from home in Hayfork) at the summit, but perfect weather, mild boredom, and harsh sunshine changed my mind. At the road's end, the ice began. Also present was a huge mob of cars, conveying a huge mob of eager mountaineers ranging from the overconfident to the tearful fearful.

http://www.shastaavalanche.org/shastaaerial12_05.JPG

A few hours sleep- and the dreaded alpine start at two in the morning.(to catch the ice at its most solid). Bright moonlight on the snow. A quickly munched breakfast of hightech food, and the beginning of a long day's marriage with my backpack. A fond reacquaintance with my ice axe, which had been reinvented as a gardening tool in Tasmania, and had been a patient reminder of fantastic adventures in colder places. Footprints in the snow led me up onto Green Butte Ridge, a wonderful long blade of steep snow and rocky spires on the SE flanks of the volcano. Most of the mob went up through the aptly named Avalanche Gulch, a topographical trap below me to my left.

http://www.shastaavalanche.org/southlg.jpg

Sunrise on the ridge- was mercifully postponed by the shade of Sargent's Ridge to the right. The spectacle of the pink sunglow on the Trinity Mountains was a special treat to be savoured before the too-bright reality of the day too come. The black cone of Shasta's shadow against the Trinity Mountains gave an unmistakeble sense of scale to the volcano's size.

There were few others on the ridge- I joined forces with Jamie, a New Zealander, as we climbed up toward the sunlight. Where Sargent's Ridge joined Green Butte, we encountered a father and son who had just negotiated a steep snowslope to gain a notch in the ridge. Steep cliffs to the right and continuing towers above marked the point at which we had to traverse another steep slope leftwards to rejoin with Avalanche Gulch at the formations known as Thumb Rock and the Red Banks. But it was apparent that the son had reached his highpoint; when we first met them he was collapsed in the snow, curled around his ice axe, with the father up ahead eagerly scouting the next section. This just before Father's Day, and it was apparent the enthusiasm was lop-sided. Fortunately, they called it off shortly thereafter, and Jamie and I continued on the traverse (piolet traction!) to Thumb Rock. Halfway across, Jamie called it a day and had a wonderful run down the Gulch on his snowboard.

Alone again, and in the sunshine I finished the traverse on my crampons side points and found myself at the base of Thumb Rock, a spire clearly visible on the skyline from the town of Mt. Shasta far below. Just beyond, at Red Banks, I joined the mob (five dozen, at least) on the false summit of Misery Hill. Moving fast and feeling fine from the altitude, which is of course a relative statement- that didn't spare me the penance of the slowstep huffnpuff. The scenery below- the dwarved double volcano of Black Butte, the intimidating granite spires of Castle Crags, other climbers meditating on gravity, the gridwork road of plantations below, the arterial I-5 streaking below, a view into Shastina's crater perched on the lower slopes, and the living world of forest greens pawing the mountain.

A bright eternity later, I found myself up on the final ridge, where the summit block was covered with icefall and a dozen gleeful climbers soaked in their success. And then I was on the top of Mt. Shasta, again. Directly beneath, melted rock dreams of the sky.

The descent was fast- a delicious glissade down three thousand feet down Avalanche Gulch, a delirious slide down snowchutes to the valleys below. The oxygen in the air was thick enough to drink and swallow.

A night sleeping by Castle Creek below the Crags, and the next morning, grabbing a cuppa coffee. Talking to a stranger, who asks of Shasta, "Is there snow up there still?" Lunch in Chico, and a brief midweek visit to Lisa + Ryan in Napa.

On Monday evening I had the especial pleasure of catching up with Barbara and Richard Diamond, my next door neighbours from my first twelve years. They new me well from days before I could walk or talk, and I hadn't been in good contact since well before leaving for Tasmania. Their perspective on me as a child- and my sister and parents- in unmatched, and their anecdotes were priceless. It was a delight hearing about their news and the happenings of their three children - Jen, Adam, and Ilana- who had been my sister Maya's and my playmates, contemporaries, and unofficial siblings. I spoke to Ilana on the phone for the first time in recent memory, a special occasion if ever there was one. How could we have gone so long without communicating?

After a lovely time, I headed toward the San Francisco Bay Area, where I looked forward to another looksee at San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and a quick pilgrimage to the old neighbourhood. Couchsurfing in Berkeley, catching up with a few friends and soaking up some of the city life of which we are so deprived in Hayfork. Some expected things- video rentals, good bakeries, cafes, bike rides, academic solace at the UC library- and some unexpected things- landfills turned into outdoor art spaces, a two mile walk on a pier into the Bayay, jazz by an outdooor fireplace, the view of the city and the Bay from an upstairs apartment, the Botanical Gardens- and some unfortunate things- most specifically the growing realisation that the persistent overheating problems in the Subaru were getting worse. Few in Tasmania could visualize it, but the San Francisco Bay Area is entirely invaded and overwhelmingly vegetated with countless illions of Eucalyptus globulus, Tassie Blue Gums, growing with eerily unnatural vigour. While locals are connected to and appreciative of their forms and leafiness, it is an unhealthy situation that will inevitably spawn uncontrollable forest fires.

http://www.anbg.gov.au/emblems/tas.emblem.html
http://trees.stanford.edu/ENCYC/EUCglo.htm

On Friday, I drove south out of Berkeley and southwards to Sunnyvale, locating my old neighbourhood from the maps and quickly finding myself on Pimento Ave, in the heart of Silicon Valley. This was the vicinity of the Known Universe, and of course, I was in the centre of that. Was I nostalgic? Not really? Overwhelmed? Not really. Everything seemed smaller (of course), and the walk from our old house to my primary school was much quicker than I remembered (of course). While filled with mental landmarks- this is where I fell off my bike, this is where Theo lived, this house has good candy on Halloween- the social landmarks are pretty much dissolved. I realised I could look up some long-remembered people in the phone book, but there wasn't the time or the need. Pleasantly, I could identify most every tree species in the neighbourhood, except the wonderfully sprawling tree in our old front yard, the one tree I could really remember climbing as a child.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1187+pimento+ave,+sunnyvale,+california&ie=UTF8&ll=37.357298,-122.047377&spn=0.014395,0.035105&om=1

But it was time to move on from my past and look forward to my future. The skyline ridges above, I only now realised were called the Santa Cruz Mountains. Looking at the map was an exciting revelation, when I left at age twelve I hadn't much of an idea of our nearby geography. I headed up over these green hills, my car expressing its displeasure as the engine temperature rose. But it made it over the hill and dropped down nicely to the Pacific Coast and the tourist-college-surfer town of Santa Cruz. I had last visited nine years ago (!) for a spring break that was perhaps less well-measured than it could have been, and was glad for a revisit. The main beach, and the boardwalk amusement park, were foggy and chilly, but still crowded and busy. The downtown walking street was affluent and affable, but ultimately not that interesting. At Natural Bridge Beach, a modest archway stands up to the waves, and a grove of Bluegum Eucalyptus offers a resting place, in other seasons, for the migrating Monarch butterflies.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1187+pimento+ave,+sunnyvale,+california&ie=UTF8&ll=37.357298,-122.047377&spn=0.014395,0.035105&t=h&om=1

As sunset approached it was time to head back over the mountains to the Valley and then to Berkeley. The white subaru 91 loyale 4wd wagon made it over the crest nicely, and then somewhere down on the flat, just near downtown San Jose, my car experienced a dramatic engine overheat on the freeway. I knew what was wrong and was already mentally prepared for the event, so to speak. Waiting for the engine to cooldown, on the highway shoulder, a friendly chat with the Highway Patrol ("Just hop off the freeway and go check out that coffee shop down there") and a few phone calls from the Starbucks, and then it was an interesting series of twenty-mile hops back toward Berkeley.

I didn't make it. I could have, but it would have taken all night. In San Jose, not so far from the house I grew up in, I slept (quite well!) in the back seat. Morning walk to San Jose, a fun time surfing through the phone directory, and a short drive to buy a new water pump. In the corner of a massive shopping mall parking lot, I set up camp and set out to fix it. Within an hour I knew this repair was far beyond me, and that it would likely not even fix the problem. And that was that. It was a long day at the mall, sorting out the posessions and arranging things, but not so bad all told. In this region, Espanol was the first language and this was reflected in every storefront. So, it offered an interesting cultural shift. AAA auto insurance came through yet again, and I luckily was able to arrange a rather longdistance tow back to Napa for no cost.

At Lisa's house, delighted to have escaped San Jose, I unloaded everything from the car into her garage, and did the wine and cheese thing in downtown Napa, which is actually a remarkable sleepy little town. Next morning, she gave me a ride to Vallejo to catch a ferry to San Francisco- but they had oversold tickets for the boat and several people were left stranded. Resourcefully, carpools were arranged, and I joined forces with Jody and Karen, a domestic couple on their way, like me, to the Gay Pride Parade in downtown San Francisco. We caught the train into the city, and exited the subway to find the Pride Parade in full force.

http://www.sfpride.org/

What a beautiful thing, that a large city would sponsor a parade for a community so despised in other places. We followed the Parade, and you can imagine in your minds eye the outrageous clothing, the rampant nudity, the ubiquitous displays of personal affection, the revelry in the normality of the queer. Looming ghastly in the mental background was the 25th (or 30th?) anniversary since the first diagnosis of AIDS, an event that salted the gay rights movement with a desperation it had never needed before. Peppering this sad anniversary (about five weeks ago), and providing a white hot core of anger and disgust to the Parade, was the knowledge that President Bush had chosen that recent date to pick a fight, proposing a Constiutional amendment banning gay marriages.

http://www.sfpride.org/heritage/index.html

But the day was more about beauty and love than about self-defense and struggle. There was music on the City Hall, I stopped at some of the side stages, including the Transexual Pride Stage where, fittingly but notably, a sign language interpreter signed out the explicit lyrics to a song & dance routine. I split in the late afternoon, saying farewells to J and K and their friends from Vallejo.

Back to Berkeley to fetch some posessions left at Amy and Maya's house, and some complicated coordination with two of the owl interns, Stefani and Tatiana. They were both flying in from the east coast at the end of their breaks, and luckily had one of our work trucks waiting at the airport. After an incredibly hectic 18 hours, we had managed to rendezvous, quickly tour downtown San Fran, fetch the car, avoid a parking ticket, figure out how to get into Lisa's locked garage to collect my stuff from Napa, tried driving my car over the hills to the nearest wreckers, had the car overheat for the last time halfway, caught a AAA tow to the wreckers in Santa Rosa. It died in the way that all old subarus die- cooling system failure and the dreaded head gasket blown.

So, in fond memory, I say farewell: I cleared out the souvenirs- seashells, fossils, rocks, leaves, bits of plants- from the dashboard, and tapped the roof in a cheery goodbye. It was a $1000 car, and it had been from coast to coast to coast, diagonally across the country, and an absolutely *sterling* collection of gravel roads, trailheads, national parks, beaches, neighbourhoods, errands, and meetings. For only a short period, did it have a name, and it was a riddle- No Name. I didn't look back, but thought of that regained freedom, no longer burdened financially or logistically or psychically by a rolling box of glass and steel.
In the work truck, we raced back north after dark, exhausted and ready to get back to Hayfork. As we travelled through the Sacramento Valley, we could see rusty red bolts of lightning in the Mendocino and Trinity Mts to our west. When we arrived in Hayfork, we found our comrades sitting on the back porch in the warm humid night, watching bolts without thunder slice the sky. None of us had ever seen a storm to match it- countless thousands of bolts, a daylight bright flash over the peaks every ten seconds. It was a busy ten days. It's an energetic existence, a perfect niche in the middle- slower than lightning bolts, but faster than icefields.

http://tinyurl.com/n2yqh

Write me back!

-y-
fourteen/jul/06
Covelo, Round Valley Indian Reservation, Mendocino National Forest, California

A Striking Pair of Traffic Hazards

2006-06-04T20:01:00.000-07:00

A Striking Pair of Traffic Hazards

**Pictures pictures:**
http://tinyurl.com/ogvcb

--
On the forested eastern slopes of Mt. Shasta: With one hand on the bumper, one foot on a slippery clay slope, one foot in the air, andthe other hand groping in the silty mud for the anchor point on mycar, I've discovered how I do not want to die. I do not want to die by falling face first into a ditch of volcanic ash quicksand, comically drowning in a half metre of silty water. The right hand tires are underwater in silt. The car is tilted at a 45 degree angle, and the floor of the car is beginning to flood with muddy water. Such is the price paid for choosing the wrong Forest Service road.

--
First night of June 2006- midnight explorations- blindly groping my way along back roads to a sunrise date with Mt. Shasta on Black Fox Peak (blind meaning with three types of maps and a GPS unit). My travels were cut short with my chance discovery of said silty ditch. Somehow I wasn't frustrated or worried at all, I simply piled everything up on the dry side of the car and camped under the stars in the forest nearby. Next morning, a walk of a few miles to the highway, a ride hitched with a mushroom farm to the town of McCloud, and an hour asking around at the hardware store gets me in touch with Mike, the local car mechanic/ junk collector/ tinker. "He pulls people out of ditches all of the time," says Dan, the de facto mayor, at the hardware store.

Mike looks exactly like the comic book salesman in the Simpsons-overweight, bearded, glasses, t-shirt. TJ the German shepherd k9 scared me off when I walked towards the mechanic's shop, but when Mike is around he is a fuzzy puppy. We drive along the morning's walk in twenty minutes, and soon I am perched in aforementioned awkward position, staring at the quicksand and thinking of the flailing that would ensue if I fell in face first....

http://www.geocities.com/colosseum/7652/comic.html

The groping yields a positive result, and I clip the tow hook into it. Pulling it tight, I somehow hop my way off the claybank to splash into the relatively more solid mud of the roadway. Mike, guns the engine on his Ford and the lil' Subaru comes out of the ditch, with a horrible grinding noise. TJ the German shepherd k9 barks alongside and runs through the mud. My car starts without a single complaint from the engine. There is an inch of water on the inside floor. The entire process from waking up to getting back on the road took less than four hours.

--
Our two weeks of sampling in late May, the culmination of the previous month's work. was inauspiciously greeted by the first blast of rain and cold in several weeks. What intricately horrible timing. It must have been because of our boss's earlier statement that the weather couldn't get any worse.

So, the 17 hour days were slightly more demanding than expected. Instead of warm sunny days watching the birds on their perches, its become rainy cold endurance matches. Truly, we hadn't even seen a cloud for the three weeks prior. Of course, the interns are woefully ill equipped for the weather- several showed up without even remembering to bring their raingear because the sunshine has melted the fear of clouds out of them.

The first five days were spent up north in Hayfork where we had successful results about four times as often as last year's crew. We surpassed our wildest expectations and accomplished far more than we imagined possible. Somehow we managed to find all but one of the twelve owls we searched for the morning of the motorcycle disturbance experiments. The trickiest part of the whole affair is that the birds might choose to ignore us, or simply can't be found that morning. It was a bit of a chaotic affair, with one house filled with ten people, waking up at 3:45 AM every day and racing out the door in a frenzy of hiking boots, hastily munched toast, backpacks, and wet raingear. And then the entire thing in reverse around 9 or 10 PM.

Our motorbiker recruitment efforts: http://www.ohvstudy.com/

Our second half south in the Mendocino forest was cut short by fewer owls in the region, and the impending epidemic of the dread lurgie amongst the interns. We cancelled the last few days with only a small bit of hesitation. All of the (theoretically) sick interns squeezed into a few vehicles and went to Yosemite. I drove one of the work trucks back to Hayfork via the coastal Highway 101- the Pacific Ocean! the coastal redwoods! Visited a corner of Humboldt Redwoods State Park and saw a handful of the world's superlatively tall and large trees. In a span of a few hours I walked along the top of a fallen giant spanning a creek, crawled into a burnt out cave inside a tree, walked through fern glades beneath the tallest trees in the world. Shiny bright corrugated trunks reaching like Icarus on a sunny day. It was very nice.

http://www.humboldtredwoods.org/redwoods.htm

Back at Hayfork- a day to sleep it all away, and then down out of the Trinity Mts eastward to Mt. Shasta. The weather was unsettled and the snow on the volcano is slippy. It was not accepting visitors. The quicksand incident on the way to Black Fox Peak happened. Southwards, following the songlines in therocks.

http://www.shastaavalanche.org/

-
Black Butte and Castle Crags are, by all accounts, a nasty pair in a triplet of traffic hazards. Should you ever be travelling northwards on the I-5 highway through this section of California, there is a short section just past Shasta Lake where you are presented with a triple punch- the looming mass of Mt. Shasta volcano (worshipped throughout the region)- and then the arrows and dagger spires of Castle Crags (glaciated, polished granite sharper than fangs)- and then the steeply compact volcanic core that is Black Butte (boulders in a neat, loose pile). Any of these three would be a major landmark in other regions; as it is, Black Butte and Castle Crags are dwarved to obscurity by the snowclad stratovolcano, Queen of the Cascades-Shasta!.

http://www.shastacam.com/

First, Black Butte. It forms an exceptionally well proportioned pyramid with an especially well proportioned side pyramid, almost a miniature version of Shasta with its parasitic side peak of Shastina. Surrounded by forest plantations on the east and freeway to the west, it is unmistakable as you travel directly towards it. A track spirals up through boulder fields- you cower as you sense Shasta looming over you- and to a rocky summit where the foundations of a lookout tower offer a little square windbreak. If you would follow my advice, you would pack up your camping gear and spend the night in this rocky fortress. You would make sure to have a good look at the evening sunset, and the lights of the nearby towns and highway, because it is very likely that you -like me- would awake to the inside of a cloud. (It looked exactly like the summit of Tassie's Mt. Ossa...foggy...)

http://www.summitpost.org/view_object.php?object_id=48718
http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock/151230/black-butte.html

-
Next, Castle Crags, the eastern ramparts of the Trinity Mountains. The word 'fantasyland' was running through my head as I gained furtive glances at it from the highway, but the nearby hills are so steep that you cannot gain a good look at it easily- except for that tantalising70 mile-per-hour glimpse. Scurrying around the granite massif's westside, I gained my first real ogling of the Crags by hiking in a quick half mile on the Pacific Crest Trail. They are, perhaps, the most striking rock stilletos I've ever seen, far more compact and terrifying than the broad horizons of similar granite in Yosemite. Far scarier than the icefields of Shasta, and a world more sinister than the boulder fields of Black Butte.... I walked up a ridge under pine trees pushing through scrub, poison oak, manzanita and more poison oak, to a wonderful lookout spot. It is wonderful. After a while it is time to hurry down, to go find another gravel road to hide away for the night.

http://www.virtuar.com/click/2005/castle_crags/70/stereo.htm

This time, however- a tire is punctured. It was long overdue, and I had been thinking just an hour before that it was time for new tires. So its put on the spare, spend another night camping besides that battler beauty of Japanese engineering, and back to the tiny town of Mt. Shasta City for a new quadruplet of wheels. And back to Castle Crags. A steep trail leads up into the heard of the granite, and offers an amazing backdrop in the form of the queen volcano herself.

http://gorp.away.com/gorp/resource/us_wilderness_area/ca_castl.htm
http://virtualguidebooks.com/NorthCalif/MountShasta/CastleCrags/FirstShastaCragsTrail.html

I try to pull down the rock on one of more rounded blades. It is vertigo- not exceedingly difficult but horrifically exposed. Climbing on the blade here is beautiful, too dangerous- I go mostway up the spire until I reach my personal point of nerve, then clamber back down in my own bright cloud of terror.

Not, however, any worse than falling face first into quicksand.

-
A midnight drive back to Hayfork, endless turns, grippy tires. I am the first one back- everyone else is still in Yosemite. A dark house, warm night- the crickets serenade throughout the night.

-y-
4jun.y2k+6

Outlasting the Rocks

2006-05-05T20:02:00.000-07:00

5may2006

*-----------------------------------------------------------*

Outlasting the Rocks

"Organisms outlast mountain ranges because they work much harder at existing than rocks do."
David Rains Wallace, _The Klamath Knot_

-------
Photos of the Shasta-Trinity mountains and Northern California (Finally!):
http://tinyurl.com/p6dd9
-------

The hot summer days have slalomed into the Trinity Mountains in a revelry of sunshine. The cold nights still linger, but the deadly bite of the ice is gone. I've just returned to Hayfork Valley after a week of accumulated weekend vacations, and we've all been delighted to see how much snow has melted in the mountain roads nearby.

Progress has been good, with several more owls detected, but it is looking like we will still fall short of the intended study design. We shall see, no matter what, we will be working very hard these next few weeks. Todd and I have done well with our squad of six interns- Jay, Jordan, Tatiana, Stefani, Wes, and Matt. Everyone is happy and they are all nice to work with.

Jordan, Stefani, Matt and I shared the first tangible progress on the study- we found the first of the owl nests! Number 759, to be exact, just to our southeast near the Natural Bridge Cave. Our early morning visit to track down this bird went by the book, and we didn't have too much trouble following the male back to the female sitting on their eggs. It was a good bit of teamwork, and a good bit of leadership experience- all of a sudden things got interesting and I had to tell a triplet of people where to go and what to do. By noon we had found the nest, grabbed a GPS fix, and collected a scat sample from the male, who curiously watched us as we patiently watched him. On the downside, Jay and Tatiana are now hoping rather desperately to see their first owl...

A week off was much appreciated, allowing an escape from the Hayfork region. Plans to go onto Mt. Shasta failed due to high avalanche danger, so new adventures were plotted. Jelte drove down from Seattle, in a zippy new Toyota hybrid. Jelte is a introspective, athletic mountain climber astrobiogeologist Dutch fellow who grew up in Zimbabwe, and is always full of surprises. He was ecstatic about Northern California, and was quite taken with the landscape/lifestyle/feel of the region. An hour underground into a cave entrance near Natural Bridge was a nice introduction to the Trinities. We then headed to the coast, camping in a blasted landscape of redwood stumps, and arriving at coastal Hwy 101 early morning on Tuesday the 25th of April. After a quick misnavigation to Eureka, we found the twisty road over the King Range to the Cape Mendocino lighthouse, driving through mossy spruce forests and open green cattle pastures, through Capetown and Petrolia, and to the craggy coastline where the Pacific meets the continent.

http://www.terragalleria.com/california/california.lost-coast.html

The Cape Mendocino lighthouse was no longer there, but just south at Punta Gorda an abandoned lighthouse from the 1910's. We trudged for six miles of soft beach sand, stopping occassionally to look at the rocky intertidal pools. We forded a chilly creek and soon arrived at a modest white building with a black balcony surrounding the tower. The lighthouse and its satellite buildings were totally empty, but the climb up the steep spiral ladder brought us out onto the balcony, a fine place for lunch.

http://www.westofpch.com/lighthouse/mendocino.html

We continued over the King Range and dropped back down onto the east side to the now inland Hwy 101, going through the lovely redwood flats at Humboldt State Park. Gorgeous trees, of course, with giants standing inches from the road surface. A brief visit to Arcata brought us to sunset, and then it was the long windy road, in the dark, back into the Trinity Mts to Hayfork again. Jelte disappeared before the following sunrise, with a long day ahead of him to get back to Seattle.

http://www.humboldtredwoods.org/

For the second half of the week, I motivated out by my lonesome down east to the Valley of California, and across to the tidy and pleasant college town of Chico. Chico is an striking twin of the college town of Davis, similarly located to the south. A branch of Cal State Uni dominates the town and (like Davis) defines its demographics, its politics, its pedestrian atmosphere. There are many bars, many fashionable stores, and a healthy scattering of coffee shops. Running through town is Bidwell Park/Chico Creek, with lush ashes, maples and sycamores providing shade from the heat. Upstream, about five miles, the creek runs through a sharp canyon cut through volcanic basalts, and it is here that the swimming holes may be found. Above the canyon, columnar pillars of rocks decorate the gorge. One million years ago, Mt. Lassen volcano erupted through its cap of glacier ice and spilled forth basaltic lava across northeastern California; as this cooled it crystallized, a much younger version of Tassie's dolerites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_Lassen_area
http://www.chico.ca.us/

North of Chico, a tantalizing blob of green on the map was labelled the Ishi Wilderness. A bit of enquiry in Chico and I learned about a special landscape of basaltic canyons: cliffs, meadows, spires, caves, and pine forests- a rare low-elevation meadow wilderness. In the early part of the 1900's, a fellow named Ishi, the last of his tribe, walked out and joined the white man's world, acquiring a tragic fame as 'the last wild Indian'. To get there, I followed a road running up Cohasset Canyon from Chico, called Ponderosa Way. This was built in the 1930's as a more discreet highway to transport war material, just in case the Japanese invaded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi

Actually, in retrospect, I gained a great respect for the Japanese, the auto industry in particular. The little 4wd subaru powered through horrificly rutted sections, pushing through flooded regions, crossing 3 small creeks, dodging countless boulders, and generally getting myself deeper and deeper into it. Eventually I made it to the Black Rock Campground, an excellent destination and also, thankfully, the start of a much improved road network back to the rest of the state.

The Black Rock is the remnant core of an early volcano. Standing perhaps 300 metres high, it is an eerie mix of polygonal facets and melted flowing rock. Mill Creek rages at its base, gaining speed and power after being diverted around this chunk of earths interior. In a scene that can only be described as idyllic, campsites are nestled next to the creek, with fragrant laurel trees offering a pleasant embrace and much needed shade. Early in the morning, the sunshine began with a vengeance. A grizzly old hiker went over a map with me and directed me towards a spot called "Cave Spring," just two ridges over. "You'll be seeing a part of the Ishi not many people get to," he tells me, but he also confidently assures me it will be only a two or three hour hike....

http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/lassen/recreation/wilderness/ishi.shtml

It took me about 7 hours, actually. Walking west down Mill Creek was pleasant enough, with these lovely open meadows and lush little creeks. Getting up the first ridge to the south wasn't so bad- I followed a deer track up a rocky side-ridge through open grassy slopes dotted with basalt spires. And then the midway ridge itself, lovely, and descending from it, a clear grassy track with herds of deer in every direction. But after I crossed the creek, bushwhacking up to the next ridge was a bit of a challenge. Suffice to say that poison oak also grows as a vine, and it will grab you. The final ridge, Lassen Ridge, was named after one Peter Lassen, a Danish trailblazer from the 1910s who led parties of emigrants across Nevada and the Sierra down to the Sacramento Valley. The old track for the wagon train is still there, and this led me right to Cave Spring.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lassen

On the ridge, the left side is covered in rolling meadows right to the crest...but the right side is sheer cliffs of eroded and curvy basalt. In one section, an overhanging cliff forms a small cave, and the meadow soil above it sends water through the rock to create a small spring- Cave Spring. An exceptional place to spend a night, with a red sunset view of Mt. Shasta generating a deep thrill. All around the cave strange spires of worn basalt stand upright, eerily resembling a stone jungle of giant male members. How strange.

The next day I hiked out along Lassen Ridge back to the road, and luckily was spared a seven hour walk along a road by a passing turkey hunter. I left the Ishi, along a relatively nice road, scouted a bit of the hills just south of Lassen (everything was snowed in) and eventually navigated through Red Bluff back up home to the Trinity Mountains...

---------
Yo
5may2006
treeoctopus@gmail.com

Torrents in the Trinities

2006-04-12T20:02:00.000-07:00

Torrents in the Trinities; One year down...

~ April 12 2006

~Haylo from Trinity County, California,

Odd, how I could live in Tasmania, at the far corner of Australasia, and feel like I was in the centre of it all...and now that I'm in California, I'm working in the middle of the proverbial nowhere.

Early on April 3rd, I bundled up against the snow and tried to ignore a lingering cough. It was still before sunrise as I drove our project van over Hayfork Pass and down to the Central Valley of California. The interstate freeway southwards was its standard high-speed concrete normality, and just before noon I was at the Sacramento Airport to meet Jay, the first of the interns coming to join our project. With a inconvenient two hour gap, we went into Sacramento town, visited the old tourist town (which I recognized from a visit twenty years ago!), and then returned to the airport to pick up Ryan, and then went to Sacramento to buy supplies , and then went to the airport and picked up Anne, and then went to Sacramento to catch some dinner, and then went to the airport and picked up Matt. Between the full day of driving, and their long flights from the eastern USA, we were glad to hear that a hotel room had been arranged for us up north....

Way too early the next morning, the interns, crew leaders, and agency contacts met up at the US Fish & Wildlife office to go over the project. There were a few Powerpoint presentations, and a fair bit of paperwork, but everyone managed to stay awake. Afternoontime, we headed up the twisty Hwy 36 through grassy plains of oak trees up into the thick and snowy conifer belt...and back to Hayfork.

The last two weeks has been filled with field training- fun stuff such as navigation, owlchasing, driving, and first aid skills. Nothing like teaching a group of people to confirm that you actually know the material. The record-setting rainfall has definitely stymied our work; we are watching aspects of the study design collapse because we can't collect the data in poor weather.

Still only two pairs of owls detected, Lisa the boss is getting more anxious and the thirteen interns are all ready to get their boots dirty. But the rain is still pouring...

March 2006 was the second rainiest month on record in Northern California since 1850. The canyons are filled with torrents of brown water, pulling the sediments off of the slopes and down to the sea. Fortunately, the warm rain has quickened the snowmelt; roads are opening to allow access to the higher areas of the mountains. We are discovering many new and exciting places but are still quite constrained.

April 10th was my 27th birthday, a pleasant day with a morning survey snowed out, and a long afternoon nap, and a chocolate cake and a bit of a gathering in the evening. A completely different style than the sunshine, blackberries, and coffee last year at Salamanca. An even more auspicious anniversary arrives on Saturday the 15th- one year since leaving Tasmania to return to these shores. Not a day goes past that I don't think of returning to Tasmania, but not just yet. All I have to do to go back- is go back... It has been a very positive experience to realise that I'm here in America because I choose to be. Its been a wonderful year, a string of experiences in a wondrous sequence- goshawks, Montana, the Clearwater Forest, Pacific, Puget, Wallowas, Salt Lake, Canyonlands, Colorado, Great Plains, TAG limestones, Blue Ridge, Atlantic, Gulf, time with family on the mangrove coastline, Calaca, the Everglades, Orleans, White Sands, Carlsbad, Chihuahua, Saguaro, Flagstaff, Vegas, Tahoe, the western coast states all over again, and now the owls.

The work for wildlife ecologists is good here (well, better than anywhere else) in the western states, but being involved in other peoples projects has emphasized to me that I need wind my path back towards the canopy biodiversity work. Top-tier predator research is nice, and neatly tied to progressive legislation, but I think they are more myopic than studies of species assemblages.

But, its certainly keeping me engaged...if you are Down Under, hoist a mug for me on the 15th and send along an email. Hope you are well, all the best

yo

Steep Green Ridges

2006-03-29T20:03:00.000-08:00

Steep Green Ridges

March 2006
~~~~~~~~~`
Hayfork, California, rests in an improbably sunny and flat valley surrounded by steep green ridges. The mountains are currently adorned by snow and fog, and hide endless forests clinging over and down to the redwoods and the ocean. This little town is in the centre of the "Klamath Knot", a bio- and geo-diversity hotspot and the northernmost mountainous region on the coast to avoid the glaciers. Here the plants of the Cascades and the boreal forests to the north meet the plants of California and the deserts. All of these organisms hid here from the ice that scoured the northlands, therefore...a glacial refuge. Hayfork itself is tiny, but larger than I expected- two groceries, two hardware stores, three bars, and several other enterprises fill out a functional little town well away from anywhere else. Perhaps the cultural diversity is less well prononounced than the ecological diversity, but I look forward to meeting more of the locals.

Upon arrival here (midmarch 2006) I met Erica and Todd, the other crew leaders, (quickly determining that I used to go school with Erica's boyfriend Dave, and did a newt survey project with Todd's good friend Doug.) This first phase of the project involves driving around like mad searching for the owls that the Forest Service has located over several years. Our options are severely limited by the snow blocking roads in every direction, and unfortunately more snow continues to fall even into the Northern spring. ("Snowiest month since April 1983," they say)

Our boss, Lisa, arranged to come in on a Friday evening, and telephoned us early in the evening that she was a three hour drive away. By midnight she hadn't turned up, or been in contact, so we went to sleep a fair bit worried. The drive up from the I-5 freeway is an intense bit of curvy road, and the weather wasn't so great. In the morning we made a few phone calls, including the horrible one to her husband to ask if he had heard from her, but we didn't track her down until noon. She got in contact and told us about the flat tire (luckily in a flat section of road), and the dead batteries in her mobile phone, the cold night in her car, and her safe tow to Redding.

We headed down to Redding, our local metropolis in California's Central Valley, where we rescued Lisa and took care of some errands. I replaced my suddenly glitching mobile phone, so I lost all of the telephone numbers (please send yours along, would you?). On Saturday, March 18th, I stopped into the post office and caught up with my absentee ballot for the Tasmanian elections. It had chased me across the ocean, to Florida, and then back across North America to California. I filled it out and sent it overseas...but of course with the time zone differences, Paul Lennon had already claimed victory for the Labour party. Yet again, I found myself in the minority vote, but at least sending in my ballot allows me the right to an opinion.

So what does this job actually entail? At this early stage, driving around to different places in the middle of the night, hooting like owls and desperately hoping for a response, and then hiking into the same spot at 4 in the morning to follow up on any leads. We've only found two pairs of owls, and its not a sure thing that we'll be able to find them again in the future. Unfortunately, some poorly measured advice early on set this project in a difficult position: the Forest Service gave an overly optimistic assessment of how easy it is to find these birds, and the study was designed with that in mind. We are now working in an overextend, overambitious mindset, but we have the potential to achieve some great results. ("You can find 48 nesting pairs," says Dennis the local biologist, "but you'll need to have a crew of eighty people.")

There are some wonderful locations here: ravines with smoothbarked flowering madronas, steep slopes with giant ponderosa pines, rocky ridges with green serpentine ultra-mafic rocks, gorges with waterfalls, abandonded gold mines with rotting buildings, limestone outcrops with small caves beneath, and the nicest so far- the Natural Bridge. This formation is a cave, open upstream and downstream, through which a creek murmurs quietly. Inside are weathered stalactites and stalagmites, and fluted rock walls, and that sharp and curvaceous limestone rock. This region is the only limestone in the coastal mountains of the USA, and its a pleasure to see these landforms again. When the snow melts I hope to get up into the glaciated granites of the Trinity Alps, but it will be months yet.

The interns show up Monday, and we will need to train these enthusiastic volunteers for the difficult job ahead of them. It will be exciting.

Hayfork is a tad isolated, and the intensity of our fieldwork schedule means its difficult to schedule time away, but the work is grand and the living expenses minimal. There's celphone reception and web access, so the technological communications have found there way even this deep into the mountains. So drop a line if you can, 206 999 4495, especially as I've lost so many phone numbers, and I hope the flow is still going wherever ayou may be.

Down the Left Coast to the Trinity Alps

2006-03-21T20:03:00.000-08:00

Down the Left Coast to the Trinity Alps

Northern Spring Equinox, 2006

Again, to Seattle, on the first day of March 2006. I rolled down from the Cascade Mountains at North Bend, after a well-spent day at Jim's house cleaning out the trusty old motorcar and staring up at the mountains.

At the University of Washington I stopped by and visited my employer at the Center for Conservation Biology, Lisa Hayward. We soon recognised each other; coincidentally she was one of the teacher's assistants for an animal behaviour class I took five years before. She is a post-doctoral researcher looking at the effect of road-usage (specifically off-road vehicles) on the Northern Spotted Owl (strix occidentalis) in NW California. More specifically, we will be chasing owls. This famous bird, listed on the Endangered Species Act, was the magic bullet that shut down the forest industry and Forest Service in 1991, when a judge declared that they were not indeed meeting their requirements to preserve this animal. That ruling switched the balance of courtroom win-loss to the environmentalists side, and the timber industry has been crippled since. No other forest bird has been as well studied, or as economically important, or as emotionally charged. Around the globe , a similar lawsuit regarding a parrot, an eagles, and a beetle is being used to test the Australian Endangered Species legislation against the forest industry in Tasmania.

http://www.on-trial.info/

We spent a week preparing to head south to our field site in California. Also arriving was Todd, who will be the other crew leader (with me) on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Lots of time learning little electronic widgets, discussing the actual study protocol, mixing chemicals for other projects in the lab, and packing equipment into boxes. The three of us, and the other crew leaders Zac and Erica, will have three weeks together to get on track before the mob of interns arrive.

http://www.goldengatephoto.com/WestUS/klamtrin.html
http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/shastatrinity/

I spent the first few nights in Seattle on Jelte's boat in the harbour near Golden Gardens beach, the last night of which was clear skies camped on the deck of the boat. Sunset over the water and the Olympic Mountains, a most special Seattle sight. The remainder of the time I was a guest at Kevin and Stacy's house just downhill of the University. Pleasant times indeed, learning how to tablet-weave from Stacy (a sterling member of the Country Womens Association, if ever there was one), trying not to get too caught up in the addictively simple video game "Grid Wars" with Kevin, and catching up with friends old and new. Stacy and I tried, unsuccessfully, to plan a surprise party for Kevin's birthday, but he somehow, unwittingly, outwitted all our scheme.

http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/parks/parkspaces/Golden.htm
http://demonews.com/download.php?det=1485

The UW campus, and the city of Seattle, were a very familiar region. It was delightful to rediscover places I knew, and also to know about places I hadn't revisited. Cindy, Jelte, Bonnie, and I walked through the UW campus one day following the "Tree Tour" map, revisiting some stately old wooden giants. The sunny week ended nicely, with a few more social engagements, a arrangement with Lisa and Todd to rendezvous at the field site.
Before sunrise on Saturday the 11th of March, I squashed into Kevins car with Elias, Hitomi, and Brian to go pound some snow in the Cascades. We drove north to the Mountain Loop highway, which I was surprised to hear was no longer actually a loop since landslides had removed a portion three years ago. At Marten Creek, we hiked up into the steep ravine and up onto the slopes of Long Mountain, stopping only to put on our snowshoes. We head up the sides of the valley, through the most fluffy powdersnow we had ever encountered in the Cascades Range. Fantastically large western red-cedars stood sedately in the deep snow. The upwards going was slow, sinking deep into the powder, and as we ascended onto steeper upper slopes it became obvious the snow conditions were too slippy and avalanche-prone. An ankle deep block of snow was shearing off from a harder ice layer and the snowshoes were inadequate for the conditions. (Later, we would learn we were only 100 feet below the summit). So we bid Long Peak farewell and hopped down the powder, alternately sliding and leaping in a wonderfull speedy and cushioned descent.

Monday and Tuesday were spent working in Olympia at the Internation Canopy Network lab, continuing the collaboration on the 3-d modelling and data structure from my work in Tasmania. I am doing my best to remain mentally connected to the whole experience, but time is stretching in its steady way.

http://scidb.evergreen.edu/CanopyView
http://scidb.evergreen.edu/databank/studycenter/ydbtasmania

Stayed with Molly and Susannah in Olympia, at a lovely house filled with vegetarians and radical views. I arranged with two dreadlocked travellers, Ryan and Kate, to take them across Oregon to the redwoods in California. We raced southwards on Wednesday, never pausing long until we arrived at Jed Smith Redwoods in far NW California. We camped in the pounding rain, not a picnic shelter to be found, and in the morning I discovered that the bridge across the river to another lovely grove of redwoods had been removed for the season. My two passengers slept in until eleven o'clock and very little time remained to see any of the other groves.

http://www.oregoncoast.net/Jedsmith.html

Back to the Pacific Ocean, from coast to coast and back again! We continued along the coastline south through Crescent City and Arcata, backtracing the route Cara and I had taken to Portland almost a year ago. In Arcata, I parted paths with Kate and Ryan, leaving them at a laundromat to dry out their inadequate raingear. Rumour was that a storm was brewing and the locals recommended that I head up east into the Trinity Mountains tonight to miss the morning's snow. Stocking up on groceries at the co-op, I looked across the street to discover the intriguingly titled "Bike Library." A quick visit to this wonderful place and I discovered that for a 20$ deposit, I was free to borrow a bicycle for six months. Convenient. I tied it on to the roofrack of my car and began the slow, rainy, dark, and twisty 70 miles up into the Trinity Mountains, arriving at the project house in Hayfork at midnight. My co-workers Todd and Erica were already there. They had left the door open and the porch light on.

http://www.arcata.com/greenbikes/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayfork%2C_California

________/\_/\_/\_Over the Mountains /\_/\_/\_/\_______

2006-03-07T20:04:00.000-08:00

________/\_/\_/\_Over the Mountains /\_/\_/\_/\_______

Across the Colorado, into Nevada, blinded by the setting sun to Las Vegas, the most infamous and undoubtedly the wierdest of all American cities...

Deep into the wild west, at the wierdest and wildest of all- Las Vegas. In actuality, Las Vegas is quite a normal city outside of the Strip downtown. I visited my sister Maya, who works for the school district as a speech therapist. We took the obligatory visit to the Strip, which is the world-infamous street of casinos, tourist shops, outlandish sculpture, and a vibrantly unique culture. Of course, we had both already been there- me a handful of times and her a basketful. She took me to the Venetian, where a canal and a Venice town mock-up has been built inside a large casino. Maya had just traveled to Italy and had gained a new appreciation for the faithful craftwork of the place. The casinos are impressive as works of art, but mostly in a hypnotic way. After you lose your interest they are just sort of overdone.

I think its important to keep a bigger perspective on Las Vegas. There is barely enough water to drink, and the city's size and growth are utterly dependent on the electricity and H20 coming from Colorado River at the Hoover Dam. There are countless hordes of people coming to Vegas to have their go at the gambling, and few come out ahead. The canyons and mountains are spectacular, but Las Vegas is undoubtedly focused on its own interior. The Grand Canyon, just nearby, is world landmark, but there are three casinos channeling the feel of Italia, one of NYC, one of ancient Egypt, one of the Carribean Islands, and so on.... It was a nice time walking around with Maya but Vegas is a bit much for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas

The next day, farewells to my sister, and I began the very long travel through Western Nevada. This vast region swoops along flat valleys and rises into craggy mountains...repeated series of rocky peaks, encompassing vast mineral wealth, run north-south parallel to the highest and craggiest of all, the Sierra Nevada (literally, snowy mountains). The driving was straight and narrow in some of the most remote portions of the USA, fast speed limits and scarce cities. Time did not permit a visit to Death Valley (lowest pt in the Western Hemisphere) or to the White Mountains (home of the bristlecone pines, heralded as the oldest trees in the world). As I angled along the long long border between California and Nevada, the sun slid quietly in a flare of purple behind the granite mountains. Somehow I kept alert, well after dark, heading up into the Sierra Nevada and up to Lake Tahoe. Early in the morning, after failing to find a good gravel forest service road, I pulled over in a roadside rest stop and caught a few scant hours of shuteye.

http://geology.com/states/nevada.shtml
http://www.tahoe.com/section/TRAVELINFO04

Cold icy sunrise brought me rolling down to Carson City, just below the Lake and the Capitol of Nevada. Thankfully, the casinos have not found fertile ground near the downtown region by the Capitol, and things seem almost normal there. Up to Lake Tahoe, overcrowded and icy sunny with the promise of a snowstorm to come. I spent an hour or so trying to track down Steve, an old high school friend, but to no avail. Not delaying in Tahoe may have been for the best, I discovered soon. As I raced westwards over the Sierra across Echo Pass I could just tell the storm system was about to hit. Rolling down the west side was a bit hectic- the weekend skiers returning to the Bay Area, the distracting scenery of granite spires, the green wet forest of the conifers begging me to go pay a visit, and the realisation that it was about to snow very heavily.

But before I knew it, I had made it down to the Central Valley and to Sacramento! As I parked in the downtown city, blocks away from the Capitol of California, the rainstorm was pounding in full splashy fury. The snow in the mountains would have kept me stuck there for days. I gave a congratulatory pat on the bonnet to subaru. This battered vehicle had crossed all (save one) of the mountains, from coast to coast and back again, with excellent fuel efficiency, many gravel road sidetrips, protection from much inclement weather, with very little in the way of serious worries. Not bad for a thousand dollar car.

The State Capitol was nice. Arnold was unfortunately not there to greet me, but I spent a great deal of time looking at the displays each of the 58 California counties had posted.

A bit more westwards through the heavy rainstorm to Davis, home of a busy branch of the U.California, and also of Janie and Tobin, friends from waywayback in Seattle. Happily married, Tobin runs a solar panel contractor, and Janie is finishing a degree in entomology. She took me to the campus bug museum and around the small and pleasant town of Davis.
http://bohart.ucdavis.edu/

Next night, to Napa Valley, famous wine country. I caught up with Lisa and Ryan, whom I had last seen at Megan & Erik's wedding. Any plans we had to explore the region were cancelled by the rains literally flooding downtown Napa. Another guest of theirs, Andy, joined us for the usual Napa city type entertainment, and farewells the next morning had me on my way north.
http://www.chandon.com/

Second to last day before returning to Seattle, from Napa to Eugene, Oregon, brought me up the fast highways, past the road to my future station in the Trinity Alps, and past the awe-inspiring, supermagnificent slender bulk of Mt. Shasta. If Rainier is the King of the Cascades, Shasta is undoubtedly the Queen, more beautiful and respected by far.

http://www.shastahome.com/virtualtour/
http://www.climbingmtshasta.org/
http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock/150188/mount-shasta.html

I could only look back over my shoulder at Shasta, which I hadnt seen since a trip to the top in 2000. Darkness fell as I crossed the Siskiyou mountains in Southern Oregon, combined with rain, triple-hitched trucks, road construction restricting traffic to one lane, and the inevitable slowdown on the mountain freeways. It was incredibly stressful, and I will definitely do my best to avoid that section of I-5 at night. But before too late I was at the lovely college town of Eugene, Oregon, where I caught up with Kristin Judy for the first time in five years. She is on the heady few days before beginning a Real Job as a geologist, and spirits were high all around.

On the morning of the March 1st, 2006, I crossed through northern Oregon, over the Columbia River, and raced along towards the Emerald City of Seattle. There was a quick visit to Olympia for a cup of tea with Susannah downtown, and then soon I was dropping in to visit Jim Freeman in North Bend, at the base of the craggy Mt. Si. I had spent my first night out of Seattle in October at Jim's house, and returning there closed an immense circle arcing to the southeast corner of Florida and back again. I was a tiny bit older and a small bit wiser, and it was nice to be back in the Evergreen State....

~~~~
yo
in Seattle U-district
at the Trabant Chai House
March 7th 2006

***************

Lava River -> Stratovolcano -> Cinder Cone -> Cherum Granite

2006-02-15T20:05:00.000-08:00

Lava River -> Stratovolcano -> Cinder Cone -> Cherum Granite

***Pictures!***
http://tinyurl.com/hlgtt
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Mid-February 2006, Arizona!

After a bit of mental anguish, I was forced to admit that Flagstaff is my favorite inland city in the United States. Straddling the junction of desert, forest, and mountain, it lacks only a coastline...

It is the largest city in Northern Arizona, perched high in the mountains among the ponderosa pines. The San Francisco Mts, the broken shell of a stratovolcano dormant for 2 million years, rise abruptly to the north, and just beyond that sandstones of the Grand Canyon country beckon the traveler. More recent vulcanism from less than a millenium ago has chaotically rewritten the landscape just to the northeast, where the Sunset Crater cindercone takes a brief rest from its recent fury.

Oh yes, and there are humans there as well. At 2100 metres, Flagstaff has the feel of a Rocky Mountain town, although the dry winter has meant there is not enough snow for the ski resort to open this year. The University of Northern Arizona was in full swing, and the mountain sunshine meant crispy, literally freezing days...I made friends fast, lots of talk about mountain and canyon adventures, but unfortunately time prohibited a trip down a slot canyon. I visited the forestry school (very nice) and also attended the Sirens Feminista Poetry Slam, which ranged from sortof bad to very good.

Three daytrip expeditions made for a splendid triplet of adventures. The Lava River Cave lava tube demanded a bit of gravel road navigation. Like Undara in Queensland or Ape Cave at St. Helens, this cave is a tube recording the cooling of a lavaflow as it hit a coldwater stream. Lava tubes are long chambers, but (I say this regretfully) are nowhere as intriguing as the dissolved limestone caves. This one had an interesting set of 'lavasicle' formations, little stalactites of dripping lava. At the entrance I met James and Kayte, also exploring the cave; I wouldn't have walked the mile into the end of the cave if I hadn't been with other people. Unfortunately, there was an amazing amount of rubbish throughout, much of it unreachable deep down in cracks.

http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2002/amy.html

Mt. Humphrey, the highest point of Arizona, is one of several peaks on the crater rim of the shattered San and extinct Francisco Volcano. At the top of its 3851 metres is the southernmost extent of boreal alpine tundra in the USA. An early start on the 21st of February from a track near the unfortunate Sno-Bowl skilift. As I drove up in the icy morning I watched a bearded man battling his way up the road on a bicycle. The trail twisted up through aspens, firs, pines- the grand montane conifer belt reaching down south. Before long the forest shrank to gnarly krummholz dwarf pines, and then to tundra grasses, rock, and ice. There is a series of false rocky summits, each offering an exciting view into the crater interior tundra. As I began slinking across these, the bicyclist catches up to me, moving fast fast. Robert joined me to the summit (and for the descent.) On the summit, I provided the thermos with the chai tea (and honey) and he arranged the ceremonial can of beer. As we signed the summit logbook (ensconced in an ammo tin) I asked if he had been to this summit before. "Oh yes," he said, "Hundreds of times." Northwards, a reddish line marked the south rim of the Grand Canyon, and in all other directions cinder cones and lava fields demonstrated just how close below the surface the hot magma was.

http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock/150241/humphreys-peak.html

The third trip from Flagstaff was a afternoon loop northeast, to Sunset Crater and Wupatki Natl Monument. Sunset Crater is a steep, ashy cindercone surrounded by chaotic sharp lavafields, all less than a millenium old. The crater is unfortunately closed to climbing. Wupatki Monument encompasses several ruins, also a thousand years old. The inhabitants built several towers and rooms perched on sandstone boulders in the most elegant fashion. An exciting place, a reminder of the precarious fertility of the desert.

http://www.nps.gov/sucr/Flag_Areas/frameset.html

I had arranged with my sister Maya to visit her in Las Vegas, and headed west out of Flagstaff on the old Route 66, originally from Chicago to Santa Monica. In the far northwest corner of Arizona, for a very quick visit to the faux ghost town of Chloride, actually alive and well. I camped out in the granite Cerbat Mountains at the Cherum Peak trail. This was classic Mojave desert, yucca and cactus and oak trees. As I camped out under the stars a grey fox scouted me out. Early morning I began on the trail, not really knowing how far it was, and switchbacked up through the scrubby trail, under some oak trees, and onto the granite summit. Ravens pinwheeled above me and we carried on some sort of absurd conversation. They viciously mobbed a golden eagle flying past, all the while watching me. But perhaps, strangest of all, were the countless gazillions of ladybugs on the rocks, so densely collected you could scoop them up in a handful. It was also on Cherum Peak that I discovered my binoculars had been knocked out of alignment, unfortunately.

http://www.blm.gov/az/kfo/kfocherummap.html

The next morning I crossed over from Arizona to Nevada, across the Hoover Dam damning the Colorado River. Southern California, and Las Vegas, are powered and watered by this chunk of cement and steel. Security checkpoints and stalled traffic conspired with the banal tourist facilities and poor viewpoints to make it a less than inspiring destination. I couldn't help but think of Beavis's laser-accurate question: "Is this a god-dam?"

http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/

Across the Colorado, into Nevada, blinded by the setting sun to Las Vegas, the most infamous and undoubtedly the wierdest of all American cities...

***************

-y- Cactus Forest; Sedona Spires

2006-02-14T20:05:00.000-08:00

-y- Cactus Forest; Sedona Spires

There was something wrong as I entered Tucson, Arizona, on Valentine's Day 2006. My upper right molar was sharing with me a healthy dose of the throbbing pain that only a tooth can provide. But I was still glad to be there. This sprawling desert town, surrounded by jagged rocky peaks and friendly saguaro cacti, is a well loved place that inspires true devotion from its residents and visitors.

http://www.gografx.com/TucsonPags/Tucson.html

I had visited Tucson twice before, visiting my sister when she lived there; now I was fortunate enough to catch up with three people from totally different aspects of my life. My high school friend and fellow birdnerd Sonya had begun school at the U of Arizona, it had been at least six years since we had last seen each other. Cara my nomadic Californian friend was coincidentally in Tucson on her way to studying jaguars along the Mexican border, and my mother's cousin Pat had been living there for thirty years.

There was a wonderful day-trip to Saguaro West National Park, where the tall green cacti live. These are the famous ones- about five metres tall with branch arms bent upward- and very spiney! We tromped along a trail through a strange forest of these silent figures, and wound our way up some unnamed rocky peak to overlook the dry landscape. But even beyond the bare rock, dry streambeds, and spiny cacti, Arizona is currently experiencing the driest year on record; the winter rains have simply not come.

http://gorp.away.com/gorp/resource/us_national_park/az_sagua.htm

The tooth demanded attention, so I found a dentist. They couldn't find anything wrong with the tooth, but an x-ray and a bit of discussion identified my woes as sinus troubles...it had begun hurting after descending from 8000ft/2424m in New Mexico to Tucson at 2500ft/735m. The pressure change had caused me no small distress, but after a bit of worry, it went away on its own...

After a lovely three days in Tucson, when I headed out, the first hint of raindrops in half a year fell on the city. They didn't make much of a difference overall, but it was a wonderful thing to witness.

Northwards across Arizona, quickly passing through the horrific sprawl of Phoenix, which like its namesake would do well to burn down in a cleansing blaze. Even farther north to the volcanic mountains of Northern Arizona. At Montezuma's Castle, a cliffline and a perrenial stream harboured ancient ruins of the Sinagua people, and is now a national monument with a number of tourists snapping photos.

http://www.nps.gov/moca/

I had another rendezous planned with two friends from Idaho, Brad and Christine, at Sedona, a town known for its redrock scenery, New Age sensibilities, its abundance of mystical energy vortices. By another coincidence, they were in the region the at the same time, and we had missed each other by minutes at Montezuma's Castle.

http://www.lovesedona.com/01.htm
http://www.experiencesedona.com/gallery/redrock/default.htm

In town, Sedona is overcrowded with tourists, souvenirs and jeep guides. But like so many other destinations, a bit of distance brought us to into the redrock canyons, closely embraced by the ridges of spires and arches. In the course of a day, we visited Fay Canyon and Vultee Arch. The sandstone was as brilliant as we expected. While I wouldn't have used the word "vortex" to describe some of these wondrous spots, there is definitely an abundance of extremely special places in the sandstone landscape there.

By the day's end, they had to head south to Phoenix, farewells all around, and I headed north through the twisty canyon road #89 to Arizona's mountain town of Flagstaff...

Follow the Sunset

2006-02-12T20:06:00.000-08:00

Follow the Sunset
***Photos!*****
http://tinyurl.com/o2btu
**
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On the next part of the journey...

The thrashed sands of Texas were, unfortunately, my last view of the Gulf of Mexico. It left me with a greater appreciation of the fragments of wild coastline in Florida. My early morning mission on Feb 7 was to get to Austin, a city renowned for being the spot to visit in this far-flung state.

Didn't stop in Houston for even a moment, and was in Austin before noon. The very imposing Capitol building was almost obscene in its excessive grandeur. I walked a few blocks north to the University of Texas. Towering above the crowded, monumental campus is the famous, vertiginous belltower which in 1966 was used lethally as a sniping tower by a crazy student. Many students were walking around on a bright sunny day, and heavy wooden doors led into dark and shadybuildings. On one particularly ornate building, massive letters read "THE EYES OF TEXAS ARE UPON YOU," which I found rather unnerving. Later, I learned that indeed, a network of security cameras are scattered throughout the campus.

http://www.utwatch.org/security/cameras.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman

A brief visit to the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library on the campus was very informative, as I hadnt really known much about his presidency. My impression of Texan presidents in my lifetime is drastically less than favourable. To learn about a progressive Texan president signing in wilderness preservation, civil rights, space travel, employment programs, and public medical insurance was a good reminder that Texas was filled with innovation. The highlight of the museum was, surprisingly, a piece of the moon!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBJ

I made friends quickly in very friendly Austin and had some nice times around town with Valera, Jason, Heather, Chris, and Lael...a visit to the overlook on Mt. Binnell, midnight chess games, car repairs, acupuncture practice, the excellent Spider House coffee shop, and of course, several walks downtown. Austin's a great city, but time there was short. I left as a stormy cold front arrived. It felt good to be out of the rain.
http://www.spiderhousecafe.com/

An early morning exit westwards across Texas, making great time and ending the day at the base of Guadalupe Peak National Park. This was my first real view of any sort of Mountain in a few months, and it was a welcome sight! The Park is composed of a Permian limestone ridge, an offshore deposit of shells from a long forgotten inland ocean. Further to the north, in New Mexico, the ridge encompasses (the massive) Carlsbad and (the legendary) Lechuguilla Caverns. On the sheltered upper slopes of the mountain, a coniferous forest of Douglas-fir and pines reaches towards their southern extent. The mountains rise sharply from the salt plains and flatlands of the desert around.

A very frosty night passed slowly and I was up an hour before sunrise to start up the track. It switchbacked up up up past cactus and agave and pine trees with views of fantastic eroded ridges across the valleys...early in the morning, I had the windy summit all to myself,at the highest point of Texas.

http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock/150689/guadalupe-peak.html

The afternoon brought me to a much less lofty locale, to the Carlsbad Caverns Park. These limestone caves are even more spectabular than most. They were formed above a pan of natural gas which exuded hydrogen sulfide acid, creating a cave of extraordinarily astounding proportions and filled with wondrous formations. Four hours of walking on the elaborate subterranean trail network was a nice contrast to the sunbleached mountains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsbad_Caverns
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/caves/journey.html

Next, El Paso, on the very western tip of Texas, with only the Rio Grande & a quadruple-razor-wired fence keeping us safe from Mexico. I spent an afternoon south of the border in Ciudad Juarez, my first visit to this intriguing country which has such been such an essential part of my cultural background. It was pretty much just as I expected, with a pedestrian vibrancy and openair market madness that is utterly absent in the USA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paso%2C_Texas

From El Paso I headed into New Mexico and camped in the Lincoln National Forest, near the town of Cloudcroft and above the Valley of the White Sands. There were plants and birds and rocks and things. Classic car camping in the National Forest, underneath pine trees on a dirt road. No fires allowed, unfortunately.

Down and westwards to White Sands, where the National Park Service maintained a Monument with some trails in the midst of a missile testing facility. The road sign on Route 70 across the valley informed me that it would not be closed for missle testing. Convenient. So I visited these eerie gypsum dunes, a unique ecological environment sparsely vegetated and intricately windblown. Most notably, the sand was white.

Exit westwards passing through the fantastic granites of the Organ Mountains, a quite stunning range that I had never even heard of. Keep it in mind if you are ever in the Southwest USA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sands_National_Monument
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_Mountains

I joined the Interstate 25 at Las Cruces and headed west towards Arizona. I crossed the Continental Divide and returned to the Pacific watershed in late afternoon. The Divide was quite flat and gentle in this region, and was modestly indicated by a boring old freeway sign. Back on the westside! Shortly thereafter, late on St. Valentine's Day, I found myself in the Grand Canyon State, the quintessential desert SouthWest- Arizona.

More soon...

The New Atlantis of Southern Louisiana

2006-02-09T20:07:00.000-08:00

The New Atlantis of Southern Louisiana

Images of domestic tragedy in the USA are relatively rare, and inevitably they resonate deep within the country with a discordant throb. New Orleans, Lousiana, (or NOLA) hummed with destruction, and even worse the twin realisations that we deserved it (for building underwater) and that nobody deserved it (the less wealthy would suffer the worst of all because they, most of all, lived underwater)

I was fortunate enough to have friends to stay with and view this legendary city- Hannah (Abby from Tassie's sister), Emma, Jeff, and Sarah. All of us were from other places, and with the exception of Hannah, all of us knew next to nothing about NOLA. I was there in the first week of Feb, 2006, just a few months after Katrina redefined the city.

The visual impact of Hurricane Katrina and the floodings were rather subdued in the areas we were situated (around Tulane University). In the upper town sections, there were amazing potholes in the roads, and giant tree stumps, and lots of rubbish being cleaned up, but it was nothing compared to the devastation of Waveland, Mississippi.

The people hanging around were, undoubtedly, not representative of the former "chocolate" NOLA; the African American population had lived in the sections hardest hit, and had returned in far fewer numbers to rebuild in the devastated regions. Geographically, the poorer people had inhabited the newer and lower sections, and these flooded drastically when the levees broke. In the upper neighbourhoods, the visual impact was less, but the psychic impact of the unfairness of it all was greater.

The busy areas of town that I saw were downright cheerful, in perhaps a hollow way- just out of sight, the low lying sections of town were being abandoned and shunned by the returned residents of NOLA, and it was a horrendous feeling in the air to know that these vast sections would not, and perhaps should not, be rebuilt promptly. The levees had never ever been adequate and they would breach again... Mississippi had been thrashed cleanly and uniformly, and here in NOLA the destruction was unfairly partitioned among economic and racial divides, and the sense of betrayal and guilt was palpable. The pleasantness of the upper neighbourhoods was comic, in a tragic way. The house I stayed in had an evergrowing pile of recyclable materials in the kitchen...but nobody in town could accept them. My friends and I were in a reborn city, and from some angles the sense of potential and possibility were as strong as the sadness.

Driving around town was remarkably tame, for all of the mess people were alert and paying attention. I felt safer driving in the battered and twisting streets of NOLA than in the fast and flat roads of Florida, despite witnessing every possible road obstacle short of a her of zebras. Signs nailed to trees: "Diabetes medicine, fast!" and "Do you need someone to gut your house?" Beneath the Interstate 10 freeway, thousands of cars had been abandoned- piled there by the National Guard to get them out of the way.

A midnight car-tour led by Emma through the utterly flooded Lower 9th ward, now dry with few lights and no people to be seen. Every house had the spray painted codes marked by rescuers in boats- whether the house had been searched, whether any corpses remained in the building. A distinct waterline could be seen on the buildings. We left there and visited the Bon Temps happiness of downtown at 2 AM for the obligatory Cafe du Mond midnight beignets (sugar-drowned doughnuts). Unexpectedly, an old man had set up a telescopein front of this landmark cafe of the French Quarter and showed us the bands of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. Around the corner Bourbon Street lived up to its nighttime cliche of drunken crowds and loud music.

Daytime, in the uptown, and a quick visit to the pulsing tourist French Quarter with Hannah. Tight streets and balconies and voodoo shoppes, of course. A very few streetcars were running on the tracks, and as they passed the ground shook vigourously. Banners downtown invited tourists to visit Jose Blanco, the famous White Alligator at the zoo...however, I had just seen this famous reptile at the Tampa Aquarium, where Jose had evacuated his own safety. Hannah showed us the oldest oak tree in the city, the Tree of Life, with its huge root mass and crown spread twice its height. We briefly watched Seattle lose the Super Bowl to Pittsburgh. All this tourist normality, with that deep painful undertone of disaster and loss, ignored but not unknown.

I left NOLA on Monday morning and traveled west, bewildered and a bit discombobulated by the life-after-death of such an already gaudy and ghoulish city. A brief visit to the city LaFayette, the centre of the Acadian diaspora. The Acadians, or "Cajuns", were French speakers expelled from Nova Scotia, and their Francophile culture thrives and survives in southwestern Louisiana. I walked around town for a bit, and continued on west.

All of Southern Lousiana is in dire straits. The entire region, built upon the wetlands at the mouth of the Mississippi, is in ecological and hydrological crisis. The River used to meander east and west as it willed, depositing sediments from floodings on the continent up north. But upstream, irrigation, and channelization, and an expectation that we can tame the river, have interrupted that sediment input, and the whole coastline is sinking, eroding, and suffering.

I entered Texas after dark on the seventh day of Feb., and made the rather tired choice of camping on the Gulf Coast. Days later, I would learn that this section is called the "Cancer Coast". A long drive through the town of Port Arthur and past a massive district of oil refineries brought me to beachside track where the sand was engulfing the road. A cold night, below freezing and windy, dragged on to a grey morning. Light revealed the countless bits of rubbish on the beach, the oil drilling platforms off the coast, and the tire tracks along the sand. This was my first view of Texas.