MX

Yesterday I went hiking at a 2,735 acre state park, on an 11 mile trail (2,101 acres). The trail itself is moderate to difficult, so generally takes about 10-11 hours to complete. I've done this trail many times before during the Fall and early Spring. That it takes so long to complete works for me. I love packing a lunch and taking the time to enjoy the scenery, resting on any of the hundreds of moss covered boulders or fallen trees the size of three of me combined. I haven't done this trail in a couple years, and was elated about the prospect of finally getting to go, even though it was by myself. Hiking by yourself is breaking rule number one for hiking. Ya just don't do it. But I felt I was more than comfortable with the area, well prepared, and really, it was something I've always wanted to do (never mind that I couldn't find a single other person to go with me, and I was sick of waiting around). It's July in St Louis and we've had some pretty unusual temps of late. Yesterday's high was only going to be in the low 80's. I consider temperature important when planning a hike through dense forests. It was to be a perfect outing.

It would have been perfect except that I let my excitement get the best of me, which lead to some interesting miscalculations and really bad errors.

I dressed well – cargos, kick ass hiking boots and a tank. The boots I wore were made for hiking, but I specifically bought them for Fall hiking. I have some trail runners but didn’t trust them on this long of a trip. But, to compensate for the warmth of the boots, I decided to wear a very thin pair of ankle socks that I generally use for running. I was very much aware how out of shape I am, but the very first time I did this particular loop I was pretty out of shape. The thing I only lightly considered was that I was twenty pounds lighter then. I put some insoles in my boots that I bought for my running shoes (these things are awesome in that they remove 99% of knee vibration when I run... which incidentally, I haven’t done since early spring). My feet felt pretty snug, but it didn’t seem like it would be a problem.

My pack was light enough. Three bottles of water, not counting the one I drank on the way over, a camera, lens, a sandwhich, and some other little necessities. My backpack was made for just this thing, so it was super comfy anyway.

I get there about 8:30 in the morning. I’m excited as hell, thinking how awesome this is going to be with no one around getting impatient while I shoot, and admire, and generally allow myself to connect with my precious woods. Right off the bat, I’m whipping out the camera shooting all the familiar things. And the trails were very familiar, which gave me an even bigger emotional boost. So off I go, deeper and deeper into the forest. A couple hours in however, my tiny dirt trail disappeared as it ran into a stream. There had been flooding earlier in the Spring, which I knew, but had grossly underestimated the effects of such an event in a place like this. This streams runs between two high ridges, but I was fairly certain that if worse came to worse, I could just follow it out, or at least until I hit another trail crossing. I walked and walked, and was getting pretty nervous. I should mention that everywhere I turned, there were these very odd looking spiders that create a rather remarkable web. Stickier than anything I’ve ever seen or felt before, heavier than anything I’ve ever felt… and they were everywhere. I’d run into one, flinch back and turn right around into another one. Of course this only happened once I climbed up the ridge to look for a trail since the stream was too full to walk through.  But, let me express that they were everywhere. I do not like spiders, but especially alien looking things like these guys.

The plan worked though, and around 11 I managed to get back on my trail. By this time, I’m soaking wet with sweat and needing a rest from that bit of excitement. A little while later, I find a fallen tree across the trail and decide that’s going to be a good spot to have some lunch. The balls of my feet were starting to hurt a bit; it felt good to get the load off. While I’m there however, I notice my pant legs were covered in baby ticks. Luckily I brought some Off and sprayed down once more (I already did this before I even entered the park). It didn’t seem to phase these things. It was pretty disturbing seeing that many ticks on my pants, but I mostly let it go thinking it must’ve been where I was sitting. I continue on…

By now I’m painfully aware that between the flooding, and the fact that it’s Summer (tons and tons of green and the landscape is covered in tall grasses – which completely changes everything), my hike is going to prove interesting. I really felt like I was somewhere I’d never been before. I recognized nothing. This certainly makes me pretty uneasy, but as long as I follow the trail (which has occassional markers), there is nothing to worry about.

About 4 or 5 hours in, my socks were slipping and I started getting blisters on the backs of my ankles. Water was going much faster than I planned. It was pretty hot, and I was sweating like a man and drinking too much. The balls of my feet were really starting to hurt. The alien spiders and there $#^&@*! webs were every-freaking-where. I kept getting covered in ticks, but more and more I’m swatting off big, nasty looking ones. Some kinds of gnats were far too curious about my eye balls. Others were bent on inspecting my ears.  I am on a pretty extreme high alert about these things, and other things I’ve seen crawling around. Like the half inch long ants. These things and much more made taking the occasional rest pretty much impossible. I’m a big advocate of breaks on this trail. If ya don’t, you get exhausted pretty damn fast. I can’t rest. Everytime I’d try, everything that bites would come at me. The last thing I wanted out of this trip was a disease or poison. Besides, the very idea just freaks me out. So, I decided I would just hoof it on through at a nice steady pace. Let the endorphins take over and I can get through the pain. I kept trying to find a spot to take off my boots and readjust my socks because the blisters were getting pretty painful, and something awful was going on with the bottom of one of my toes.  Evey single time I stopped for a second, I just got swarmed with everything crawling and flying alike. I hadn’t taken the severe bug factor into consideration when I planned this. When I normally go, most of these things are gone. And there’s very little grass, so the view is clear, and there hasn’tbeen a flood since I’ve been going, and the temperature was a whole lot cooler (drank less water), and I’ve always gone with another person.

I’d say about six hours in I started wishing I could have a conversation. I started texting Johnny but it wasn’t the same. Dehydration was getting to be a pretty scary factor. I crossed another stream, and the water – so clear, and icey cold, made my stomach clench I wanted to drink from it so badly. I also wanted to strip down and bathe in it. I’m obviously not going to do any of those things, but the desperation it made me feel, told me how badly I needed to get out of there.

Not being able to rest was really starting to take its toll around 7 hours. As I was walking, I’m trying to keep my brain occupied, trying to look around (which was fairly useless since most of the time all I could see was grass as tall as me). But my eyes kept trying to close. It’s like when you’re driving and get hypnotized by the road. Evidently, at some point, some important part of my brain went to sleep. There’s a big chunk of the hike I don’t recall. The next thing I do recall is staring at this spot on a stream which I had stopped at two hours prior to take pictures. My heart sank. Somehow, I looped back and am now two hours behind. I had to work that night, and planned on being out in good time. But now, I’m two hours back and everything hurts. I’m drenched in sweat, my ankles are stripped of flesh, whatever is going on with my toe is excrutiating now, I’m low on water, have no food, and I have no freaking idea what went wrong. The best I can figure is that during the many times along the way when I tried to stop for a break, which was way too short and always lead to the fighting of many, many bugs, when I picked up to leave, I went the wrong way. That I was practically sleep walking didn’t help in the least.

I sent Johnny an appropriate oh shit text. I wanted to cry. I absolutely would not allow myself to shed a single tear over something so ridiculous. All I knew to do was to follow the trail again. Keep trucking forward. But I was beyond exhausted, really dehydrated, in pain, sick to f’n death of the things that kept trying to eat me, and just wanted to go home. Knowing I had to re track two hours, with at least five more hours to go, was a bit more than I could handle. Johnny says to me, “Go west.” I didn’t have a compass – remember I’ve done these trails many times before and made it successfully without one. He said to just follow the sun, then. I look around for the sun. It’s behind me. Suddenly my chest tightens in a very big way, I can’t breathe. Every inhale is met with some kind of block – no air is coming into my lungs. Unsure if I was having a heart attack or a severe panic attack, I unbuckle and throw off my backpack and call Johnny. As soon as he answered, my airways start to open up  and I could breathe a little better. But then, I noticed a lot of itching around my torso and when I lifted my shirt I saw that I was covered in ticks. This boiling stew of disgust, panic, longing to just be out of there, rose up through my chest and I just burst into tears. Exhaustion, frustration, damaged ego – all making me want to scream and bawl all at the same time.  I could not believe that I failed in my own sacred place. But at this stage, I very much have to accept that fact cos I’m about to lose my f’n mind. I told Johnny to call the rangers. I couldn’t think straight enough to even guess which way I should go, and frankly didn’t trust myself to make that judgment any longer.

All of that was arranged, and I ended up waiting for the rescuers at this intersection that I was at earlier that morning. I really had been going backward.

There were two rangers, one with lots of water, and the other who carried my backpack, despite my warnings of it being soaked with sweat. They took me through the woods, getting off the trails completely, which got us out of there faster.  I think it was adrenaline this time that kept me going with them.  Soon, I would be at my car, and I could take off my boots, and get more water, and be on my way home where I could shower and get these ticks off of me.

All together I was there 10.5 hours. There were so many little things that got screwed up that resulted in a big ass mess. Many lessons learned here, but the biggest one for me is that I will never, ever go hiking during the summer or alone.

That was some pretty scary stuff.The good thing is, I think I took some pretty awesome shots, which I'll have up somewhere a little later.

 

 

It's been a great morning. heh.
One of the things that's made it so great is because yesterday I found a rainbow mix of coleus seeds, as well as a little sweetheart sweet pea mix of seeds. So! This morning I planted 12 of the sweet peas in little starter container do-dads (I really have no idea what those things are called), and 6 of the coleus, which I'm going to try and get going indoors. Evidently, they don't like it above 85 degrees, and are part sun anyway, so I'm gonna try to get them going inside. I'm only excited about the sweet peas because 1) they're very pretty, 2) they were part of the initial front garden design that failed on epic levels.

I've realized over this whole process that pretty much everything I plant is going to have to be full sun. One side of the house faces east, the other west, and no way to plant anything on the south and north sides (not that I'd really want to anyway). My one part sun hosta is evidence to this fact. When I begin the edging along the walk in the backyard, I'll likely be able to do some part sun things closer to the garage. But that's next spring. And I have every intention of building a little greenhouse thing in the basement to keep all this stuff going. No idea if it'll work; if I can keep annuals alive that long, but that's the hope - and the experiment.

The other day when I was talking about all the cuttings I have going, I forgot to mention one that happened almost by accident. When I took the first cut of our coleus, I planted a small part of it in good soil and all of that. The rest I tossed in the flower bed. The next day I decided I may as well see what I can do with it, and plucked off the leaves and put the stem in the ground. That thing is now going quite strong. Unbelievable. They really are resilient!
Love it. :)

The morning glories that survived the squirrels are going quite strong also. They're actually starting to climb the pole, which is very exciting. :) We have these iron poles in the back yard... they look like maybe they were used for clothes line thirty years ago. Who knows, but rather than try and figure out how to remove them, I decided it might work better to simply cover them with morning glory. I think it'll be lovely when they're all grown up.

I've been experimenting with all sorts of new things this spring/summer.
So here's a quick review:

Scott's Weed Killer plus fertilizer/grass seed killed the grass on the front lawn. Now it's a huge eye sore. After looking at the many solutions, I decided to go with Scott's Patch Master. I've been watering this stuff a couple times a day, and just noticed the first few tiny twigs of grass popping through yesterday evening. It's working! I guess time will tell just how well it's going to work. I didn't patch the entire lawn though. Just the huge parts where there were weeds. The rest is grass - dead-looking grass, but grass nevertheless. Some weed killers say that if it kills the grass, it may recover. So I'm hoping it'll recover. I fertilize it once a week too.
I should note that the same weed killer killed some of my flowers in the nearby garden. I used a spreader, so controlling how the granules landed was something of an issue. A few on the leaves of my flowers is all it took. I attempted to repot those flowers in hopes to save them. Only one so far has survived.

In other experiments, I've taken cuttings of just about everything that's available. Some I've used root hormone, others not. Both seem to be working well. Of those, I have two coleus that's doing wonderfully! That is one resilient plant! It already has little leaves popping out all over. I've taken two cuttings of the unknown bush outside. It's very full and beautiful when it blooms. Those are developing roots, but no green at all yet.
Yesterday I took cuttings of my little palm, hosta, and viola. They're not dead yet, so it's looking promising. The cutting I took a while back of a peace lilly is questionable. It's not dead, I don't think, but it doesn't seem to be rooting. Or if it is, it's going along very slowly.

Of the seeds I've started (late), some I started wrapped in plastic. Others I started with mulch and no plastic. The ones with mulch grew a lot faster than the ones in plastic. In fact the ones without mulch seem to be a little stunted in comparison.

This morning's experiment was transplanting. There are some beautiful native plants growing in the back that I adore... but I'm not real fond of their placement. So I dug up a few, root and all, and placed them where I wanted them. If this works, I'll continue and replace their old spot with grass seed or patch.

I'm not sure how I'm only now discovering this, but Scientific American has a book club! The New Arrivals feature items such as "The Geeks Guide to World Domination", "Quantum Mechanics in a Nutshell", and "How to Build a Dinosaur."

I'm gonna have to buy more bookshelves.

via Scientific American:

The WWF hopes that one billion people (roughly 17 percent of the world’s population) in 82 countries and more than 2,100 cities will cut their energy usage during the hour; last year, some 36 million people in 35 countries and more than 370 cities lightened their electrical loads in solidarity, according to the organization. WWF Australia organized the first Earth Hour in 2007, at which time 2.2 million households and businesses participated. EnergyAustralia, a Sidney utility, estimates that initial event saved 48,760 kilowatt hours (the same amount of electricity needed to run more than 400,000 televisions for one hour) in its coverage areas.

The results of this year's Earth Hour will be presented to world leaders when they gather later this year in Copenhagen for the Global Climate Change Conference to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, an international environmental treaty reached in 1992 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through 2012.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement that lights will be switched off at the UN's New York headquarters as well as at other U.N. facilities around the globe. The U.N. is participating in Earth Hour as part of an effort to mobilize support for December's Copenhagen conference.

I know there's some skepticism. I know there's plenty of people that think this whole thing is a big waste of time. But, even if it is purely symbolic, it's not hurting anyone or anything.

It's the laziest activism I've ever seen, but if people are doing it on a world wide scale - it's gotta mean something. It certainly doesn't require much effort. Personally I get excited about it because it shows people actually do give a shit. A little bit of renewed faith in humanity doesn't hurt either. People want to make a change. They want to save our planet. They're just not willing to change much about the way they live. We have cultivated an energy hungry society. You can't ask people to change their lifestyle - for a good many people, this is all they know. I'm no different. My computer, laptop, phone, stereo, etc etc etc., are all heavily intertwined into my everyday living. Could I give it all up permanently? I'd be glad to! Just as soon as my employer starts shooting film, and all my professors stop using the internet as a tool, the school provides type writers, and every single person I know also stops using their computers.
Not likely.

As a final quick thought - for the opponents to earth hour to actually suggest "celebrating human achievement" instead, I would have to wonder what they do with every other hour the rest of the year, if they're not celebrating it then. This line of thinking only makes sense if they live their lives in caves and only come out during earth hour to use their mom's computer. I want to say more about disease and scourges on the planet, but really there is little point in going there.

In the meantime, have a look at the success of Earth Hour across the globe.  
 

 

One might think that because rain forests are so plentiful, they must be good for farming. The problems with this kind of thinking are equally plentiful. Nevermind that the rain forests are responsible for 28% of our oxygen, that cutting them down is often cited as a major contributor to the greenhouse effect, causes extinction, displacement of indigenous people and desertification. If those weren't reasons enough to acknowledge what a bad idea cutting those forests down is, allow me to clarify the permanence of it all.

The thick red soils that are common in the tropics and subtropics, are the end product of extreme chemical weathering, and greatly associated with tropical rain forests. The average person probably thinks that this sort of soil, because of the lush forests that grow from it, would be excellent for farming. However, the exact opposite is true.
Rain forest soils develop under conditions of heavy rain fall and high temperatures, which causes severe leaching. Leaching does not refer to the squirmy thing that sucks blood in this case. It is a depletion of soluble materials from the upper soil, which is caused by water percolating downward and dissolving the soluble inorganic soil components. The point is, leaching removes materials such as calcium carbonate, the water removes much of the silica, which in turn results in insoluble oxides of iron and aluminum become concentrated in the soil. The iron oxide is what makes the soil red. Leaching also destroys fertility. All of this is to say that even though the vegetation is dense, the soil actually contains little nutrients. The nutrients that do exist are locked up in the trees. The trees live off of the continuous cycle of death and decomposition of the surrounding vegetation.

When forests are cleared, there is little left to nourish crops, it speeds up soil erosion and exposes the ground to strong direct sunlight. These types of soils harden to bricks and become practically impenetrable to water and crop roots. If ya need proof of this, have a look at the ancient temple in Angor Wat, Cambodia. The entire structure was made of this kind of soil.

Obviously, the soils used for farming aren't going to be well nourished and are only good for -maybe- a few years.
What then?

 

 

With Madagascar's government paralyzed after a recent coup, looters are invading the African island country's protected wildlife sanctuaries, harvesting trees and threatening critically endangered lemurs and other species, conservationists said this week.

More....

I wish I could comment. The fury these kinds of stories sets in me tends to dissolve any ability for intelligent/coherent thought.

Today has been quite the exciting day. I spent most of the day with middle school kids from one of the worst school districts in the area, assisting the CHOCD folks in teaching human origin and cultural diversity - two subjects I feel very, very strongly about. I'd be almost certain that when I defined the kids as coming from one of the worst districts, you likely had a vision immediately develop in your mind of what my day was like. Well, I gotta say, if that's what you did, you couldn't have been more wrong. Those kids are the reason I'm so excited about the experience today.

Before these kids come to UMSL, they're essentially briefed about what will happen on their field trip. They are given loads of anthropological information, including cultural diversity, archaeology and paleoanthropology. When they get to us the next day, indeed they're expected to remember it. The group we had today not only remembered a great deal of what they were told on Thursday, they seemed eager to learn more.

The entire program is very hands on, like a workshop, so it really gets the kids involved. There are several different "stations", where each one presents something different. I was in an archaeology station where we discussed not only archaeology, but hints of paleoanthropology, lithics, and even a little forensics. It was great for me to have to recall what I've learned in three different classes and have a chance to use it.

But the kids... the kids were the best part. It was one of the best feelings to witness these young, eager minds - all the while knowing their own city expects so very much less of them. It's a sad state of affairs with this city's schools. Each day this entire week I've heard the news talk about more school closings. The number was at 17 as of this morning.

This experience helps to solidify my view that all schools should be taught equally, regardless of whether it's a private or public institution. Where our kids go to school should not matter as much as the mind within the student.

The interest in learning is there, even in the worst circumstances. Cultivating the students should be of the highest priority.

Today was a great day and I'm eager to continue.

Archaeology and photography... a beautiful combination.
via Archaeology.org: "An exhibition at the Guggenheim reveals how archaeological sites, sacred temples, and ancient art served as sources of inspiration for 20th-century sculptor Isamu Noguchi."  - by Eti Bonn-Muller

"Noguchi shot archaeological sites in his photographs as modern abstract form, reduced to black-and-white cropped shots," explains Munroe. "He didn't photograph them as an archaeologist. He wasn't really interested in the sites for academic or archaeological purposes. He was interested in understanding the power of their form and how to abstract it and adapt it as modern expressive form."

The Third Mind and The Bollingen Journey are on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City through April 19, 2009.

Visit The Noguchi Museum's website for more on Isamu Noguchi's life and work.