Wednesday Filler: Redwoods Of The East

While next post we take a look at the broader canvas offered by the boardwalk at Congaree, here today we can catch a glimpse at one of the defining features of the lowland experience.  Seen below is the trunk of a Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum), in fact an extremely large and old one, at chest height, from about ten feet away.

Why yes, the camera has a rough time in 90% humidity.  The trees seem to enjoy it, though. 

There are other trees of vast scale in the east.  Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana) and Bur Oak (Quercus Macrocarpa) are massive sprawlers of immense volume that can dominate nearly every setting they can find enough crown room to stretch out in.  Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus) and Florida Royal Palm (Roystonea Regia) can both grow incredibly tall and dwarf a mature forest of some of the tallest eastern and northern Caribbean trees in their respective northern and Floridian/Cuban habitats.  For a lovely combination of both features, however, the Baldcypress certainly holds its own.  These things are massive in the western redwood family sense of the concept, and just as few of them remain, despite having a much broader range of acceptable native habitat. 

It's a shame we don't have more of recorded testimonies from the early European explorers about what they thought of such sights, and why people were so astonished by the western forests when the East put on quite the show for the centuries leading up to their Californian discovery in the mid-nineteenth century.  If Americans are more so impressed by frontier than the familiar, then what a wonder a frontier in the eastern backyard must have been.  Perhaps words failed so many times, and the redwood family got more attention because people started understanding how so many failing words had started to cause their frontier to disappear before the approach of the civilized world.  John Muir came to his botanical passions when growing up in Wisconsin, and fermented them on a long walk through forests such as these to the shores of the Gulf before he set off for California, and by ship rather than experiencing the heart of the continent the long way.  His loss!

And yes, I just said something bad and silly about John Muir.  Makes you want to pay attention to your backyard more, doesn't it?

Parks in the News: Hetch Hetchy possibly unleashed!

Hetch Hetchy Valley was one of the first great casualties of the war waged by the conservation movement.  These days we tend to think of National Parks as nature preserves with recreational opportunities in them.  Back in the early days of the park system, protected lands were involved in a battle over utility vs. preservation.  San Francisco needed a reliable source of water delivered to it, and a reservoir capturing runoff from the Sierras seemed like a good idea at the time.  Unfortunately, instead of damming an expanse at slightly lower elevations, plans were drawn up to damn the valley, despite protests to the contrary by John Muir and many, many other people.  The valley, you see, was already a part of Yosemite National Park, and could easily go toe to toe with Yosemite Valley in terms of sheer beauty.  This is what it looked like before the damming:

Public Domain,  Sierra Club Bulletin, Vol. VI. No. 4, January, 1908, pg. 211.

These days it pretty much looks like a third to a half of the bottom of the valley is missing.  This might very well change soon, however...

 http://www.wdam.com/story/19195501/yosemites-lost-valley-will-be-subject-of-vote

In a change of pace from the usual entrenchment of the conservation movement well into liberal front lines, environmentalists are siding with the Republican party against the San Francisco Democrats, with both the green and the elephant hoping to unleash the waters of Hetch Hetchy so that they may flow freely once more.  This comes in the midst of an age when the Sierras and much of the rest of California are experiencing some heavy drought, which is the last time one would figure a vote would be put forth to remove a source of water from a major city.  The battle of the damn is turning into a very peculiar and unpredictable conflict, and the outcome might have ramifications for water use agendas elsewhere on the continent.