Pacific Northwest Deciduous

 Day 25: While the East Coast revels in color in the Autumn, Pacific Northwesterners enjoy (if I may use the term loosely) a surfeit of earth-tones in the lowland deciduous woods. You'll notice I don't refer to Flatland's thickets as "forest." That is a word I reserve for the stately evergreens which dominate the mountain ridges from 2000' to timberline. There, by and large, the canopy is dense and the understory thin. That's not to say that there is no deciduous growth at the higher elevations. It makes incursions up stream and river beds, colonizes open space and puts up ramparts at the margins of forested stands. However, in Flatland, it grows thick and fast, and sheds a litter of leaves each fall which in turn support a variety of vines and brush, making cross-country almost impossible without a machete. The jungle-like tangle is a paradise for a wider and less specialized wildlife population than those species which inhabit the restrictive alpine and subalpine regions. Here, food is plentiful and protection from predators is readily available to small critters of all sorts.

That said, the deciduous Pacific Northwest is nothing if not brown in Autumn. There are some reds, but they are rarities amid blander hues. Yellows quickly fade into the murk of browns from tan to chocolate, returning to the Earth without flamboyance, without a shout. When fall comes, the lowland forest curls up quietly and goes to sleep, trusting the evergreens to keep things in line until the spring.