Big Leaf Maple Litter

During one of my recent field excursions I observed the mulching effect of big leaf maple. The leaves covered the gravel logging road I was traversing and had completely filled the ditches. 

Within the forest off road and trail the covering leaves made footing more an act of feeling versus seeing with branches and logs and small streams and mud holes completely covered.  At another site it took some looking to find a culvert entrance and the leaves had completely obscured tension cracks in a poorly built road.

Big leaf maples are of the western Pacific Northwest are the biggest maples in North America. They are somewhat restricted to the milder weather side of the Pacific Northwest. Ecologically they appear to play a big role in soil development with intense leaf litter adding significant potassium and calcium to the forest floor soils. The tree does produce sweet sap but it is of lower quality than the northeast and eastern Canadian sugar maple and the sap flow is not as productive. 

Yakima Entrenched Meander Images

I have previously done a post on the entrenched meanders of the Yakima River viewed from a fly over of the Yakima Fold Belt south of Ellensburg antecedent-yakima-river. I had also touched on the Yakima entrenched meanders  on a couple of other posts. I was putting together some images associated with the Yakima and have three images of the same very deep and very loopy section of the Yakima. The river is flowing from north to south in the images.

Aerial view (USGS)

Topographic view (USGS)

LiDAR image via http://opentopo.sdsc.edu/gridsphere/gridsphere?cid=geonlidar&format=ge

 

The LiDAR imagery via the Opentopo jointly with Gooogle is great fun and a powerful demonstration of LiDAR even in desert environments.

100 Million Year Old Shoreline and Voting Obama

Image from Paleogeography and Geologic Evolution of North America.

New York Times 2008 Blue counties voted for Obama

Dave Tucker alerted me to this and apparently it is making the rounds so I am helping spread it as well. The original observation of southern voting patterns linked to the former Cretaceous shoreline was noted by Steven Dutch back in 2002 ( http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/Research/Elec2000/GeolElec2000.HTM). Craig McClain follows up (ttp://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/).

Divided by Coal

This video gives a little bit of the feel for the first environmental impact statement scoping hearing in Bellingham. A little bit of me in here as well. Subsequent hearings at Friday Harbor and Mount Vernon also drew large numbers of folks mostly opposed or very concerned.   

 

Divided by Coal from How Loud Media on Vimeo.

Stillman Creek 5 Years On

 

Little Mountain landslides (picture from DNR Forest Practices Board presentation)

 

In December 2007 a large storm dumped large quantities of rain on northeast Oregon and southwest Washington. The above picture was a rather infamous picture from that storm of some steep slopes in the Stillman Creek drainage southwest of Chehalis, Washington. The picture was on the front page of the Seattle Times. This site was one of tens of sites with landslides that took place in the area.

Little Mountain landslides (piture from DNR Forest Practices Board presentation) 

A PowerPoint presentation by the Department of Natural Resources to the Forest Practices Board regarding the harvest pictured above ended with a conclusion that the forest practice "application was correctly classified and processed by the DNR according to Forest Practice Rules."

 

The harvest was approved because there were errors and discrepancies in the application. The DNR does have maps showing potential unstable slopes based on the shape and steepness of the slope. A glance at that map indicates there were numerous potentially unstable slopes within the harvest. However, the only way that the DNR can make a determination of the slope stability is to do a site visit. Apparently they did not in this case. Hence, the DNR relies on the applicant.  

 

I pulled up an image from the other side of the mountain. Different harvest but in a way worse  results from the December 2007 storm. Clearly harvests were done on steep convergent topography and road construction across this terrain appears to have played a role as well. Again the slide locations were within areas that slope screening tools indicate as potentially unstable. 

 

 

Southwest side of Little Mountain (USGS), red dots are my own marks of landslides

 

The December 2007 storm was a big storm and was particularly intense within the area where these slides took place. Storms with that much rain should be expected to result in landslides. Indeed these same slopes and similar slopes have tolerated more typical winter storms without slope failures (or at least this level of failures). However, the frequency and magnitude of slides in recently harvested areas appears substantially greater within the are shown above.

 

I do not know what exactly was said at the Forest Practices Board meeting. This storm did cause some agency and land management angst and nearly 5 years on still is. Why? The policy established by Washington State Forest and Fish Law is that landslide delivery streams to streams should be at levels similar to natural levels. That should include large storms.

 

The above image implies that the current rules or rule implementation have not been working. The DNR statement in the PowerPoint presentation that the "application was correctly classified and processed by the DNR according to Forest Practice Rules" perhaps sums up how well policy is being met.

Post Office Walk and Salmon

A routine errand associated with work is walking to the post office to mail reports. The walk from our office to the post office on Prospect Street is a nice nature walk along the banks of Whatcom Creek. The City of Bellingham has constructed a nice trail along the creek so that an otherwise four block urban walk is a four block walk through forest and brush - way easier than most of my time in the forest. The walk ends at a roaring water fall as the creek flows over a resistant unit of Chuckanut Formation sandstone. Whatcom means noisy water. After a stretch of rainy weather the creek is running very high and very noisy.

Dupont Street Bridge just above the falls

The lower falls of Whatcom Creek

With the high water salmon are returning to the creek as well. There is hatchery at the mouth of the creek that utilizes the former sewage plant. Some of the fish swim into the hatchery entrance. But the wild fish and some of the hatchery fish take a run at the falls. It is a tough falls to get up, but if you catch things on the right day you can see fish make it all the way up with big multiple leaps out of the water. Before reaching the falls the fish have to get past a gauntlet of fishermen . 

Fishing at the estuary of Whatcom Creek

But in a way the fishermen are helping the salmon. Fishing helps fund some salmon helpers. While returning from the post office I tagged along with a couple fish helpers that were giving a couple of Coho salmon a lift via wheel barrow and then a short slide down a pipe into calmer waters above the falls.  

Beyond Post Election Gloating

Nate Silver at http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ has reason to gloat; he picked all 50 states correctly in the Presidential race and in the last week of the campaign had stirred up a fair bit of noise. He got 49 out of 50 last election. He did miss on two US Senate races: Montana and North Dakota. 

In Washington State there should be some gloating. The big winner was Initiative 502 legalizing marijuana. I got to know slightly some of the people that worked on this initiative and put their necks out politically, financially and time wise to support it. They deserve to gloat all they want, but that was not the tone I heard Tuesday night. They are committed to making this work in Washington State.

Alison Holcomb and Cody Swift

Alison was not only the campaign director, but she also did extensive research so that the initiative was well crafted and the initiative itself answered all the questions that would come up during the campaign. Cody committed to this campaign very early on.

Rick Steves

Rick Steves has long been an advocate for changing our drug policies. Rick has pointed out that the only way alcohol prohibition was ended was by states one by one legalizing alcohol. In the case of marijuana, it should be easier as it will not require a constitutional amendment.

Pete Holmes

Pete Holmes came out very early in support before the initiative was placed on the ballot. He provides an excellent description of the Initiative here: