Phellinus weirii and Douglas Fir

I spend a fair bit of time on forested slopes assessing slope stability. This particular site has some fungus trouble. The Douglas firs over an area of the site have the fungus Phellinus weirii. Fortunately this fungus spreads rather slowly and apparently only via root interaction from one infected tree to another, but can remain in the dead or downed wood for a long time. An issue foresters must keep an eye on and in this case will influence reforestation decisions. It can readily be seen that this fungus takes a bit of value out of the timber by turning significant amounts of the lumber into mush.

  

A Dressed Up Apple Tree and More Spring Flowers

I had some field work over the weekend. Spring this year is following a slow stretched out pattern with mostly cool weather still. After months of just sticks, mud and evergreens all the new leaf and blooms captures my attention. Soon the western Washington landscape will be a jungle like place. On one of my ventures, I noted that the native cherry trees were blooming. 

Cherry tree blooms amongst the red alder

Cherry blossoms

Across the pasture I observed an odd looking tree. As I like trees with character, I made a little detour to check it out.

A tree with character

Upon closer inspection, the tree was very thickly covered with moss and lichen

and was an old apple tree

A couple of other spring blooms:

Bleeding heart

Skunk cabbage

A Few Spring Flowers

Besides seeing may favorite Garry oak and the gnarly Douglas firs HERE (as well as few Juniperus maritima), I did note some spring flowers on Turtleback Mountain during my field work on Orcas Island. Identification of flowers is a bit of a stretch for me. In the past I noted the fawn lily as "upside down white flower" and the calypso orchid as "spotty small flower". A couple of years ago I was working on a project with some biologists in northeast Oregon. We spent three days in the field together and I set a goal of learning at least three plant identifications per day. Easy when you have able help at hand, but most of the time I am on my own and my ability to go through plant keys is a bit limited. What follows is my attempt at finding out the official names of a few flowers that I see every spring. I could go with the species name, but that may be a bit too much for this geologist to take in.

Fawn Lily

Fawn lily

Calypso orchid

Blue camas?

And the big leaf maple with green blooms and new green growth 

We Are the 100%

I regularly read U.California economist Brad DeLong (delong.typepad.com). A while back Delong put up a post with this image:

The context of his post was that everyone benefits from a particular employment bill that was before Congress at the time and that opposition to the bill was not in the interest of the top 1% earners.

But beyond the context of the DeLong post, I like the inclusiveness of the statement in the image. We are all in this together. Over the past few years conversations regarding our shared economic troubles often drift to complaints about corporations. These conversations turn a bit awkward when I mention I am president of a corporation. I am sure that there are very few people that would view my small company as part of the economic trouble we have found ourselves in, but my point is language and rhetoric matter because we are all in this together.

Tunnleing in Seattle

I received an email from the Washinton Department of Transportation regarding a talk on Seattle tunnels. The State is starting a big dig in Seattle to put a portion of Highway 99 below ground. This project will be a big change to the landscape of Seattle. It will not be the first big dig in Seattle.

There is of course the two tunnels that carry traffic on Interstate 90 through one of Seattle's drumlin hills. And all those north bound trains near Safeco Field, including coal trains pass though the heart of the city via tunnels. And then there are miles of less glamorous tunnels for water, sewage and other utilities. My underground work has been limited to a few ventures into exploration tunnels associated with ore mines.

Anyway what follows is WDOT anouncement:  

  

Milepost31 spring speaker series – Tunneling in Seattle

The WashingtonState Department of Transportation is hosting a monthly speaker series at Milepost31 in Pioneer Square to give visitorsmore insight into the massive SR99 Tunnel Project.

Please joinus May 3 for our next installment – Tunneling in Seattle. Take a virtualtour exploring tunnels built during the past century and learn how tunnelingtechnology has advanced.

6to 6:30 p.m.

Thursday, May 3
211 First Ave. S., Seattle

Admissionis free.

After thetalk, be sure to leave yourself enough time to explore the rest of the FirstThursday Art Walk in Pioneer Square. Milepost 31 is open until 8 p.m. on FirstThursdays.

Save the date for our next speaker series event on June 7, when we’ll show you howWSDOT’s custom-designed boring machine will build the SR 99 tunnelbeneath downtown.

Gnarly Firs and a Favorite Oak

I had a misty-moisty day earlier this week on Orcas Island. Between field work sites I ran up Turtleback Mountain. The moss was brilliant green on the balds (bare areas with very thin soil over bed rock) and the grass green on the open prairie meadows. I've posted images of Douglas firs showing different growth habits, but these two on the edge of of the same bald were remarkably different in appearance.

The first fir has developed a shrub like aspect due to having its new growth constantly trimmed by deer. No wolves or cougars or packs of wild dogs on Orcas or very little human hunting if allowed at all to keep the deer in check and this low bush growth habit is a common feature on the island. Approximately 100 feet away was an old leaning heavy set fir likely dating from a time when the clearing was much larger and before other firs began to encroach. Both trees tell a story of changes to the ecosystem. The cropped tree testifies to a grazing population with no predators and the second tells a story of when fire was routinely used to maintain openings and grazing on Orcas.

After the two firs, I stopped by a favorite Garry Oak with Crow Valley below. This oak is also a tree from a remnant ecosystem of managed landscapes by First Nations peoples that had lived on Orcas for thousands of years.

Notes on Tsunami Debris and the Washington Coast

NASA put up an image and write up of tracking probable tsunami debris paths earthobservatory.nasa.gov from the Tohoku Tsunami.

Keep in mind that this is not the first time that tsunami material from Japan has traveled across the Pacific to the coast of Washington. The flotsam of tsunamis, huge storms and damaged boats and simply garbage has traveled across the Pacific Ocean to our coast for thousands of years and has left some interesting legacies. 

For many years glass floats used with Japaneses fishing nets adorned many Washington and Oregon coastal homes as greatly prized beach comber finds. But try to picture the arrival of debris if you were living on the Washington coast say 500 years ago. A striking indicator of this was encountered at archaeological excavations on the outer coast where First Nations peoples were utilizing metal fishing hooks and other decidedly non local implements prior to European contact.

My favorite story of debris was the arrival of a Japaneses boat that washed up on what is now the northern Washington coast in 1834 after drifting across the entire Pacific. Three of the survivors of that wreck were initially enslaved by the Makah, but were then released to the Hudson Bay Company at Fort Vancouver (now Vancouver, Washington). This event has led to an often repeated story of a young Ranald MacDonald meeting the three Japanese and this meeting being the inspiration for MacDonald having himself cast-a-way on purpose on the Japanese coast prior to the opening of Japan. However, MacDonald's meeting with the Japaneses cast-a-ways is not accurate and has been described as a story that “settled like sludge into the historical record”. That said, MacDonald is credited for his role in the opening of Japan; a monument at his grave in Toroda, Washington near the U.S.-Canadian border in the highlands of north central Washington has a matching monument in Nagasaki, Japan.

Hudson Bay Company Chief Factor John McLoughlin was interested in the Japanese cast-a-ways as potentially helpful for trade relations with Japan. One of the cast-a-ways ultimately aided England in establishing trade relations with Japan. (More Here)