a wilderness journal

There is a small freshwater wetland adjacent to our new apartment in Corvallis. A very shallow creek and pool is vegetated with large hummoc...

We’ll soon be leaving the coast for the Willamette Valley, so I took a short trip this morning to Ona Beach, where Beaver Creek meets the Pa...

Crater Lake is the only national park in Oregon, but it is a gem, and it is surrounded by a number of other beautiful places in the southe...

I’ve been in coastal Oregon long enough to get very accustomed to mild temperatures, lots of rain and green everywhere.  But during the late...

The O’Shaughnessy Dam, designed to provide water for the city of San Francisco, was in place by 1923 to drown the Hetch Hetchy Valley.  Befo...

It has been a La Niña year, so winters in the northwest can be accompanied by higher than average precipitation . ENSO-linked precipitation ...

Hoping to find some real spring weather in California, we left Oregon for a week of adventures down south.  This was our second visit to Yos...

Human life can be a cyclone of uncertainty at times.  Uncertainty, stochasticity and complexity are inherent in nature.  For us in our struc...

It seems that there are not usually too many places on managed public lands where visitors are free to wade through a wetland.  Today I had ...

City lights, courtesy of NASA, visibleearth.nasa.gov Cities are living entities, imitations of natural ecosystems and individual organi...

Over the winter break, the family took two day hikes in the Suislaw National Forest that runs along the coast range of central Oregon. Virtu...

Usually the ocean moderates climate here on the west coast, pushing down summer temperatures and keeping winters mild.  However, sometimes w...

The National Weather Service forecasts rain essentially all week, but cumulous clouds and spots of blue in the sky this morning suggested th...

In early September, MWS and I went backpacking in the Sky Lakes Wilderness in the southern part of the Cascades.  The wilderness is just sou...

This first post will be autobiographical.  I grew up outside of Chicago, and then later, in southern California.  Suburban life certainly di...