Jaci Dawn

I love insects for the most part. And a healthy high desert stream has a lot of insect life.

Apart from the nasty mosquitoes (tiny buggers that leave fluid-filled welts), most of the insects we encountered were fairly benign creatures (to humans and dogs). Well, the western yellowjackets (Vespula pensylvanica) are probably not entirely benign to humans and dogs (especially Murphy) but they weren’t trying to attack anyone and Murphy didn’t annoy them enough to get stung. Harvey did, but he’s not allergic and he got over it rapidly.

The wasps were thirsty and came to the water’s edge time after time, delicately balancing on their six legs atop the water’s surface and floating like the water skippers.

Other insects (like the grasshopper infestation) tend to sink and drown, but the yellowjackets are like tiny rafts on rippling water. I assume they are somehow storing water that they take back to their nest to distribute to the wasp grubs, but I really have no idea. Any takers?

Lorquin’s Admiral is a very common butterfly of the high country.

This stink bug hitched a ride into Field’s Station with us. I looked it up and discovered it is a Say’s Stinkbug (chlorochroa sayi).

Whatever this caterpillar will be when it grows up, it likes cockleburs. It didn’t move much the entire few days we camped by the big rock. Colorful fellow but camoflaged by the pink rock and colorful lichens.

This tiny Gray Hairstreak (Strymon melinus) liked the cockleburs, too. And yes, it really is called a “hairstreak” – if only the grey hairs on a human head could be so striking!

This little butterfly is hard to capture with a camera. Great Basin wood nymph (cercyonis sthenele).

While I was chasing the Great Basin wood nymph, I accidentally captured resting dragon flies. There are always dragon flies.

This one was an accidental capture as well. I turned the camera back where the wood nymph had just been a second ago and discovered a different butterfly hiding there. I’m fairly certain this is Milbert’s Tortoiseshell (nymphalis milberti).

My camera caught this one on the sagebrush way up the draw. I tried to get a better closeup so I could later identify it but this was the best I could do. i am pretty certain it is a Becker’s white (pontia beckerii).

This was not a very focused photo (thanks, Harvey) , but it was enough for me to deduce the butterfly is a Pine white (neophasia menapia).

I had a great time tracking down the insects (butterflies mostly). It really helps if you have a good field guide (I used Kaufman’s Field Guide for Butterflies) and the Internet (the bugguide.net). There were way more insects than I could photograph. A person would need to spend three seasons sitting with a notebook, a camera with a great macro and several field guides to really understand the insect culture of a high desert creek and ecosystem.

So – for my NEXT camera: Macro lens and huge Zoom lens. Oh yeah, Baby!

ttfn!!

One of the reasons I love Pike Creek (and the entire Steens Mountain, but especially this one little creek) is the rocks.

There are the familiar basalt cliffs, shale talus slopes, and hidden thunder eggs. Before the public lands were turned into Wilderness, we used to rock hound up above the old mine for thunder eggs (geodes).

Down on the private property section of the creek, the boulders are house size and made up of some pink-and-white sedimentary composition. There are green rocks, too: startling green rocks.

I thought I’d post a photo blog of rocks tonight.

Green rocks and pink rocks and all kinds of rocks.

Pale green rocks and more.

Green rocks to pink rocks…

The pattern of white rock in the pink rock looks like some sort of ancient graffiti, but it isn’t: it’s a natural streaking.

It’s not just on one pink rock, but all of the big pink boulders are striated with white.

A different combination of colors: pink, peach, grey, purple.

Strange green boulders and green slide composition abut next to the pink rocks up the canyon.

Something altogether different in a pale grey stone chock full of tiny holes.

Add old lichens and new ones to the pink-and-white rocks and the effect is breath-taking.

I don’t know what it is about dropping over the pass and into the Alvord country, but I feel a sudden “Ahhhhhhhhhhhh” settle over my spirit when we do. There’s a junction at the bottom of the grade: south two miles to Fields and on to Nevada or north. We took north. The first five miles are paved, but then it turns into a wide gravel road that winds through ranches, the community of Andrews, and more ranches, turning along property lines and taking you steadily north. Cheat grass faded white, sagebrush and green alfalfa fields pass by until the last rise.

Suddenly, the earth drops off and you’re staring at the dry lake bed of the Alvord Desert on one side and rolling sagebrush foothills to Steens Mountain on the other side. There’s very little green except what is irrigated or where there is a natural water source (small springs up the draws and the natural hot springs at privately owned Alvord Hot Springs). One draw is always green: Pike Creek.

Pike Creek is glacier-fed from a multitude of springs in that high box canyon on the east side of Steens. It is a year-round creek, but I’ll post more on the water flow later.

It’s the house-sized boulders that fascinate. You can see them, littered down the canyon: remnants of some great glacial melt, push from that canyon and deposited along the hill side. They are not basalt rock, but some sort of sedimentary rock. And they aren’t ordinary colors: they are pink, green, purple, and then brown, black and white. The rocks are amazing and I will do an entire blog on them.

The road up takes some skill to navigate as the smaller boulders make up much of it.

You can’t see if anyone else is camped up there until you are right on top of them, so we always hold our breath going up: we want the campsite under the “big rock” with the juniper growing out of it, right at the very top of the camp ground.

(Yes, that’s Harvey barking. Harvey is always barking. Harvey can be a pest.)

We made it, we got our camp site, and we’re ready to do NOTHING for the next few days except to sit in our chairs and watch dogs play in the water or the wind blow up dust storms down on the Alvord.

ttfn –

I have very little time for the computer tonight (I’m behind on reading blogs but I *will* get caught up). How time just flies right now.

Last Saturday we crossed over the Cascades and dropped down into the more arid part of the state. It always fascinates me how you can be in the midst of fir forests with thick underbrush and moss on one side and on the other side, you’re into tall Ponderosa pine forest and a different kind of underbrush. Right on the Santiam Pass, the forest is all dead sticks: a reminder of forest fires past and a legal battle over salvage logging. The loggers lost that battle and the snags stand rotting, but the thick undergrowth provides a different kind of habitat and smaller mammals thrive. The corridor into Sisters and Bend has been managed to look like a forest preserve along the highway with all the undergrowth burned out (presumably to help stop wildfires through all the resorts).

Once past Sisters, we veered into Redmond and Prineville and country that is a mix of sagebrush land and pine forest, sometimes giving way to juniper forest. We took a back road to Post (the geographical center of Oregon) and on to Izee before we dropped south on a Forest Service road. A side note on Post: we once stopped there when the entire town was having a yard sale.

Don had an idea that we could camp at a USFS designated campground but when we got to that site, it was full. And full was really not what we wanted with two big dogs that like to bark at other dogs and children on bicycles. So we back-tracked a little and took a chance on a spur road and found a beautiful site right on a creek.

The only problem was…

We got to clean up after the previous campers.

There were more in the trees everywhere. Nearly all of the junk had been purchased at Safeway, so my bet is that the culprits live in Burns (the nearest Safeway). They used the cans for target practice. After we cleaned it up, the site was nice. And on our way through Burns, I deposited all the trash in the Safeway trash cans. Had anyone attempted to stop me, I would have pointed out that it was all Safeway trash and they ought to thank me for cleaning up the campsite and returning the items to the store that sold them.

It’s one of my pet peeves: people can haul all this stuff out into the woods (or on a backpack trip) when it’s full. But when it is empty and no longer weighs anything, they can’t be bothered to life a finger to pick it up and haul it back out. Yeah, I see that as real macho.

But garbage aside, we were beginning to relax.

We didn’t see many wild animals (probably pretty gun-shy after the last party), but we were at least in a healthy strip of Ponderosa pine with currants and sagebrush and wild grasses still green for the undercover. The stream had a healthy population of frogs, fingerling trout, and dragonfly nymphs. The mosquitoes were minimal, but that could have been our fancy new ‘Skeeter Beaters and the fact that the temperature dropped to less than 37-degrees (F) overnight.

Yeah, it got cold. Good thing we pack our winter coats when we go on vacation to the desert in August: I wore mine all morning plus a pair of fleece gloves to keep my hands cold. No camp fire: fire danger was “Extreme” or “High” everywhere we went. And just around the corner from this camp was a grim reminder of why a camp fire in August is not such a great idea.

I took the photo on the move, hence the window reflection.

Love the cows.

Until the next post – Jaci

I’ve been out of town for the past nine days and today was spent sorting through over 260 photos (narrowed down to 190-something).

Don and I loaded up the dogs into their car kennels and took them on a road trip to the high desert of Oregon’s Outback country. Our destination was in the very southeastern corner of the state: the Alvord Desert which is situated at the eastern base of Steens Mountain. It’s country that is rife with interesting geology, a healthy insect population, migratory birds (Malheur Wildlife Refuge is on the northwestern side of Steens Mountain with all of its wild marshes), reptiles and a few mammals. It is also one of our very favorite vacation destinations.

I will be posting about our adventures and the critters over the next few days (unless something else comes up and interrupts me). For now, I need to continue on with sorting through all those photos.

But before we left, we welcomed a new little life into our own little world: Eliran Jeremy Weisser was born at 6:37PM on August 12, 9#4oz and 21″ long. Eliran is Hebrew for “God is my Song”. He’ll be called Eli for short and he seemed so tiny when I held him Friday afternoon.

What can I say?

This is why they call them GRAND children. 🙂

Two boys, finally exhausted from bowling each other over in the back yard.

I am SO BUMMED. I took several photos of the sunrise this morning and absolutely NONE of them came out with the blood-red color of the sun as it rose above the smokey horizon to the east. It was a breath-taking red and why the camera couldn’t capture that color is probably a physics issue.

What the camera saw was this:

But what I saw was more like this:

Yeah, I had to color that in.

But it really was that breath-taking of a red sun. The smoke is from several wildfires in Washington State and in Central Oregon and as the sun rose up through the haze, it was glowing red.

I’m sad the photos did not come out – I waited all day to upload them and see. Crushing disappointment. If the sun is red tomorrow, I will take several more photos, changing my camera settings every time. Surely I will get one to come out??? I’d hate to face that disappointment again.

But I will live.

And speaking of living (this is totally unrelated to red suns): the duck is still alive! He was still hanging out at the same pond, in almost the same place he’s been since his last sibling died, but he’s lost his black-and-yellow down! The pin feathers are coming in and he’s starting to look like a mallard! A little mallard, but a mallard all the same. And he’s still living. If he gets much older, he will look like all the rest of the young mallards and we will lose track of him, but that’s a good thing. I am just amazed that a little orphan duck could survive so long.

And I am done with Photo 365.

Geese circling for landing – 363/365

A boring photo of ducks in a goose-feather lined pond. 364/365

And while he’s hard to see over there in the right hand side of the photo just above the brown spot of lawn, the last surviving duckling orphan is taking a nap.

We found the other baby dead on the lawn on the 27th. He was upside down and whole: my walking partner thinks a crow or something tried to carry him off & dropped him. Who knows? But the last duckling hasn’t traveled far since the loss of its last sibling.

Today I noted that it was keeping fairly close to the lone duck in the pond. 3 weeks old and the only survivor. But ducks don’t feel things the way humans do, and perhaps it is not as lonely as I imagine it is. Maybe a little lost on how to survive, but it’s made it this far. One week closer to pin feathers and one week closer to learning to fly.

And that’s the end of the story – for now.