Today we strolled through the Johnston Wilderness Campus, a piece of wooded land owned by Whitman College. The handful of cabins, and the astonishing number of bunk beds they house, are open for use by Whitman students, faculty and staff.
Amelia tests the cold water of Mill Creek.
Steep rocky cliffs rose on both sides.
I felt like I was home in a western Washington coastal forest as I wandered among evergreens and squishy moss through a persistent grey drizzle. The Doug firs were particularly familiar.
The grand firs, with their flat needles, reminded me of the absent western hemlocks. The turquoise Engelmann spruce, small and lonely in its deer cage, substituted for the Sitka spruces I was expecting, and the majestic western red cedars seemed prehistoric as usual.
Our professor, Bob, points out a stand of aspen.
Bob's 11-year-old dog Kili is still as spunky as a puppy.
One color stood out as discordant: the lime-green needle tufts of the western larches. Those trees are utterly foreign to me: a conifer that loses its needles?!
The five larches we could see from our resting spot on a steep mountainside meadow reminded me I wasn't in a coastal lowland forest at all; I was in the strange misty peaks of the Blue Mountains in eastern Oregon.
Hiking across an ecotone into a south-facing subalpine meadow. Notice the lime-green larches in the background.
Our resting place had a very steep grade.
I tried to capture the steepness with a photo facing up the hillside.
I love exploring this new habitat, and I hope I'll find a way to get back out here over the next two and a half years after my environmental studies course ends -- maybe as part of Semester in the West!
... Stay tuned for that dream.
Even in hot pink pants, Yidi blended right in with the fall foliage.
The identity of this cone had us stumped.
My botanical samples: ponderosa pine, cottonwood, grand fir, western red cedar, maple, Douglas fir, yew, alder, and a non-native Port Orford cedar.
Have you ever been on a hawk watch? Until last month, neither had I!
I was lucky enough to get invited on the Blue Mountain Audubon Society's Saturday morning field trip, a hawk watch in the Blue Mountains with the legendary Walla Walla birding duo, Mike and Merry Lynn Denny.
I joined a group of 34 birders at eight in the morning at their meeting spot near Whitman. Mike and Merry Lynn adopted me for the day; I felt like I was riding with the Queen and King.
Unlike other styles of birdwatching, in which the watchers wander trails with binoculars around their necks, a hawk watch is a stationary endeavor. Our caravan parked on a pull-out where Skyline Road turns into Forest Road 64, and set up chairs so a quarter of us were facing in each of the four directions. I was on north-looking duty.
Blue Mountain Audubon Society members set up the hawk watch at a pull-out.
Hawk watching in two directions.
When somebody spotted a raptor, she would holler to get everyone's attention. Birds were identified with lightning speed. A black dot on the horizon: "Turkey vulture!" A flock of twittering brown specks: "Pine siskins!" I could barely keep up.
A soaring turkey vulture from below: bald pink head and two-tone wings.
The same bird, a turkey vulture, can be identified head-on by its dihedral (V-shaped) flight.
Our spot was ideal for hawk watching because we were sitting at a high point: raptors were attracted by the thermals rising up the steep canyon slopes, and our elevation gave us a 360-degree view. I imagined the cold waters of Lookingglass Creek way down at the canyon floor. Across the canyon I could see a grassy patch on Bald Mountain which acts as a ski slope in winter.
The steep slopes of Lookingglass Canyon.
An incredible spectacle took place between a pair of Cooper's Hawks and a raven: they chased each other, dove in free-fall, and performed acrobatic twists in a full circle around the captivated hawk-watchers. I managed to capture a moment of the show on video:
Merry Lynn led a short walk up the road, through a meadow, and down into the pine forest.
Rubber boa roadkill.
A dead white-crowned sparrow we found in the road.
A live white-crowned sparrow we found on a branch.
A red-breasted nuthatch.
A dark-eyed junco.
A ruby-crowned kinglet.
A yellow-rumped warbler?
A dead pine dripping with dry mosses and lichens.
An American kestrel, the littlest falcon in North America.
Fun fact: my first American kestrel sighting took place among ancient Incan ruins in Peru! (You can read about those adventures here.)
Flashback to my first American kestrel sighting at Sacsayhuamán, an ancient Incan site near Cusco, Peru.
It was great to share the experience with Walla Walla locals of all ages. I made lots of new friends including another Whitman student, Eva! I hope we will have many more birding adventures in the future.
Walking, birding, and making friends!
Eva models the spreading base of a lone pine. The tree reminded me of a lady in a hoop skirt.
Blue sky and blue hills.
After lunch the hawk-watchers dispersed, but my dedicated guides were not finished. I soon discovered that not only are Mike and Merry Lynn master birders -- they're also experts at all things natural! We explored roadside botany, native pollinators, and even rocks.
Indian paintbrush.
A little plant with soft leaves.
A lady bug on the flower of that same soft-leafed plant.
A tiny succulent.
Coyote balm.
Scarlet gilia.
Mountain brome.
Aster.
Rocky Mountain ash.
A huckleberry bush in bright fall colors.
Andocite basalt with veins of iron oxide running through it.
The insects just LOVED a yellow flower called rabbitbrush.
A different kind of hawk than we were expecting: a spiderhawk! (That's a spider-hunting wasp to you.)
A skipper -- one of fifteen skipper species native to Oregon!
A syrphid fly! It mimics a bee, but you can tell it's a fly because when it rests, it holds its wings out at an angle rather than folded back on its body.
We found two wasps battling each other in the gutter, biting and stinging! I thought one might kill the other, but in the end they both flew off alive.
We concluded the day with a drive through the back-roads, and I learned even more about human interaction with the Blue Mountains.
We met a father and son chopping wood, and I learned that National Forest land is open to personal logging.
We came across this overgrown relic: a jack fence, built years ago by forest service rangers to protect a young aspen stand from voracious elk.
This guy flew in through the car window to say hi!
The day's magic lay in all the little discoveries and unsolved mysteries. The most thrilling mystery for me was the ghostly wailing I heard reverberating throughout the hills all day. Eventually I figured out the sound's origin: bugling bull elk! I didn't lay eyes on any of the giant mammals, though. It seemed like the Blues themselves were singing.
Last month I visited Ice Harbor Lock and Dam on the Lower Snake River with my environmental studies class. We learned a great deal about fish passage, lock operation and dam construction.
Ice Harbor Dam, with a fish ladder on the near side and a lock on the far side.
The fish ladder is used by lamprey, jack, steelhead trout, and wild and hatchery salmon. This season 190,000 chinook salmon have already passed through!
As we toured the dam, I was constantly reminded of a much larger dam I visited just nine months ago: Itaipu Binacional. That enormous dam sits on the border between Paraguay and Brazil; it's one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World and the largest dam on earth after the Three Gorges Dam (and it claims to produce more electricity than Three Gorges.)
My classmates and I spell out O-H-I-O in front of Itaipu Dam.
Standing inside Itaipu Dam, looking down from a dizzying height.
One of the massive turbines seen from outside Itaipu Dam.
As I compare my two dam experiences, I notice differences in spillway engineering, turbine size, and electricity transportation, but the most interesting comparisons were the ones I could make between people's reactions.
At Itaipu Dam in Brazil, my study abroad program was led by a natural resources economist from Universidade de São Paulo, and each of us participants hailed from The Ohio State University College of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Sciences.
We toured the immense structure with an English-speaking guide, took a multitude of photos, and returned at night along with flocks of tourists to watch the famous light show. The next morning, we each wrote a journal entry in which we marveled at the dam's engineering and expressed our gratitude at the chance to see such a wonder (you can read mine here.) There was no mention of environmental impact or displacement of people.
Itaipu Dam at night after the lighting ceremony.
At Ice Harbor Dam in eastern Washington, my class was led by a geologist and professor of environmental studies from Whitman College, and each of us students had just watched a new documentary called DamNation and even heard from one of the film's subjects in person.
As we approached the dam itself, I heard a classmate say, "It's so ugly!" There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd. I asked my friends where this sentiment came from, and they told me they had always felt negatively toward dams. I wonder, though, how much of the reaction was based on the dam-critical documentary and lectures we had experienced in class that week? How much depended on the reactions of the peers surrounding them?
To me, the juxtaposition of my classmates' very different visceral reactions to dams -- wonder and awe versus skepticism and disgust -- was an example of how controversial topics like dams become polarized. One group focuses on the good, another on the bad, and the individuals within each group reinforce the opinions of the rest of the group. When individuals from the two groups meet, they might encounter a disconnect in emotional response (are dams beautiful or ugly?) and underlying assumptions (are dams fundamentally positive or negative?) which preclude meaningful dialogue.
I am endlessly intrigued by the processes through which individuals develop opinions about controversial political topics like dams. What would it take for a Whitman student to become pro-dam? What would it take for an Ohio State student to become anti-dam? At what point is someone open to changing her opinion, and at what point is she opposed to new ideas? Perhaps by understanding these processes, we can be better prepared to come together and address environmental issues which impact each of us.
The lone specimen of wildlife I noticed at Ice Harbor Dam: this female mallard duck chilling in the reservoir lake.
Irrigated wheat fields, vineyards and orchards seemed to increase as we neared the dam, which is the source of agricultural water in this arid region.
Whitman's Introduction to Environmental Studies class looks on at Ice Harbor Dam.
