Atrani, Italy and Large Metalic Debris

I am working on some original content for a few future posts, but this video is impressive. Thanks as always to Dave Petley for drawing attention and Ivan Montarari for sending it to Dave. Anyway enjoy all you debris flow fans - be patient watching, it really is impressive.

Surface Rupture on the Canterbury Fault, New Zealand

Having once toured the trail of the San Andreas rupture line south and north of San Francisco this aerial view of a surface rupture has great value. And WOW!

Wild Horses and Prairie In the Sky

Wild horses gathered together and on the run - central Nevada

The New York Times had an article on wild horse roundups HERE. The issue has been receiving new attention due to costs and various opinions as to the best management strategies. Large wild horse populations are present in large numbers in the Basin and Range provence in Oregon, Nevada and California.

How about Washington State? Up through the 1980s a small herd lived on the Hanford Atomic Energy Reserve, but has since been removed. The reserve is one of the largest in tact wild land areas in eastern Washington and in 2000 a large portion was designated the Hanford Reach National Wilderness Area.

Wild horses live on the Yakima Indian Reservation and there are wild horses on the Colville Indian Reservation. Both reservations have extensive wild land areas. The Yakima wild horse herds have grown substantially and are having a profound impact on the landscape as bunch grass is being grazed at unsustainable levels. The number of horses has been estimated to be on the order of 5,000.

Horses were for a period of time highly valuable and northwest First Nations peoples readily adopted to this new animal that arrived with the Spanish in the southwest in the late 1500s and 1600s. By the time Lewis and Clark traveled through the area of southeast Washington, the First Nations peoples in the area were managing large herds. Our image from first written accounts of the First Nations are associated with horses. Life in eastern Washington must have been substantially different prior to the arrival of the horse in the 1600s.

The initial horse herds would have been managed as a valuable resource. Some horses may have wondered and become wild, but the numbers would have been limited due to their value. With the arrival of the beast of steel and paved highways, horses declined in value and remnant herds faded into the wild land in out of the way places. The horses adapted with the ones best suited for living in those harsh areas surviving and in recent decades rapidly multiplying. The Yakima Nation is, like the Bureau of Land Management in the Basin and Range, trying to reduce the size of the herds on their lands.

As I wondered through the Horse Heaven Hills of south central Washington recently I had Mary McCaslin's Prairie In the Sky running through my head as I thought of the wild horses and the role horses have and continue to have on the Washington Landscape.

Whidbey Formation

I really do not like seeing this unit on steep shoreline slopes. It is ill behaved. This particular exposure is likely the Whidbey Formation, an interglacial unit deposited approximately 100,000 years ago. It contains some clay, has a bad habit of soft sediment deformation and is associated with a number of large deep-seated land slides. I was not happy to see this unit on a recent field project assessing slope stability. More on this after I get the report written.

Indian Island, Jefferson County

Google Earth Map showing Indian Island and Marrowstone Island

I had some field work yesterday that included a slope across from Indian Island in Jefferson County. Indian Island wasn't always an island. It was formerly connected to the mainland via a sand and gravel bar. Charles Wilkes called the area Craven Peninsula when he mapped Puget Sound in 1841. A canal was carved through the spit in 1913 to shorten the distance between Oak Bay on the south and Port Townsend to the north. A ferry was operated to get from the mainland to the the island until a high bridge was constructed in 1951. A county road still angles down the slope to the old ferry landing.

Old ferry landing for Indian Island

Bridge to Indian Island.

The Island is almost entirely owned by the U.S. Navy as a weapons depot with loading facilities at the north end of the island. The entrance to the depot is located just past the bridge. The entrance area was a scene of protects during the Iraq War with as many as 37 arrests for trespass and blocking the depot entrance.

Entrance to weapons depot

The road (a state highway) continues past razor wire topped fences along the south end of the island to Marrowstone Island. The entire south end of the island is lined with county park land with great shore access including beaches and back water tidal estuaries. A number very healthy garry oaks are located between the road and Oak Bay. A rare tree and rarer still to see such large oaks in western Washington. A few are the biggest I have seen with the exception of a some in a park in Oak Harbor.

                

Oak Trees along the south shore of Indian Island

The road continues across a culvert and onto Marrowstone Island.

Tidal area between Marrowstone Island on the right and straight ahead and Indian Island on the left

Wind and the Washington Landscape via Cliff Mass

I am wrapping up a weekend of being a bit under the weather. Lots of reading, sleeping and video watching. So here is another video that has relevance to our local landscape. Wind shapes our forests and in some places explains the types of trees we see. One reason Sitka spruce are much more common on the coast is the strength of the wood. There is a reason it was used in manufacturing of airplanes for a period of time.
What I really liked about this video is Professor Mass' comparing hurricanes with the huge storms that frequently batter our coastal areas. Anyway a nice video for you weather geeks when under the weather.

Big Rocks in Debris Flow Clip

This may be one of the best views of really big boulders being floated in a debris flow I have ever seen. The rocks are floated because the specific gravity of the fluid becomes so high due to the presence of greater than 50% by volume of sediment in the flowing fluid. The best part of the film is about one and half minutes into the clip. 

The footage is from northern Pakistan and was via Dave's Landslide Blog. Dave had a another video suggestion that I had put up in July on Yosemite thanks to Sam Crawford.

Debris flows a big risk to alluvial fan areas in Washington State and numerous debris flows have routinely damaged property whenever we get big rain falls.