Gratitude For Snowy Saturdays

Snow has finally made it to Southeastern Michigan, and it looks as if the ground will have a decent blanket for some time to come (I know that seems shocking to those of you who live in the Ohio Valley or D.C. which has since seen winters to put our historic ones to shame).  This is the first decent snow cover we have seen in Livingston County for well over three years now, a sad situation that has gone hand in hand with extremes of heat and cold, prolonged seasonal lag, and even tornadoes in March, something I thought I would never see.  I write this now because I am thankful that we are seeing something of a real winter this year so far.  I write this because I have seen so many people posting about the snow in Cairo and claiming that such is evidence that global warming is a hoax.  Perhaps it is, but what is not a hoax is that the world's climate is changing dramatically, rapidly, and through our actions.  Snow in Cairo, week long freezes in Florida, an August here in Michigan that felt more like an October, followed by a September that felt more like a July?  These are not normal things, and they are happening more and more.  Hurricanes are turning into half-a-continent wide superstorms.  I, and people like me, don't say these things to scare you into something.  What good does it do me?  What do I get out of it?

On the other hand, there are politicians in the pocketbooks of corporate leaders who want you to feel like this is all some Leftist conspiracy meant to take away even more of your guns, religious freedom, and force you to give money to poor people or else the Planet might explode.  Truth be told, I could care less about your guns as they are your property and not mine, but I do care about how you use them and if you have the right judgment to know when a good time to use them would be.  Truth be told, I don't want religious freedom taken away as I view religion as I view the rest of human everything, an incredibly good thing, again, if used properly and for the sake of looking into our place in eternity.  I myself am a Roman Catholic and believe in my heart and soul that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, which is a very good thing because I have so many, many bad things to be accountable for.   I'm thankful that I can proclaim this without being shot by some control freak despot who thinks I should be something else.  Truth be told, I don't want you to be forced to give money to some poor person, because you might just miss the point of what that deed means.  I want you to understand what life is like for that person and to see them as more than just some required object of charity, as they are much more than that.  Money, like any resource, should be also more than just an object and used a bit more responsibly than we tend to use it, at least in Canada and the United States. 

I could keep going, but this is not a political blog.  Why bring it up at all, you ask?  I bring it up because this is a very political continent.  I tend to view such a reality in a positive light, even while I can sometimes be pessimistic about the path to open war we seem to be set on.  I say this because politics of our sort does have a good side wherein change can come a lot quicker than in more sedate democratic societies.  While I tend to think that extreme partisanship is a dreadful thing that weakens us all, I think that having sides at all means that we care a great deal about some issues.  That partisanship, though, can lead us to believe that we have to follow a certain line and that yucky, ugly things like "climate change" are part of the package of the "other side" and we must therefore think of them as little more than a blinding toxin.  I could probably keep blabbering on here to tell you why climate change should not be just dismissed as a political issue of the opposition, but I think for now I will let this wonderful video do the talking for me:

http://www.upworthy.com/the-future-of-the-earth-s-next-100-years-visualized?c=ufb1

Our continent, and indeed our world, is a precious thing.  It is our home, and we are responsible, as its most dominant species and/or as its caretakers entrusted by God not to keep vomiting on it the way that we have been.  Yes, we do need to rise above political agendas from both sides (looking at you Kyoto accords, you dirty, self-serving German brainchild designed to cripple economies you don't like), but we also need to understand that we are having a really bad effect on our planet. 

In the meantime, there is a solid blanket of snow outside, we are getting a good amount of winter chill needed by the local assortment of ecosystems to thrive, and it does well to remind me that while change is a constant in nature, there is a plan for it and us that are far beyond what our limited visions can even imagine, a plan which our arrogance needs to be reviewed in the face of.  The celestial time table could give a you-know-what about your stocks and futures.  In the meantime, I am happy to have a reminder that I don't actually live in the South that I look at with envy, because down South they don't have these:

I-94 near Port Huron, some of the southernmost Paper Birch (Betula Papyrifera) around. 

And for the moment, I am glad to be reminded that we do, and that I live at the southernmost whispering edge of the amazing hemisphere-spanning Boreal forest.  Those lovely birch there are still holding their own despite thousands of years of gradual climate change after their prime northern weather retreated with the Laurentian Ice Sheet.  They are a testament to a grand plan in which some things do remain constant despite and/or even in the midst of so much change, a reminder that a greater mystery always remains above our little plans and fields of vision.  As the elegance of the birches reminds us, though, not entirely being in control is hardly as bad as it might seem.  This Saturday night, when someone my age should be out getting bombed somewhere, well, I'm instead just happy because I see that pure white blanket outside. 

Not Really Rhododendrons: Mountain Laurel (Kalmia Latifolia)

Well, we took a look at the three biggies of the Appalachian Rhododendrons this week.  The funny thing is, however, there is another plant that, while not a Rhododendron in any way, shape, or form (other than also being a member of the heath family), they compete with them rather well on their home turf in terms of sheer loveliness. 

Somewhere along the Blue Ridge Parkway.  This specimen was so lovely that I actually did a Blue Ridge "no-no" and stopped traffic to take a picture of it and sigh over its gracefulness for a few seconds.  People honked, but then they each did the same thing behind me.  The sun filtered through the canopy so perfectly on this one glorious tree that I figured it just had to be arranged as such by Divine Providence.

Mountain Laurels grow in association with the Rhododendrons, where they expect similar conditions of fickleness in terms of soil acidity, just the right shares of sunlight and shade, and handle practically growing right out of a pile of rocks with the same ease as any of member of the heath family.  The funny thing is, they are a heath plant, but are closer related to blueberries than Rhododendrons.  They are evergreen, and they could definitely qualify as a small tree; their branches are curled, twisting, and numerous, forming an under-canopy cage of sorts just like the Catawbas.  Their leaves tend to look more like, well, a blueberry's, but much larger in scale.

Blue Ridge Parkway, near some sort of overlook.  This one had seen better days, but was still growing strong from some of its branches.

They are fairly common throughout much of all but the far northern Appalachians, and even grow as far south as the Mississippi gulf coast.  This means they can handle lower, steamy southern elevations, even while they seem at home up to the 5,000 foot mark.  They seemed to be most common between 4,000 and 5,000 feet.  I did not see as many Mountain Laurels as I saw Rosebays or even Catawbas, but when I did come across them, they were hard to miss.  I have never seen a single one in cultivation, although apparently many people grow them.  It seems that the Master Gardener keeps them mostly for himself, which is probably for the best, because nearly every one I have come across is a masterpiece when left in its own setting.

Words fail to describe more of this lovely thing, so I will let the rest of the non-Rhododendrons do the talking.  I never did manage to get a close up of the leaves or the flowers, in most cases because they were actually a bit inaccessible, being off some dangerous looking outcropping too far up or down to get safely close.

This was also off the Blue Ridge Parkway, hiding behind what a Table Mountain Pine (Pinus Pungens).

These last three are of the same glorious plant growing off of Newfound Gap Road in Great Smokey Mountains National Park on the Tennessee side.  This plant illustrates how thoroughly the blooms overtake the body of the tree.

Roan Mountain

The highest peaks and ridges of the southern Appalachians are an incredible world set apart from their surrounding lower elevations.  Relatively little of the high ground was ever settled by either the first or second born of the area, and although the summits were logged in the early twentieth century and roads were later constructed for tourists to visit the highest reaches of mountain in eastern North America, the area by and large has remained a great frontier of the wild.  One such place is Roan Mountain.

Roan has your typical southern Appalachian high ground features; Red Spruce (Picea Rubens), Frasier Fir (Abies Fraseri), Catawba Rhododendron (Rhododendron Catawbiense), American Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana), some nice open vistas set in a cold climate (things rarely heat up past 70 here), that sort of thing.  To someone just passing through from one high point to the next in the region, Roan might not seem to be anything special, but the truth of the matter is that it really does stand alone.  For one, Roan really is alone.  Most of the surrounding mountains are over a thousand feet lower, if not more than her misty reaches.  The result is that the feeling of being "on top of the world" is overwhelming here.

Wide open spaces dominate, with grassy balds affording incredible views of sky and distant land much more readily than places like Mt. Michell or Clingman's Dome, where the summits there actually require viewing platforms to see the forest in spite of the trees.  This is probably because Roan is less a true peak than a very high ridge, the end result of which is that even from the dense Spruce-Fir forests, the edge of the world is never far away:

Still, Roan does not attract the same level of attention that the other heights seem to get.  This is probably because it is a bit more isolated from the rest of the giant, set back in the backdrop of the Blue Ridge rather than directly along the highest reaches and its celebrated parkway.  Her high elevations are rather accessible, being both on the Appalachian Trail and not far from public highways, yet even in the peak of the touring season, my walks through Roan were largely done in solitude.  Yes, it was rather late in the day when I finally made my way there, but the crowd of people at the Appalachian trail parking lot 500 feet down from the higher ground indicated that this was not really stopping anyone from having a look at the place.  Perhaps part of what makes Roan so quiet, and then too so intimate, was the scale of presentation there.

While Roan is every bit as florid as the other flower hot spots in the region (and rightly so, for the Rhododendrons here are considered to be the finest "gardens" in the world), our friends from the Heath family seemed content to share space with the conifers and ashes.  If anything, the ferns give every bit as much of a show as the Catawbas did.

That said, one can not go a few steps in any direction without finding them.  They just tend to form a part of the scenery without dominating it:

This is not to say that Rhododendrons are far from being the stars of the show here!

As seen in yesterday's post, they can grow quite large and cover a bit of territory, enough so to contend with the spruces and firs, but like everything else here, they don't tend to dominate so much as they do, say, at Craggy Gardens, which is basically a giant forest of them.  You can still stand in a nice thick patch here, surrounded by branches with the flowers over top rather than on your same level, but here they are a part of something more, and more often than not they look as if they are a part of their greater forest portrait.  In short, if you want to see Catawba Rhododendrons in their natural setting, you can do so throughout the southern Appalachians, but by and large the best place to see them like this would be at Roan.  The Catawbas, you see, can easily make a forest in and of themselves, but they grow best as a friend to the spruces, firs, ashes, and the lovely grasses, sedges, and ferns.

Roan just has a very primordial feeling to it.  As I mentioned last post, it feels like a piece of Eden that got left behind for us.  Roan is a place of balance, a place of greatness, to be sure:

But also a place of balance, where the young are even more prevalent than the old, and where the attentive eye will notice that the more delicate creations have just as much of an allure to those who come to marvel at the beauty of the created world here:

Roan is very like a religious icon set in the natural world.  This place invites one to quiet rambling thoughts and instead look into a natural world that we so often ignore or expect to put on a show for us.  This place invites us in to a world that is our home, and yet one we still can be amazed by and curious about.  Roan is definitely a place I will explore again and again, as I wish to travel more through its sunny balds and deep spruce-fir forests.

"I Never Imagined I Would See a Land Like This"

Part one of our adventure can be found here:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-land-of-our-savage-paradise.html

When the two other major European powers, the English and Spanish, came to North America, they largely did so out of an interest in conquest and settlement.  The spoils of conquest were initially a great prize and purpose for the Spanish in heading deeper into the lands of Mexico and Florida, but conquest, largely a means to an end of empire building rather than outright pillaging and piracy, took a back seat to establishing a thriving "New Spain".  The English, content to commit their piracy against the Spanish who had already done the primary work for them, took part in building a thriving "New England" in a series of colonies less telling of empire than of a transplanting of domestic hopes and dreams.  While many of her colonists came to plant tobacco and have a nicer estate than they could ever afford on Sheepshire-on-the-Thames, just as many came for a chance at a quiet life, free to live it how they chose, usually as dissenting Protestants.  The French, however, considered both conquest and colonization secondary to opening up a very lucrative commercial trade with the native peoples they encountered.  (That trade would be because of an encounter between the French and the Beaver, one of the most fascinating relationships between man and beast ever made).  Guess which system the locals liked more?

That said, 1608 was a very cautious year among both French and Algonquin alike.  Samuel de Champlain and his men arrived on the shores of what would become Quebec City with guns in hand, and the Algonkin and Montagnais were no less at the ready to come to blows over what looked to be a matter of potential battle.  Gestures were exchanged, the French gave "gifts" of trinkets to their new-found neighbors, and battle was deferred while both sides kept one eye on the other even asleep that night.  Houses and buildings of all sorts started being constructed almost immediately in order to allow the French to survive what Champlain knew would be an incredibly brutal winter.  As the men would later shiver and wish they had never left France, much less Tadoussac, Samuel kept to himself, making maps and looking outside his window wanting something more than just a crazed hunt for the Beaver.  Like so many North Americans before and after him, he looked west.

For a man who had never been to the Great Lakes nor even heard much about their existence, Champlain was incredibly accurate about his predictions regarding Canada's most attractive feature, extensive watersheds connected by easily portaged heights of land that permitted canoe travel clear to the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic Ocean, and the Rockies.  With Quebec profiting off his successful gamble that the Algonkin and their trading partners would come to his new "inland" trading post first, Champlain was able to set out for western lands at his leisure.  By 1611, he found Lake Ontario, the great lake that kept the Haudenausonee and Algonkin apart from one another.  By 1622, thanks to the Mattawa portage, he found Lake Superior.  In his travels, he lived and worked with his Algonkin guides as an equal (albeit with the French necessity/penchant of elaborate dress).

Public Domain, 

While his grand objectives and military exploits against the Haudenausonee are known quite well, and the modern image of the man largely amounts to just another imperialist, we would do well to remember that he did not view the native peoples nearly as brutally as did men such as Cortez, or with the fear deep in the hearts of the early American colonists.  While certainly not a saint, Champlain was definitely an explorer, and probably took more than a passing glance up the various tributaries of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence as he made his way inland.  He almost certainly took a few side trips up rivers such as the Madawaska, Petawawa, and Amable du Fond, even if only for a short while.  This was a man so completely enthralled by the people and land he had come across, a man who stood in silent awe when he saw the Laurentians towering above the mouth of the Mattawa river or the waters of deep blue Lake Superior which went far off to the horizon.  This was not a land of conquest or even commerce, but, as it had been for so many before him and so many to come after him, a land of wild beauty and a power of nature that would bring pause to the plow and axe alike.

He was also a man on a mission, however, and had to document the better known routes before he could explore rivers of his own desire.  Fortunately, he could live somewhat vicariously through a man he considered a son, Etienne Brule.

Public Domain

Brule was given a mission by Champlain: Travel with the Algonkin to the land of the Wendat and then live among them and learn their language and their way of life.  Between the years 1611 and 1629, he would spend much of his summer among both peoples, and while his voyages with them have never been deeply chronicled, spending summers with the Algonkin meant that he most certainly visited and stayed on the shores of the larger lakes of Algonquin that were situated on the paths of the largest waterways, notably Opeongo, Grand, and the great meeting point of the pine and maple forests as well as the Nippissing and Petawawa rivers, Cedar.  He was probably distracted enough by what he saw, as well as by the bountiful fishing, to ignore the huge concentration of Beaver that inhabited the mountain lakes and streams.  He is documented to have shared his experiences of the area with Champlain, apparently in detail and reverence, and even as he would continue to return to the shores of Georgian and Nottawasaga Bay to be with the Wendat, the fact that he returned to be with the Algonkin year after year and came home with less than an abundance of pelts meant that he was constantly drawn back to Algonquin.

Now this is definitely conjecture... Commercial ventures of the voyageurs reached deep into the heart of western Quebec and northern Ontario, but largely avoided Algonquin.  The area is extremely rugged in places, but no less accessible than the rivers of the rest of the lands around it.  It is quite possible that Brule and Champlain respected Algonquin and the sacred summer home of the Algonkin enough to leave it off the map.  Don't believe me?  The purpose of this blog and the purpose of these posts in the next two weeks is to share with my readers not only what our continent is all about, what there is to discover, but what sort of majesty can be found on our shores.  This objective is furthered by encouraging travel to the places we visit here in the blog, because nothing can substitute for a full blessing of the senses in experiencing the land for ourselves.  My friends, there is no place like Algonquin on this entire earth.  I dare say these men thought so.

Many after them would agree.  Some would leave it alone, some would embrace it as a cause to be championed, and some would see it as a land to be exploited beyond recognition.  Stop by tomorrow as we continue the story of Algonquin.

Q and A Session Five

Q: You seem to jump around not only the geography quite a bit, but also from nature to civilization and history, etc.  I thought all this was supposed to be seeing North America for what it really is?

A: What North America "really is" is a continent that has been dramatically transformed in only a few centuries, much of it far more rapidly than that.  American Voyages is all about showing people what they have in their backyard, because it is amazing how many people really do not know what is just around the corner from them, what has happened there, etc., to say nothing of what lies further afield, especially in one of the neighboring countries.  Part of sharing what places are like involves:

What was this like in its natural state?
What has happened here because of nature?
What has happened here because of people?
What is this place like now?


I like to focus on the first and the last question, but you really can't get from one to the other without the middle two being asked as well.  Question one holds a particularly strong interest for me, because in so many places we just have no idea what we have changed, and might never get the chance.  Understanding this, especially through the lens of history, is very important in getting to know ourselves better.  For that matter, it helps to ground the sciences, such as botany, in something not distanced from humans.  Simply put, we are a component of the environment, and a danger lies in ignoring this by either insisting on our dominance of creation or seeing us only as an invasive element within it.  Anyway, whenever studying anything, it is important never to do so entirely from within or without a fishbowl.  This, of course, leads to another question:

What is my perspective on these things?


I made this blog because I wanted to share my perspective with others so that I may be in turn enlightened by theirs and open our worlds a bit more.  I suppose I could say the idea for American Voyages came when I was in high school and shocked that some of my peers did not know much about the world beyond their county.  I became aware of the idea when I went to Mexico to learn Spanish and was exposed to a much broader viewpoint of the place than I expected.  Finally, as noted before, in my very second post in fact, I became enraptured by the sheer grandeur of the Grand Canyon and knew that I wanted to share not just impressions of my travels and research, but my wonder.  Many people could care less about the facts and would prefer to skip ahead to "what is it like?"  To answer your question, in considering all of the components of a place, meaning its ecosystem, history, and forces of change, I like to expose both the facts and "what it is like".

Q: Why so much attention on a few places?  Why all the focus on Michigan?

A: I live here, and I have taken a lot of pictures of places like here and southern California.  I like to present posts that include photographs whenever possible, and I like to make sure they were pictures I or someone I was with have taken just to keep the images pertinent and meaningful in sharing my perspective.  Anyway, what's the big deal with Michigan?  It tends to not get a lot of good press from the rest of the country, to say nothing about getting much press at all.  On that note, just wait until I get some Mexico pictures together, because then you will probably be sick of those too!  Don't worry, I have plenty of requests and plans for more variety.

Q: What is corn?

A: A grain often eaten as a vegetable that is native to Mexico and has been cultivated throughout the Americas throughout human existence here.  In English it can also refer to grains for making bread in general.

Wilderness Among Cities in North America

Upon exiting Penn Station in Manhattan, one enters a very urban environment of concrete, tall buildings, and hordes of people coming and going.  One can see one of the great capitals of the world of finance, culture, and transport, in many ways the sum total of what we have made for ourselves.  Easily impressed by the hustle and bustle around them, most people will not notice what the horizon terminates on down west 31st or 33rd street. The street vistas end at the Hudson River, but rising above the river is the low rise of the beginning of the Hudson Palisades, a remarkably undeveloped set of cliffs that run parallel to the river and give an often ignored scenic backdrop to New York's skyline, if viewed from down below in the streets.

Likewise, out near another packed metropolis, Los Angeles, are towering mountains somehow still largely covered by forests and chaparral, the Santa Monicas and the San Gabriels, despite every other nearby inch of available land being developed as thickly as possible.  Surrounding and even within Chicago, amazingly, are patches of tallgrass prairie that once dominated much of central and northern Illinois.  And perhaps most amazing of all, near the very spot where the United States traces the start of its modern lineage to, stands a forest of pines, cypress, and tupelos, the very same mysterious forests that greeted the first Virginians coming ashore.

Today these wild lands stand close to one of the larger complex of cities in Virginia that surround the mouth of the James River and Chesapeake Bay, seemingly unfazed by the intense development that has transformed the east coast of the United States in the centuries since the founding of Jamestowne.  Perhaps these sorts of places get unnoticed by most people.  I remember taking a course on Greek history back in college, where on the first day of class the professor asked us all "how many of you have ever even been to a farm?"  Aside from the professor and myself, no one else raised their hand.   I would imagine the same response would be true if he had asked which of them had ever taken a walk into a forest, to say nothing of into a forest off of a path.  Then again, perhaps these places do get noticed by most people, and they exist even if we can't quite figure out why.   The same people would gladly raise their hands if asked if they would support preserving the forest or even help save the farmlands from being turned into mini-malls.

This seems to be an weird sort of dualism in the North American consciousness, that we feel the necessity of wilderness, or at least something rural, even while we enjoy the rush and comforts of the city.  Canadians are proud of their vast northern expanses of nothing but tree after tree, Americans are absolutely enamored of their National Parks, and Mexicans love their native forests and deserts, a love which in recent years has transformed into a broad cultural movement of gardening with natives.  At the same time, we love our convenient highways, our manicured lawns, our benefits of civilization.  We started down in Mexico by draining Lake Texcoco to start farming its muddy remains.  We hacked our way into those swampy tidewater forests we see above to farm tobacco and re-create something of the England we left behind.  We divided up the land into thin strips that marked ownership of the forests that flanked the St. Lawrence River.

We made our way up the rivers and along the bases of mountains further into the wild-lands in order to settle and transform them, and yet the burning desire that propelled this expansion was not so much a steady steamrolling of development, but a thrusting into an exotic frontier that always made us want to see what was behind the next ridge or further upstream the river.  If this were not true, we would not have moved so quickly into lands as distant as California or Alaska.  Eventually, we would recognize this fascination with the world we were transforming and make parks, preserves, and help restore what we had changed back into something more... ancient?  Pure?  Mysterious?  No single reason can explain why we have such a subconscious fascination with our beginnings, but the truth of the matter is that we do have a fondness for our heritage, cultural, natural, and both in relationship with one another.  Heck, I was crazy enough to make a blog about this sort of thing, right?

Q and A Session Four

This Q and A session is dedicated to the concept of not taking your backyard for granted.  I was lucky to get three questions that worked well this way.

Q: Why so many posts about prairies and savannas?

A: Grasslands are the most common ecosystem across the entire continent.  They can be found in nearly every state, province, and territory of our three nations, albeit in different forms.  In pre-colonial times, they were far more extensive than in the present day, engaging neighboring ecosystems in a battle royale of wildfires, rains, and herd grazing patterns.  Grasslands are extremely resilient and adaptable ecosystems that define the wild nature of our continent on the whole: a fairly warm, windy place that is full of water and yet also remarkably dry.  They can handle the worst weather we get, including extremes in temperature and precipitation, and manage to survive.  Conversely, they are among the most productive and diverse lands on the entire planet, positively exploding with life and beauty with just a little bit of rain and warmth.  They can be found at the edge of deserts, in meadows high atop mountains, far north in the tundra or far south in the leeward slopes of tropical Mexico, in sandy expanses left behind from the last glaciers melting away over the Canadian Shield, amidst the pines and palmettos of Florida, in patches of "barrens" surrounding the great cities of New York and Philadelphia, in clearings amongst great forests, and of course, in the great central plains that stretch from Alberta to Coahuila.

What's more, in addition to being emblematic of the frontier and survivalist spirit of this continent, they defy simplification, and are often the most misunderstood ecosystems out there.  North American grasslands are often thought of like so:

When in fact they are often wonderful worlds bursting with life like:

In short, they are often far more than meets the eye.  On the whole, nature has so many wonderful surprises awaiting for those willing to take the time and explore it.  Our hectic world these days is so caught up in activity for the sake of self-benefit that we often overlook the concept of self-improvement, and definitely leave wonder and exploration out of the equation.  Quite literally, we cannot see the forest for the trees!  Grasslands are wonderful places where we are forced to pay attention to what is underfoot and seemingly invisible to the glancing eye in order to fully appreciate what they have to show us.  This was certainly true for my development in observing and understand ecosystems.  After I gave the Great Plains a chance, I never looked at a forest the same way again.

Speaking of that, to respond to the question on a more personal level, I had always wondered where the forest stopped and the prairie began.  When I was a kid hungry for travel with that dog-eared and bent atlas in my hands, I always envisioned everything from Regina to Dallas to be one giant flat expanse of lawn.  I could not help but imagine what the line between this lawn and the forest to the east looked like, and I pictured a dark, lush forest somewhere in Missouri that all of a sudden petered out into the endless prairie, a wall of tree meeting a sea of grass.  The search for this grand line of division, though largely dispelled when I started to read about the places in that atlas, has always been a bit in the back of my mind even recently.  Whenever I head out west, when driving through Iowa and Missouri, I always take in the scenery with even more intensity and detailed interest than I do elsewhere ecological transitions, or ecotones, occur, expecting to find that line one day.  I wanted to know where the forest turned into the plains which gave way to the mountains which became the desert which... you get the point.  Ecotones are fascinating worlds of connections between diverse areas, both because of the contrast between life zones they display, and because of the shared features between regions they represent.  This dovetails into the next question:

Q: What are some places you have not yet been to in North America that you would put on your "bucket list"?

A: That would make for a very interesting post, and I say that because there are so many places I would want to see before I give myself back to the soil.  I suppose here I can cheat and qualify that question with a specific direction: what places would I put on my list of places I am most ecologically curious about?  I would say that have to do with transitions, and finding more of my great wall of forests.  Specifically, I would give my right eye to see (or rather have seen) where the boreal forest transitions into the central grasslands.  Picture an arc stretching from Edmonton to Winnipeg and down towards Minneapolis.  The biologist-powers that be call this "Aspen Parkland", where the great forests of spruce, fir, poplars, birches, and pines dance and meet with the prairies.  I have always wondered what an outcropping of Canadian Shield granite looks like emerging from tallgrass.  Yep, I have very simple desires and plans in life, a man who wants to find a rock sticking out of a field.  I imagine very little of this landscape survives intact in the United States, and the best bet would be to find it in Canada in some of the national parks set aside to preserve such a landscape, but the remaining ecotones in Minnesota hold a particular fascination for me because they share many species in common with the lands next door in Michigan and Ontario that I love so much.  Algonquin meets the prairie, I can only imagine it!

I would also love to see the Black Hills, as they are the easternmost extension of the great western mountain forests, one of the few places where elements of eastern, western, and northern forests come together, stuck in the middle of hundreds of miles of the Great Plains.  Again, I like putting the puzzle together as much as seeing the finished map.

On the same general note:

Q: You seem to be passionate about much of the country (I assume this is referring to the United States specifically), finding something nice about everywhere.  Is there any place you could not live?  I mean, could you actually live in a desert or on the plains?

A: Probably somewhere in the Deep South, and not out of a cultural bias that leaves me with a raised eyebrow and open mouth whenever I encounter "rednecks" (but when it comes down to it, I find all sorts of people to be far more interesting than undesirable).  The Deep South is exotically lovely, what with magnolias, live oaks (Quercus Virginiana) and balcypresses (Taxodium Distichum) dripping in Spanish Moss, and palmettos making the most of the steamy landscape.  All the same, it is, well, a steamy landscape.  I don't do heat and humidity in combination very well.  I would imagine parts of Mississippi would be my least desirable place to live, owing to the conditions and the fact that anything resembling a mountain would be at least a half day drive away.  Then again, the flora is lovely, the music is great, and the river and Gulf are never far away.  As for the desert and plains, as per my response to the first question, they are not as desolate and devoid of life as they seem to be.  They also both tend to be close to mountains, so if I wanted to, I could easily get my fill of some pine forest for a bit.  I like both snow and palm trees, so the desert or the southern plains could work nicely, sure.  St. George, Utah comes to mind, as they have both.

Well, actually, this is Washington, Utah, but that is right next door.

It also helps to have friends there.  The western migration trend never really has stopped, it seems.  Anyway, I would probably be most at home in northern Ontario or western Quebec, which would be outside of the United States, but you get the picture.  That would be the heart part of my "home is where the heart is" even if I could adapt to any place fairly well.  Even if circumstances forced me to live in Jackson, Mississippi, I would hardly consider my life shot to hell, but would get a really powerful air conditioner as soon as possible, or at least a nice ceiling fan.  I would explore every nook and cranny of my new home and get to know its flowers, trees, history, and way of naming soft drinks rather well.  The Creator left us a nice world to live in, and the least I can do is come to know and appreciate it.

Oak Savannas of Southeastern Michigan: A Reminder of Our Natural Heritage

Taking a much needed break from the Civil War content, and heading back to something a bit more natural, we take a glance at some of the remnants of the savanna landscape which once covered sizable areas of Michigan, Ohio, and Ontario.  Of course, this being the Nearwest, rather than the Midwest, things are far more moist and both the infrequent natural fire regimes and the soils are much more capable of producing full-blown forests.  These were all taken at Island Lake State Recreation Area in Michigan, near Brighton.  Island Lake is a wonderful haven of some of the last remaining "as it was" bit of wildlands in the metro Detroit area.

As you can see, right beside the savanna is a typical mixed deciduous forest full of oaks, hickories, and even a few ashes and maples.  

 Even over the oak savannas, the canopy is exceptionally high and relatively dense.

More into the "thick" of the savanna, we see a semi-open horizon and a rather appealing park-like setting.  We also see a lone Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus), which is at the southern edge of its naturally occurring range, at least in present times.  The White Pines, which normally infrequently poke their way up in  sunny gaps in hardwood forests, have much less competition here, and grow quite well in the well-drained soils and sands.

Such a landscape is a rare find these days.  Even when things revert to nature after being abandoned, plants that humans have brought to the lands here often transform the ecosystem.  Setting aside any arguments over the benefits or curses of the trans-formative hand of humanity on the world, these few natural places we do have left, especially in the central eastern part of the continent, usually tend to stand out when they get stumbled across.  Most people would assume a place like Michigan or New York would be a relatively mundane affair of endless, uniform forest.  Instead, our natural landscape shows a much more intelligent design at work, one of astonishing complexity.  The warm season is upon us, readers!  Go outside and try to find some of the primal beauty of North America.  Get to know your state or province or even county or district and what is so great about it, like the post we have today about mine.

Returning to a Sense of Wonder

Sometimes politics and culture can get a little distracting and overwhelming.  It would be a shameful thing for this blog to turn into some soapbox when it is meant to expose the continent instead.  Today we can take a break from anything too technical in history, culture, politics, religion, or nature, and instead just become lost in rock, vistas, and primordial creation that existed well before us and shall outlive our mortal span.  Take whatever interpretation from this that you will, for nature can help rejuvenate us in different ways.

A frozen garden.  Bryce Canyon is certainly something not to be passed up in a lifetime.  Don't be satisfied with the pictures, because being there, experiencing any part of the world with as many of the senses as we can, is just an amazing thing.

Q and A Session Three

Q: What inspired you to produce this blog?

A: For the past several years, I have been traveling pretty extensively around the United States.  By traveling, I mean on the ground.  The experience has let me see how such a diverse continent fits together.  As a child, I often spent hours staring at climate and vegetation maps because I wondered how everything fit together in the place I had gone to.  I explain more of my fascination with travel and trees in the prior Q and A post, but personal geographic wonder aside, connecting maps and the real world has remained an interest of mine.  In 2008, I was able to make my first continental crossing.  Seeing the plains unfold from the forests, seeing the Rockies rise in turn from the plains, heading into mountain forests, and then down into sparse deserts, well, it was all pretty amazing.  While the main purpose of this blog is to expose our continent to my readers, I suppose the impetus to keep it going has more to do with sharing my own sense of wonder and awe over everything from Opuntia Fragilis to swimming in the Pacific Ocean for the first time.  I want to share with people how I get excited about geography, nature, history, etc.  Hopefully, some of the joy can be passed on, or at least some sort of heightened awareness of one's surroundings, no matter how seemingly mundane they might be.  Heck, right now I am half writing this, half staring at the silhouettes of some Red Pine (Pinus Resinosa) blowing in the wind outside my window.

This motivation and odd preoccupation with resinous conifers is all well and good, you say, but what about the spark that actually got you to write this glorified amateur photo-journal, you ask?  I would have to say it was because I was almost struck by lightning.  The funny thing is, I did not even flinch.  I was at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon back in June, and was simply awestruck by everything around me.  Maybe it was the cold air up around 9,000 feet up (I had been baking for weeks in lower elevations).  Maybe it was the lovely forest I was surrounded by.  Maybe it was the actual canyon.  Maybe it was seeing the storm come across the wide open space.  Whatever it was, I felt that I was in my element, and I figured that maybe I should start making a chronicle of these sojourns and experiences.

Of course, it never hurts to put more on a resume either.


Q: Why do you never write about the churches you have been to?

A: Maybe I should.  Churches and other visible religious elements are very much a part of culture, and I definitely have the academic background to write on them, having degrees in both theology and art history.  We have some wonderful religious buildings of all sorts here that can give some of the greatest ones in Europe and Asia a run for their money.  After all, this blog is about history and culture as much as trees, trees, nature, and mostly trees, and North American history can be difficult to understand purely from a secular context. Try leaving Junipero Serra out of Californian history, or Frederic Baraga out of the story of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

I am Catholic, and thus have a tendency to, you know, mostly visit Catholic churches.  For one, writing about a mosque or a Baptist church would be overstepping my bounds and field of expertise, to say nothing of how I most likely would not have the spiritual eyes to experience such places as their associated worshipers would.  That said, North American history involved more than just Catholics, and I don't think I would be struck down by lightning (knock on wood) just for stepping inside a synagogue or going to a medicine wheel.  In fact, I would not mind checking out a Synagogue or a Wheel.

As usual, send your questions my way in the comments or by e-mail at BKryda@gmail.com.

Arizona Strip Country: Vermilion Cliffs National Monument

One of the lesser known national monuments, the Vermilion Cliffs, is easily one of the most surprising ones.  In taking a jaunt through the Arizona Strip back in June, I had planned to at least give a passing visit to as many NPS sites as I could handle (which, trust me, even for a passport stamp fanatic like me, is a very bad idea).  I had done some research on what sites were in the area, such as Pipe Spring National Monument, and noticed a few others, such as the cliffs, were significantly large and filled up that usual nice green map shading that attracts your blogger here as if it were the ultimate candle and I was a moth.

I had made the assumption that such cliffs would easily stand out, that a visitor center would be clearly marked, and that signs a plenty would direct me to the scenic areas otherwise.  Well, it turns out that is one of those more annoying national park sites that are under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management.  Now, some places, like Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, have lovely visitor centers and enthusiastic staff that are all about having silly travelers like me go all "park fan" on them, but for the most part, the BLM is more concerned with making sure land gets used properly than with making sure people can enjoy themselves, get connected with nature, and learn things.  That said, it turns out that they did have a visitor center at Navajo Bridge, the last crossing over the Colorado river that one can drive on before it cuts the vast canyons of the Grand Canyon further downstream.  Silly me, I was less concerned with stopping and enjoying the view than I was with getting on to more monuments.  

I at least afforded myself enough time to stop on the new bridge and take a shot of the river.  This is a downstream view of the Colorado river, not too far away from which the Grand Canyon has its relatively humble beginnings.  Though you see cliffs off in the left horizon, and the Vermilions are off to the right outside of this image, the land immediately around the top of the canyon walls are quite flat; as one drives toward the bridge from the west along US 89, the canyon can be seen nearby as a shadow in the otherwise barren and flat land.  The river is 500 feet below the bridge.  The soil and rock is extremely red.  The land is trodden by few people.  I have to say, I want to come back here some day, and perhaps my greatest travel regret ever is passing through here so quickly.  Maybe I was so much in awe of creation still, after having been to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon only an hour or so prior, but Marble Canyon and the Vermilion Cliffs enthralled me, put me in an extreme state of relaxation, and made me not want to go.  Yet, on I went, almost without a second thought until I was near Flagstaff.  Maybe I was nature drunk.

Anyway, how about the actual cliffs, you know, the point of this post?  Well, let's go see those in just a minute.  For now, as a reference point, this is where we are talking about:

The cliffs themselves are the yellow... banana looking circle I put there.  The orange dot next to them is the Navajo Bridge.  The Arizona Strip is so named, as you can see, because it is cut off from the rest of the state by the gap of the Grand Canyon.  In many ways, it feels like it is isolated from the rest of the continent.  But enough of my pseudo-mystical ramblings, you came for the pictures!

Now, as you can see, at first I did not think much of them.  Yes, those are awesome looking cliffs, and but I had seen taller ones, was still in something of a nature daze, and was mindlessly making my way to "the next stop".  Yeah, you know what, I think I will blame all this on just being out of it at the time.  Anyway, the skies had opened up not ten minutes before getting here, and let me tell you, this is one of those places that rain improves a whole heck of a lot.  The cliffs literally started running water, mud, and even small rocks like mad, and the colors burst out them.  Now, that picture is blurry because I did not think to slow down for a better shot,  but those boulders captured my attention.  A few miles later, I realized where I was, probably because the cliffs got closer and a bit more colorful.

Still, even though I was excited to see yet another place on the map come alive, I was more concerned with destinations than the journey (I promise to stop complaining about this soon), and I had seen cliffs like this before.  The talus piles at the bottom of the cliffs, for example, reminded me of the Book Cliffs near Grand Junction, Colorado, the very first part of the dramatic dry and sculpted west that I had come across back in 2008.  At that point, as if God was mad at me for not being impressed with his work, I came across one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life.  You may disagree, but you were also not there, and trust me, the camera just not do it justice.  

These are the Vermilion Cliffs.  I am told that on the Paria plateau above the rim of the cliffs are some of the most amazing rock formations anywhere on the planet, including The Wave (check out some pictures in the link provided).  Of course, when I come back here (not an if), I plan to explore the area on foot.  Still, I can imagine that at that time, as when I was here before, I will just want to stare at these marvelous red walls as if they were some sort of a natural holy icon.  Now for me, much like a religious icon, these cliffs, even in these pictures, serve to empty out the mind and calm the spirit so that it may listen.  Maybe I was not ready to receive what such a meditative experience might have to offer, and so I rushed.  I don't know.  I plan to return to find out.  

Sadly, I had another camera card with pictures of the washes bursting with RED water in them.  I do not know where I put it, but I will certainly make a second post of this place when I do find it.