Friday, August 1, 2014

Cedar Breaks

This post would have been up days ago but for the completely inadequate internet here. HH and I had been doing very well at Petrified Forest with a Verizon add-on through a third party that gave us decent service. Well, that requires actual Verizon service and to that the North Rim says Ha!, so we had a satellite dish installed behind the house and thought we were covered, but it works when and how fast it wants to. 

We can get only 10 gigs a month, daytime, and another 10 at night which is defined as something like 2am-8am. If we use up the 10 daytime gigs we're not cut off but it slows to less than dial-up speed for those of you who remember that (and remember how we thought that was the cat's meow, just to have internet?). The night gigs are supposed to remain at full speed even if we go over but there's not a lot of interneting going on during those hours anyway. If there's a cloud in the sky somewhere in Arizona or if the wind blows or if a tree drops a needle, service slows. I couldn't get any work done on the blog because, I admit it, I don't have the patience to wait 3 or 4 minutes for a photo to upload and then be told over and over that my Save isn't working. Right now I can't see a preview of the post, only the draft version, so I have to publish without that final proof I do. Let the reader beware.

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Here is Cedar Breaks, finally.  To get there, to get anywhere, as I've said before, you have to drive through Jacob Lake where there's a cookie-magnet phenomenon going on. I was strong and just kept driving. I was so, so strong.

I headed north on Highway 89A, a dotted (scenic) road on my map. Even with three stops for road construction and the fact that this was my third or fourth time driving it, it's a lovely road to travel. There aren't more than a couple dozen camping spots at Cedar Breaks, some reservable and some held for walk-ins, so I left home early to better my chances. This is the spot I got, primary considerations being the view of the meadow and in deference to my age, its proximity to the loo.

Cedar Breaks National Monument kept the name given to the area by Mormon pioneers. They saw all the junipers and thought they were cedars, and the word breaks was commonly used as another term for badlands.


Note: Anywhere there's a description of the flowers that sounds like something I wouldn't normally know, which is mostly all of it, it's because I copied it from the Monument's website.

I got set up after considerable references to the directions for putting on the rainfly, and headed out for a ranger-led wildflower walk. Aspen bluebells were going strong along the trail. According to the park's wildflower identifier, these bluebells are favorite fodder for cattle and sheep. The reason they're abundant here is because there aren't any sheep or cows.




I've seen what I thought was this same purple penstemon at the Grand Canyon, but the species at Cedar Breaks, the Markagunt Penstemon, is endemic to Utah’s Markagunt Plateau. Here's something I learned: The scientific name Penstemon refers to the fact that the flowers have five stamens. Another common name for this group of plants, beardtongues, refers to the fact that one of the five stamens does not bear pollen but is covered with hairs or is bearded.



The butterfly was so busy feeding that it didn't startle away even with people moving all around it. The flower might be a showy goldeneye.
 
It's not all about the flowers here, although they steal the show for a good part of the summer. The canyon reminds me quite a bit of Bryce Canyon, just on a smaller scale.

I don't know about this one at all.

Shrubby cinquefoil, low-growing, and a member of the Rose family.


There are so many of this kind of flower in bloom that I can't tell them apart. It may be Orange Sneezeweed. As with other members of the Aster family, the flower heads are actually a composite of many central disk flowers surrounded by petal-looking ray flowers. In other words, the petals aren't petals.

Some kind of larkspur. The one listed on the Monument's website is called Subalpine, but I can't tell from their photo if it's the same flower as this.


A stand of larkspur with a backdrop of canyon.

This is another penstemon, a Rydberg. The genus Penstemon is one of the largest in the US, with about 100 species found in Utah alone.

Mountain deathcamus, highly toxic but apparently not to pollinators. The flowers are about the size of my fingernail.

This species of Colorado Columbine occurs throughout the Rocky Mountains where flowers are typically blue and white, hence the name, caerulea, from Latin for blue. Many of the plants at Cedar Breaks, however, have flowers that are completely white. The petals of the Columbine flowers have long spurs that contain nectar as a reward for pollinators such as bumblebees and hummingbirds. Some insects that don’t have tongues long enough to reach the nectar, however, will steal it by biting a hole at the back of the spur and get the reward without doing the work of fertilization. I saw a bee doing exactly that.



Lupines and columbine at the side of the path.

The bright red color of Paintbrush “flowers” is actually not from petals but from specialized leaves called bracts (like poinsettias) that surround the obscure, light yellow-green flowers inside. The red bracts do a good job of attracting butterflies and other pollinators to seek the nectar reward at the base of the tubular flowers.

Paintbrush species are known as hemi-parasites. While the plant’s leaves and stems contain chlorophyll and photosynthesize, their roots also can graft themselves to those of their neighbors and steal nutrients.


Richardson's geranium, very common.


This dragonfly stayed put long enough for me to get a few shots. This is one of my favorite photos of the trip.


This moth was the same, not moving much at all on the thistle. Another thing I learned is moths tend to pollinate white flowers, hummingbirds red, bees will do anything, and flies go to stinky ones.

These might be asters. The color!

The one road cuts around meadows, under a wide blue sky.

Elkweed grows as a rosette of leaves for years until it stores enough energy, and the growing conditions are right, for it to bloom. Like agave, once they bloom, they die.

The stalk is about 3 or 4 feet tall.

The flowers grow all up and down and around the stalk.






I'm fascinated by all the insects so intent on their work, except for one gigantic, threatening monster that landed on me at Bryce Canyon. Thankfully there was a teenager there who, although freaked out by the whole episode (and if anyone should have been freaked out it should have been me, don't you think?), brushed it off my shoulder before it could attack. I don't care who you are, that thing's scary.

 Another view of the hoodoos.
 
Evening primrose.


I went walking to see the Monument's bristlecone pines. They live on the rim here, under harsh conditions at 11,500 feet, growing very slowly. They're like junipers in that they allow parts of themselves to die off to direct energy toward survival of the rest of the plant. I took the photo below to say, "I didn't go there," but I actually had to because the pines are at the end of the peninsula.

In 1964 scientists cut down a bristlecone in Great Basin National Park, not far from Cedar Breaks, for study. It turned out to be 4,900 years old, probably the oldest living thing on the planet. Explain that to your supervisor.


This is the cone from the tree, the bristles giving the tree its name. Its needles are in clusters of five, just like limber pines that also grow nearby, but limber pines' needles are longer. They get their name from the flexibility of their branches; a ranger said they can be tied in a knot.

 Almost there on the trail that skirts the canyon.


This is one of the largest one I saw, about 1,500-1,800 years old. A two-foot sapling is thought to be about 200 years old.

 
 This is fireweed, common as anything, but just beautiful.



And, finally, my two other favorite photos from the trip. The twist in the log that makes up the top rail of this fence caught my eye just as it was reflecting the light from the setting sun.



The visitor center was built in 1937 by the CCC and is on the National Register of Historic Places.


As I said, I was so, so strong on my way to Cedar Breaks, driving past Jacob Lake cookies with determination. Well, I did the same on the way back, exhibiting such control I would have wondered who I was if I hadn't already stopped at Dairy Queen in Cedar City for a Peanut Buster Parfait (with caramel sauce added). One can be only so strong.

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Thought of the day:

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. - Leonardo da Vinci


Insanity

[8/2:  This post is now redundant because I finally got the Cedar Breaks one published, which includes the paragraphs below.]

I've had a post on Cedar Breaks ready that would have been up days ago but for the completely inadequate internet here. HH and I had been doing very well at Petrified Forest with a Verizon add-on through a third party that gave us decent service. Well, that requires actual Verizon service and to that the North Rim says Ha!, so we had a satellite dish installed behind the house and thought we were covered, but it works when and how fast it wants to. 

We can get only 10 gigs a month, daytime, and another 10 at night which is defined as something like 2am-8am. If we use up the 10 daytime gigs we're not cut off but it slows to less than dial-up speed for those of you who remember that (and remember how we thought that was the cat's meow, just to have internet?). The night gigs are supposed to remain at full speed even if we go over but there's not a lot of interneting going on during those hours anyway. Even when I do work at that time it doesn't seem any better than mid-day. If there's a cloud in the sky somewhere in Arizona or if the wind blows or if a tree drops a needle, service slows. I couldn't get any work done on the blog because, I admit it, I don't have the patience to wait 3 or 4 minutes for a photo to upload and then be told over and over that my Save isn't working. 

I've been gone a couple of days and returned with the hope that whatever was holding up my ability to publish would have resolved itself, but I'm still having the same problems. I'm working on it, meaning I keep trying the same things over and over to get it to work but keep getting the same results. Isn't that the definition of insanity?

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

(Some) wildflowers on the North Rim

I did indeed go to Cedar Breaks last week and for all my good intentions of two nights' camping, I got run out after one. It wasn't rain, although it threatened for a while. It wasn't the cold; I just put on more layers. It wasn't for lack of interest; it's a gorgeous place flush with wildflowers. It was two women who showed up with a pack of kids and who went on, loudly, until midnight. Campgrounds generally have quiet time after 10 pm but I think this bunch didn't/couldn't hear about the rule. I really wanted to stay another night but between them and the guy in the next spot over whose snoring I could hear even with earplugs in, I just couldn't do it. It seems I'm doomed to one-night stands when it comes to camping. HH is wary of me camping by myself in undeveloped areas but I told him my experience that night is precisely why I prefer to be away from humanity. Is it really too much to ask for people to realize that tents are not sound proof? The kids were typical, noisy, having-fun kids all day, which I have no problem with, but I did find it ironic that one of the moms shouted at them that it was time for them to use their whisper voices.

I have a slew of photos from Cedar Breaks that I'm still working on, but on Sunday I went on a different hike from any I've done before here on the North Rim, and those photos are finished. There is no dearth of wildflowers here, either.

The trail I went on is called the Ken Patrick, named for a Ranger killed in the line of duty. It's a 10-miler but I didn't do it all. The middle section is overgrown with thorny locust and even the bit I did was closely grown over, rocky, steep in parts, and isolated. I showed some rare sense and turned around before I broke a body part.

Here's a sweet aster, with a jaunty flip of two petals. Well, I think it's an aster because I just found out today how to discern an aster from a fleabane. They look very similar but the clue is the underside of the flowers. If the green part is neat and orderly it's fleabane. If it's all in a tangle, it's an aster. I don't have any shots of that part of the flower so I'm just guessing that these are asters.

Another aster. Maybe.

There are dozens of sunflower-like species in bloom. This is just one.

 Some sunflower-y blooms with asters and aspens.

These are pineywoods geraniums. Don't they look good enough to eat?



One silvery feather was lying lightly among the flowers.

Hooker's evening primrose. These grow on spindly, wavy plants about a yard high. I've seen them everywhere along the road, and always where there's no place to pull over.

I don't have enough of this plant to identify, but it's a tall narrow spire of flowers.

A native thistle just emerging from the bud. The purple/lavender/pink ones are non-native.

This is part of a tall stalk of flowers and buds. I've not seen this before. It's redroot buckwheat.

This is part of a drooping, tapered stalk of flowers. They're very delicate looking; this is highly magnified. It may be goldenrod.

The grip of one of my hiking poles is in the background, put there for scale but it doesn't work well for that. I've seen these little flowers for a couple of months now. The blossom is maybe 1/16" across.When seen at a distance, the anthers look like tiny dots on the petals.

I'm happy I didn't get any sense to turn around on the trail until I came across these. I was stopped in my tracks. They're not rare but I haven't seen them anywhere else. Another of the volunteers is much more knowledgeable than I, has a $50 book to back her up, and identified this as a campion. I loved these and took about 25 photos. If I ever have a garden again, I'm planting these.







This is just about where I turned around. The steps look easy from here but they were more formidable in person, each about a foot high. Most of the trail was not stepped like this, just steep and rocky.

People put a lot of effort into having a garden that looks as casually elegant as this.

Pussy-toes! That's what this is called. The dried blossom, about 1/2" across, is in the next photo down. The leaves are about the same size, maybe a little smaller.

The papery pussy-toes blossom.

Non-native thistle but what a color!

A short-horned lizard. These lizards have a unique, disgusting defense: they can shoot blood from their eyes to a distance of three feet.

I spotted this photographer at a distance; he was just a speck on the pinnacle.

A clump of asters/fleabane that any gardener would love to have. When I gardened in Washington state, asters didn't show up until late August and into September. When they started blooming, I knew fall was on the way.

Paintbrush.

Pink skyrocket. I first saw these in almost fluorescent red, and later also in lavender.They may be part of the penstemon family. The flowers grow along a tallish stalk.

A Western fence lizard? If so, Wikipedia says, "Studies have shown Lyme disease is lower in areas where the lizards occur. When ticks carrying Lyme disease feed on these lizards' blood (which they commonly do, especially around their ears), a protein in their blood kills the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. The blood inside the tick's gut is therefore cleansed and no longer carries Lyme disease."

The weather is a crap shoot around here this time of year. It's monsoon season and the rain can come at any time (Actually, hello!! the rain can come any time now, for whoever's listening.) but mornings are generally safer than afternoons. I like to head out earlier in the day, when critters are stirring, the air is cooler, and there's less wind to wave the flowers around. It's a nice time to be on the trails.

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Thought of the day:

I will be the gladdest thing under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
       -  Edna St. Vincent Millay


Thursday, July 17, 2014

More sexy librarian work

I realized that no one's asked me what work I've been doing here and further realize no one probably cares, but in the interest of putting together a quick post and therefore quieting my chastiser, here are a few pictures of my workspace.

First, though, my work started with an inventory of articles and other kinds of information that the interpreters use to present their programs. I'm not sure how useful it is because it dates to about the 80s, but I was asked to do it, so I did. In the bottom drawer of the file cabinet that held the articles was a large stack of 11x17 manila folders that held black and white photocopies of plant samples that were collected in the 50s and again in the 70s, each one showing the scientific and common names, where and when collected, and who did the typing of the plant. The originals, it turned out, are in the archives on the south rim.

That work was just a warm up for the real job, which was to first do a quick and dirty inventory of 47 3-ring binders of 35mm slides. Most of them have a label on the spine that names the subject category, such as Flora or North Rim Scenics. Two binders were US history images collected for the bicentennial(!!!) and I don't have to worry about them. A couple more are black and white historical images, very, very interesting, but unfortunately most of them aren't labeled so I have no idea what they're from. Altogether there are eleven and a half thousand slides that need further work.

And what is that work, you ask? What is the work that gets me and the HH a free place to park our house, plug into electricity, all the water we need, and three days in a row off to explore God's little acres? That work is weeding the eleven and a half thousand slides of duplicates, copyrighted material, images from other parks or some other place, the bulk of what I call 'similars,' and others less kindly referred to as of 'dubious value.' Then I am digitizing what's left and cataloging it in Adobe Lightroom.

The first photo here shows my workspace in the conference room of the administration building. The banker's box holds archival slide pages. The slides have been stored in icky plastic pages in the blue binders, which in turn were stored since who knows when in a non-climate-controlled building, open to any kind of critter that wanted to go in. When I started pulling the binders off the shelf I wore a mask and gloves and sprayed everything with disinfectant. Hantavirus, you know. I had heart palpitations when I saw the binders, but the slides are in amazingly good condition. Maybe archivists have been wrong all along about optimal storage conditions. 

That's a light box on the table in front of the chair. This was during the first phase of work after the initial inventory. Take note of the pile of brownish things behind the light table, against the wall. Those are the old slide pages.

Here is what I was faced with, page after full page of slides. Someone went to a lot of trouble categorizing them, and his/her work gave me an excellent framework for a keyword hierarchy I'm building.
 
This is one of the original pages on the light table during the purging phase. As you can see, some have information written on the mounts, which helps me a lot when I'm cataloging.

Below is the setup for digitizing. The 'image guy' on the south rim scavenged equipment when it was heading to the dumpster and my HH, who knows everything there is to know about this kind of thing, cleaned it up and got it working. The darker box, called a ChromaPro, can be calibrated for different light temperatures but I leave the dials set to 0 and let the camera do the color adjustment. The ChromaPro sold for a couple of thousand dollars when it was new, but in the digital age you can get one on eBay for a couple of hundred. The wooden box does nothing but hold the camera mount. I slip a slide into little grooves over the bright light, take a photo, and then put the slide into an archival-quality sleeve.

See the pile of discarded slide pages growing at the back of the table? I can throw them away but want to see how many I can stack up before the whole pile collapses. I'm achievement oriented and it doesn't take much to count as an achievement. As of today, the stack was another couple of inches taller.

The camera is fixed to the copy stand and it and the box are fired up and ready to go. So far I've photographed and cataloged just over 1000 slides. I'm not doing any cropping or color correction; there just isn't the time. All of the binders you see piled everywhere except for four that I've finished are awaiting photographing. I made one pass at weeding the binders, but in the beginning I was far less discriminatory and kept stuff that should have been pulled. Now, when I'm doing the actual photographing and cataloging, I'm doing another quick and necessarily brutal purge. There's a box off to the right that holds the discards and that pile is also growing quickly. At first I thought I'd have to process about 8000 but now that I'm pickier about what to keep I know it will be less than that.

The photography is the easy part, and the quicker. The cataloging, though, (and I will say it's not assigning numbers like Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress numbers, but assigning keywords) is so brain-intensive, so detailed, that I'm worn out at the end of the day.

The good part about the work is it allows us to live very frugally, see the gorgeous country all around us, and eat Jacob Lake cookies. I switched my schedule around this week and am heading to Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah for a couple nights' camping, assuming I don't get monsooned out, on a wildflower hunt. They should be at their peak this week. Yes, I count my blessings, all the time.

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Thought of the day:

Be In love with your life. Every detail of it - Jack Kerouac