Sunday we went up little-known Sevenmile Hill near Chenoweth, OR. No trail, and much steeper than it looks. No trees until the top make it hard to gauge distance. The balsamroot and lupin was in full bloom, and Mt Hood to the southwest kept us company. Blackbirds and meadowlarks sang, a few cow moos and train whistles. At the top we had lunch in the shade of a ponderosa surrounded by a grove of oaks and flowers, with the gorge and Mt Adams beyond.

Mt Hood.

Clear border between grazed and wild hillside.

Moo moo and looking east along Columbia river.

The Dalles.

Western end of Stacker Butte on the Washington side of the river. Doug’s Beach is at the bottom. There’s some area to explore here too, though may have to wait until next spring when the poison oak is little again.

Mt Adams, Lyle, WA. The cliffs on the right have the Lyle Convict Road at the bottom.

View from our picnic blanket. Not too shabby.

I love these little guys. They have little blue stripes that remind me of circus tents. I think they are Bicolor triteleia.

Then stopped by to see the White Salmon Sees at Everybody’s Brewpub before heading home. A good day.

Yes, I will accept this as legal tender when it is released.

It is, after all, the first Canadian glow-in-the-dark dinosaur quarter.

Canada, I love you.

(Via Blag Hag.)

..

Sunday I explored the remnants of a 1910 road-building project east of Lyle, WA in the Columbia Gorge. Yes, built by convicts. Still lots of road left, despite really poor geology for stable road building. Some exciting sections knocked out, and lots of poison oak arising. Full (too full?) report posted on Portland Hikers forum.

Vary pretty interactive wind map. Semi-accurate. Don’t forget to zoom in!

..

(via Mad Art Lab)

..

Upper point–you can get fairly far out on the fin before it gets sketchy.

From the tippy top. Looking north in Washington state, Underwood WA is up there someplace. Columbia River below.

Looking west from the top.

A Grass Widow on the lower point.

The keen eyed can spot the same grass widow in the lower left. Across is Washington Highway 14 and the train tracks cutting through several headlands by tunnel. Also the Broughton Flume cut across the hillside here on its way from Underwood/Mill A to the lumbermill at Hood, WA (near fish hatchery west of Bingen).

A brave photographer challenges the wind to take that perfect shot.

Grass widow in the moss.

Grass Widows (Olsynium douglasii) are drooping purple crocusesque flowers that grow in meadows along the Columbia River, though the phrase has another more common meaning. Saturday the weather was mild enough to head out for a brief hike. Little streams running everywhere, though the grass is still yellow with only the occasional spot of green by a vernal pool or moss. R spotted this one along a faint path along the canyon holding Catherine Creek. This is about 70 miles east of Portland on the Washington side. It was not too windy, and on the way out there were a few frogs calling from the pools. Ah.

That’s Mt Hood to the SW through the haze.

Time to update your maps!

Volcanic activity in the Red Sea has broken through sea level (as it were) and created a new island.

..

Okay how many baby weasel pictures do you want to see? A lot? More than a lot?

Well, this site will get you started, but there will never be enough…

..

(via Edward “Eigerman” Whats-his-name)

(Personally I turn the sound off when I watch these. Put some music on you’d actually listen to.)

(…and of course watch full-screen…)

Finding Oregon from Uncage the Soul Productions on Vimeo.

..

(also on Hooray Reality)

..

Psych! it’s actually liverwort, real close.

From a beautiful collection of submissions to The Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, via the Big Picture.

This week a dam that’s blocked salmon runs since 1913 on the White Salmon River in Washington State was breached. Don’t expect to see the whole dam explode, they take out a bit of the bottom with 700 lbs of dynamite and the water pours out. The “after” view of the lake that was behind the dam is really impressive.

Not only will the salmon be able to get back up the river (past BZ Corner, where there’s a big waterfall?) but white water rafting and fishing on the river is going to get even better in a few years.

The power company that ran the Condit Dam had to add a fish ladder for the salmon if they were going to get the dam re-certified–they decided the cost of constructing the fish ladder was more than the profit the dam made them, so they are dismantling the dam instead.

National Geographic has another version of the video which includes nice time-lapse of the lake emptying out, but also includes really annoying ads.

We discovered that bats use echolocation (sonar) in 1940.

Colobus monkeys (Colobus guereza)

HAPPY COLOBUS DAY

The colobus are old-world monkeys of Africa.
They almost never touch the ground.
They are pretty.
In 1492 they did pretty much the same shit they did in 1491.

(via Bad Astronomer)

Not a huge amount of information yet, but looks like there’s a forest fire along the Timberline Trail on Mt Hood near Elk Cove and Vista Ridge. Depressing–this is some of the prettiest part of the mountain, and my family’s favorite area, historically, for backpacking. Add to that that it’s nearish to the family homestead at Cooper Spur Junction (though the burn from previous much closer Gnarl Ridge fire is apparently acting as a sort of fire break). Amazing photo by Adam Lepierre via the Hood River News.

The Northwest Interagency Coordination Center

Inciweb

updates:

• 10/11/2011: It’s pretty much over. Looks like everything in the alpine and subalpine area from Elliott Creek to Cathedral Ridge on the north side of the mountain is ash. Luckily not much of the over-cut timber land outside the wilderness area was burned. Thank goodness! OK, the upside is that there will be a lot of morels and wildflowers in this area for the next decade. And the views will be better. But it’s still very sad.

• 9/6/2011: The fire spreads west around the mountain. Updated map. Very depressing.

• 9/3/2011: from inciweb: strong winds out of the east pushed the western flank of the Dollar Lake fire to the west in the Mt. Hood Wilderness. By Saturday afternoon, the fire had spread as far west as Cathedral Ridge and the Mazama Trail area. They have yet to update the map to reflect this, but this may mean Eden Park is burnt up.
• Picture from KATU
• 

• 9/2/2011: Finally added to Inciweb: http://www.inciweb.org/incident/2563/.

And my own synthesis of the fire map on Inciweb and features, including location of Grandma’s house/Tamarack/the mountain house. Does seem like it’s not hit the Cairn Basin/Wyeast Basin/Eden Park area (yet).

•  08/31/ 2011 8:12 PM: Sounding hopeful. Weather projected to be cool until Saturday.

We just returned from Cooper Spur and a nice dinner with friends. Everything is calm, and there are a lot of fire resources such as tankers and engines on standby in the area as well as at Cloud Cap. I can tell you it was very cool there, somewhere in the low 50′s.

I talked to a Forest Service law enforcement officer, who was there keeping the ski area and Cloud Cap road closed, and the latest word she had was there is no indication of any evacuation of the Cooper Spur area at this time. However, the fire people did commit equipment to the area on the basis of rather safe than sorry. — John F. Marker, Sentinel Orchards, Parkdale

•  08/30/2011: Parkdale fire chief synopsis

• 08/30/2011: a video of the view from Parkdale.

We had a bit of a time pushing the stroller up the hill, but mainly I made Alissa do it while I walked ahead to get my “flow” on. Don’t ask.

Anyway, we hiked up about a mile or a little more to the Anna S Mine complex, which had a few interesting features to see and explore. First and foremost was the nice vista which is like a huge gravel beach on the side of the mountain. It is really weird. This is the view:

and you can see what it looks like from across the valley in this photo:

There is a sign up there that calls this vista the Anna S Haunted Vista. According to the PA Hikes site above:

The vista is said to be haunted by coal miners that lost their lives here. During the late 1800s, there was a cable car setup for hauling coal across to Antrim. On occasions, coal miners would get into the coal gondolas to take a shorter ride across the valley as opposed to hiking down to the valley floor and then back up to their houses. Many times, unbeknownst to the operators of the cable cars, these gondolas would be shut down with people perched high above the valley below. On cold, winter nights these stranded miners would perish and their souls are said to haunt this area.

So yeah! It’s a ghost hike. Boo-ya!

Anyway, just beyond this vista is a huge complex of open areas and roads and gravel. I wandered around (while Alissa fed the baby) and saw this cool looking cistern:

as well as some other weird structures and ponds all with a strange blue green color:

I put two and too together and realized that this complex was a water filtration site to treat Acid Mine Drainage from the Mine (which has completely destroyed all life in Wilson and Babb Creeks below). I had heard that there had been a huge treatment project in recent years to de-acidify the water draining into these creeks. A quick internets google found this paper with more information about this reclamation project. Apparently this is the “largest passive treatment project to date in Pennsylvania”. Anyway, it was a pretty bizarre looking landscape up there and kind of fun to wander around.

We didn’t have too much time to spend up there, and we had to get the little one back. For good measure here is a picture of trail-side diaper changing: