A Quick Look at Kenilworth

A quick photo trip today.  I intend to keep posting at least every other day, but currently your author feels a bit under the weather.  Digging back through some pictures from the Mid-Atlantic trip of last July, I found a few pictures to tide us over in the meantime.  They were taken at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens, one of the least visited and definitely most under-appreciated NPS sites in the Washington, D.C. area.  Not much time was spent there, mainly because it was 109 degrees that day, with humidity to boot.  Still, I figured it would be a shame not to at least take a passing glance at the park, as I was in the area.  While it is well worth a visit, it can be difficult to find, and is in a rather rough area that might scare the more timid away (parking is secure, so don't let that stop you).

The park and gardens is dedicated to the propagation and study of aquatic plants and ecosystems.  Plants from around the world can be found here, but the park is interested in keeping up a stock of native North American vegetation.  The gardens were built on the floodplain of the Anacostia river, a tributary of the Potomac, which had historically been heavily polluted and becoming something of a cesspool.  The landward portions of the park became the gardens, which would help in filtering the river water to some degree and serve as a plant bank and research garden.  The floodplains and marshes closer to the river, which I did not brave the heat to see, are the last remaining vestiges of tidal marsh in the D.C. region.  Apparently, the best way to see the entire park is to arrive by canoe with the oncoming tide, fool around, and leave with the departing tide later in the day.  

The gardens are certainly lovely, and I can only imagine what the marsh would be like.  

The flowers were not even at their peak, but were certainly exquisite.

Aside from the obvious benefit this place brings to all sorts of birds, the place also teems with insect life, the majority of which is more than happy to assist in controlling mosquitoes.

All in all, a lovely place to visit, and a nice way to see a major city from its natural roots.  Like much of the eastern side of the capital, this park does not really receive much attention, mainly because it is so far off the beaten path.  

Traffic and a Water Rant.

Traffic, as you can see, can happen just about anywhere.  In this case, it happens about 90 miles away from anything remotely resembling gridlock, and is a wonderful reminder that while highway maintenance is necessary, it is very poorly timed, and places far too much emphasis on driving competence that most people do not just have.   I'm looking at you, person who likes to merge after the sign told you to!

Such a lovely scene utterly disgraced by the supposed miracle of the internal combustion engine.  For those wondering, this is along interstate 70 in Colorado, westbound, about 90 miles away from Grand Junction.  The canyon, called Glenwood Canyon, is among the many vistas one can pass by in the boring, sheltered world of a car along the interstate.  The Colorado River has cut and flows through the canyon, at this stage taking on its familiar brown, wild appearance.

Granted, it still has to drop over 5,000 feet and course through two major deserts before it can find its way to the sea.  Hopefully.  For much of the last 20 years, it has made it within miles of the Gulf of California only to sink into the hot sand, the sad little trickle unable to cope with being drained so excessively for desert farms.  If you are not upset that the south western states want to divert the Great Lakes to them, drive on interstate 10 between Tucson and Phoenix, and then kindly write the USDA to take a lesson from Israel in the importance of drip irrigation.  Grow those oranges in California and Florida, grow those apples in Michigan, and trust me, wheat grows just fine in the Dakotas without an extended growing season.  

Anyway, enough about my water raving, Glenwood canyon is a lovely little stretch of land, whether you drive or take the train.  

Life at the Top, part two.

For part one of this set of posts, click here.

I was looking through the blog and noticed that I never finished a look up into the amazing world of mountain summits.  Anyway, heading back above 11,500 feet above sea level, we find a world where life has not given up, but exists in a stunted state.  As noted in the prior post, alpine and/or boreal trees are pretty resilient things.  They continue to grow unabated, sheltered by one another, despite the increasingly hostile conditions, until at last they reach a breaking point.  Here, they either grow only on one side, facing out of the prevailing winds (as here), or grow extremely low to the ground in clumps called krummholz, literally German for "knee timber".  Here and much father north, in the actual tundra edge, one will find that the "moss" at one's feet is actually clumps of trees only as tall as a finger, if that.  Walking into the field is prohibited here, for the reason that careless steps might actually kill something that took centuries to get even this tall.

 In some instances elsewhere, one will find individual trees that do manage to gain some size to them, but instead of looking like normal trees, are twisted masses of mostly wood and few exposed needles.  This commonly happens to Limber pine, especially in the mountain heights above the Los Angeles and Cucamonga valleys (where it is normally the highest growing tree), and the famous Bristlecone pine.  Although both occur on the Front Range of the Rockies, they were mostly absent from this area in the national park, and most of the tree mats instead consisted of very tiny Englemann spruce and Subalpine fir, both of which form extensive forests of evergreen spires just below the tree line.  Such forests are very reminiscent of the Black spruce dominated Boreal forest that covers a good portion of Canada.

Tree balds, of course, can happen on much lower peaks, and elevation is but a sign that multiple factors for stunted growth are happening all at once because of sheer exposure.  Never ending wind, a short summer of two months with temperatures high enough to permit growth, intense ultraviolet radiation, and dozens of feet of snow cover all combine here into a cocktail of conditions inimical to the sustenance of most life.  Here, the treeline is the thus the limit for most growth; elsewhere, an empty summit might bear one of the conditions because of the particular location of peaks in storm tracks(such as Mt. Washington), isolated and exposed tops, and the altering effects of maritime and latitudinal proximity.  Here, however, is a land at the top of the world, with ground that welcomes clouds that have come all the way from the Pacific Ocean and will release what moisture they have left for the first and last time since precipitating on the Sierra Nevada and Coastal ranges.  These peaks, masses of rock more than two and half miles above sea level, are walls between deserts and grasslands, Paiutes and Arapahoes, and lands that trees and explorers never braved.  Here, ice still rules far into the summer.  If not for trail ridge road, even the hardiest of hikers would never spend much time up here.

 Yet even ice is not immortal and isolated from human impact.  Regardless of what one believes about climate change, the fact remains that glaciers even 14,000 feet up have started to disappear in recent decades.  Core samples drilled from these melting wonders imply that they have otherwise been stable for centuries, if not millenia.  These cores were drilled not by environmentalists, but by water authorities in nearby Denver and throughout the Colorado river compact, wondering just why snow melt from higher lands have not sustained their reservoirs when they did in the past, even under extreme droughts.  For the time being, the icy giants persist, and can still be seen and marveled at.

Water concerns and a changing world aside, the summit lands are still a place where nature and eternity trump human presence.  As is the case in much of the west, including the lower plains and deserts nearby, the land seems to go on forever.  Valley vistas are obscured, even on the clearest days, just from the sheer distance they lie away from the peak country.

Yet this is not a land of desolation, despite the seeming domination of ice, rock, and sky.  Even in this place of distant horizons and extremity of scale, the diminutive persistence of life endures in the spaces close to the ground.  In some cases, flowers start to bloom while they are still under an inch of snow.

 And of course, we too find a way to dwell in these lands, if only for a little while.  The alpine visitor center at Rocky Mountains National Park has to be one of the most exotic locations maintained by the NPS.  I might have spent more time there had my head not been feeling like an inflated balloon at the time.

Once I made it back below the treeline, however, I was golden.  Maybe I am just a man of the forest; as this was only a thousand feet lower:

That or I could be as tough as a spruce, I don't know.

Your Author and his Methods

I just received an e-mail about the blog here, and took immediate attention to one specific statement made in it (which was not directed to me): "I want to see these places too, and not just as a tourist, but really getting out there and hiking in the wilds".  Paraphrased.


You will notice that many of my photos are taken from roadsides or short jaunts from the pavement.  This just happens to be circumstantial, and I want to remind my readers that the best way to see something is in full contact with the senses.  Books, videos, museums, and even car trips are all wonderful ways to discover more of the world, but nothing beats getting out there (with reasonable precautions taken) and getting surrounded by the natural world.  "Windshield tourism" is but a start to a great adventure further in.

Walking is something of a lost art, I feel.  When I lived in London back in 2003, I found myself walking everywhere.  I was in a car maybe three times while there, a bus a handful of times, and the subway only for the first few weeks.  I ended up being in the best shape I was ever in, and I got to see a lot more of the great city at a personal level.  People used to walk everywhere, even if they had horses, carriages, or boats.  John Muir, in fact, walked 1,000 miles to the Gulf of Mexico from Indiana, just to see the changes in landscapes, ecosystems, and people pass by him.  I have found out that there are people who still do long journeys by foot this way.  I have considered taking such a trip of my own, from Sarnia, Ontario to Brent, Ontario.

Insane?  Not nearly as much as the people who walk the entire Pacific Crest Trail in one shot.

Detroit Before Detroit

Many of the larger cities of the world share one trait in common, that they look nothing like the original landscape on which they are built.  While London and Manhattan stand out as prime examples of the results of urban development, even smaller cities, such as Detroit, are so heavily altered that one is hard pressed to find a surviving place that looks anything like its natural landscape once did.  What is natural Detroit now?

Detroit is heavily developed, to the same degree that Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, etc. are, meaning you are just as likely to find concrete as you are soil in a given space.

Detroit has an abundance of small neighborhood parks, but lacks a large body of central urban parks like Buffalo's Delaware Park or Manhattan's Central Park.  There are two parks on the periphery of the city, Belle Isle and Hines Drive, both created over river land difficult to build on.  Park design has been largely based on a recreational initiative, rather than a preservation initiative.

Detroit is extremely flat, with no noticeable hills or valleys (most creeks that would have had such are now underground or simply gone).  The highest point in Detroit, all 675 feet of it, lies near the corner of Wyoming avenue and Outer Drive.  The Detroit river remains the lowest point, with the average water level resting at around 571 feet.  The level elevation gradient is a result of much of the area being the former lake bed of Lake Maumee, which was also partially responsible for forming its soil.

Detroit has soils consisting largely of sand, clay, and some remaining muck soil rich in humus.  While not overly rocky, the soil contains a good assortment of rocks and minerals left by past glaciation.  A good dig through a backyard might even produce some of the same stones you can find on beaches throughout the Great Lakes.

Detroit landscaping often makes use of non-native vegetation.  Even native trees and flowers are usually planted outside of their normal conditions; the lovely maples and oaks might not have been there before.  Lots that remain untended to after human alteration are often taken over by the invasive and destructive tree of heaven.

The east side of Detroit is still somewhat flood prone, not only because of an aging sewer system, but also because some of the area lies in a broad flood plain.

Now, what is true about what pre-settlement Detroit used to be like, and where can remnants be seen?

Much of south east Michigan used to be swampy bottomlands, including the lower areas of Detroit.  In fact, the east side neighborhood known as "Black Bottom" was so called because of its original landscape.  There would have been creeks that pooled a bit in places, but were otherwise extremely wide and maybe only an inch deep where they had standing surface water, sort of like the Everglades. Very little of this remains, and most of it is on Belle Isle in the forested section.

The grasses you see in the background are actually invasive.  Now, to be fair, there would not always be standing water like this, but the soil would have been very spongy otherwise.   The area, after all, was not a true swamp.  The ground I was standing on was fairly solid, and there were slight rises of half a foot here and there which were dry.  Here, and probably in much of the lower portions of Detroit, Black ash was the dominant tree.  There would also be many cottonwoods, and in a few places, you can find old survivors.

In cases like these, the trees were most likely just thought to be lovely and built around.  Now, when the land would rise as little as a foot or so, drainage improved.  Creeks could also form and help clear out water faster, and oaks, hickories, and White ash would start appearing.  On some locations, particularly with sandy soils, White oak would grow in small pockets of prairie, maintained both by the relative aridity of the location, along with fires that could spread easier than in the wet low lying areas.  Dramatic examples of this type of landscape can no longer be found in Detroit proper, although the Oak Openings Preserve of Toledo and Ojibway Prairie Provincial Nature Reserve in Windsor are remnants that can be found nearby.

Woodward avenue and much of the immediate surrounding area downtown are about 40 feet higher than the lower east side and the areas southward leading up to the Rouge river mouth.  Records of the original French settlements on both banks of the river indicate that the area that Cadillac founded the city on in 1703 featured a somewhat prominent sandy bluff that tended to be a bit more hospitable than nearby areas (and provided the most strategic viewpoint).  Despite the waterlogged appearance of the lower areas of the city, conditions must not have been too bad; people settled here, drained what they could, and made use of the muckland for agriculture.  Some of the landscape today even retains land use patterns which began under the Seigneurial system of French settlement.  The most prominent examples remain south of Windsor, though the city grid of the east side of Detroit retains the pattern as well.  As you can see, the straight lines that form blocks of land parcels stand in contrast to the relatively ordered farm squares further inland which were plotted much later.

Also of note in the river front portion of the east side are the numerous canals and harbor indentations which creep in from the river and Lake St. Clair.  Many of these were formerly creeks, including Connor creek.  As noted, nearly all of the water courses in Detroit proper have long since been buried.  Plans are currently underway by both government and private interest groups (such as The Greenway Collaborative) to unearth these streams and recreate them as greenbelts and strip parks.

The land gradually slopes, at a rate of 10 feet per mile or less in places, as it heads toward the north west corner of the city.  In the area of Old Redford, one would most likely see a few more oaks and hickories, and perhaps even the occasional Eastern White pine or Eastern hemlock sticking up through the canopy, provided the soil was drained enough.  The land would look somewhat similar until one would notice that the slope of the terrain was getting a bit more definable, where it would meet the glacial lobe that ran from Adrian, MI up to about Port Huron.  Here, the ashes and their accent oaks and hickories would meet the beech and maple forests of the rest of upland lower Michigan.  Detroit itself, however, would remain the dominion of a relatively lush wet forest.  Think about that the next time you complain about having to water the back lawn.

Memories of a Michigan Fall

Nothing too elaborate today, just a little reminiscing of a more accurate and pleasant season.  This winter has been quite unimpressive.  Yes, I know, commutes are easier without weather problems related to snow and such, but the effect on the spirit is somewhat mean.  40-50 degrees in January in south-east Michigan?  No thanks.  Snow is lovely, and lukewarm temperatures with mud and dull skies are only lovely as a promise of flowers and frog mating calls around the corner.

Anyway, these are scenes around Green Oak township, Michigan, in the "Midwest".  Nearly everything you see belongs there naturally; Michigan remains rather unspoiled for a state of its population.

What's the Deal with Capitol Reef?

There are over 390 units in the National Park system.  Many parks are places of great natural beauty, while others are preserved historical landmarks or the sites of important points in history.  Most parks make sense, meaning that their preservation needs little in the way of explanation to convince people of why they have been set aside.  Sometimes parks require a bit more explanation, if only out of wonder as to why they are so important.  Cuyahoga Valley National Park, for example, does not immediately come to mind when "National Park" is mentioned.  The place lacks the obvious grandeur of the western parks or the more scaled down eastern ones such as Shenandoah or Acadia.  Even out west, though, sheer cliffs and interesting geological formations can get commonplace, and one can wonder, for example, why a place like Capitol Reef National Park could get such a lofty designation.

The defining feature of the park is a 100 mile long escarpment type geologic formation known as a monocline, named the Waterpocket Fold.  In several places, water has carved canyons through the fold, the largest of which is the canyon cut by the Fremont River.  Now, as in the past, the monocline served as a transportation barrier, a difficult ridge between areas of relatively smooth terrain.  To the first Mormon settlers in the area, such an obstacle was reminiscent of a reef.  A dome shaped formation within the ridge reminded them of a capitol dome, hence the combined name.

Not a bad description, really.  From a distance in the west the dome looks a bit more spherical, but the strong morning sun disagreed with my getting any decent shots of the thing from such a perspective.  As the park was somewhat of a "see this on the way" sort of thing, I did not get a good shot of the line of the ridge which would illustrate the reef aspect; that had been passed under darkness the previous night and there was not enough time to backtrack far enough for a good shot.  A definite planned excuse to return!

Anyway, where is this thing?  Well, it is a bit out of the way of "civilization" in general, which is probably why it does not receive the same level of attention or visitors as nearby parks such as Arches or Bryce Canyon.  I only went myself because it was it was on a route that would also go to Bryce, and, well, because it has the national park designation.

Looking at things a bit closer, one can see what an obvious "reef" this does make.

You can easily make out the ridges within the teal circle.  Just to the north lies a similar formation, which I have circled in red, called the San Rafael Swell.

Now, about those canyons that made passage through the area possible... Within the Fremont river canyon conditions are rather lush compared to the rest of the lower elevations in the region.  First, take a look at the otherwise lovely desert landscape just outside of the canyon.

And then inside.  If not for the context of this post, you could not imagine this being in a desert canyon.  Even in person, the riparian forest is dense enough to obscure the canyon walls in some places.

And yet the walls retain their grand imposing scale.  In a North American version of the contrast seen between the Nile and the Sahara, one can see the lovely green of Fremont Cottonwoods standing out against brilliantly patterned canyon rock.

To Paiutes and their ancestors, the vegetated canyon floor was an oasis of water and game. The earliest inhabitants of the area even left us a record of their life in some well-preserved petroglyphs:

For Mormon and other Euro-American settlers of the region, it was a pleasant and convenient place to pass through the reef.  Some of them even stayed, and what remains of the tiny settlement of Fruita, Utah, is one of the showcased features of this park.

Then there are the orchards, which gave Fruita its name.  As fellow nature blogger Steven Mullen points out,  a fruit orchard with cliffs in the background is not something you see every day.

Now of course, no one is actually looking at that lovely orchard in front of the cliffs.  I agree, that is a rather nice sign, even if it did spoil the view.  Oh, yes, and there is that mule deer running across Utah 24, sure.  Needless to say, where there is water, shade, and plenty of green to feast upon, there will be plenty of animals around as well.  There were tons of mule deer.

OK, so I took a shot of that one twice (very photogenic deer), but there were about four or five different deer in various points throughout the canyon.  There were also a lot of lizards, like this one here:

Try looking in the middle of the picture if it eludes you.  Amazing what camera zooms can do to keep animals safely to themselves, but allow us to get wonderful shots of them at the same time.

Historical and biological sights aside, there are also those absolutely wonderful sheer cliffs and walls that contain this whole drama.

Even in the darkness, these walls made the scale of their presence clear, and driving Utah 24 at night is perhaps almost as incredible as it is during the day.  Amazingly, it was the little Fremont river that carved out this canyon.

I am told that in times of spring rains and melts (the rim is over 1,000 feet above the floor in some places, so there tends to be snow in the winter), water descends in lovely waterfalls all over the place.  By mid June, however, there was only one trickle.

Water has an amazing power to shape the earth, and this canyon is a monument to the potential of a river.

And the amazing geological features this park has do not stop there.  As is the case of much of the arid west, the rock is bare and exposed, not hidden by soils, vegetation, or worn down by the more frequent rains of the east.  Layers of rock sit upon one another, thrust up from below.

So what?  There are other more significant historical sites out there.  There are plenty of far more dramatic canyons around.  Mule deer and Fremont Cottonwoods range throughout the west.  "Naked geology" is plentiful, especially in grander locales like Death Valley or the Grand Canyon.  There are other rivers that flow through the arid west to make an abundant oasis.  True.  Here, however, they are all together and the variety is further enhanced by the contrasting scale of minute and grand elements all merged into a lovely whole.

The park is a delightful surprise, to say the least.  Even if one comes here only for the park proper, and just the canyon drive at that, the immediately neighboring scenery does not disappoint either.  The land to the west of the fold is open, rugged, and colorful.

I noted that the land was something of a desert, which is only a half truth.  While it shares much in common with the nearby high desert of the rest of the Colorado Plateau, the land also rests at just about 5,000 feet above sea level, where the pinyons and junipers start to show up.  In areas of barren red rock where sagebrush will not grow so thickly, they stand out rather well.

Not a bad place at all.  Shameless endorsement: Just west of the park on Utah 24 is Torrey, a small town.  There is a rather convenient Best Western hotel there, and if you pay an extra 10 dollars for your room, you get a lovely view of the red rocks on the western edge of the Waterpocket Fold.

All in all, a different sort of area and a lesser known park that combines the best of many features of the west.

And that was only from the small park drive, and half of it at that...