Sand and snow

Usually the ocean moderates climate here on the west coast, pushing down summer temperatures and keeping winters mild.  However, sometimes winds shift or other meteorlogical magic occurs and the coast has a strange day.  I recall, for example, a warm summer morning on the beach in Monterey before a camping trip and another warm beach day in November at Pigeon Point north of Santa Cruz a few years ago.  This year, coastal Oregon turned bitterly cold the week of Thanksgiving.  That monday night there was a chance of snow right down to the coast.  I was excited when I took a peek through the window at flakes coming down during the middle of the night, and later woke up to a light covering of white powder at our house just a few blocks from the beach.  The rare snow event distrupted the routine here - schools closed and roads were very slick.  I went into work a little late on tuesday, intending to check out the coastal dunes and see how close the snow made it to the sea.  In the back dunes, leaves of salal cradled little accumulations of snow; ends of branches of the  coastal pine, Pinus contorta, were dusted white.  Thin snow drifts had accumulated in the little valleys between dunes.  The snow and surface crust of frozen ground extended right down onto the beach, perhaps as far as the last high tide had reached during the night.  Sure, it was modest and short-lived, but drift bull kelps (Nereocystis) in the sand mingled with ice crystals for a brief time.

Oregon wetness

The National Weather Service forecasts rain essentially all week, but cumulous clouds and spots of blue in the sky this morning suggested that I might take a chance with some field research at work today.  My current project is centered around studying salt marsh plant and algal distributions along salinity and tidal elevation gradients in Oregon.  Our current field work mainly involves GPS surveying to obtain high resolution vertical data to match up to our plant surveys gathered during the summer.  NOAA weather forecasts aren't really too reliable here on the central Oregon coast; we're the first place to experience all of the nasty fronts that come off of the Pacific.  They typically come quickly.  Sure enough, we were only partly through the short drive to the local estuary field site when heavy rains hit.  They lightened up at the boat launch a short time later and we continued.  Once in the marshes, the fronts kept coming: hail, rain, lightning, and sunshine, all within the span of less than a half hour.  More hail and rain later.  Water invades from every direction here in the tidal marshes, so one will inevitably be wet.  The tidal marshes exist in the thin vertical layer of space between the tidal influences from below and the freshwater inputs from above.  That thin layer of space oscillates daily with tides and weekly to seasonally with rainfall patterns, so plants and animals must be able to cope with wide variations in salinity and inundation.

Sky Lakes

In early September, MWS and I went backpacking in the Sky Lakes Wilderness in the southern part of the Cascades.  The wilderness is just south of Crater Lake, that lake of iconic blue water entrapped in a caldera that forms the focal point of the only National Park in Oregon.  Dozens of lakes dot the Sky Lakes Wilderness; they are concentrated in a few basins settled among higher peaks at an elevation of about 6000 feet.  Many of the lakes are very small and some had even dried to the point of becoming moist mud pots by the end of the summer.  The cold waters were islands of habitat for a fish, tadpoles, insects and a single colorful water snake, but these were the only residents that revealed their presence at the aquatic islands.  Forests, dominated by pines, generally grew right up to the lake margins.  The lake waters were clear, but a thick grey ooze covered the bottom. 

After the first night of camping, we hiked a ridge that gave a commanding view of one of the lake basins to the east.  In the warm midday sun we stopped on a bedrock outcrop next to the trail.  I was busy with the camera, trying to obtain landscape shots, concerned with framing and blown out skies and the like.  Here we sat and I meditated, in any sort of structured way, for the first time.  The meditation was a good experience, but the wilderness was sensory overload, challenging a focused concentration.  Sounds: the rough wooden croaking of a toad in a granite crack just below us; the quick snapping of grasshoppers unseen; insect buzzes close to my ears; wind through the trees like distant water moving.  Sights: a tuft of whitish grey cloud accompanying Mt. McLauglin to the south; living swarms of white dancing sun sparkles reflecting off the lake surfaces below; lava flows of dark grey rubble breaking up the forest carpet.  Smells: evergreen warmth; the rich perfume of the humus soil.

Autobiographical introduction

This first post will be autobiographical.  I grew up outside of Chicago, and then later, in southern California.  Suburban life certainly didn’t afford much contact with nature or wilderness, but my parents supported my interest in science and nature through museums, fossil hunting trips in the Mojave Desert, and visits to the beach.  In high school, my interest in biology seemed to solidify and by the time I went off to college on the central California coast, I was pretty certain marine biology was the course I would take.  I’ve been a nerd of many interests, but cells, molecules, organisms, taxonomy and the like have long been near the top of the list.

I was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, a beautiful campus in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, nestled on the border of the redwood forest and the dry grasslands of central California.  It was the perfect biological environment for me – good professors, a diversity of interesting courses, and field opportunities ranging from the rocky intertidal and kelp forests to coastal redwood forests.  I had lots of labs too: dissecting invertebrates like the sand crab Emerita, collecting marine algae and pressing them on paper, and getting intimate with flower structures in order to learn to classify vascular plants.  I was an undergraduate in the mid to late 1990s and was lucky enough the catch what was maybe one of the last waves of opportunity in organismal biology.  Lab and field intensive courses like marine botany, fungi, kelp forest ecology, invertebrate zoology, and ichthyology don’t seem to be very plentiful at major universities these days.  At Santa Cruz into the 1990s they still were.  By the time of my senior year, I loved to wake up at 4 or 5 AM to catch a tide on the Big Sur or San Mateo County coasts.  I’m not a morning person, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever regretted waking up early if I could be the first on the coastline to smell the salty foggy air, numb my feet in the freezing waters of the California current and look for something new between cobbles and bedrock carpeted with marine creatures.

I did my PhD in San Diego, doing research on coastal salt marshes.  It wasn’t a favorite habitat of mine initially, but I’ve learned to appreciate these amazing ecosystems since.  They are wild mixtures of terrestrial plants and insects and marine invertebrates and algae.  Coastal marshes are dynamic – changing seasonally and with each tidal cycle – and full of stressful elements like salt and sulfide that make life hard and hardy.  As a graduate student I learned a lot about how to do environmental science and how to act like a scientist, but my real passion was still for the basics like the field and the organisms and the inquiry.  I discovered John Muir during this time, an author who overflowed with those kinds of passions and who wrote beautifully.  I wish often I could be like Muir, throwing some bread in a backpack and wandering into under-explored forests for weeks at a time.

Today I’m a coastal ecologist in the Pacific Northwest working on salt marshes.  I’m lucky when I can be on a small boat winding through the shallow waters of an estuary or wading in soupy mud trying to keep expensive electronic equipment from meeting instant death by mud, water and salt.  Off work, I still spend time on the rocky shoreline or forests or mountains.  Wilderness and nature appeal to me for many reasons.  I love the intellectual stimulation, the endless questions, that come from a hike in a place where natural processes dominate.  I like the solitude and the absence of human sounds in a forest or a remote place on the coast.  And spiritually, I like having a break from societal constructs and even from the sometimes suffocating issues of human emotion, human expectations and human morality.  This blog will be a collection of connections I make with nature and wilderness – scientific, personal, philosophical, and spiritual.