A Walk in Spring's Splendor

Today, Lloyd and I went to the Red River Gorge, like we do on so many Sundays.  We hadn't been in a few weeks, and it was really nice to get back outdoors and breathe the fresh air.

Our goal was to climb up to Castle Arch.  It's a very significant arch that we've been meaning to do for quite a while, but it involves a creek crossing (across Swift Camp Creek).  Although we did our fair share of winter creek crossings, it seems like if we were going to do it, it was going to be around Indian Creek.  We didn't have the stomach for it elsewhere.

But it's spring now, and we decided to brave the rapids.  The hike to Castle Arch was listed by one blogger as "1.0 miles - moderate".  Close, although I think they misspelled "straight uphill".  But anyway, we found it and it was worth the climb.

But what I wasn't expecting was the burst of spring wildflowers.  I should have expected it.  After all, it's the right time of year, and the right weather, and it's nice and sunny, yadda yadda yadda.  But as soon as we stepped out of the car in the parking lot, we were greeted with wildflowers EVERYWHERE.  Most of my pictures didn't turn out too great, but here is a sampling:

One of my favorites: Woodland stonecrop (Sedum ternatum)

Star chickweed (Stellaria liners)

For some reason, Blogger is being a stinker about inserting these images.  It's dorking with all of the formatting.    I'm tired of fixing and refixing, so head on over to our Instagram channel here for a bunch of pictures of the wildflowers.

As a gardener, I've always appreciated spring.  "The long, dark, teatime of the soul" has come to an end, and the good people can get back to turning up the soil, planting all manner of wondrous things, and nurturing nature's bounty.  But I think this spring has been the first spring I've fully appreciated nature's bounty that springs forth where the wild things grow.  If you haven't been on a good walk in the spring, I'd encourage you to do so.  It's like a magic eraser for melancholy.  My lawyer is currently working on copyrighting, trademarking, reserving, and otherwise keeping all of you hosers away from that line for me.  Someday, it might make me a gajillion dollars, which seems like it might also make a fairly decent MEM (the acronym is reserved too).  Although I suspect a walk in the woods in the spring is still better.

The Known and the Unknown

I feel a little bit like I'm coming of age as a camera trapper.  I feel like I've hit a few milestones:

• I've collected several tens of thousands of images from camera traps
• I've had a camera trap claimed by mother nature with floodwaters
• I've had 2 camera traps claimed by thieves
• I've camera trapped some extraordinary species
• And I've seen quite a few completely inexplicable things on my camera trap SD cards

This doesn't make me extraordinary in any way, really.  In fact, when I read the blogs of my fellow camera trappers, it makes me realize that I am quite ordinary by camera trapping standards.

If you've read this blog in the past, you've probably read that I've found this remarkable little spot in an overloved section of a public park near my house that I love a lot, despite the fact that it looks like someone dumps a dumpster full of trash there once a week.  I've gathered almost 9 full trash bags, and I still can't seem to make a dent.

We've recently had a LOT of rain.  As in 5 inches plus overnight kind of rain.  I had a camera trap set up next to a stream bank, and I laid awake at night, thinking about that creek swelling up and my beloved camera floating away.  It turns out that that was pretty prescient.  I went the next day, and the camera trap was gone.  I searched the area in vain, and finally found it in a clog of trash and sticks in the entrance to a very, very long culvert.  It was a lucky break to find it.  Any advice on how to dry it out?  I'm going to try the rice method.

I'm going to assume that this camera is toast (perhaps a bad metaphor for something that is waterlogged), but as I was driving home, I knew the SD card would be fine, and I just kept thinking, "wouldn't it really be something if there was something cool on there?".  Well, it turns out that there was.  There were lots of pictures of trash, sadly, and lots of picture of common birds.  The Big Fat Raccoons made regular appearances.  There was an interesting series of pictures as the floodwaters rose, claimed the camera, and then showing the camera floating away underwater.  It would have been pretty humorous, if it wasn't so sad.  I had a picture where someone stepped RIGHT next to my camera, wearing boots and breeches that didn't belong to me or anyone I knew, but which looked exactly like what my paternal grampa always wore on the farm.  That was a bit of a shocker!  And then, there was one picture of something known and cherished, and one picture of something unknown.

Let me first just say that I think it's pretty extraordinary to take a picture (in this case a daytime picture) of a mammal, in an area that I've grown up in all my life, and NOT be certain of what it is!  There is a pretty finite list of things it could be, and I'm fairly well versed on that list!  Regardless, it happens infrequently, but it has happened maybe a dozen times.  It surprises me every time, and I always think it's so cool.

So, let's show the unknown one first.

The red coat is what throws me

My best guess is that it's a groundhog.  Groundhogs are VERY common in this area.  I used to call that road that this was on Groundhog Alley when I was a kid, because whenever you'd drive down it, you would see several.  But there has been a lot of development, and you don't see them like you used to, but they're still not uncommon.  But I've never seen one with this red of a coat.  I usually see them out in the open, not in a wooded area.  SOMETHING about it just doesn't seem groundhoggy to me, but it's the best guess I can make.

OK, OK, I just zoomed in VERY close and I'm pretty sure it's Mr. Fox, buried deep down to his sock tops in mud.  It seems a little full bodied to be the fox, but I think it's just the way he's turned (and buried in the mud).  His tail is somewhat telling too, although not definitive to me.  But I'm pretty sure it's Mr. Fox.  And I actually have some fairly compelling supportive evidence, too.  I guess I've sort of stolen the thunder, but it's my Known Exhibit.  So, without further ado...

Mr. Fox Shoots Lasers Out of His Eyes!

I really love foxes, and as before, I'm really excited to capture one in a nearby park.  This is my 4th or 5th picture of him.  I'm going to have to work at finding a better picture, but this is pretty cool, I think.  His den is just maybe 10 feet to the right of where he is currently standing.  I still think it would be something to catch some kits this spring!

So, maybe the title of this should be The Known and the Known, but that just sounds odd and doesn't have the element of mystery, does it?

Ever Had the Eyrie Feeling You're Being Watched?

A friend of mine from church posted a neat link to Facebook.   It's an eagle cam that is focused on a nesting pair of bald eagles in Pennsylvania called the Hanover Bald Eagle Live Stream.  It's really pretty fun to watch.  I am not particularly knowledgeable about bald eagles, so several things have surprised me.  For one, the male seems to help out quite a bit, and he's also smaller than the female which apparently is quite common with bald eagles.

It feels a bit like voyeurism to sit and watch the private lives of these birds, but nonetheless, I plan to be glued to this when the eggs are due to hatch, which is somewhere around the March 21st timeframe!  In less than a week, we'll get to see something that under any sort of normal circumstances, we would have no access to.  I love to see the power of game cameras and the like in terms of helping educate the public (including me!) on wildlife and conservation.  Seems like a great use of technology.

People are really enthusiastic about this project.  I've heard a number of people expressing so much excitement, but the Pennsylvania Game Commission is VERY quick to point out that nature being what it is, some ugliness could very well happen.  Perhaps this is in response to the now infamous Woods Hole Osprey Cam.  I heard a story about it on NPR.  You can read the transcript here (scroll down to act three or search for "osprey").  Basically, everyone got excited about an osprey cam, in much the same way that they're excited about this eagle cam, but the mother osprey turned out to be a real "Mommy Dearest" and it was apparently pretty brutal to watch.  Really brutal.  As in, it apparently scarred some people to the point where they wanted the osprey mother killed!  Show biz is a tough business!

I don't worry that this would happen with the eagles, where the parents would do something so horrific that people would want them to be killed.  Because that would be ill-eagle.

As a parent, I've had that look in my eye.

What a Waste

I'm convinced that my father was an environmentalist before there even was such a thing.  He probably wouldn't say he was, a lot of other people that knew him back then probably wouldn't look at him that way, but I still say he was.  He was an outdoorsman, he loved nature.  Whether he did it consciously or subconsciously, I think he always tried to live in harmony with nature.  And my father absolutely, positively could not abide a litterbug.  I love that he instilled that in me, but it wasn't always in me.

I'm not sure how old I was, somewhere around the snotty pre-teen years, maybe 11 or so.  I remember this one discrete moment in time very vividly, it made a big impression on me, but it was just a 2 minute slice of my life.  Pop and I were driving somewhere.  We were still on the street we lived on, about a block away from the house, heading away from home.  I was eating an apple or a banana, I can't remember which, but I had just finished it, and I casually threw it out the window.  My kind, gentle, mild mannered father lost his temper.  I would never describe my father as stern, but that day, he gave me a pretty stern lecture about littering.  It made a big impression on me.

Fast forward to more recent times.  I found a little spot in a nearby park that intrigued me.  It's in a really nice, large park in my town.  Something about it told me that it could house some interesting wildlife, and I felt like it was off-the-beaten path.  That is saying a lot for this park.  It is really nice, but when I walk the hiking path (which is paved) around it, it always strikes me that it is "overloved".  So many people, so desperate to get a little slice of nature, come here, and it shows.  But, this little 2-3 acre plot I found, seems to fall off the radar.

This spot is really nice.  It's wooded, which is nice to begin with, but it seemed secluded, which is odd because it borders a major road artery on one side, and the other three sides fall into that "overloved" category.  It seemed like a potentially nice spot to set up a game camera and see what I could see.  I ventured in, and to my horror, I found that it had more trash than I had ever seen concentrated in one place that wasn't a dump.  Well, I've mulled it over in my mind, and I think it is basically a dump.  I've hauled six bags of trash out of there, and I can't hardly tell that it has made a dent.

I have a lot more to say on this little spot, but the bottom line is that I've decided to adopt it.  I'm going to organize a trash cleanup.  I'm going to see if there is any way to stop the trash dumping.  And I want to see what I can do about removing some invasive plant and tree species that seem to have completely taken over.

My initial instinct was to try to take on this mission, because I really fell in love with this place from the start.  But what REALLY convinced me, came from just 3-4 camera trapping sessions.  During that time, I camera trapped:

• raccoons
• squirrels
• robins
• a skunk
• an opossum
• sparrows
• a housecat (it would be nice to capture this one and send it off to find a home)
• a human (me)  ;)
• cardinals
• AND A RED FOX!

Vulpes vulpes survives in an urban area

That is ten species, with very little effort, including a red fox, which is particularly extraordinary, considering it's almost completely surrounded by urban areas.  I've seen other extraordinary species too, including a red tailed hawk.  I'm pretty confident that a coyote might pass through from time to time.

This spot needs a little TLC.  It's pretty extraordinary anyway, but I think if we treated it with the care that it deserves, it could be even more of a local treasure.  A wet weather creek runs through it, which makes it an important part of our local watershed.  Given that, and everything above, I think it's important to fight for it.  That is what I want to do.  First up on the agenda is a little spring cleaning and seeing about getting some permission to do something about the invasive plants.  Wish me luck!

The Tomb of the Unknown Camper

In the past year, on several occasions, Lloyd and I have specifically tried to wander into remote areas, and when Lloyd and I try to find remote areas, we find remote areas.

There is something about going into really remote places that makes your mind mix up a batch of really strange concoctions.  The same thing happens to me when I go camping by myself, and it's a little uncomfortable and, at the same time, really wonderful.  But I've never been camping by myself in a really remote area.  It's something I'd like to do.

But back to Lloyd and I.  There have been two occasions in the past year where we've really been off the beaten track and we have found really primitive campsites.  It's been really fascinating, because the two sites couldn't have been more different, and yet there was something intangible about them that made them very alluring and made you think that their founders had something in common.

The first one we found was near the Copperas Creek watershed in the Red River Gorge.  Lloyd and I had been stomping about for weeks, trying to find Snow Arch.  It was probably our 3rd or 4th trip before we finally found it.  It was an extremely difficult climb up to it, but it has been one of my favorite arches in the Gorge.

Snow Arch

We came staggering down off that ridgeline, exhausted, but happy to have finally found our goal, and excited about how spectacular it was.  Both of us were kind of stumbling along, and all of a sudden, we both walked into the middle of an old campsite in the middle of nowhere.

Lloyd and I have been through a LOT of campsites, but this one was very different in many ways.  First of all, it was pretty remarkable in that it looked straight out of a Boy Scout manual.  Someone had put a LOT of work into this campsite.  There was an area cleared specifically for a tent.  It looked like it had neatly been leveled and it almost seemed as if they had even brought up buckets of tiny gravel, like I used to see at Clear Creek Campground on Cave Run Lake.  They had made a tidy little wood crib, and there was some still sitting there, although the little site seemed like it had been abandoned for several years.  All of this seemed really amazing at the time.  Exhausted as we were, and in a rush to get home, Lloyd and I stopped and marveled at it.  Here was someone, not at all unlike us, happy to get out in the middle of nowhere.  I think it spoke to Lloyd because that is the way he would design a campsite.  Neat and tidy and picture perfect.  It spoke to me because that is the way I would LIKE to design a campsite if I wasn't so messy.

But what was even more remarkable about it, was that the unknown camper, years ago, and taken painstaking efforts to make it invisible.  You could be 20 feet away from it, and be completely oblivious to the fact that it was there!  If we hadn't accidentally come across it, we would never have been aware of it.  The other thing that had a tiny hint of eeriness to it, was that the architect of this campsite, while trying to keep it hidden, had also seemingly designed it to make it an excellent place to unobtrusively watch the main trail nearby.  Did this meticulous camper specifically set it up for that purpose?  So many questions ran through our minds.  For the most part, we were just very impressed and very curious.

Weeks later, we were hiking DEEP into a very remote section, very deep, and once again, we completely stumbled across another "campsite".  This one was much more crude, and seemed like more of an emergency shelter.  I found it particularly fascinating because it was a debris hut design, and that's something that I've been fascinated about for a very long time.  I can't tell you how many websites and youtube videos I've watched about the construction of debris huts.  A rough estimate would be A LOT.  

Long Forgotten Debris Hut

The picture doesn't do it justice, of course.  Click on the image to get a better view, but you could easily imagine that it was just a bunch of sticks and leaves and pine boughs, but in person, it was very clearly a shelter that someone had designed.  I specifically looked all around to see if I could find any other remnants of its inhabitant.  But it had long since been abandoned.  But you could see the craftsmanship.  Even though it had clearly been built a long time ago, it was still largely functional.  The room inside was enough, but only just enough, which shows the builder knew what they were doing.  A common mistake, as I understand it, is to make them too big, but doing so necessarily makes them not as cozy.  This little home away from home would have been very warm back when it was built.

I can't tell you how mesmerizing it was to find this in the middle of nowhere.  Once again, so many questions came to mind.  Who built it?  How long ago?  Did the architect spend many nights in there?  Probably the simplest answer was that it was a hunter, who believed in simplicity and liked the raw satisfaction of surviving without all of today's modern conveniences.  I can really respect that.  But was there something more?  We'll never know, but I enjoy thinking about it.

When I'm having trouble falling asleep, I try to imagine the person building this, and tucking into it at night.  Was he running from something?  Was it something external, or some inner demons that he found were easier to wrestle in the middle of the woods? Did he find resolution?  Did it matter if he did or didn't?  Maybe just wrestling them in a far away place, on his own terms, was enough to give him some solace.  Maybe he had few inner struggles, and this little shelter, far away from his home was a manifestation of the fact that he was carefree and completely devoid of demons to subdue.

I don't know, but I felt a kinship to him.  Whoever he was, I hope this little sojourn gave him clarity or reinforced what he already had.

Great Navigation on the Cheap

I spoke in an earlier post about how game camera manufacturers and GPS manufacturers should feel a little uncomfortable.  I spoke more about the game camera side of things, but recently, I've felt the need to test the GPS side of things from an Android viability standpoint.

I took a plunge going down a steep embankment recently, and although I don't know it, I'm pretty sure the GPS unit that my father gave me must have popped out, never to be seen again (RIP Sheila).

  That GPS unit probably helped us navigate to several dozen very remote areas and more importantly, helped get us home.  I was sorry to lose it.

I was also sorry because I'm cheap and GPS units are not.  But THIS article is fantastic!  I held off on pointing it out until I had actually tested it, but Lloyd and I put it through its paces today and it was remarkable.  Better in many respects that the GPS unit my father gave me (sorry Pop).  But it was several years old, so that is only to be expected.

In case the link to the story above isn't active in the future for whatever reason, let me give you the skinny on what the author espouses.  Basically, an Android phone (see my earlier blog entry for a $20 Android 4.4 phone with standalone GPS), with standalone GPS (also called S-GPS, so it doesn't need a cell signal), and an app called Backcountry Navigator and a REALLY amazing website called caltopo.

I worked for Google, so I am a bit of a Google bigot, but in several keys areas, Caltopo seems to be better than Google Maps.  The combination of these three things is a great marriage of technology that makes for a great GPS solution, even offline.  The one area I couldn't seem to figure out was getting the coordinates that I imported as GPX to stay loaded.  Every once in awhile, the phone would go to sleep and I'd open it up, and have to reload my waypoints.  But it was amazing in every other way.  I particularly loved being able to stand still and get my bearings without having to walk around in circles.  It's very good tech, all for $20 ($32 if you buy the full-blown app).

It helped us find Friendship Arch today, which was remote and worthwhile.  It's in the Red River Gorge off Chimney Top Road.  I'm sold on this tech as a viable alternative (and in some ways superior alternative) to GPS, for a fraction of the price.

Go See Friendship Arch with a Friend

Red River Gorge Water Quality

I have a brilliant daughter, and it's often hard to think of new and exciting ways to keep her mind stimulated.  But today we did something together that was a lot of fun.  A long time ago, I bought some water quality testing kits.  I imagined myself going around and testing several of the creeks in the central Kentucky watershed and busting any polluters and keeping the water supply clean for my family.  I wasn't wearing a cape, but it was implied.

Those test kits sat in my garage for quite some time.  Story of my life.  Here is a picture of the test kit.

STAND DOWN Central Kentucky Polluters!

It looks to be a nice kit.  It doesn't have an expiration date, which seems a little suspect, and I don't think these little test strips are supposed to have a high degree of accuracy, but I suppose they can answer the high level question:  is this water closer to being potable, or closer to being bleach?

My buddy Lloyd and I went to the Gorge this morning (01/18/2015).  It rained a little here and there, and the sun shone brilliantly here and there, and generally we had a great time, like we always do.  Also, like always, we were a little late in trying to get home on time, but I convinced Lloyd to let me stop by Schoolhouse Branch Creek.  I wanted to find the arch there, but settled for a quick sample of the water.  This kit has a little vial and so I got a vial full.  I brought it home and my daughter and I ran it through the paces.  She wasn't as interested in the tests themselves, but she loves to write and keep tabular data, and so she was the data logger.

Brilliant is as brilliant does.

The test, like I said, had no expiration date, and it always seemed a little bit ambiguous with its results, but it was our conclusion that the water in the Schoolhouse Branch watershed in the Red River Gorge seems good with respect to chlorine, iron, copper, nitrates, nitrites, and hardness.  It seemed a little acidic pH-wise, but again, not quite sure how accurate this test is.  Here is the raw data, compiled by my amazing assistant.

Experimental Data

I really love the Red River Gorge with all of my heart, but I have been a little worried about the water quality.  It just doesn't seem like the watersheds support the wildlife that I would expect, particularly fish and baitfish.  I've also seen what looked like some oil in the water near Tildy, not too far from Schoolhouse, and the whole area is dotted with oil wells.  But these results are encouraging, if not definitive.  The water did seem crystal clear.  I wouldn't drink it unless I was in a pinch, because I collected my sample about 3 feet upstream from where deer regularly cross the creek.  But it's clean and clear and seems to be largely clear of contaminants.  That's a good thing.

Today was a good day.  Spent time in the Gorge, spent time with my family, did a water quality experiment with my daughter.  I'd rate it topnotch, except we said goodbye to my oldest niece today, she is moving up to Michigan, as her husband is taking a job up there.  She is one of those people you just feel privileged to meet, let alone be related to.  I will miss her dearly.

I'll just have to go up and see her regularly, and take my game cameras too!