Ready To Roll On Weeds

Day 237: Once again this year, the Invasive Plant Council honoured me with an award for being one of their top three volunteers. I was asked to pick my prize from one of three items, and opted for a Patagonia "Black Hole" day-pack worth (gasp!) $129. It has convenient sleeves in the interior to hold various small items, one of which will be used to contain the brochures I hand out to land managers when appropriate. I've already put in several patrols this year. While I can't exactly claim to enjoy finding invasive species, having my time and effort recognized in this fashion softens the aggravation and annoyance of discovering large patches of Yellow Archangel, acres of Knapweed and patches of Poison Hemlock or concentrations of any of the other "baddies" on the state's blacklist. I treat them when possible: pulling, digging out or clipping seed heads as recommended for each individual species, or if the situation is obviously beyond the scope of one person's ability to handle, filing a report with EDDMapS for referral up the chain. Say 'bye-bye,' you weeds! Crow is coming to get you.

Yew Will Be Relocating

Day 58: The former owners of my property must have been on a tight budget. They planted a line of two dozen yews (species undetermined) along the front to serve as a hedge, spacing them uniformly until they ran out...about fifty feet from the actual corner of the lot. The remaining space was protected against trespassers by a three-line barbed wire fence which lasted a few years into my tenancy and then fell over. By then, a significant amount of unsightly brush had grown up in the gap where the fence had restricted mowing, so I left it as a deterrent and kept it trimmed back to a manageable mess. Then one day as I was walking around the yard, I spotted a couple of yew seedlings thirty feet from the hedge. At first, I thought they might have been the progeny of the sole female yew in the planting, but then I realized that they had propagated from pruned bits I'd dropped on my way to the burn pile. Nature herself had offered me a solution to the hedge gap, so I transplanted four or five to the line. Only one survived, possibly because I shaved the others off at ground level with the mower, not recalling where I'd put them until it was too late. Now I have another opportunity. I've staked out half a dozen volunteers, the tallest no more than six inches. Yew will be relocating some time this winter.

Been There, Done That

Day 83: The phenomenon first made itself known to me when I was about 45. I was engaged in a conversation about mountaineering with a couple of much younger friends and mentioned that I'd made six successful summits of Mount Rainier on five routes, only to see eyebrows go up in that inimitable, disbelieving arch which precedes the dismissive, "Oh, really? That's nice," phraseology which falls just short of calling the speaker a liar. Part of their skepticism could be blamed on my diminutive size, but the bulk of it lay with the silver threads which had begun to weave themselves into my raven-black hair. The older I got and the greyer I became, the more frequently my stories were met with suspicions of embellishment or outright doubt, and although that might have irritated another person, I found it amusing (if in a mildly aggravating way).

Last night, I had the slide projector out for another reason, and as I returned one slide to its catalogued slot in a plastic sleeve, it occurred to me to pull out a few others from my climbing files. Capturing them from the textured screen was a less than perfect process, but I did get better results than previous attempts with a scanner. All were taken on Mount Rainier: top left, on the crest of Disappointment Cleaver, 1988; bottom left, camp in the summit crater (ascent via Kautz Glacier), 1984; right, vertical ice climbing, Cowlitz Glacier, 1977. My last successful summit attempt on Mount Rainier was in 1990, and I continued climbing lesser peaks for another decade or so.