Nisqually State Park

Day 17: Between nasty-cold weather and a sore knee, perambulations through Nature's wonders have been at a minimum for the last week or so, and my disposition has taken a turn toward decidedly crabby as a consequence. You hear a lot about Vitamin N these days, and my body demands more of it than most. So, what's to do? Bundle up and head for a relatively flat trail! Nisqually State Park offers a variety of old roads to walk with elevation changes of no more than about 500 feet. That's "flat" in my book, so I headed out with no particular plan in mind except to start at the beginning and go until I was "halfway." That's my criterion for turning around, and I'm a good judge of it, always leaving a little wiggle room for the trip back. I parked in the main parking area and started down the gut. I'd got roughly this far (about a quarter of a mile) before the real Plan surfaced in my mind. It seemed like a good time to explore some of the "bunny trails" which lead vaguely off to either side. The first one headed toward the river, but I was fairly certain it wouldn't descend to it and I was right. It wound in multiple mileage-adding S-curves, occasionally skirting the edge of the bluff but never providing a view of the river, then twisting back into mixed forest with its glades of ferns and thickets of salal. Once, it ventured within twenty feet of the main trail before bending back riverward. I followed it until it forced me back onto the main track. Not satisfied that I'd gone halfway, but not wanting to repeat another recent hike, I headed back toward parking, but then diverged onto a second "bunny trail" just to see where it would wind up. A mile or so later, it dumped me out onto a different road. I recognized the area, and since I knew where the road would take me, I just hoofed it back to the car. Did I find anything interesting? Maybe. I'm waiting for confirmation of an ID.

Bryo Cryo

Day 53: It's cold. Okay, it's only Pacific-Northwest cold, not East-Coast cold, but it's all a matter of what constitutes "normal" for the residents of any given area. I'm sure somebody in Florida would classify 40 degrees as "cold," 30 degrees as "damn cold" and 25 degrees as "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey," but here in the PNW, 22 degrees is cold enough to justify complaining. Let it drop into the teens, and we go into full-blown weather cursing. Now I happen to know that there are a lot of people out there who believe that colder winters disprove global warming, but they are confusing two non-interchangeable terms. "Weather" is what we get daily. It rains, it snows, we have a dry spell or a heatwave. That's "weather." Climate change is, in a short definition, a long-term shift in norms, e.g., a shift toward lower annual rainfall or hotter summers charted over decades or even centuries. There may be some backsliding in the graph, downturns when an unusually wet summer seems to make up for 20 years of dried-out lakes and glacial retreat, but when viewed from farther back temporally, a shift becomes obvious. Climate and weather are not the same thing, and while thousands may lose their lives in a meteorological event like a flood, a global shift in climate will make its effects known on all living creatures.