Social Networking...Arghhhh!

Apologies for being off the blog for so long. Just the way it is. In the beginning there was email, then Twitter, then LinkedIn, then Facebook. Sometimes I think a string and two tin cans is better.

Dian and I were coming back from Ellensburg and we were going to go Chinook Pass but that morning there was a bad slide outside of Naches and we came back via White Pass.

Nice view of Rainer at the overlook west of the pass. Beautiful day.

SR 12 over White Pass was designated a Scenic Byway recently and it's easy to see why.

Taking out the trash and "bearing" it

Taking out the trash and "bearing" it



















BEFORE

Bear with me here. Nothing disrupts an early spring or summer day more than walking out to your trash bin only to discover that it has become a buffet for a bear (Black Bear) or big dog. There you are at 7 am in your sweats, robe, suit, or whatever and picking up stinky old this and that and tossing it back into the bin in hopes that the sanitation truck will come before the bear does. I got so good at detecting our Serena's tone of bark (she's a really big Border Collie) that I knew, I just knew, that in the morning, I was going to spend 15 minutes chasing down the trash that a bear (possibly big dog..but most likely a bear) spread all over the neighborhood.

I was bemoaning to Ilwacoan Truman Rew about the situation and how I was debating between putting the bin in a Fort Knox style enclosure or padlocking the bin lid shut. Truman said, "no big deal", "just go down to Dennis Company", "buy a hasp and put it on", and "the bear will knock it around like a soccer ball and give up".

So that's what I did. I bought a hasp, bent it to fit the bin, used a piece of scrap Trex (plastic wood) and wood 2 x 4 to secure the hasp and lock and most importantly, tested it to make sure that the hasp hangs free when open (important detail). As our bin had a crack in it, using backing material helped fix that too.


Here's a pic of the hasp in place. A narrow piece of Trex fit nicely between the lid and bin proper. I used short deck screws to fasten everything. The 2 x 4 is inside the bin and also fixed the crack.


















This pic is of the hasp hanging free, an important detail not to be overlooked.

BIN vs Bears&Dogs: Ah, the bin rests victorious, asleep after a long brutal night of futbol with the bears. Better yet, score to date:

Bin 2 Bears&Dogs 0




The downside.

1. 1. IF YOU FORGET TO UNDUE THE HASP ON TRASH DAY...THE LID WILL NOT OPEN. Now you are under a week long trash siege and your spouse will be P.O.'d. This has happened to us twice in a year (oops). The truck drivers are smart and they'll see that your hasp is locked and the bin stays put.



2. PENINSULA SANITATION will "officially" tell you it voids your contract on the bin as you've modified it. Unofficially, and off the record, they don't like garbage spread all over hell and gone either and they are sympathetic to the cause. ALWAYS UNDUE THE HASP. In my case, the bin was splitting apart and my repair job will add years to the life of the bin (as well as keep bears and dogs out).



3. Your neighbors will wonder why you feel the need to lock your bin (actually, it might keep unwanted garbage from appearing in it as it does take a little extra effort to open it up).



4. IF YOU FORGET TO UNDUE THE HASP ON TRASH DAY THE LID WILL NOT OPEN..get the picture.

And one more thing...Black Bears are very very strong. If they really wanted to, they'll open up a car like it was a paper bag so ultimately, this bin fix is as only good as the bear's willingness to give up after a few minutes, which has been the case. There is a lot of food on the beach and the bears are opportunists. That which is easy, they'll go for, that which is not so easy, they'll make an attempt.

Years ago I was in Yosemite National Park at the Ilwahnee lodge..and the NPS kept a nice little photo display of how Black Bears deal with cars that have food inside of them. Scary.

Of taking out the trash, Bald Eagles and River Otters.

Taking out the trash.

Where else but here is there such a glorious view for such a mundane task! Here is Patty bagging away as visitors stroll along and enjoy the beach. Saturday was the perfect day for gathering up debris.

Vacationers hiked from both ends of the beach as we gathered the remains.

Patty and Diane doing the good work as they collect and stack debris.

Darren and the flying kelp. There is alwasy adventure on the beach! A little known fact. Kelp will fly if persuaded. Bull Kelp is usually found resting in large tangled piles with their feet all wound up. To make kelp fly you've got to cut them loose from each other as well as cut their single foot off. Then the gas in the bulb will allow the kelp to rise into the air. This can be accelerated with the aid of any 17 year old teenager with a good arm.

Darren observing flying kelp as it wings its way low over the dunes. A rare view of kelp in the wild. Notice how it is looking down as it searches of another good place for a nap.

The point of all this is that on Saturday, the Friends of the Columbia River Gateway (the 501-c3 that runs the LCIC bookstore and North Head store and donates proceeds to Long Beach Area State Parks) participated in the Grass Roots Garbage Gangs beach cleanup.

Participants were located in local tavs, bars, and watering holes. A cruise to new lands was the bait and a free trip to the Pacific was the hook.

Most eagerly hopped on board, a few weren't so sure and clung to the sides just in case they needed to make a quick get away.

Shanghaied in the end!

The "Friends" have adopted Benson Beach and soon Waikiki Beach as our ward and so we bagged trash from nine to noon. Here we are in the largest piece of trash. A fiberglass lifeboat that has been on the beach for quite a few years. It's not going anywhere and is sort of what visitors might expect to find..an seagoing artifact truly "beached".

One of the most interesting "natural" trash events we spotted was the immature Bald Eagle pondering a breakfast of California Sea Lion. Eagles are opportunists, carnivores and scavengers and in the latter, they tend to be as gross as Turkey Vultures when they dive into a morning snack of well aged marine mammal. Makes one want to gag. No need to bag that as it is part of beach ecology.

This brings up an important point. Dead things need to stay on the beach (well..whales and seals, sea lions, etc..not humans) and not be buried, blown up or hauled away. Why leave them there? They area much a part of the ecology of our area as the living organisms. Benson Beach is a natural beach (aside from the accreted land). Crows, vultures, eagles, gulls, insects, etc. all feed on such dead animals.

Otter tracks were spotted as well, based on the size, I'd guess these to be River Otter (not uncommon for our area). I know that a couple of Sea Otters have been spotted in our area earlier in late winter but these tracks appear smaller than Sea Otter.

We salute the trash picker uppers of The Beach!

For those statistically minded, we found substantially less trash than 3 months ago, I'd say about 25% or 300-400 pounds. Tires were still common (4) but mostly we found rope, water bottles, and misc pieces of plastic debris from the tiny to garbage can sized. Nothing totally weird or unusual.v

Alien Invasion with Tequila II

Alien Invasion with Tequila II

Just a note. The Yucca comes from the Agave family of plants. This group of plants is well adapted to the hot dry desert areas of Central America, Mexico, New Mexico, etc. and many Yucca's are grown as ornamental plants. Being naturally tough..particularly on dry sandy soils, as well as having the ability to survive freezing temperatures, no surprise that they are grown as ornamentals throughout the Pacific Northwest..even though we aren't in their natural range.

Agave's include (Yucca's) those that are distilled (with the worm) into a....liquid that is a favorite refreshment of thirsty revellers... The Blue Agave (see http://www.itequila.org/made.htm) is the source of the refreshing drink (and some memory loss). Thus my play on words. I'll take some photos of Yucca's (and palms) that are growing here on the peninsula as ornamentals.

Come to think of it though..if the rain disappears here and I've choice between drinking saltwater and Tequila..well, maybe those Blue Agave's would survive here. The moth's the real issue (moth pollinated).

What Kathleen and I found fascinating was that this plant was feral. What this speaks to is the domestication of our local environments by the collision of two forces. Humans (and our penchant for gardens) and available habitat for non-native plant species (or animals for that matter). A warming earth would theoretically expand the range of such plants..but for the plants to truly undergo a range expansion..the pollinators also have to expand (like bats and moths) otherwise..no plant sex and they must withstand other impacts (disease, herbivores, etc.).

See my earlier posts on European Dune Grass. The Yucca was growing in a "sea" of European Dune Grass. Now isn't that fascinating as in where am I?

Jim

Alien Invasion With Tequila

Alien Invasion With Tequila

So I'm hiking out from Beard's Hollow with Sue Cody and Alex Pajunas from the Daily A and we're talking about Discovery Trail and how cool it is. As we get to the beach, the trail turns north and we do the same. We ran in into Gerry Shields, nursing a repaired knee into health by taking a long walk south from Seaview. The Turners zoomed by on bikes and other families with their kids. As we walked along I spied this plant in the dunes:

I'm thinking..what the hell is that? Looks like some palm or something that should not be there. Of course, no camera and Sue's wasn't working as well. Anyway, went home, emailed Dave, Kim and the sister Kathleen and let them know strange things are afoot and that if this is global warming, then there's no need to move to Hawaii or Arizona for that matter.

Kathleen calls me immediately and she's got to see this thing and so we hike out and she's dumbfounded. "Mother of God, Like Holly Cow!" and a more prosaic "What are you doing here?". Then "It's a Yucca" as in "You know, like Tequila".

We stand before it, awe struck. Speechless. What the hey? Is this a Sign Of Things To Come or are we entering Gabriel Garcia's twilight zone with a special twist (with lime) for ecologists? Are there more out there?

Then we dig around in the sand and find the top to a disposable soft drink container right near the root wad and some netting that oranges would be sold in and pretty soon it dawns on both of us that this Yucca got here in a storm, was tossed over the dune edge about 30 feet and landed in that soft fine sand that follows a storm. It was probably an outcast from the Columbia River after a flood or as Kathleen says, somebody flipped it over a bank and it floated down and ended up here, on the LBP dunes. And there it grew, in fine shape, possibly 4 years old.

The wind had whipped the Yucca around to a frenzy and probably damaged the trunk as a consequence, the alien invader was likely not particularly long for the world. No diplomatic immunity so we made a citizen's arrest and proclaimed 25 to life in a garden plot.

Yucca! can't believe it.

Beach Wetlands II

Beach Wetlands II


One of the great things about wetlands on the beach in prehistoric times is they were more than just wetlands, they were lakes. The land form of the beach is pretty much defined by north south dunes with swales between. The swales (wetland areas) also run north south. The swales tend to be low and very flat. That flat profile means that a fairly low head (low elevation) dam can flood a tremendous area. For example, a road about 18"-24" high that crosses a wetland can become a dike (look at a cranberry bog) and back up water in a hundred acre area. Of course, this is what beavers are so good at doing. They will build a series of dams and each dam has the capacity to raise the water level behind it 2 feet or more.

Now all these lakes had connections and with some creative portages over beaver dams and across the dunes, these connections formed an inter-dune lake system that was the backbone of travel for Chinook canoe paddlers as they traveled north and south in the lake system. In historic times, my fathers friend Ed Chellis commented that when the lakes froze north of Ocean Park, it was possible to ice skate from Ocean Park north towards Oysterville, then take off your skates, walk over the dunes and be in Oysterville. I've looked at the wetlands north of Ocean Park and sure enough, the wetland that is defined by the WPA ditch drains a wetland that connects north to Surfside (behind the golf course), then a short crossing over dune puts you in another wetland (Skating Lake..nice name) that connects north towards Oysterville Weatherbeach Road. During the cold weather in the late 60's, my family would join other families at Skating Lake for skate parties but once Surfside was built and an outfall was built to drain water away from Surfside (and towards Whisky Slough), this lake disappeared.

Beach Wetlands I

Beach Wetlands I

Ah..beach wetlands, by that I mean the wetlands on the Peninsula..all of them, the freshwater ones that are all over the place. My sister Kathleen and I've had an occasionally lively discussion on the pre-historic (that is like, 200+ years ago) size and make up of these wetlands.

Years ago when I was a young sprout I spent part of one summer participating in an archaeological dig up Nahcotta way yonder. Dr. Robert Shaw from WSU (he later went to Alaska from which I hear he's retired as the state archaeologist) was directing the dig as a post-doc under the tutelage of famed archy Dr. Daughtery. We were investigating a Chinook summer village located at the edge of a lake. The lake was no longer present, having been drained in historic times.

Now Kathleen's and my discussion centered around...how much water, particularly groundwater, was originally visible on the beach? Ground water becomes visible in the inter dune swales, the low spots between old (and new) dunes. Same place where cranberry bogs are as well as most of the beach wetlands.

Prehistorically speaking, the beach drained naturally through the following sloughs: Loomis, Tarlett, Giles, Freshwater, Whiskey, Paul's, and Stackpole. What might a prehistoric sloug look like? Well go to Long Island and hike the logging road from Sawlog Slough to the Cedar Grove and peer at the beaver dam that appears on the north. Beavers built a dam literally at tidewater and that day I saw it, the tide was higher than the freshwater slough! We suspect that the beach was no different, thus at every slough, somewhere near tidewater, there was a beaver dam and low..the slough was dammed up.

What that meant is that the surface water discharge was substantially slowed. When you compare that with the present day situation..in which most of the sloughs are maintained as drainage ditches as well as many new ditches added (East Main, South Main, 30th Street outfall, Beard's hollow outfall, Surfside outfalls, WPA ditch, etc.), then the water retained was likely substantial. We can never really know but I can give you examples from the historic record.

The Shaegrun Ranch was located north of Joe Johns Road (the farm house still stands). A giant hay marsh was west of it in an area later known as Espy Lake. Espy Lake appears on early USGS topo maps as a lake. Today this area is a cranberry bog but years ago it was a lake. When the crew floods the bogs during harvest, well it returns to a lake for a day.

The upshot of all this is that it is very likely that the winter time water level was at least 3 feet higher than modern times. An example would be Al Shire's comment that in early Long Beach, you could row a small boat across Pacific Avenue at Bolstad. Go to Long Beach City Hall and look east towards Culbertson park, note the dip in the land, that's an old swale. If the very able public works crew at Long Beach didn't maintain there stormwater pumping system...in January, then it is likely you too could row across Long Beach.

By the way, in the summer during a low tide, you'll notice water draining away from the beach in seeps either along the bay or ocean, that water is groundwater draining downhill from points higher.