The Flying Monkeys of Zion

So there I was... surrounded by a scrum of scruffy fire fighters in a dimly lit garage in the shadow of The Sentinel, listening to a briefing of the surrounding hazards.  "So there's a huge propane tank behind the museum, and over here is the magazine for storing blasting caps that has a quarter-mile detonation radius, and this area over by Hurricane is called Monkey Fling Mesa and may have jet fuel and rockets..."  Yes, boys and girls, life is strange.

A crew from Mesa Verde had arrived at Zion National Park to assist with a 670 acre prescribed burn in the northwest area of the park to restore a ponderosa forest.  By the time we arrived, the weather forecast had changed; red flag warnings would be in place over the next several days along with above normal temperatures and relative humidity in the single digits.  Since the Rx-burn was cancelled, we were asked to remain in the park for the next few days to assist if a wildfire would occur.

Why is that area with the rockets called Monkey Fling Mesa, you ask?  It turns out that this area is where fighter jet ejection seats were designed and tested.  To ensure the rocket-seats were safe, chimpanzees were strapped into the rocket-propelled upholstery.   Therefore, at least one of my friends buttocks has benefited from a mach-1 monkey arcing 2000 feet above the desert floor.  Discuss.

The final bit of surrealism was having our campsite below the Altar of Sacrifice.  Being able to visit Zion National Park for the first time was a real treat.  The scenery is as stunningly majestic as Kings Canyon and Yosemite, except it is out of sandstone instead of granite.  It should be on your bucket-list of places to see, and maybe it already is because the park gets in excess of 3 million visitors per year.  The campground was constantly full, so plan accordingly. 

I really wanted to hike a little into the back-country, but since we needed to be close to the engines, our hikes could never get more than 2 miles away.  We were still able to see much of the valley, and did short hikes up the Watchman Overlook, Emerald Pools, and the end of the famous Narrows.  Near our campsite, little frogs would sing us to sleep while bats would wheel through the sky overhead.  We explored different parts of the park to familiarize ourselves with access roads and were able to visit Lava Point overlook and the Kolob Canyon Overlook.  Kolob Canyon looked amazing and still had pockets of snow hidden in the crevices.  There's lots to explore, so I hope to return soon and hike around a bit -- maybe starting with Angel's Landing?


Meanwhile, back at Mesa Verde, we have begun surveying some of our plants of special concern.  This included a nice hike down the Square Tower House trail to look for Aletes macdougalii (Indian Parsley), and another fun hike to Soda Canyon near Battleship Rock to look for the endemic Hackelia gracilenta (Mesa Verde Stickseed).

This Sunday would be a great time to visit some of these parks, since there will be an annular solar eclipse visible.  Many national parks are planning events around this astronomical event. 

Happy National Park Week!

 I hope everyone had a chance to take advantage of National Park Week: no entry fees!  It's nice being back, we saw a cattle drive going right past the entrance of Mesa Verde and while writing this entry, a pony-drawn carriage just went down the street with 3 girls. 



Since the spring here has been really warm, the plants are all running a week or two early... which makes us a week or two behind schedule!  We knocked out a few projects, the best of which was reseeding parts of Yucca House National Monument with native plants, such as Big Sagebrush, Four-Winged Saltbush, Globemallow, Dropseed, and a few others.  It rained that evening, so maybe they have a good start.



Another project has been identifying some of the species that form the cryptobiotic crust in the soils of cool, mesic environments.  My own research project also had to kick into high gear, with putting nets around a dozen budding Schmoll's Milkvetch plants.

My goal is to determine if Schmoll's Milkvetch is an obligate entomophile; a plant that requires an insect for pollination.  We were able to take a few nice photos of bees visiting the plant, so that is a good clue (free guided trip to Spring House Ruin to anyone that can name the species for me!).  Next is to determine if the plant can pollinate itself somehow.

For fun, we made a trip out to Telluride to see Cornet Falls (aka The Frozen Throne) once again.  Despite being there more than 2 weeks earlier than last year, half of the ice cone had already melted away.  The snow pack around Lizard Head pass was substantially less too.

Fortunately, we had a little rain and snow over the weekend, so hopefully the wildflowers are going to have another great summer.  For now, the La Platas still their cloak of snow and the mountains look spectacular.

I Feel Refreshed

We're back for a three-peat season at MEVE! March has been warmer than normal, which has hastened the bolting of many early-season plants. The past two years, it had snowed on my first day of work, but this time it was 78 degrees and sunny. Very pleasant weather, except in the distance I could see the snow disappearing day by day in the La Plata mountains. That snow pack is needed for the summer wildflowers, stream flows, and the montane forests.

Before I had the chance to fully acclimatize to the altitude, we had the red-card refresher course. After a winter of very little physical activity, I was concerned how I'd do on the pack test, but I was able to finish the 3 miles with 5 minutes to spare. That afternoon, the winds kicked up into a red-flag warning and the forecast had called for gusts of 55 mph, so there was concern that a few field burns on agricultural lands would get away. Fortunately, we weren't called up for duty on my first day. Whew!

As luck would have it, the Four Corners received a decent snowfall over the weekend; a little over an inch fell on the Mesa and 4-8" fell across the South San Juans. That should help keep springtime green, and a little boost to the 48,000 baby pondos planted last week at our nearby national forest.

How To Know You're in the 21st Century

And now it's time for something completely different. Every now and then, I come across something that makes me pause, maybe get goosebumps, and maybe even say something profound such as "duuuuuuuuude". A few good examples would be the sequencing of the human genome (happy DNA day on April 20th!), pushing the frontiers of particle physics with the Large Hadron Collider, or merging the boundaries of technology and art to create wonders...

But perhaps the best indicator I live in a new century: The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia

761 planets and counting (image courtesy of NASA/JPL). These are just the confirmed results; Kepler has another 2,321 candidates in the queue and that number will keep climbing. Considering Kepler's field of view is just the right wing of Cygnus, the number of planets awaiting discovery is, umm, astronomical.

What is perplexing is that despite the overwhelming success of Kepler discovering new worlds is that there appears to be no follow up missions. A delay might be explained by the James Webb Telescope going way over-budget and its launched delayed almost a decade. There were some difficult technological challenges with Darwin and the Terrestrial Planet Finder, but aside from JWT, NASA does not have any big exploration missions on the books. It looks like there is finally planning for a successor to Hubble called ATLAST, but it likely will not launch until 2030! Ouch! Perhaps that is being realistic, but it sure is a far cry from the Apollo-type mandates.

One ray of hope is shining from the ESA, who is proposing a follow-up mission to Kepler called PLATO. It will scan about 250,000 stars, so about 10 times the results from Kepler. It is not expected to launch until 2018. I suppose patience is a virtue, since by the time we can actually study these new found worlds we will have discovered over 20,000 of them!

Bees & Birds

Calm down; there's still 5 more days to log your Great Backyard Bird Counts (although the observations must be for dates Feb 17-20th). Almost 100,000 lists have been submitted for this year, which is a record setting pace. It's always fun for a bird nerd to peruse the past results, and this year's interesting bird is the Snowy Owl with a record number of observations. I had read in December from several sources that this winter was likely going to have an unusual irruption of Snowy Owls, which might be due to a predator-prey oscillation. A great example is it is the first time a Snowy Owl was ever seen in Hawaii, and there was even one spotted near my winter foraging grounds in Texas!

Our GBBC list was not the best this year, since we didn't record some of our regular visitors over the weekend (downy and red-bellied woodpeckers, and white-throated sparrows have often made our list). My favorite was going to a nearby pond by the library where we counted over 70 Lesser Scaup! We also saw some American Widgeons hiding among the Mallards, and like the Scaup, will be migrating north soon. Since central Texas experienced record drought over the summer, I was concerned how this might impact migratory bird populations. I don't know how accurately the GBBS counts can be used to track population counts from year to year, but it was comforting to see the species counts were at least very similar so far.

Oh, and speaking of migrating north for the summer, so are we. I'm going for a 3-peat season at MEVE!

One of the activities I'm excited about this year is studying how some of the rare plants produce viable seeds. I had read a book called The Forgotten Pollinators and one of the topics about the Allee Effect made me consider if it could be the reason behind the inexplicable range of Schmoll's Milkvetch. Schmoll's Milkvetch is an endemic for the park, and grows only on a few mesa tops. There seems nothing particularly special about its habitat requirements, which made me wonder if the fruits are not viable due to lack of proper pollination. If so, is the lack of pollinators because there are too few plants left to support the pollinators? We hope to do a few experiments and determine if Schmoll's requires a pollinator to cross-fertilize the plants. If it does, it would be interesting to find out who it is (or was), and if the pollinator needs protection along with the rare plants. There could be other reasons for the limited range, but this research has never been done for Schmoll's, or any of our rare plants for that matter, so enlightenment awaits! Stay tuned for more exciting details!!!

As if anticipating my research, our Yellow jessamine-trumpet vine flowered like crazy and attracted a bunch of these pretty green-metallic halictid bees in the photo. Extra credit to anyone who identifies them.

Migrations

It was great having a few weeks off to enjoy the changing of the seasons in the mountains. The aspen trees turned their glorious gold, the oaks and serviceberry turned into ruddish browns, and soon the peaks had dustings of snow. We went on little hikes to scenic Spud Lake and the ghost town of Ironton. A longer overnight hike took us to Blaine Basin at the foot of Mount Sneffels, which had really neat examples of glacial moraines still actively eroding, along with a couple of waterfalls to explore.



You might think that Mt. Sneffels and the surrounding public lands in its shadow was included in the Mount Sneffels Wilderness, but you'd be wrong. The exciting news is that there is pending legislation before congress to be reviewed on November 10th to expand it by 22,000 acres to include the mountain! Please pester your favorite politician to make it happen, since it is an uncontested no-brainer of a designation; the only industry impacted, recreation, has grandfathered exemptions to continue heli-skiing and the hardrock races.


As Aldo Leopold eloquently said, "the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech."


We made one last trip up to The Meadows to visit George before the snows set in. We're glad we did, since the upper elevations were soon socked in with snow. Wolf Creek Pass got over 36" and the ski valley had its earliest open season ever on October 8th. Since I hadn't been skiing since Snoqualmie a few years back (on its latest open day ever, May 25th), we had to check it out. The snow was great, but they only had enough staff to run 3 lifts. Whoa, I needed the practice!


Then it was time to pack up and drive the long, lonely road home.

End of the Season

One of the wonderful aspects of working at Mesa Verde is the opportunity to make casual discoveries while walking about. Last year, it was a parrot figurine we found at Yucca House that piqued the interest of the archeologists. This year we were surveying the only known population of Acer grandidentatum (big-toothed maple) to exist in Colorado, which only grow along the north escarpment in the park. The terrain is really steep in places, so it's some of the least explored, and this is when I stumbled across Squirrel-Bear. I call him that, because the body looks like a bear to me, but the long tail makes me think of a squirrel. The archies were interested in him too, so they picked him up and brought it back to the lab for scrutiny. Surface finds like this, especially without the context of an ancient ruin nearby, can be tricky to date, but squirrel-bear was unique enough to that it was important to investigate. Looking under magnification, it became clear that the quartzite was worked by steel tools, and therefore historic. While it's not 100% conclusive, it was probably a Navajo fetish, since near the area was an old hogan and sweat lodge. Alas, probably not cool enough to go on display in the new visitor center, but it made me keep my eyes open.

The past few weeks of work went by very quickly, as they always seem to do. We headed into areas of the park I had never visited before, which is always a treat. One of the archeologists had spotted Ulmus pumila (Siberian Elms) growing in an ancient kiva on Battleship Rock. The kiva was one of the largest I had seen, although mostly buried under sand and shrubs. It was an interesting place to be, mostly since the archie escorting me was kind enough to take the time to explain all that I was seeing. After that, I spent a week with the Lake Mead EPMT team chasing weeds and dodging lightning bolts.


One of the biologists had placed a wildlife camera at one of the springs and got a series of amazing images of these pumas. I had seen a few paw prints and drag marks, but I'd never seen a mountain lion before... and still haven't... but I'm certain they've been watching me.

On my 2nd to last day, they needed someone to rotate onto a wildlife surveying shift... in a helicopter! My crew-boss graciously asked them to let me go, since I had been whining about missing a helicopter flight last year (2 of my crew last year were flown to a fire). This was my first time on a 'copter, so wasn't sure what to expect, so I popped some Dramamine and waited for the shift. My job was simple; look out the window for wildlife, call out anything interesting, waypoint it, and writedown the location, sex, and count.

The 'copter took off, turned, and started flying towards the south-east corner of the park to begin a series of North-South running transects. We were flying low, but also somewhat slow, to give us a chance to survey. It was really awesome flying over canyons... the same canyons that would take a half day long slog of a hike and were were just into the breezing blue like it was nothing but a walk in the park. The eastern mesa ends in a series of cliffs and steep slopes down to the river, so the 1st transect was fun topography... oh, there's an ancient ruin... I wonder why no sagebrush grows there... hey, is that an eeellllllkkkkk!?!?!? The co-pilot had just pointed out a herd of elk and before I knew it, the pilot had spun the copter and begun a dive at the same time, spiraling in close to allow the biologists a chance to photograph them. The first spiral-dive really caught me unawares, and I was suddenly glad for the dramamine as I fumbled with the GPS unit and tried to listen in on the counts. After I knew what to expect, it wasn't so scary, but there were certainly IMAX-like scenes of ridges and cliffs looming before us, especially along the north escarpments. The coolest thing was watching the pilot maneuver the 'copter broadsides down a canyon for survey photography-- it was really unnatural to look out the front when the motion was sideways with a pronounced yaw.

It was a terrific way to end the season; now if only I could fly home instead of drive. I won't be leaving for a little longer, since watching the aspens turn color and seeing the first major snowfalls are great incentives to stick around and I have the free time to soak it in. Meanwhile, is anyone interested in a not-so-gently-used alarm clock?