Not to boast or anything, but this planet really is very beautiful.

The Hemp Creek Canyonlands are not very far from Edgewood, but we can’t see out that way from the house. The canyon views must be earned with a westward hike beginning with a boot-lacing pause at the back door and a cursory check of conditions in the garden on our way out. Thanks to Trevor’s translation of deer trails into of human trails, we can make good time across the less view-y plateau to access the very view-y canyons. Canyons in the plural: Three creeks cut into that landscape (Hemp, Philip, and Trout), tributaries combining into one main canyon. And the combined canyon in turn merges with the Clearwater Canyon further downstream, out over a greater hiking distance to an even viewy-er landscape.

May 19 is a lush time in the Clearwater Valley. Green-up is the sudden onset of northern mass photosynthesis after the oh-so-long wait for the last snow to vanish and for the ground to warm sufficiently for the phyotosphere’s veins to start moving sap. At Edgewood, we usually watch the last snow patch melt away during the first week of May. At that time, even after many days of summerish temperatures and dry, sunny weather, our surroundings look drab. A few daffodils in the garden, and the crocuses already faded, the wild soapberry bushes blooming subtly. But not much green. The birches, cottonwoods, aspens, alders, and maples all know to keep bare as long as they can just in case the gods of winter feel like having one last, late hurrah. But then, the north decides that it’s time to declare winter officially dead. The sun is just too powerful by May 19, and the winter gods finally give up the struggle.

We watch the green-up each year breathlessly like the people in E.E.Cumming’s poem:

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

Or at least we do if we take the time. Mid may is a busy time in the garden, and the work is brutal on my body. I am not Cummings’ delicately careful hand. I swing a pickaxe. I dig out rocks, sometimes boulder-sized, from new garden beds. I yank up unwanted cottonwood roots. I extract and sift the year’s worth of compost, moving it one arduous wheelbarrow-load at a time. That compost has to be dug into the garden beds, double-mixed and fluffed up. I don’t do “no-dig gardening”. Not here, not in this climate. And there’s the endless weeding, weeding, weeding. Thanks in large part to this garden, I am wiry, healthier now at 51 than I was in my 20’s. At the end of May days, I lie down in bed with a thump and go to sleep with a fatigued grunt. A healthy body is a body that is used severely. Sedentary mollycoddling does not work.

But on occasion, I decide enough is enough and I go walking instead.

Mid-May is a sweet time in this valley, both poetically and literally. When the cottonwood trees finally open their leaves, the resinous sap that covered them in the bud peels away from them like afterbirth. The bud-resin sap saturates the spring air with volatile terpenoid compounds, which dissipate through the spring weeks, By summertime, the scent is only detected by a close sniff.

Some years ago, upon his mid-May arrival, a visiting friend from Europe paused and asked why our air is so fragrant. Thanks to this question, suddenly we were aware again of that perfume. Why is it so easy to fall into sensory complacency? Each spring I’m reminded of that question, and I’m again aware of the cottonwood scent of May. The photo below can’t deliver that scent, sadly, but the green of all those carefully unfurled new leaves is, at least to the synesthetic mind, that very same scent.

And so, out we go, Purple and I. Back then, Purple, and now Kabuki, remind us of another sweetness of May. Along the trails, fur brushes up against the leaves of the semi-ubiquitous, low-growing, broad-leaved, thornless bramble species Rubus parviflorus, a.k.a., and presently more properly, Rubus nutkanus (that’s a long nomenclatural story). Or more easily: thimbleberry. Whatever you call it, that bramble bears a scented exudate that form in hair-tip glands on its young, fresh leaves. It’s delightful. No shampoo can compare. Our late-spring dogs come home from hikes in a cloud of perfume. For dogs, with their olfactory superpowers, the cottonwoods and thimbleberries must make mid-May a sensory masterpiece.

Shortly before reaching the canyon rim, the trail goes up and down a few times, steeply crossing a few side-gullies. The steepening suggests some of the geology. The flatter terrain we’d already traversed just said over and over “Quaternary alluvium, Quaternary alluvium”. But now we see some bedrock: shale-like phyllite, and now a small, out-of-place exposure of sandstone, which is a strange thing for this valley that otherwise lacks such rock. And finally the basalt cliffs and talus where the terrain really drops off. Steep ground everywhere is where geological stories are most easily read.

Well, “easily read” for a geologist. I have very little to write about these basalts. I can only say that they are peculiar. Part of the canyon rim is formed by pillow basalts, where lava poured into a lake, causing rapid cooling with haphazard results: oddly shaped igneous clumps mixed with contact-metamorphozed mud. Some of our local basalts are very young, just thousands of years. I’m told some is very old, dated back to the Eocene/Miocene, including an exposure at Coal Creek Falls, which we admire from its rim along our route southward.

I didn’t plan on coming this way. Or this far. But we continue southward past the falls, lowering ourselves down a grade, a broad passage between cliffs, a very good way down.

I had never visited this span of cliffs south of the falls. I was already familiar with the spectacular row of hoodoos (rock pinnacles) and pillow-basalt cliffs on the opposing side of the canyon, and so I’d expected more hoodoos on this side. There are a few. But the canyon rim here is mostly a long, sheer wall of something I don’t understand. There are bits of pillowish basalt in it. But it’s mostly like some sort of pyroclastic deposit. While the rest of the basalt cliffs in this part of the canyon are sloped a bit, or complexly incised, why is this cliff so straight and so perfectly vertical? I need a geologist. Where’s Cathie Hickson when you need her?

The cliff is pockmarked with little caves, each with signs of packrat occupancy. A well-traveled animal trail skirts the base, like a sidewalk straight-edging the base of a skyscraper.

And there’s an animal bed in a shallow recess at the cliff base, a place especially interesting to Purple. Conifer twigs and leaves are stacked up as a mattress. This doesn’t look to me like a packrat’s handiwork. The twigs seem too large for an animal that size to carry or to find comfortable for bedding. Are we imposing on a bear’s bedroom?

At a few small spots on this cliff are deposits of some strange white crystalline substance (salts, I guess) settling out of the cracks and holes in the cliff. There’s a green, single-celled alga growing over the relatively stable portions of these deposits. Is this the sole habitat for this alga? I’ve seen similar (salt?) deposits at the bases of other basalt cliffs in the Clearwater Valley, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything similar anywhere else. Is this a local geological specialty, with its own specialty alga?

The cliff, now all pillow basalts again, with hoodoos, continued southward, but Purple and I did not. It was time to go home. I hate backtracking. It’s defeating to retreat along the same route. Round trips are better: you spend the whole walk going forward, exploring. I found a broad cleavage in the cliff with hoodoo sentries on either side. It looked easy enough for a steep ascent back up to the plateau and homeward. We could make a sort of loop that way, and then return home by a more southerly trail.

Up we went, no trouble for Purple. She had great vertical abilities. She knew how to climb step-ladders, so a cliff-gap ascent was nothing to her. Purple, just like all my dog friends have always done, ascended far quicker than I could and then stood directly above me looking down from the cliff top. Not to the side, always directly above, from where a loosened stone could fall on my head. My human friends are not allowed to do that.

And so up I went, steeper and steeper, foothold by foothold. To help keep my balance and to catch myself in case a foot should slip, I pulled my way up by handgrips on the few sturdy shrubs and bunchgrasses. An experienced field botanist knows which species will hold and which will break or pull up by the roots. I’ve had plenty of contract work in canyons like this, I’m used to these sorts of ascents. So far so good, no serious accidents in my 30 year career.

But I misjudged slightly this time.

This cliff cleavage kept steepening. Within the last few meters to the level top, I was running out of choices of where to put my feet. The foot-holding soft sediments were all below, and now it was all hard but crumbly basalt. It may seems counterintuitive, but hikers who explore tilted terrain know that ascending is easier than descending, and it is safer to go up than down. On the descent, gravity-driven momentum makes the legs and feet work harder in order to prevent out-of-control falls. You need to know where to put your feet, and you need thighs sturdy enough and knees strong enough to catch yourself with each step, to stop the momentum each time in order to avoid the accumulation of speed.

We all know situations where we reach a point of no return. The point where you cannot turn back because you have too little fuel, or food, or time to return to your starting point, so you must continue on to the destination. It’s do or die.

On a steep ascent like this, there are not one, but two points of no return to remember: first, the point at which descending becomes more dangerous than the continued ascent, and second, the point at which it becomes impossible to ascend further. You don’t want to be caught between the first and the second, and you may not quite know how much further you can go before you reach the second point. Cats know this conundrum when they climb a tree. It’s easier to go up than it is to go down. So they keep going up, and the higher they go, the more convinced they are that they can’t get down again. So they keep climbing until they can’t go any further. And then they cling there up in the branches, meowing pitifully.

I realized, a bit too late, that I had already passed the first point of no return. I shouldn’t have done this. The cliff gap steepened at the very end, more than I anticipated, but I couldn’t ease myself down without gaining speed enough to start a bruising tumble to the bottom. I had run out of stable hand-grips and sure footholds. Pillow basalts are crumbly. A fractured hand-grip and a sudden transfer of my weight to my feet could send me sliding and rolling down again. Purple was just a few feet away looking down at me wondering why I was having trouble doing what was, for her, so easy. This is no place for a bipedal ape!

This is also not the place or time for hesitant planning. The brain is not the tool to use here. The body must do all the thinking. Its the moment for do-it-don’t-think-go-hop-hup-up-foot-here-foot-there-there-is-a-toe-hold-two-more-hops-go-go-DONE!

Whew! Look, it’s spring, and nothing is broken. Hi Purple. Let’s go home.

Thanks to Quentin Cronk for the explanation of what makes cottonwoods smell so sweet.

For our first walk today, Buki and I explored the Dismal Swamp. These are fine days for walking in the wilds. After a month of thawing temperatures and a condensed, re-frozen snowpack, we can now walk freely anywhere without our feet punching through. No need for snowshoes. We could waltz through the valley on days like this.

A few nights ago around midnight, I took Buki out for a quick pee. Quick was the intention. But after she did her duty, she aimed at the North Crossing (which looks north into the Dismal Swamp) and looked back at me to make it perfectly clear that she had super-urgent business on the trail west across the pond and into the forest. This despite the day having been a busy one. I’d already given her five walks (two of them rather long), two rounds of frisbee catching, a ski outing, a few rounds of can’t-have-the-stick, visits with friends, and some silly indoor games, but she still wanted more. That’s life with an Australian shepherd. Dynamos, so full of life!

Buki is currently a few pounds overweight (too many treats), and needs to slim down before our veterinarian appointment on March 12. So I, though tired, obliged for a sixth walk. What she was thinking, though, was that it’s just so, so good to be able to run freely anywhere on this hard snow that it’s unbearable to just lie around indoors on a night like this. And so she turned right at the four-way trail intersection and led me north to explore the Midnight Marsh (appropriately for that time of night). The snowshoe hares had been there before us.

Now on this morning’s walk, enjoying the freedom of a hard snowpack, we walked down from the North Causeway, across the frozen pond (minding the notorious thin ice over the springs), and beyond into the Dismal Swamp. Trevor suspected that the hot, dry summers of 2021–2023 might be causing mortality in the small population of hybrid spruce Picea x albertiana (the white spruce-black spruce cross) that is scattered around the swamp. As far as we’ve seen, there are no true black spruce (Picea mariana) here in the Clearwater Valley, though it’s common in the next drainages east and north. But the presence of its hybrid with white spruce (Picea glauca) suggests it might have occupied the valley not so long ago. Picea x albertiana likes an intermediate setting. It’s very good at averaging out the divergent preferences of its parent species. The Dismal Swamp is a bit iffy as habitat for P. x albertiana here at the southern margin of its range. It’s much more common further north, in colder climates. It usually forms as an encircling stand around cold-site fens and bogs, not in the middles of swamps.

Sadly, Trevor’s prediction came true. Most of the hybrid is either already dead and devoid of needles, or badly yellowed and quickly defoliating. The impossible heat wave of late June 2021 must have been hard to survive for these cold-loving trees. The official high recorded on the climate station on the (cooler) west side of the pond during that “heat dome” event was 42.7 C (109 degrees F)–Las Vegas temperatures, not Canadian mountain temperatures. Our previous all-time high was less than 100 F. The heat dome scorched the trees. In the following weeks, on all sorts of plant species, there were dead, burned-looking leaves in the canopy and understory. Climate change galore! A massacre.

In a half hour of wandering around the Dismal Swamp, I saw no healthy Picea x albertiana. Farewell, hybrid spruce. The white spruces mostly looked OK, they’re somewhat more heat tolerant. But they’re not really made for growing in such a wetland as the Dismal Swamp. They stay off to the sides where the ground is a bit higher. And one by one, though at a slower pace than this Dismal Swamp stand of P. x albertiana, the white spruces, plus Engelman spruces, a higher-elevation species, have been dying at a higher rate since the terrible drought of 2003 and subsequent dry/hot years. They’ve been falling, one here, and one there, a few more during the next big wind gust. Their piled up logs cross each other all over the forest understory. The same goes for their hybrid (Picea x darwyniana, named for our ecologist/conservationist friend Darwyn Coxson, whose climate station recorded our all-time high). Pines, too, and aspens. The nearby forest canopy is looking rather bald.

The Dismal Swamp this morning was full of tracks. So much animal life! Buki was enraptured. Hares, fox, squirrel, grouse…and weasels, as in the photo above. Maybe all the animals feel as Buki and I do, like waltzing across the hardened snow. How about that long-slide track in the photos above? What happened there? Bounce-bounce-sliiiiiiide-hop-hop? Mustelid joie de vivre? Joie de la neige?

For our second walk of today, Buki and I chose “north” from the end of the driveway onto the road. Buki understands “north” and “south”, at least in the context of this one intersection. She answers the question “Do you want to go north? Or did you want to go south? Show me.” by turning in the affirmative direction then waiting for me to say “OK, let’s go”. But this time it was my choice because I had to take the camera up north to the Battle Mountain Bridge, where a few days ago we saw the first stone flies. I wanted to photograph them.

We’ve now seen three signs of spring: The crows returned a few days ago, two Canada geese flew over Edgewood today, and our earliest stonefly species has begun to emerge from the creeks. The two in the photo above are, I’m assuming, the female and male of the same species since these two sizes were intermixed and intermingling all over the snow on the bridge. The male in the photo didn’t seem to be in the mood for mingling with the female, though. Just after I took the photo, he ran away from her as fast as his short legs would carry him. Or maybe he just wanted to get away from me?

As always (or usually), I was glad to be accompanied by the ravens Ravena & Rowan on this walk. I’d already fed them (and the gray jays), but they still came along with Buki & me all the way to the bridge. I’m sure they like us for more than just the handouts. This time I was particularly glad to see them alive because there was something on the railing of the bridge that looked like a piece of dead raven (or crow). People shoot ravens. One old local, the most old-timey of all the old-timers I’ve ever met, used to shot them on sight. “Ravens are taking over the world!” he used to say, according to Trevor. Some less old-timey locals still threaten to shoot dead any raven guilty of harassing their chickens. Ravena is now 12 years old (refer to a past blog post if you want to find out how we know that). I’m glad she’s made it this far without anyone shooting her.

Too much death.

Tonight, past dark, for our fourth super-urgent walk of the day, Buki and I went back out yet again over the North Crossing, in a blizzard. It’s a strong north wind (by our standards) and heavy snow that’s piling up and drifting. It’s been going for 3.5 hours, though the forecast was only for a chance of flurries. Walking along dressed heavily in my thermal layers and heavy coats, wishing Buki would hurry up and be ready to return to the house, I was following her, grumpy, hunched, face down, arms against my front, and shoulders up, trying to keep my body heat in. We reached the middle of the crossing, where the wind is most free to blow fast. I wasn’t enjoying the feel of the frigid air or the snow pecking at my face.

But then I thought I would try something else: I unzipped my two coat layers, straightened my back, reached my arms out and spread my fingers, opened my eyes and mouth wide, and faced the blowing snow head-on.

So much life!

First day in the Walker. A hot day in an exceedingly hot spring in another one of these recent years that have us riding up and up the climate change slope. Kabuki the dog is along with Shane and me, climbing a forested ridge after a day of meetings and filmed project first-day interviews.

We’ve reached a row of large, ridgetop Douglas firs. Those with a curve at the base where the trunk rises from its roots need close, near-sighted examination. Crouching low and looking up at the ground-facing bark where it’s sheltered from direct rainsplash, I’m delighted to see the pin lichens I’d hoped for. These are delicate, inconspicuous beings that raise their spores on stalks as high as a bug’s belly. Most lichen spores are forcibly ejected into the air, but these have spores that have instead a static cling. Their spores amass like black soot on top of the stalks, brushing off and clinging to the belly of a bug as it walks over the bark. Free transportation to get the progeny into their new homes on whatever trees the bugs travel to. Pin lichens are adapted to this world of shelter. Most of them need old trees with leaning bark surfaces because they cannot live where rain drops hit them. Other pin lichens specialize in the habitats of cliff underhangs, or the undersides of rootmounds of large, windthown trees, or the undersides of leaning snags, or the bark fissures of enormous old cottonwood trunks. Dozens of species of lichens, all of them small and seldom seen, are at home on world of old Douglas firs with that down-slope underlean. Why do these trees grow that way? Is it that they got pushed over by a sagging snowpack when they were saplings and then had to straighten up? How long does it take for a trunk to grow the girth to shelter tiny lichens from rain splash and splatter?

Botanical exploration requires getting into, as people say about other occupations of mental concentration “the zone”. On first days of these floristic inventories, especially on the year’s first fieldwork day, that zone is elusive at first. The landscape is a new one for me and the diversity of its life is at first overwhelming. The names of visually familiar but seldom seen lichens and mosses are filed away in latent parts of my memory. It takes a while to retrieve those names. My mind is on the search for those names, and simultaneously on the trajectory of our traverse. And a portion of my attention is on the perpetual visual scan for the next species to be recorded. It’s the beginning of a species inventory, and the mental graph shows a near vertical line of species added per hour of effort. It’s all kept as voice recorder entries, photographs, and specimens. And it all requires a good memory of the appearances of species, where to find them, and what their names are. I’m immersing my senses in the landscape and my mind into the zone, and also on where Kabuki (Buki for short) is, I didn’t have much attention left for noticing how hot and thirsty we all are on that waterless ridge. The thermals rising upslope have gathered a lot of heat from below.

Further upslope in the distance, there’s a barren cliff shining in the sun. Is that limestone? Probably not, with that waterfall flowing over the surface rather than cutting through the rock like water does to limestone. But it looks like some sort of carbonate rock. Much of our (‘our’ in the sense of Canadian) lichen and plant diversity grows only on sparsely vegetated carbonate rocks – limestone, siltstone, dolomite. A seasoned field botanist knows that the bee-line traverse to a limestone cliff will certainly pay off with amazing floristic variety. But the heat, and Buki’s thirst caught my attention eventually, and so did the time of day. And the bee-line wasn’t working out, it was just too steep. And the ridge I’d hoped would angle along on our wished-for trajectory veered off in the wrong direction. Time to turn back. Michelle and Evan, who had accompanied us for the first half of the day for the meet & greet and filmed interviews, had departed back to the road a couple hours earlier. Before we returned to the creek gully where the two parties said goodbye, Buki had disappeared. I assumed she was cooling off in the creek, but we didn’t find her there. Ten, then twenty minutes of worried calling, no dog.

Buki’s prolonged puppyhood (dogs really are puppies for three years) was training time on the forest paths near home. Those puppy disappearances are worrisome – puppyhood without an older dog’s leadership is a dangerous time. Pursued wildlife will defend itself even against a ridiculous young pup. The puppy’s nose leads the way on a half hour’s track to a moose or a bear. One kick or swipe and it’s over, or life is lived as a lame. This is her first day accompanying me on fieldwork. A good trail dog is an asset for an explorer, and I had high hopes for Buki to fill that role. I explained to Shane that she’d had no such disappearances for a long time. I was worried, imagining a moose kick or a bear swipe, and in that case not much likelihood of finding her. Twenty minutes of calling, still no dog. Until, there’s a sound…is that her? Yes, what a relief, there she is, from the direction Evan and Michelle had gone on their return to the road.

How many times has it been pointed out to me that the backing and forthing between humans spread out on trails is a shepherd dog’s “human herding”. You might believe that if you haven’t paid attention to Australian shepherds, border collies, or other sheep and cattle herding dogs. Herding looks like this: belly to the ground, an unblinking stare at the animals, short bursts of running, then belly to the ground again. When necessary, policing the more obstinate members of the herd happens with a nip to the ankles. Good herding dogs don’t herd humans. The humans wouldn’t like the bloodied ankles or the spooky predatory staring. The human-to-human backing and forthing is not herding behavior, it’s “checking on the pack” behavior. We’re all in Buki’s pack, and it’s her job to make sure all the pack members are alright. There might even be message delivery through emotion-driven scents or body language, but humans would have a hard time understanding all that than fellow dogs (or wolves) would.

It was a learning experience for Buki as well as for me. I’m understanding her better now. And she needs to understand when it’s acceptable to check on her humans. Minutes since departure, OK, go check on the absent humans, but return quickly. Hours of absence, and a half hour return time. No, that was wrong. I don’t like to think of how far she went out solo through this unfamiliar forest landscape on her tracking mission. Other than this one demerit, Buki did well for her day on the job. And for the rest of our time together in the Walker, she was spectacular. “She’s a good pup”, said Shane.

I have learned to be at home in the wilderness. My first driver’s license in my teenage years was my ticket to the trailheads within a day’s drive from my home in sprawling Spokane. Wildlands in eastern Washington are fragments, but some, even near the city, are large enough to give an explorer enough room for a proper day-long scramble. I was fascinated with the diversity of plant life before I could drive. Plant variety is the best spice of my life. The gardens of Spokane didn’t offer the same spice as the wild variety of ferns, trees, and those annual events of flowering that I had to see and identify. I was inspired and had to learn to feel at home in the wilds. Decades later, I’m still climbing the mountains to try to see it all.

I clearly remember my first wild plant identification, not including the simple ones adults taught to me: cattail, balsamroot, ponderosa pine. Among the ponderosa pines on a steep slope above my childhood home was a wild larkspur that, in my junior high level of expertise, equaled one of those Australian blue sun orchids that I had seen pictured in a National Geographic article. A whopper of a mistake. I corrected it by the time I entered high school.

My teenage loner-botanist time on my first solo trails wasn’t entirely a great time. I was nervous about all the bears and cougars I would meet. Those imagined encounters weren’t pretty. I jangled my car keys before rounding those slope-hugging trail bends further into the shadowed forest. I had read that making noise on a trail will alert the wildlife and avoid surprise encounters. I still make noise on trails for this reason, but without the fear. Nervous as I was as a teenager, I kept going because I had to see all the species identified in Flora of the Pacific Northwest, that superb though taxonomically flawed volume of Hitchcock & Cronquist published just a year after I was born. That flora and I were both taxonomically naïve, but trying to get things right.

Now at the age of fifty, I am at home in the wilderness, at least for short times. I’m no John Muir, I still like my creature comforts, and it’s not the best thing for a project’s results to sleep rough under a tree without a means of downloading photos, pressing the plant specimens, charging devices, eating a hot meal, and being well rested for the next day’s explorations. Shane and Buki are at least as comfortable as I am in this wilderness. I’m in good company.

Back at the road, with a specimen-laden backpack, with plenty of data to document the first day’s results, a sense of relief to see that Michelle’s truck was not there. The thought of Buki’s having detected a rescue situation was on my mind since her absence. And so, once Buki reappeared, I asked her (she has her Australian shepherd’s amazing language skills, so she clearly understood) “show me friends Evan Michelle, where are friends? Show me”. She led us back to the road not as we had come, but instead following the outbound scent trail of her friends. She’s a good pup, indeed. And Evan and Michelle made it out safely.

Earlier in the day, the two halves of the party still together, we were aiming for something curious I had noticed on satellite imagery in the Morkill Valley, an hour’s drive from the Fraser River Bridge into the Rocky Mountains. Bare white marks in a forested landscape. Expecting (hoping) to find tufa seeps, those scarce-in-the-landscape seepages where mineral rich ground water is forced to the surface to unload its accumulated calcium carbonate and other minerals. The water drops its precipitates onto every surface it first touches. A porous, laminated, moss-bearing, limestone-like rock results. Large tufa seeps can be chambered with moss-grotto caves and waterfalls, and can be home to rare primroses and seldom-seen liverworts and mosses. They are habitats for specialists tolerant of a mineral environment that larger, more dominant and competitive plants, including trees and shrubs find overwhelmingly alkaline. Robust plants need nitrogen to grow new cells and tissues, but nitrogen is scarce in those seeps. Tufa seep specialists are small; being diminutive means that you can do without much nitrogen. The alkaline drippage is exactly what only they have evolved for. They have the place to themselves so long as the tufa keeps depositing.

But what we found were not tufa seeps, and we never did find any tufa in the Walker. There may be some out there, still undetected. The Rocky Mountains are just right for tufa seeps, being made mostly of highly soluble, alkaline rock types. What we did find that corresponded to those satellite image white marks are steep, oozing silts that had naturally eroded into great slope-failure gashes and bare canopy gaps. Now the satellite imagery made sense: I had noticed that there were odd-looking forested landscapes along the lower Morkill River, with repeating up-and-down topography and between all those rounded hills, a network of evenly spaced, small bare white marks and lines that did not make sense except as limestone karst, perhaps like a small-scale version of those astonishing pillar-mountain karst landscapes that have inspired hundreds of years worth of loving depiction in Chinese scroll paintings. Wishful thinking.

What we found on that first day’s traverse was a whole valley’s worth of fine, silty glacial lakebed sediments gouged with natural erosional features and steep-sided, round-topped forest hills. It has an unusual flora. How good it was to see Adoxa moschatellina, an elusive little plant, scarce in the far west. I had seen it only once before on the other side of the Rocky Mountains. A new find for the Robson Valley region, that part of the Rocky Mountain Trench where the Fraser River passes through interior rain forest on its turn west and then south through the drylands toward the coast. That’s a good start.

So it’s all a lot of silt, ground down by the ice-age glaciers and then backed up behind a dam of ice for a time sufficient enough to settle out of the water into these deposits as much as three hundred feet thick. It’s a dissolvable landscape that doesn’t seem well suited for road building and clearcuts – would logging, which is planned here, turn it into a series of slumping mud pits and landslides? Would the accelerated erosion following clearcutting send so much silt downslope that the Morkill River would have a hard time carrying it all away without choking? These intact forests are doing an especially important job. Let’s leave them to it.

Disappointment at the non-tufa, non-karst landscape aside, I was pleased to find that portions of the silt had leveled and stabilized enough to bear a veneer of mosses and liverworts. Reboulia hemispherica is present, a flat liverwort looking like forked green tongues. There are little dicranelloid mosses with their characteristic short life spans. The mossy green patches included Pohlia atropurpurea, putting on a good show of its curiously stubby, red-brown spore capsules. This is a moss I don’t get to see often.

All of these mosses and liverworts have one thing in common: a quick spore-to-spore generational turnover that is a more suitable lifestyle for erosional slopes than the years- or decades-long seed-to-seed generations of trees and shrubs. Larger, slower-growing plants just wouldn’t have time to reproduce before losing their roothold on these fast-moving slopes.

This silty habitat is indeed a world for the short-lived. Even the longer lived, creeping and branching mosses so common in forest understory or rock outcrops can’t live here. They would end up smothered under the ooze during the annual winter’s end thaw. It’s a good example of how a habitat can add non-uniformity to a landscape, and how it can bring more species into the sum of a region’s biodiversity. These little mosses and liverworts have the place all to themselves in a slippery world of permanent ground disturbance – a place of stable instability. This is the sort of landscape attribute that a botanical explorer must be aware of to characterize a flora fully. Floristic inventories are nooks & crannies work, a job for the curious.

I’ve read that fast-eroding silt habitats like these are favoured by Pseudoditrichum, a single-species genus in a single-genus family of mosses that has been documented, so far, only twice: once in Siberia, and once near Great Bear Lake in the Canadian subarctic. An extreme case of rarity. A celebrity moss that almost no one has ever seen alive. Traveling to Great Bear Lake to see the moss in its sole North American location would take me to one of the greatest mosquito landscapes on Earth, or so I’ve read about the place. That would be interesting. And that far northern lakeside landscape would be fascinating for its flora – I’ve had a taste of the floristic fascinations present in other subarctic locations further east in Canada’s far north. But it would have been nice to find Pseudoditrichum here on these silts in the Morkill Valley. Maybe it’s here, undetected. This is another habit of a successful botanical explorer – knowing some of the possibilities, knowing what to look for. Maybe we’ll find it another time.

And there is a lot of time to keep exploring, it’s only the first day. This will be a big job. The size of the unroaded landscape leaves me a bit intimidated. I’m at home in the wilderness, but it’s not wrong to be intimidated by it. It could swallow us alive if we don’t take care. Shane and I looked up from the Morkill Valley north further into the study area. Those slopes are steep and high. How to traverse them to avoid obstacle cliffs? And what would we see from the ridge tops? Even from those ridges, reached by a day’s hardworking ascent, we would see only the margins of the Walker. It’s an area of 25 km north-south and 40 km east-west. Roadless and trailless. That’s a lot of bushwhacking, and it’s steep. Intimidating. Difficult on a hot day, even harder on a cold and rainy day.

What’s to be found in all that wilderness?

My past is becoming more interesting to me than my future. I must be getting old.

Here’s a past excursion with Trevor and our wonderful dog-friend Purple. In July of that year, Purple was diagnosed with bone cancer, and a week following the diagnosis, her tumorous back left leg was amputated. After nine years of exploring the world on four legs, Purple had to relearn how to walk. She was able to stumble along the next day after surgery, but she fell over on her stump a few times. That was devastating to see. She had been such an athletic, graceful, strong dog, and now to see her defeated and confused made it hard to concentrate on encouraging her. But within a couple of days, on a short walk along the road with Trevor and me, she suddenly brightened, hobbled a quick circle, and gave us a look that said “I got this now, I know how to do it!”. Less than two months after her surgery, we went on an excursion into the mountains, and the day is portrayed here in this blog.

Onward and upward. As we usually do on hikes, we wasted too much time lingering at distractions along the early part of the trail. There’s so much to see in the subalpine wetlands and forests. So many photos to take. So many ideas to vocally sketch down in our voice recorders. The shadows are long, it’s September, we must press on. Purple knows the way.

The north face of Raft Mountain is a frequent destination for us. It’s a near-at-hand, high-elevation biodiversity extravaganza. A day trip. Specifically, this trip was all about studying Gowardia (yes, a genus named for that Goward), which are tundra-dwelling hair lichens.

Gowardia grows up high, where the wind blows strong. If you’re in the town of Clearwater on a day in winter when the arctic air blows into town, look up at Raft Mountain and imagine the Gowardia up there, without a protective blanket of snow, fully exposed to the cold on their sky-scraper, wind-funneling, peak-top notches and saddles. Winter up there is not the place and time for human survival, but Gowardia just loves it. In fact, it dies under a smothering snow layer, which is why we climb to the windiest mountain faces to find them. It’s cold already in early September up there, but up we go, with a cheerful, courageous, sure-footed, three-legged dog who knows the way.

The north face of Raft Mountain is a geology museum. There’s a lot to see among the talus rocks that are all tumbled down, dislodged from the various formations and layers. Most of Raft Mountain is a batholith, a plume of magma crystalized underground. It may not seem like it, but granite is a relatively light rock. It’s buoyant while denser rocks sink around it. For this reason, batholiths tend to form prominent peaks, like the tops of icebergs rising above the ocean surface. On their way up to meet the sky, batholiths often drag along pieces of neighbouring subterranean geological formations. And where magma meets older rock, contact metamorphism alters the substance of those neighbouring rocks.

I’m not a geologist, so I can only relate the basics here, and if I were tested on batholiths and contact metamorphism, I’m sure I wouldn’t get an A, even if I studied. But what I can say with confidence as a botanist is that some of the plants and lichens on Raft Mountain tell a geological story translated into a language in which I am fluent.

There are metalliferous/sulfide rocks as accessories to the granite core of Raft Mountain. On these rocks occur some acidophilic/sulfurophilic species such as the crust lichens Acarospora sinopica and Tremolecia atrata. I looked for the mouthful metalliferous moss Mielichhoferia mielichhoferiana, and I think it is there, but in such a sad, starved looking state that there isn’t enough for verification. Another day, another trip up to Raft, and maybe I’ll find a healthier patch. There are also some calciphilic plants up there, acidofuges (scientific false-Latin term to mean ‘running away from acid’), such as Dryas hookeriana, Hierochloe alpina, Polyblastia muscorum, and Solorina bispora. Seeing patches of both acidofuge and calcifuge species on one mountain means that very high species diversity can be expected. A large portion of the BC flora, or floras anywhere, sort out according to high-pH and low-pH environments. Having those chemical environments intertwined in a small area makes for a long species list. It’s one of the reasons why Raft Mountain is a biodiversity extravaganza.

Onward and upward, the shadows grow longer…

Beyond the geological jumble of the boulder talus, we climbed to a higher mountain cirque with its tarns (small lakes that form in the glacier-carved depression on the lee side of mountains). Now we’re on solid bedrock, and the geological story is no longer scrambled, but in cross-section to read on the rock faces above us. But it’s a language I don’t read clearly. Just a word here and a phrase there. But I think what it’s saying is that the foreign rocks associated with the batholith include volcanic rocks, gossan, and pieces of old sea-bed sediments, some more altered by metamorphic forces than others.

Those cliffs and outcrops kept us interested and delayed. Gowardia is expected higher up, and we still have a long ascent to get there. But here, below, are bryophytes of note: Grimmia crinitoleucophaea cfr., Marsupella condensata, Scapania hyperborea. Assuming it’s correctly identified (the marker “cfr.” indicates uncertainty), would it be the first ever found in Canada? The Marsupella might be a new find for interior British Columbia. And Scapania hyperborea is a surprise, the nearest reported populations occur in the Boundary Ranges near the Alaska border and way down south on the high Colorado Rockies.

And upward. It’s a risky business, to continue ascending a mountaintop while the sun is setting on a clear autumn night and when you carry no camping gear. Oh well, let’s go see the Gowardia. And finally there is some. Not as much as last time we came here to study it. The die-back worries Trevor. But there is enough for some specimen gathering for DNA analysis and morphological study. That’s Trevor’s project, but I’m helping to look for more, at least so we can finish the job and start our descent. Those long shadows…

And now Trevor’s back muscles seize up. Pain, and difficulty breathing. And the sun is now sinking below the horizon. We have a long way to go to get out of here.

Trevor, wheezing in pain and with badly compromised mobility, is slow to climb down outcrops, talus and boulder faces. Both parties of friends who came up with us already departed (wisely), so it’s just Trevor, Purple, and me, and between the three of us, we have only one headlamp with weak batteries. I have my smartphone for added illumination. Before we’re out of the boulder talus, it’s fully dark. And it’s still slow going, and we still have a long way to go. Once we’re off the boulder talus, there is a trail, but now that the headlamp is so dim, it’s hard to find. The phone screen isn’t much help, but it is some. Fortunately, we have Purple.

Purple proved herself heroic in previous ordeals (those are stories for other blog entries), and she doesn’t fail us tonight. “Purple, where’s the trail, show me the trail”, and she leads ahead, not so far we can’t hear or see her, but far enough to acknowledge to us that she intends to lead the way. The trail is not easy for us humans to see, but Purple “smells” the trail just as clearly at night as in the day, so it’s easy for her. But it’s not easy in these busy modern times for humans and dogs to develop the sort of relationship in which the dog understands the humans’ limitations or that there is a job to be done. But we don’t care much for modern times, and so that was the relationship we had with Purple, thanks to both her work and ours, and thanks to so much time on so many trails. It was a collaboration of almost ten years.

Purple passed away three months later. The cancer metastasized into her lungs, and there was no way back to good health or quality of life. Easing her out of life was heartbreaking, but it was done with the utmost respect and love. Purple had countless friends, and made new ones right up to the end. The day before her amputation surgery, we took her up to the Trophy Mountains, which you can see in the first photo of this blog entry. There, trailside, as she was peering into the water of a creek, Purple and I were approached by a young hiker who approached slowly, fascinated. The hiker looked up at me, her eyes big with astonishment, and said “your dog looks so wise!” Oh, my friend, you have no idea how wise. But thank you for noticing.

We made it back to the truck, eventually. Cold, relieved, in pain (Trevor). Homeward with Purple for a good meal and a deep, deep rest. And now we have rich memories of the day, of the place, and of dear Purple.

Thank you for reading.

Humans have been mapping North America for at least 15,000 years. Everywhere Buki and I wander, we map our excursions in our minds. Buki’s mind holds a large vocabulary in terms we humans express to her vocally. And her mind holds an even larger vocabulary of scent terms, scents that we can scarcely communicate about because we’re human and we’re olfactorally stupid. I’m human, so I map out the results of excursions in photos, specimens, and words. I enjoy doing that. It’s what I was made for.

If you’re a dog’s good co-explorer friend, you’ll have seen this: after exploring a thrilling place for a while, joyful rolling in the grass, the moss, the dust, or the river-shore rotten fish. When wild wolves return from exciting excursions their fur carries an olfactory record of good places–that’s what the rolling about is all about. Dogs are friendly wolves, and we are their pack. Buki returns home from our excursions to her pack (Trevor, and any guests), excited to share the scent of the wonderful places she explored. Her joyful post-excursion facial expressions and body language reinforce the story about “the good place”. If the recipient of the dog’s story ever wanders there on their own, they (according to the dog ways) will know they are in a good place because they will remember the scent Buki “told” them about. It’s not so different from the honey bee returning to the hive to dance out the record of where they found good flowery forage (go this way, this distance, and you’ll find the good stuff). It’s their system of cartography. For dogs, the lines of cartography are all about evocative scent gradients and the record of joyful moods. I wonder what a visualized scent map of the Clearwater Valley might look like if translated into the visual.

North America’s contemporary human cartography tells stories of the dazzling diversity of indigenous cultures and languages. It tells of what we have learned about the geology of this most ancient of continents. Climatic maps of North America are fascinating to review when all the relevant variables are considered (timing of precipitation, seasonal changes in precipitable water, recent changes in annual temperature extremes, etc.). Biological maps are no less exciting: the distributions of individual species, the patterns of distribution of multiple species, the concentrations of endemic or disjunctly distributed species. And the maps of ecosystems: where species do remarkable things in their environments.

The Biogeoclimatic (BEC) system is British Columbia’s official mapping of ecosystems. BEC tells stories of the mixes of dominant trees, shrubs, and understory plants. Mixes segregated by climate, region, or by the local soil’s capacity to grow merchantable timber. Each mapped unit in the BEC system comes with published details of its productivity. BEC leaves out the remarkable, though. BEC maps omit the vernal pools, marl fens, limestone cliffs, the whitewater shores, the windblown ridgetops, the talus and its Bausch ventilation, the coastal aerohaline band, the pinnacles of metalliferous rock, the serpentine slopes, the lava flow and its lichens, the nearby birch forest that has a Sphagnum understory–the places with the richest stories of biodiversity and most elaborate and specific ecology get no mention. BEC is not the sort of mapping done by people who are thrilled with the beauty of landscapes and the diversity of life.

BEC, as cartography, reminds me of those anatomical diagrams of the butcher’s cuts of pigs and cows. British Columbia chopped up into the tasty and tender, or the stew pieces, the parts for hamburger, the sinewy parts thrown to the dogs. It’s government telling industry all about where the good stuff is. BEC (like all such public-private communion in land management) is current-time colonialism, a map of how to use the land and then keep going on and on using it all up. It’s government bureaucracy working hard to prove that the world is unremarkable. Do you see the point? There’s no need to advocate for conservation of the unremarkable.

In my work in British Columbia, I am often expected to use BEC for the context of my findings. No thank you. It is not a system appropriate for mapping biodiversity patterns or species autecology. For my own cartography, I’d rather return from excursions like the thrilled canine with a scent record rubbed into my fur. Here, sniff this, if you smell that out in the wilds, you’ll know you’re in the good place. The world, at least what remains of it, is remarkable!

You can see the butchering of British Columbia on satellite imagery. The wonder places are fewer and fewer thanks to the butchery (butchery that the bureaucrats call forest health). But we humans still have some room to explore, and we still have much left to map. I hope to return from my future excursions with stories of the remarkable that I hope you will find exciting. Some of my excursion blogs will be current-time, others dug up from the past. There’s a lot to tell. 15,000 years of exploration, and we still don’t know all the stories out there. We’re scarcely getting started. While government and industry use their cartography to prove that the world is unremarkable, I hope to tell something truer than that, and I hope you will, too. The wild world is dazzling!

We are mortal. Edgewood’s mix of tetrapod residents changes with each arrival and sad departure. Currently, in late February 2024, we are two humans and one dog, plus the salamanders hibernating in the root cellar, the frogs & toads sleeping in the mud under the pond ice, two ravens and sometimes their various associates who come for feeding time and who hang around to watch what we’re doing. Chickadees and nuthatches gather seeds at the feeder. There are snakes down deep between the boulders in the garden, and the first of them should start to venture out in the next few weeks. We were dismayed yesterday to hear the sounds of a packrat who somehow found its way into the walls of the house. Mice are already well entrenched in the walls, and the smaller species of weasels sometimes follow them in predatorially. The garden is lousy with voles this winter; Kabuki caught one yesterday and dispatched it, her first kill (finally). She was very proud of herself. The ravens were keenly interested in this scene, and landed close to Kabuki for a good look. Ravens follow wolf packs to see what they can scavenge; sorry ravens, it’s just a vole this time, not a moose carcass.

The chief raven here is Ravena, who we’ve known since 2012, when she was a fledgling. In June of that year, an unusually cold three-day rain killed her two nestmates; Trevor found their bodies in the meadow. Ravena survived by keeping herself perched on the railing under the shelter of our veranda. Looking glum all that time, she stayed there watching us through the dining room window. We figure that in those three days, she saw enough evidence to decide that we are not dangerous, and so with the return of sunny weather, she stayed close to us.

An inexperience young raven like Ravena might need some help to survive, so I left food out for her. That sealed the deal. She’s been a part of our monthly food budget ever since. Soon she found a mate, who we named Rowan. We know, by the way, that Ravena is a female because Trevor once saw her mounted by Rowan, and we can tell them apart because Ravena has a stouter neck. Ravena has always been bolder, going so far as to eat out of my hand. Rowan is more watchful, ready to warn Ravena of any sudden danger.

Over the years, we have endured the squawking of several of Ravena’s broods. Juvenile ravens are not sonorous when begging, and begging is what they do all day. Feeding them to shut them up soon turned into stressed feelings and a rush to feed them as soon as they start squawking again, again to try to shut them up. That stress lasts for months. I think I know now how a parent raven feels trying to keep up with demand.

In summer 2023, Ravena had no brood. Something happened to Rowan. Ravena, now without a mate, started spending more time with us, keeping close, looking lonely. She and Rowan had been together for over ten years. We can only imagine the cause of Rowan’s demise, and could only imagine Ravena’s grief.

Ravena seems to have become a respected matron in her raven community. Last summer, though she had no offspring and no mate, she brought around a trio of juveniles for me to feed. I don’t think those were adoptees. She was in service as a trusted raven chaperone, taking the juveniles out for a fieldtrip to Edgewood to show them where they could get fed. “No, absolutely not! No more food for any of you, scram!”

Ravena & Co., deprived of privileges, took spite on the gardens. They’d already tried pulling the plant tags from the vegetable gardens, so I lost track of which variety was which. Since she watches me work in the garden all day, she can see what I spend time on, and what I value. So her vengeance was well directed. But I didn’t give in, so then they tried pulling up rock garden plants, even the rare ones, by the roots. Fine feathered frenemies! Matching spite for spite, I didn’t feed Ravena again that year until the juveniles were all gone, no matter how much damage they did (the finally gave up and kept away). Sorry, that’s just how it is. By late summer, Ravena had a new partner. We name him Rowan also. Not for lack of imagination, but because Rowan is just the character, no matter the actor who plays him. That’s just how it is.

Past offenses and punishments are water under the bridge. By Autumn, we were all back in friendly accord, Ravena, Rowan, Buki, Curtis, and Trevor. Regular daily feeding times have resumed, and Ravena spends her days watching me through the windows as I work in my office, monitoring everything. I wake from naps on the window bench, peer outside bleary-eyed and see her perched up in an aspen looking down at me.

Ravena and Rowan come along for strolls and hikes most days. If you see Buki and me walking along the road in daylight hours, look carefully and you’ll probably see a couple of ravens keeping up with us, flying from tree to tree as we go. Even when feeding time is over, we’re all together, a three-species procession. Now that they’ve noticed feeding-time opportunities, a flock of gray jays sometimes follow along on our walks, too, making it a four-species parade. And Steller’s jays, too, are starting to see the light.

We are mortal. Edgewood, according to our intentions, will go on living after any and all of us animals dies. Each of us only borrows the stuff of our bodies and minds. Trevor and I don’t own or even really borrow Edgewood. Instead, Edgewood borrows each of us residents, for a while. We are part of its system. The system is the thing; I don’t matter very much individually. I like knowing that when I die, my body will become incorporated into much else, some of it alive, some without the spark of life. Let my remains remain here.

Original [sc]ANIMISM[/sc]

The great paintings of 30,000 years ago or older at Altamira, Chauvet, and Lascaux Caves in France and Spain were created by different human minds than those alive today. The animals portrayed in, for example, the Panel of the Horses at Chauvet, were painted from memory with results full of awesome living power. Lions, rhinoceri, reindeer, aurochs, mammoths, horses, and more appear in complex, sometimes overlapping relation to each other. There is flesh and fur over bone structure, they are keen-eyed. They charge, graze, stampede, rest. They look alive. In the animist mind, they are alive.

The dating of the panels in each cave tell of the contributions of countless generations, not just a few genius artists. So those were whole cultures of people who seemed to know the animals at least as well as they knew themselves. Their paintings are a journey’s depth underground, far past the last faint filtering of sunlight. The artists had to carry their memories with them; no chance to paint from models down there. Note, by the way that human portrayals in those cave paintings are only stick figures or so vague that they it can scarcely be argued that they are indeed human likenesses. But the animals are painted in all their vitality with confident accuracy.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Chauvethorses.jpg/330px-Chauvethorses.jpg

A few artists today can sketch out from quick memory in a few brush strokes a lively Chinese horse, a bird in flight, or a fox in mid-leap. But that ability comes with disciplined practice within traditions that train initiates in the tricks of eye-hand coordination; the admirable facsimile of models that are themselves painted facsimile. Few artists now spend much time in truly consequential relationship with animals. Could contemporary artists paint the panels of Chauvet from memory alone? I doubt any but the most unusually talented could. We’re just not animists anymore.

The animals are no longer in our minds. Lascaux is no longer possible, I’m sure. The wild animals are neglected, or extinct, or going extinct. Globally, humans and our livestock now sum up to a much larger biomass than the wild animals. The wilderness is almost gone. And now it’s in academic fashion to frown on the supposedly human-excluding preservation of wilderness. Conservation is colonialism, they say. So is that it? No more animals in our minds? Just lifeless technology, wealth, the quantitative rather than the qualitative, objects rather than beings. 21st Century human life is nasty, brutish, and so long that our population size has rushed way past the sustainable. Maybe we should try becoming animists again.

We all need more time outside of what the human world has become. Many of my blog posts will relate the stories of Edgewood’s animals, as best as I can understand and relate them. I may not have the keen mind of those cave artists of the Pleistocene, but I will try to get into the minds of the animals we have close at hand. Especially Kabuki. After seeing how much fun Buki and I have, friends have said that after they die, they hope to be reborn as my dog-friend. “Dog is man’s best friend”…that old adage needs its complement: “Humans are dog’s best friend”, which, of course, is not always true. But it’s something to strive for. Buki is joyful, inquisitive, communicative, silly, headstrong, appreciative. A beautiful little being. Her human friends have much to learn from her.

I couldn’t have asked for a better rebirth than into the life I occupy now, with good friends, including canine and corvid ones. Please read on over the coming blog posts as I share some of the stories of animal life at Edgewood. And please, share your own stories.

Sky Pond is Edgewood’s primordial soup. Here’s who lives in, on, around, and over the pond: protists and other mysterious single-celled beings, algal muck, spatterdocks, lake limpets, leeches, whirlygig beetles, bladderworts, mergansers, damselflies, water stick insects, hornworts, mares eggs, cattails, freshwater sponges, islands, scuds, fishing spiders, beavers, canoes, fireflies, wild rice, sandpipers, spotted frogs, calla lilies, ostracods, water voles, fringed heartworts, olive snails, muskrats, Barrow’s goldeneyes, spike rushes, fingernail clams, giant water bugs, little brown bats, mayflies, tadpoles, the nesting catbirds who sing through the night, and lovely reflections of the sky.

Sky Pond really sings. In winter, when sudden waves of arctic air shock their way in to the valley, cracks in the ice proliferate suddenly with a resonant SNAP! In spring, bubbles melt from the ice with hushed gurgles and sighs. That’s when the spotted and wood frogs croak, quietly, getting their business done as quickly and inconspicuously as they can. On warmer days later, aroused toads locate themselves and each other with louder vocalizations that sound, not inappropriately, like giggling. And then the mating chorus frogs spend a month in crescendo–hundreds of voices, powerful from such small bodies. Pondside mornings in June are a tangle of bird song while the drier uplands elsewhere in the valley are quieter, with fewer species to hear. In the darkest hours through the short northern summer night, Lincoln sparrows pierce the quiet with sudden outbursts as if singing in their sleep. Late in summer, the cranes become conspicuous again, once their young are less defenseless. The cranes’ calls are so loud and clear that all the other sounds vying for attention become null for a while. As autumn sets in, migrating wanderers fill in for the songbirds who have already left. That’s when marsh wrens and great blue herons, or an occasional Baird’s sandpiper arrive, or the rare greater white-fronted goose just come down from the arctic tundra. And all through spring through fall, the beavers slap their tails. Something worries them, or maybe they slap just for the pond-owning joy of it.

Sky Pond is a series of springs where the water floods up stagnantly, lingering a long time before seeping away into the swampy forests to the west. The largest of the springs can be viewed by leaning over and looking down from the rim of the canoe (but be stationary a while to stop the reflections from jostling so you can see clearly). The big spring is just a running-leap dive from shore near our parsnip bed. This spring fountains out so much fresh, cold groundwater as to form a large gap in the usual submerged vegetation, a sort of chasm with swags of some sort of pea-soup coloured goo. You’d think a couple of biologists would have a scientific name for the goo organism, but we don’t. This and some of the other springs weaken the winter ice from below, so be careful where you walk on the frozen pond!

It was the beavers who blocked off the spring flow to make a pond, starting who-knows how many beaver generations ago. The main beaver dams form the northern border of the Sky Pond wetlands. Beavers are are offended by even just a weepy bit of outflow, so they’ve chinked up the low-shore spots elsewhere around the pond margins. Trevor and his hired machines augmented the dams with a more southerly, artificial one that forms our main crossing. From this causeway, you can see the main dam to the north. Dam dimensions: total length over 270 meters long and variably 5–8 feet high. Quite a major construction, better than the hired machines could do.

Until 2019, the beavers had been absent from Sky Pond for a few decades. Their dam was in disrepair, leaking badly, and the pond levels were dropping to a level we didn’t like. Hence the machine-made causeway dam to try to keep Sky Pond from becoming a marsh, as abandoned beaver ponds tend to do. While the dams were leaking, many aquatic organisms were stranded and dead, and others took advantage to grow up from the dried peat and exposed mud.

So it goes in the radically fluctuating world of beaver pond cycles. I tried once to fix the main leak in the dam, with Purple’s help (Purple the dog, who had beaver-coloured fur and a castorian eagerness to move logs). We stuffed logs, mud, and sedge leaves into the underwater drain. It was muddy work with thoughts of unseen leeches. Purple was proud to show me how large a log she could move by the strength of her jaws and leg muscles. It’s amazing how strong a small dog is. Beaver work is hard work, and after a couple hours, we gave up. No leeches found their way to us (not a big deal, really; I know from experience that an attached leech is far less awful than the thought of an unseen leech trying to get me).

The leak continued. But two years later, the beavers returned, repaired the dam, raised the pond levels too high (from our perspective), and caused us to place wire mesh around the trunks of the trees we didn’t want cut down. Using the various shrubs and young tree stems, the beavers have constructed two new lodges, one of which is a sort of lean-to on the flanks of the causeway. In the coldest times of winter, we know they’re inside the lean-to lodge because we can see their crystalized breath as hoar frost lining their air vents.

And so it goes with introductions: a light and (I hope) inviting preview. Sky Pond is an assembly that includes the most diverse habitations and residents of Edgewood. We (the humans and dogs, that is) look at, listen to, canoe on, and occasionally submerge in this primordial soup of stories and thoughts. Without Sky Pond, we would be very different in mind and body. Body, literally, since so much of the food we eat grows from the pond muck-enriched gardens. Mind, because we would be poorer in stories if we didn’t live with a pond. As lichenologists, we (Trevor more than me) theorize much about systems, synergies, and symbioses. But Sky Pond gives us maybe even more evidence of the complexly layered nature of life: systems-of-systems-of-systems.

Many future blog entries will relate the events and beings from Sky Pond, from our bowl of primordial soup. Stay tuned…

Stepping stones

Let’s catch minnows in a jar,
Abandon our shoes on the bank
Like an old sorrow, a heaviness.
Let’s cross the creek
only for the sake of crossing
the slippery stones
which may or may not
hold our weight.

Though there’s no time
to hesitate (all is in the movement,
the lack of pause) everything
at this moment
depends
on the firm and precise
placing of the
foot.

 – Lorna Crozier
   From The Garden Going on Without Us

hen I was a small child, I was afraid of ants. Seeing one wander toward me, I would scream in exaggerated terror. My mother worried I was so fearful that I would be poorly suited to life in this world.

In the 1979 Russian film Siberiade, a multigenerational epic of isolation in the vast taiga, there is a character who works himself to death trying to build a corduroy road across the vast, impossible swamps to lead aimlessly anywhere but the place of his birth. Scenes pause on the wide-angle-lens view beyond the last logs he’d laid down, into the wilderness to the unpromising horizon. At the point of ultimate exhaustion, he fell over dead at the side of his pointless road, landing cheek-down in an ant mound. The actor who portrayed this character had to lie dead-still, eyes unresponsively open, camera rolling, as the ants crawled over and bit his face. Though grim, it is a beautiful scene.

I’m told that in the native Okanagan culture, children are dared to place a hand down on an ant mound. A challenge to see who can stay palm-down longest, enduring the biting, before pulling away to brush off the swarming ants. Now that I’m an adult who can take an ant bite without panicking, I wonder, if I were present at this test whether I’d be drawn into the challenge. Would I do any better than the kids?

One of the three full-time mammal residents of Edgewood is Kabuki (Buki for short). Based on her puppyhood behavior, we thought we were in for a difficult time with a problem dog. She was a bold and headstrong imp, and was too quick to play-bite and dominance-nip. I became her self-designated bitable friend to give her an outlet for the roughhousing she loves. The bite-Curtis-but-nobody-else strategy worked, and later we developed designated biting game situations while biting me was no longer allowed in any other situation. The bloody (painful) results of this training were shown to Buki with played-up “ouch” emotions, and that brought out the needed empathy to train her to be gentler and more cooperative. My scars faded, and now Buki is three years old. Our biting games are elaborate, harmless (no bleeding, but it still hurts), and hilarious. A game perfect for bonding and for building trust. As a child, I was afraid of dog bites. Now dog bites are a silly game.

As an adult dog, Buki is gentle (aside from our careful biting games), never aggressive or skittish around people, except for one friendly and perfectly trustworthy local who freaks Buki right out of her mind. Is it because he has big crazy curly hair and wears a low-brimmed straw hat? On trail outings, Buki meets other hikers with obvious joy. On the approach to strangers on trails, she stays with me until I call out “don’t worry, she’s gentle”. And then she bounds toward them, all her body language saying “I love you, let’s play!” She’s met with “Oh! What a cutie!” and “Hi pretty dog!”

On a recent trail, a couple approached Buki and me. As usual, I called out reassurances, and Buki (ears up, eyes wide, tailless butt wiggling fast) bounced like a puppy off to greet them. The woman screamed. I thought at first it was the usual scream of delight, but the pitch and volume rose higher and higher, and I saw her bury her face in her husband’s shoulder. She was in a state of grossly exaggerated terror while Buki went and picked out a stick from the forest to play with. As a confused apology, I said “Oh, you really are scared aren’t you?” I tried to explain that Australian shepherds like Buki are not the sort of dogs who attack people (their overly friendly and playful tendencies make them very poorly qualified as guard dogs, let alone attack dogs). Despite reassurances, I saw a look on the woman’s face that I would expect of someone who just witnessed terrible violence. The husband explained that his wife is scared of animals, and they walked on without pausing. My dear, for the sake of your own and others’ happiness, try to learn the difference between danger and safety. Urban people, obviously, but at least they were out in the forest tails (albeit an easy, short one).

My first drivers license gave me freedom from the city and out to the wildland trailheads. My curiosity about plants started in childhood. By the time I was a teenager, the need to know plant taxonomy had become a strong force. At first I was a nervous solo hiker, but curiosity kept me going. I wanted to see and understand all those species I was reading about on my page-turning reviews of the regional flora. Blind curves on the forested slope-contouring trail seemed at first to conceal a wild animal ready to pounce. I’d heard it was wise to make noise to avoid bad surprise encounters with cougars and bears, so I jangled my car keys loudly as I walked. My childhood fears faded slowly. I wasn’t terrified of ants by then, but I had to learn the difference between danger and safety. And now I know that in those dark forested places that raised my fear and alertness are not the sort of places where a hiker is likely to meet any animal larger than a squirrel.

Earning a place in the wilds requires the taming of fears. Especially now that Canadian kids are so sheltered from any cause for courage, it’s common for young people to react badly when first taken out to see a wild place. Maybe not as badly as the dog-fearing woman, but will they ever learn to keep their hand in the ant mound, gritting their teeth, maybe giggling about the silliness of the contest? Even Buki, who fearlessly and gleefully runs toward potential danger (she’s been called an adrenaline junkie), had to learn through her puppy years to let go of some useless fears (though she never has got over her terror of the crazy-haired man in his straw hat).

In this blog series, which begins here, I hope to help foster fearless connections between people and the living world. Let’s venture out and see what we can find.

Oh the rewards of the wilds!