Winter 2014, A Final Farewell

Spring looks to be finally upon the continent, even towards more northerly reaches.  While the alpine heights of the mountains and the more distant north will not experience the hints of a growing season until June, more temperate lands have started to feel release from what has truly been a difficult winter.  Were it not for the snow many of us (except, sadly, on good portions of the Great Plains) had, the landscape would look like a disaster area.  Here in Southeastern Michigan we experienced the grip of the sort of cold best reserved for Northern Ontario, and our friends on the other side of Lake Michigan were even worse off.  In contrast, much of the far west experienced relative warmth... except for one place.

Thanks to a special friend for taking this shot for me. 

This would be in Washington, Utah, a place otherwise noted for being at the edge of the Mojave Desert and thus prone to mild winter days in the lower fifties and chilly nights hovering around half of that value.  Now and then snow can fall in this land, as it did in record amounts back in 2008, but in general the thaw comes around quickly and winter rains, rather than fluff, prepares the red land for a floral display of utmost brilliance when spring sunshine warms the scenery.  Things are warm again there now, but back in December they almost got as cold as they did back here in Michigan; some days did not go above freezing.  Nearby Zion National Park recorded sub-zero temperatures.  Most of the native flora handled this somewhat well, but some had a rough time, including the palms seen above.

Those are crossed California Fan Palms (Washingtonia Filifera), a palm otherwise noted for its incredible cold tolerance.  While they do not grow native in this particular part of the Mojave, they can be found less than a hundred miles away in an isolated grove in northern Clark county, Nevada, and in general they can handle the climate anywhere lower than 3,500 feet around there pretty well.  They can handle periodic freezes and snow just fine, with the storms of 2008 barely phasing them.  Unfortunately, that little corner of Utah got just a little too cold for comfort, for too long.  Many palms and tender plants bit the dust in what was well below any sort of normal occurrence.  In the meantime, nearby coastal California never got even close to that cold, nor did it see any sort of rejuvenating precipitation, snow or otherwise.  This winter has simply been out of control for everybody, which is not a good sign when taken in conjunction with temperature and precipitation swings wild in the other direction even just last year (and especially 2012).  I'm not going to go on a tirade about Climate Change, but I am saying to keep an open-mind; this is not proof that things are going screwy up there in the sky, and it is not "how winters used to be when I was a kid" either.  My parents at least claimed there were thaws in January and March was actually March and not what January should average out at.  Out there in extreme Southwestern Utah, they have also been growing palms for quite a while too, meaning that this was extreme and not so much a return to "how things used to be".  I encourage them to try again with the palms, or at least start planting Joshua Trees (Yucca Brevifolia) a bit more; both can take the heat, both can tolerate the cold, both can definitely shrug off the dry.

Oh, and for a little more information on the picture, we have two western classics out there, one more Plains and Inter-mountain, Sinclair Oil (I know, ironic in a post about winter not being normal), and one more Pacific western, In-N-Out Burger, which in all bust the most impossible climates puts a signature pair of crossed Fan Palms (usually California variety) outside of their restaurants.  Hopefully they try again, or wait to see if the things survived; our North American palms are exceptionally hardy.  

2013: The Cool Wet One

2012 began with one of the mildest winters in memory.  Here in quintessentially southern Great Lakes South Lyon, Michigan we managed to see our lowest mercury reading a chilly 6 below zero Fahrenheit, but that was a brief adventure into a winter which saw January days well into the sixties and found March acting more like July, even giving us a tornado which we would not have expected until May.  This was followed by a July that acted more like we were in the desert Southwest, complete with 105 degree heat for weeks at a time and absolutely not a cloud in sight.  A sudden frost came in mid-September, rather early for this part of the Lakes, but it was followed by sixties well into December.  This all followed a 2011 which saw extremes of daytime highs in the thirties down as far south as Miami but also record breaking rains just about everywhere.  Not so 2012, which was bone dry and brought drought even to the entire length of the humidity factory known as the Gulf Coast.  Then too, there was Hurricane Sandy, a tropical-strength maelstrom of immense geographical scope; I witnessed the edge of the outer bands passing by here in Michigan. 

Then came 2013, a year in which extremes got altogether left behind, at least this far north.  Not so down south, where tornadoes were reported in January.  Up north we witnessed neither intense cold nor intense heat, but a lack of spring, a lack of summer, and a confused fall.  A killing frost happened in late May, but the growing season managed to last without a killing closer frost in mid-November.  My birthday and the start of the third year of this blog came along with much of my garden was still in bloom, followed by a deep freeze well below normal into the single digits, a freeze that we have risen above for only a few brief days thus far.  Out west single digits blasted the otherwise mild-winter Mojave desert, with St. George, Utah being buried under well over a foot of, get this, wet eastern-style snow.  Unlike in the storm of 2008, the snow stuck around for some time.  Again, however, the rest of the year was punctuated less by extremes than by moderation.  Much of July in southern Michigan was sitting in the upper fifties, ambushed here and there by a few days of summer heat.  Summer almost never came in the first place, with snow happening well into May.  This fall we had sixties from late August until mid-November, and unlike the previous year, we had little to show for it in foliage color.  The trees just seemed to give out almost instantly and without much warning. 

All the while we had the intense drought of 2012 beaten to a pulp in all but parts of California, Nevada, and a tiny corner of south western Oklahoma which has seemed to suffer intensely for the experience.  Rain kept falling, our Lakes seemed to rebound nicely, and the snow seems to have remembered that it belongs here this time of year.  Down South I certainly encountered rain, the likes of which fell in such intensity that I have never seen anywhere else.  This made for treacherous driving, a rather humid jaunt through coastal South Carolina, and a mosquito-empowered trip through Congaree National Park. 

While it is a floodplain, the swamp along the boardwalk in Congaree is not exactly a huge body of standing water.  In this wet year, however, things were very mucky even into June.

Which, by the way, we can continue down the boardwalk on now that the holidays are over.  My dear readers, thanks for continuing to visit us here and to discover more of the continent.  Despite my lack of presence over a good deal of the year, you made this the most visited thus far. 

Sunday Post: Balancing Act

Our dry continent has a scenic advantage over wetter parts of the world.  We have amazing rocks here.  Since my recent days have become something of a topsy turvy adventure, I figured I might post this wonderful shot from Arches National Park.

Arches is often described as a place that you not only must see before you die, but must see soon before it falls apart.  While the process of erosion is not nearly that dramatic on the dry Colorado Plateau, things do still crumble now and then.  Arches, like much of the plateau, is a great way to introduce kids to the magic of the natural world, and the wonders here are enough to usually make even the skeptical adult take a second look.

As you can see, it is also full of life.  The smells after a fresh rain are beyond compare.  

Distant Cousins

While the corners of North America can often seem worlds apart in terms of climate and landscape, our continent is notable for having more similarities than differences between its distant ends.  White-tailed Deer (Odocoileus Virginianus) can be found both in Veracruz and central Quebec, various spruces and firs range from Alaska to the Appalachians, and even the rocks beneath us can remind the lonely traveler of a distant home.  Take a look at the scenes below:

Nope, that's not actually Canadian Shield!

While these might seem to have been taken in, say, Maine or Ontario, they were actually snapped (poorly, I know, I had yet to master the art of windshield photography) in central Utah.  The mountains of Utah and neighboring Colorado pull off Boreal artistry rather nicely despite being 1,000 miles south of the true Boreal forest.  Rather than Balsam Fir (Abies Balsamea) and White Spruce (Picea Glauca) we see spires of Subalpine Fir (Abies Lasiocarpa) and Engelmann Spruce (Picea Engelmannii), and the granites, schists, and gabbros of these relatively young mountains are old, but only recently exposed and not nearly as old as the ancient outcrops of the Canadian Shield rocks of the same names.

The western mountains, you see, are youngsters that rose less than 80 million years ago.  The life which thrives on their slopes, however, probably shares common ancestry with lower elevation life in similar climactic areas much further north.  During the last major glaciation, when the Boreal forests were much further south, these forests interacted with the northern versions at much closer proximity.  These days they are a bit more isolated, but serve as a unique southern extension of the northern forests well into central Mexico.  We are blessed and cursed, in a way, to have such a unique continent that features north-south mountain ranges and winters and summers both that can move uncontested far beyond where they can in other parts of the world.  The two worlds of alpine and true Boreal meet in the Canadian Rockies in a strikingly subtle mingling of separately evolved worlds.  Though I have never been to this grand meeting place of north and west, I can imagine that the sensations would be nothing short of incredible and perhaps even something reminiscent of a more unified continent that had to face much colder conditions as a tighter biological entity.  Again though, the differences are not too far apart from one another.  Take a look at a similar stretch of forest:

Taken off of Michigan 35 halfway between Menominee and Escanaba, MI.  

The casual viewer might not even notice a difference, even though the Utah and Michigan scenes are 1,300 miles apart.  With the exception of some aspens, none of the trees are of the same species between the two scenes, and the air in both places has rather different qualities to it.  Still, there is a little bit of Utah in Michigan and a little bit of Michigan in Utah, relations which have common roots in a more severe past.

Undeveloped Land

Films set in the American west usually feature dramatic settings of canyons, cliffs, and raging rivers, but more often than not, they also get set on a backdrop of wide open spaces.  While your average North American urban dweller might disagree with the statement, there are still many such places on the continent.  In northern Mexico, western United States, or much of Canada, one can go miles without seeing so much as even an animal amounting to more than a squirrel.  While we humans tend to dominate the scene even in places as remote as Antarctica and our moon, one can still easily run out of cellular reception in such places, the only trace of our reach being in the GPS signal which seems to reach us just about anywhere.  Here and there, too, one might encounter a road:

This messy picture was taken along lonely Utah 24, at dusk and with bugs on the windshield.  This is somewhere between I-70 and Hanksville, looking south, and yes, there are no bathrooms in sight.  

Of course, this would be the limit of our development in these places.  A road, after all, is a passage meant to take someone someplace else, and roads such as these are mainly just there to get people away from there.

Beyond that, we have plants and the local geology.  While the areas lacking population, which usually tend to be deserts and grasslands, are perhaps the best places to get lost in such quiet reaches, the truth is that they can be found in any abandoned field, undeveloped woodland, or swampy area.  We have the luxury of having more of these than in most other parts of the world, at least as far as having them close enough to where we live is the case.  Every morning on the way to work, I pass by one of the few remaining Tamarack bogs in southeastern Michigan.  The land is otherwise surrounded by development, but in one marvelous little stretch, we get a glimpse of something older than us.  Again, sometimes even the other creatures of the earth settle down and leave the place quiet; on cold mornings such as these, not a chirp or rustle can be heard, nothing but a breeze moving through the branches and the sun breaking away the fog.

Various religions make usage of simple images to help quiet rather than stimulate the mind.  The icons of some Christian traditions are examples of this.  While some practitioners use them as instruments of prayer and veneration, they are more so meant to invite the viewer into something of a staring contest, helping to quiet distracting thoughts and direct one to a different layer of reality.  So it is with our bits and pieces of undeveloped land, things we have built around and left behind.  Nature can be quite good at giving us breathtaking moments of awe, but it can be just as good at reducing our activity to something more primordial.  That tree or pile of rocks sitting across the street, that field that they sit in?  It might be labeled an undeveloped plot, and it might not be as remarkable as a great vista in a national park, but in some ways it is just as valuable.

Sunday Afternoon Post: Sagebrush Flat on the Colorado Plateau at Dusk.

Utah 24 southbound looking west.  The range in the background is part of  Goblin Valley State Park.  The night skies here are among the most spectacular in the world.

The Great Mojave Snowstorm of 2008

With the possible exception of taking an extremely southerly route through Mexico, there is no guaranteed safe passage across North American in the wintertime in the worst of years.  Yes, one can assume that travel along the Gulf will not result in encountering any sudden blasts of winter weather, but even Houston and New Orleans have seen nights in the 20s and a good blast of snow now and then.  Likewise, despite encountering some of the driest lands in the world moving further west, the desert seems to forget it is a desert sometimes, and otherwise bone dry, 110+ degree locations in the summer can turn into frigid deathtraps in which the local driving population is sorely unprepared.  In December 2008 in the Mojave Desert, the land became blanketed with well over two feet of snow.  

Now, yes, those are desert evergreen plants in that picture, and what you see is a normally toasty portion of the Mojave outside of Baker, California.  The snow also persisted for over a week, with temperatures remaining low for the duration.  It was a strange event, all the more so because everything else on the trans-continental trip had not at all prepared me for an actual blizzard.  Yes, there was an absolute terror of a snowstorm in the Rockies, and yes, the higher elevations around a place as close as Cedar City, Utah, were frigid in the single digits, but 30 miles later, a descent into the Mojave raised the temperatures into the 50s and the snow was melted, leaving the red landscape of St. George and environs even more brilliant than normal.  I did not have an unreasonable expectation in assuming that the even lower Las Vegas would feature similar milder conditions.  Instead, a blizzard ripped across I-15 near the end of the strip.

Yes, this is really Las Vegas, Nevada.  Let me tell you, the rates on rooms were amazing that night!

This was a really interesting experience, to say the least.  At the start of the descent into Las Vegas Valley, the external thermometer on the car was reading 46 degrees.  A drop from St. George's high of 50, but not a surprising one considering that there were fewer gaps in the clouds.  Then the numbers kept getting lower every mile until Las Vegas was reporting a chilly 32.  I wondered when the few raindrops falling from the now solid cloud sky would turn to snow, and sure enough, the normally baked landscape played host to a fair impression of a Great Lakes blizzard.  

Now, again, we are a cold continent.  Frost has been reported everywhere throughout our land except the Florida Keys, a thin strip of coastline in extreme southern California, and the tropical parts of Mexico (though even a place as far south as Tampico has seen it).  Jacksonville, Florida has seen snowfalls of several inches that managed to stick around for a while, and the last few years have seen arctic outbreaks which have threatened the citrus crops in the state.  At the same time, while these are not entirely unexpected occurrences, they are also not normal by any stretch of the imagination.  An average December day in the Mojave sits anywhere from the mid-50s to lower 60s, depending on elevation.  Some of the higher rises in the desert might see a dusting now and then, but it is hardly persistent.  The pools in Las Vegas stay open all year, and palm trees are a reality of landscaping throughout the region.  Worst of all, they do not have snow plows at the ready around these parts, and I-15 became a parking lot at the border with California.  This, of course, led to a night in Vegas and a chance to see what happens to palms in the snow.

This would be the famous "Whiskey Pete's" in tourist tr... er Primm, Nevada.  The hotel was packed with stalled travelers.  

Let me tell you, palms and snow do not mix.  Your hardly desert dwellers like the California Fan Palm (Washingtonia Filifera) and such are used to the occasional upset like this, but they still get weighed down and look very, very sad.  In the same fashion, the local drivers know that things are more dangerous when frozen and slushy, but like the palms bent under the weight of the snow, they cannot help but apply their defenses and hardiness with a lack of grace and hit the brakes hard enough to get locked into some truly embarrassing fish-tailing.  Again, this can happen, but it rarely does, but then it also gets remembered.  While it might be convenient to blame climate change for a mess like this (and the frequency of such events does tend to support the theories out there), the fact is that travelers have historically encountered such shocking visits from Father Winter.  Juan Bautista de Anza and his expedition, in fact, encountered one heck of a snowstorm down in the warmer Sonoran Desert not far from Palm Springs, California!  

Southbound I-15 approaching the 4,900 foot pass that in the Mescal range near the California/Nevada border.

 Travel inconveniences aside, the snow tends to melt pretty quickly in the lower elevations and urban areas.  By the next day, downtown Las Vegas had chunks of ice in the shadows of buildings, but not much in the way of snow except a little dusting on the grass and in the trees.  The higher elevations, though, like the mountains pictured above near Ivanpah Dry Lake in southern California, continued to carry a load of the white stuff well into the next week.  The result was stunning, to say the least, and even left dry lakes like Ivanpah with a bit of water in them for a while.

North America's Rocky and Piney Forests

Yesterday's post was about California Redbuds in their natural setting, the lower elevations of the western slope of the Sierra Nevada.  Part of the commentary included a remark on how relatively lush broadleaved forests, deciduous and evergreen both, are relatively rare and tend to stand out in contrast with the rest of the arid, rocky west that tends to be dominated by conifers.  While there are notable exceptions outside of the wetter parts of the west coast of the continent on the western slopes of the coastal ranges and the Cascade-Sierra chains, much of the low and middle elevation (the higher elevations tend to be a bit more wet and full of spruces and firs and take on a different atmosphere altogether) forests and woodlands are relatively open pine forests.  In some areas, such as here on the slopes of Mt. San Jacinto, rocks, pines, and a bit of open sky are what one will tend to find in the way of forests.

In others, the canopy does tend to get a bit more compact, such as here in central Utah.

This sort of forest can also be found in eastern North America, particularly on the Canadian Shield where Jack and Eastern White Pines manage to creep into any available hole in the rock and form soil pockets over the centuries together with the lichens and mosses.

Found at  Global Forest Watch Canada, an excellent site on the life of Canadian forests!  This picture was taken at Killarney Provincial Park, one of the loveliest parts of Ontario.  

This sort of soil formation is a very primal process.  One tends to think of soil merely as fertile dirt, but the truth of the matter is that it is broken up rocks and minerals often rich in organic materials of ages of decayed plant life and bacteria that pretty much make soil a place to live.  In essence, when we see these forests, we are looking at a plant succession process that often takes place over a very, very long time.  We are often fortunate to have some of them intact, if not entirely virgin, because the terrain engendered difficulties on the part of those seeking to extract the natural resources found there.  At the same time as these "last forests" were being considered for the saw and plow, in fact, the conservationist movement was heating up and usually targeted such areas for preservation as the Sierras, the Rocky Mountains, and parts of the Appalachians, Laurentians, and Algonquins, to be later joined by efforts down in Mexico's Sierra Madres.  The great rocky forests of California and Ontario were the first to be saved back in the 1890's.  Perhaps we got so emotional over such landscapes not because they were still relatively untouched by the hand of humans, but because they have a look and feel of something remote and almost savage, places where we explore and play but have difficulty setting land to the plow or settling down.  Heck, the forest really has to work overtime here just to raise the canopy!

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.

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.

The Wonder of Microclimates: The Douglas Fir of Bryce Canyon

Microclimates are amazing things.  They sustain conditions to allow things to grow that would otherwise not be found growing in a particular region.  Here we have a Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga Menziesii) growing in an otherwise dry and warm southern Utah.  

Even at the relatively high elevations of Bryce Canyon (7500 feet or so), the air is usually too dry and frequently the recipient of warmer days in the 80's.  Douglas Fir are simply not able to easily reach climax growth in such conditions, except in these dark, cooler spaces.  The sun is obviously muted here, which results in lower daytime highs and allows moisture to linger on while the rest of the countryside dries out.  Enough light reaches the trees during certain times of the day (in this picture we see a morning tree in shadow and an afternoon tree in the light behind it) to sustain growth, and when the canyon floor otherwise seemingly sits in shadow, light reflects off of the walls as well.  The larger trees sit well within the canyon amphitheater and are apparently quite the sight to behold; all of a sudden, a canyon walker can round a corner and be staring up at a tree nearly two hundred feet tall, nestled alone in between great walls of rock.

More information can be found here.  Douglas Fir are wonderful trees, and one of the few to naturally exist in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, from nearly up in Alaska all the way down to the higher mountains around Mexico City.

The Mormon Presence in the Landscape

Cities in Utah tend to stand out from other cities found in much of the rest of the United States.  Their defining features are not huge corporate towers, grand monuments to the past, or even sporting facilities which seem to get larger and larger as the years go by.  Rather, their landmark sites are religious buildings that jump out of the developed scenery, usually painted a bright white and illuminated strongly at night.  These are Mormon temples, wherein authorized members of their faithful participate in the higher rites of their religion.  At the time of this posting, there are 136 temples worldwide, with another 15 in the works, the vast majority of which have been built in the last 30 years.  Non-authorized members and non-believers are not permitted entrance into these places, and as such, I have no photos of their interiors to show here.   I do, however, have a picture of the oldest currently operating temple, in St. George, Utah.

This temple ranks prominently in the ecclesiastical geography of the Mormons, specifically, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the largest sect of the religion.  Earlier temples existed in the migration of the faithful, who found themselves frequently on the move.  None of these have survived, and the temple of St. George is the oldest running, completed in 1877.  As is the case with most of these structures found in Utah, it tends to really stand out, even from miles away on I-15.

Other temples around the world tend to blend in a bit more, sometimes even looking like a local structure rather than something so dazzling and alien from a cityscape.  The temple in metro-Detroit, for example, could pass for a synagogue and is but one of many religious buildings found along Woodward avenue.  In Utah, however, the Mormon religion tends to stand out a bit more, even as demographic shifts in the state are changing the census counts.  There is a very long and complicated history behind this, which I will cover when I have had the chance to experience the places where this history took place for myself.  This history involves far more than just Utah; in my opinion, it actually began with a a massive forest fire in Northern Ontario in 1780, which set off a flurry of American religious development that lasted for nearly 50 years.

Where the Pines Meet the Desert, the Herd Rushes Through

The east gate of Zion National Park is perhaps one of the less dramatic entrances one can enter through to get access to the canyon.  Much of the landscape is low in relief in comparison to much of the inter-mountain west, and the vegetation consists largely of scrubby pines and things that can tolerate sandy, arid conditions.  Most people entering the park from the east pass by this seemingly unremarkable, almost typical scene of the Colorado Plateau while looking forward to the canyon, tunnel, and other sights beyond.  The truth is, transitional areas are often overlooked in favor of the areas they border.  After all, who wants to see a stunted tree on the edge of a desert, or slushy snow at the snowline on a mountain?  If you ask me, that is taking a "glass half-empty approach" to watching the world unfold around us.  Instead, try seeing a tree growing as tall as it can despite all the odds against it, or watch as the slushy snow feeds little streams that turn out to be the source of a mighty river.

So what do you think of this scene?

At first glance, there is nothing really remarkable about it.  The Ponderosa Pines in the background are hardly impressive, the sagebrush in the mid-ground is altogether too common, and the yucca up front is in flower, but otherwise is as common as the sagebrush.  Then again, things look a bit lush for having all that well-drained sand around, and while pines and desert scrub can appear together, they often do not.  Indeed, there are two different worlds converged into one here, the equivalent of being several hundred miles north and south of a respective mid-point at the same time.  Not ten miles southwest of here is the Mojave Desert, devoid of any sort of tree that claims more than twenty feet of sky, while a mere five miles to the northeast is a forest of pines,spruces, aspen, and flowing streams.  In the meeting places of these two worlds, such as in the space seen above, species co-exist in a marvelous natural garden that makes room for just about any plant one can find in North America, short what can be found in the most tropical and most northerly climes.

Most people wait for the fall to watch nature go through changes, but in places like southwestern Utah, they can do this around the year.  The environs of Zion National Park contain the frontiers of the Mojave Desert, the Great Basin, the Colorado Plateau, the Wasatch Mountains, and the geological diversity of rocks and minerals spanning millions of years of sequential development, all of Utah in miniature.  

Utah Highway 12

Scattered across the United States are roads recognized by the United States Department of Transportation as offering unique archaeological, cultural, historic, natural, recreational, and/or scenic features known as "National Scenic Byways".  While I maintain that the best way to experience the continent is on foot, these drives are certainly a decent way to get off of the beaten path and sample what lies away from the interstates.  In the case of Utah 12, one can experience most of the west has to offer in general, from deserts to forests to mountain meadows.  Many people start at the western terminus of the road at US 89, though in my opinion the best starting place is at the other end in Torrey, for reasons that will become obvious.

First of all, where is it?

Utah 12 may seem to be off the beaten path, but it is surrounded by a handful of national parks, monuments, forests, and includes a few smaller towns with services along its length.   Drivers can expect to see at least a few cars and pedestrians along the way, though there will be many places that are absolutely deserted and incredibly wild looking, despite the popularity.

Starting from Torrey, the landscape is fairly even, dry, and low.  The surrounding environment is very typical scenery of the neighboring Great Basin desert, despite being located on the Colorado Plateau and within the Colorado river watershed.  The relative height of the land (4,000 feet and higher) and residual precipitation and moisture from the nearby Wasatch mountains give it a noticeable contrast from the rest of the lower portions of the Colorado Plateau and Escalante desert.  This is a land of sagebrush and juniper shrubs.

The junipers increase in size and are joined by pinyons with the passing miles, until they become more tree-sized.  See here for a more detailed description of the Pinyon-Juniper woodland.  Eventually, these trees are overtaken by Ponderosa pines and the odd Lodgepole pine.

The views start to become more dramatic here, and pull outs are available for those who wish to gaze across the lower lands to the distant Henry mountains.  There were trails leading every which way up there, and the area seemed pretty sparsely occupied.  Here, as well as portions further down the road, are sections of Dixie National Forest, which is broken into four divisions that stretch across much of the southwestern quarter of Utah.

The pines begin to give way to spruces and aspens, which serve as indicators that the road is nearing its highest point.  The forests here were somewhat unexpected; the southern Wasatch seem so much lower and isolated from the rest of the Rockies that it can be easy to forget such "sky islands" exist.  They do, however, and the experience of driving from desert to sub-alpine forest is like taking a trip clear north to northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, where the forests are remarkably similar (though the Engelmann spruces and Subalpine fir are replaced by White spruce and Balsam fir, which look close enough like them).  If there were no grand views or interesting curves, Utah 12 could be a great drive just for being a sample of entire ecosystems.  

At the highest points of the road, elevations level off at 9,600 feet, and the exposure the land receives creates balds and meadows, over which distant horizons of contrasting desert can be seen.

In many obvious places along the way, a traveler can see first hand the root colonization reproduction habits of Quaking aspen.

Aspen are truly remarkable trees that can reproduce by root clones.  The Pando tree/colony of aspens not far north of this area are said to be close to 80,000 years in age, which, if true, means that the groves would have migrated with the glaciers during the last ice age.  The tree/colony is located in Fishlake National Forest, and unlike Methuselah, the oldest known individual tree, is not kept secret in location.  This is probably because Pando is simply too expansive to be easily violated; the trees in the picture above could very well be part of a branching of the clones tens of thousands of years ago, despite being over a hundred miles away and on a separate mountain body.  

The great thing about Utah 12 is that no one driving it, even avid followers of things tree, will likely even give a passing thought to how amazing aspen are, because these trees are but part of a huge buffet of wonders that have already opened up along the way.  Case in point, the road suddenly gets straight and becomes set on a gentle gradient that drops like a very long ramp.

Forests pass by, transitions from biome to biome can be easily seen, and the desert returns.  This time, however, it is very different from what was left behind to the north.

The road also becomes quite the adventure, with thousands of feet of nothing but air serving as the "shoulder".  The experience was so breathtaking that I did not think to take a picture at the most dramatic point, though this would probably do:

Why yes, that sign does indicate a 14% grade.  At this point, Utah 12 is literally paved on the spines of mountains.  "Watch your step" takes on a whole new meaning, and even if the heights were not enough, careless feet can run into other fun little surprises.

Mindful of cacti, cliffs, and careless footing, one can now rejoice knowing that things are only going to get more incredible from here on out.  The road now passes through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, one of the nicest surprises in protected lands.  The breadth of land really is a staircase, if perhaps tilted on its side.  Starting from the top, one passes through age upon age of geological history that ends at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in Pre-Cambrian granite, a younger version of the rock that makes up the Canadian Shield.  Again, the miracle of that plays second fiddle to the views alone.

Travelers need not be kept in the dark, however, as one of the best visitor centers anywhere sits conveniently off the road in the town of Escalante, Utah.  The place had the most informed staff I have ever encountered from a government office, and were truly passionate about their land.  In the interest of education, the store there is subsidized by the Western National Parks Association, and nearly everything was at cost if not lower in price.

Now, if by some chance the desert would start to get monotonous, green fields and lush riverbanks pop up between here and Tropic, Utah.  As one approaches Bryce Canyon National Park, the forests re-appear, though not beyond the altitude of the pines.  Of course, they would probably not be on the mind either:

Bryce is a destination in an of itself (as if the rest of these mileposts were not), so that picture will suffice for now until a better post can cover the place.  Anyway, moving on from there, the land opens up into lovely prairie of green, rich grass that is dominated by Utah prairie dog colonies.  The poor creatures have not fared well, and despite being an endangered species, are considered more of a nuisance by local farmers.  Yes, there are farms around here, mainly down in the warmer desert elevations.  You know, where there is no reliable water source?  Ranches are understandable, but farms?

As the prairies and meadows are closed in by encroaching cliffs, one heads down into the final leg of the highway, known simply as Red Rock canyon.

The pines stand lovely against the red cliffs.  There are several rock tunnels one drives through to complete the tour of Utah 12.  Mind you, the roads beyond are no less exciting from here on out; US 89 continues south to the town of Orderville, Utah. On the way, despite the lower elevations, the land is lush, green, and heavily forested.  Mind the dirty windows!

At Orderville, US 89 branches off south to Arizona and a slew of destinations like the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, or west to the eastern approach of Zion canyon.

This approach leads down to the Mojave desert, which is bounded on neatly all sides by incredible transitions.  Zion in the afternoon, though, has to be the most amazing way to enter the land of the Joshua tree.  The road leading into Zion is no less amazing.  Elements of the Ponderosa pine forest, Escalante desert, and Mojave desert co-exist in a delightful combination of pine, sand, yuccas, shrubs, and boulders.  That particular leg of this great adventure, however, will wait for a more detailed post.  

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...