To All

Happy New year, and a Joyous Holiday Season!

Anyone’s guess…

Alder

It grows in disturbed areas, sometimes where other shrubs cannot establish themselves. I’ve seen dense thickets of it cover old forest roads, establish itself on burned hillsides and provide green growth in avalanche tracks.

I know that it improves soil fertility by fixing atmospheric nitrogen in nodules on its roots.

I’ve had it make me extremely uncomfortable when I had to push my way through its dense growth that completely covered a back country trail while hoping that the bear who left a fresh pile of scat and minutes-old tracks on the trail was not still in its almost impenetrable thicket.

Yet it was only recently that I realized that there is also beauty to be found in the tiny flowers in its long and drooping male catkins.

Sitka Alder ~ Alnus viridis 6/5

Wildflowers of spring (8)

With a few warm days recently and plenty of rain the wildflower blooms are coming rapidly now, as though they are trying to catch up to the season. I’m still trying to post to document them but feel like I’m losing ground.

Yellow Corabells, Fuzzy Emera ~ Elera racemosa 5/29

Common Sheep Sorrel ~ Rumex acetosella 5/29

Common Dogmustard ~ Erucastrum gallicum 5/29

Suksdorf’s desert-parsley ~ Lomatium suksdorfii 5/29

Chokecherry ~ Prunus virginiana 5/29

Siberian Springbeauty ~ Claytonia sibirica 5/29

Summer’s work, winter’s comfort

One advantage of living away from the cities and near the forests is the ability to utilize wood heat, if you don’t mind doing a little work for it. This is about twenty five tons of wood which will heat our home for the next three years. It also serves as an exercise room: note on the right end of the log deck in the last photo the tools that will be used to turn it into firewood.

High water

We are fortunate here in western Montana, at least for the most part, to not be threatened by flooding because this part of the country is not flat, thereby greatly reducing the temptation to conduct our businesses and our lives at the same elevation as the rivers which go through major changes each year when the mountain snow begins to melt.

Just down stream from where I live, there is a small section of rapids on the Clark Fork River, and in the middle of the river at the head of the rapids is a huge boulder, placed there by Mother Nature about 12,000 years ago so I can gauge the relative depth of the river at that point. The first of these two photos was taken during a time of low water, and the top of the boulder is eight to ten feet above the water. The second was taken today at about the peak of our spring run-off and the top of the boulder is just below the turbulence seen in the middle of the river. (The perspective of the two photos is somewhat different because today the water level would not permit me to access the location from which the first photo was taken.)