Adventures Of a Phoebasaurus: July 2015

The last month or so has been quite busy, then we were both been knocked on our butts by a head cold. At first I thought I was only getting a pettite version of what the Otter was enduring, turns out bugs work differently in different bodies. Who knew!

May brought the last of my class room presentations for work, then an 8 day 'backcountry spike' in the national forest on Lake Chelan.
As far as spikes go, it was very cushy. We (myself and about 25 other WCC members and supervisors) got boated up-lake some 20+ miles and dropped at our campsite. There was a cook who took extremely good care of us the whole time. And for six of the eight days we sprayed or pulled an invasive little weed called Curpina, a spindly looking plant with the capacity to carpet the relatively bare burn areas with millions of tiny new curpina-ettes.

This meant a 6 am breakfast, hopping on a boat around 7, getting dropped off down-lake, hiking several hundred feet straight uphill to the trail, and breaking off for your task.
Then, if you were spraying, you would hike up and down the steep slopes with a 3 gallon clunky pack of herbicide, praying that being top-heavy wouldn't compromise your balance too much and that your tyvek suit wouldn't betray you by getting caught on too many branches and brambles, until your pack ran out, and you went back for more.

If you were 'picking' (pulling the plant up) you spent the day straggling up and down, up and down, eyes glued to the ground trying to eradicate every last plant you could, and consequently activating every pollen bearing bush and grass in your path. That's how I almost walked up and introduced my tasty leg to a baby rattler. At the end of the day, you hiked the 2-3 miles back to camp, which was my favorite part. It is undoubtedly a gorgeous area.

The area had burned in the last few years, snags galore! And thousands of silky lupine in full bloom.

Columbia lily

It rained lightly one day, but otherwise was sunny and wondrously warm.

Tiny monkey flower densely packed into little wet seeps and barely flowing drainages

Snowbrush, a white shrubby ceanothus

Various shades of lupine

I am very grateful our friend Collin was on the spike with me - he and the Otter were on a crew last summer together.

A plant related to phlox who's name I have forgotten

Lots of caterpillars of some species of little blue butterfly

A shiny bullet shaped buprestid beetle, known (to me at least) to live in burned areas

Lots of yarrow to be had

Death camas and some sort of clarkia

And that's the gist of it. Bathing options were minimal consisting of a) Lake Chelan and b) water from the lake stored in solar showers in an attempt to warm them. Sadly those solar showers were smack dab in the center of the camping area, so I partook of the frigid lake water a number of times.

In the end, I am glad I had this little adventure, but am very glad that that's not my full time job.

One of the best parts was as we waited for the boat to arrive to pick us up. One of the guys mentioned there were a ton of butterflies on the beach, so I went to check it out and viola...

An Indra swallowtail, which I don't see that frequently

Look at them all! My understanding of this behavior is that they are looking for minerals. There were little blues about too, but they're not quite so noticeable.

Upon returning to my home, Brandon and I loaded up to visit a college friend of mine in Ellensburg, recreating a couple hours of the drive I had just done. She showed us all the fruit trees in her neighborhood she planned on harvesting, showed us around to a couple hiking spots as well as a wind farm operated by Puget Sound Energy.

Paintbrush, hiding among the sagebrush

My second encounter with a rattlesnake in the space of a week. I think we were happily coexisting on the path until a group walked up. And then it let us know it was there... about three feet from me.

Always I appreciate the willingness of my friends to entertain my peculiarities. I border-line demanded to be taken somewhere that had recently burned to hike. So that we could hunt for morels. As a great bonus it turned out that quite a lot was blooming too.