Chattermarks

By Daniel Matthews

Editor’s note: Renowned Northwest naturalist Daniel Mathews, author of Cascade-Olympic Natural History, recently released a new field guide with a twist — “Northwest Mountain Wildflowers” isn’t the trailside book you might expect, but an iPhone app. Interested in this new format for field guides, we asked him to share some information on what the app does, what his motivations were in creating an electronic guide and whether or not he thinks there are any drawbacks to this technology.

I have released a field guide for iPhone and iPod touch, called Northwest Mountain Wildflowers, based on my books Cascade-Olympic Natural History and Rocky Mountain Natural History. It covers 514 species, illustrated with more than 830 photos, and it weighs nothing, or at least adds nothing to the weight of your mobile device if you’re carrying one.

It does not require being online or on a cell network, as the content is contained in memory, and it works just the same on iPod touch as on iPhone. (When the user does happen to be connected, they can use direct links from species pages to the same species in EFlora BC and the Washington herbarium website.)

» Continue reading New NW wildflower field guide for iPhones

As much as we love North Cascadian landscapes, we here at the Institute are still called to visit and experience other amazing places on our planet. We publish accounts of the places Institute staff and graduate students visit in our Road Trip series.

About this time last year, summer solstice, with its long days filled with light and birdsong, I left Bellingham and headed out on a pilgrimage to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons national parks. It is a tradition of mine to spend some portion of my summer out there in the glory of western Wyoming. Having lived for a few years as a snowboard bum/river rat in Jackson Hole in the late 1990s, I have tasted the ineffable sweetness of summertime in the Tetons and the surrounding Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Once you sip that nectar, it is impossible not to go back for more whenever possible.

This particular road trip with two good friends, one from Portland, another from San Francisco, started with a visit to Yellowstone’s northeastern Lamar Valley, an area of the park renowned for wildlife viewing opportunities and a more remote feeling than other popular attractions like Old Faithful or the springs at Mammoth. We spent two nights at the lovely Lamar Field Station in the heart of the valley, a rustic outpost that is operated by the Yellowstone Association as accommodations for many of their field excursions.

Approaching the Yellowstone Association’s Lamar Field Station

Out the front door of our cabin was a view across the verdant valley in fresh flush, studded with silhouettes of hundreds of bison grazing with their young. Out the back door, a trail followed a creek back to Druid Peak, the famed mountain where Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt let loose Canadian wolves in 1995 to reintroduce this vital carnivore to the ecosystem. It felt like a holy place, this ground where our culture made an attempt to right a wrong from the past, where the food chain thrives in all of its perfect, intact elegance.

» Continue reading Road Trip: Yellowstone

As students in the Masters of Environmental Education program, naturalizing is at the forefront of our studies. Our curriculum encourages, and requires, us to get outside and document our experiences in nature. We keep journals marked with sketches, notes and questions that record our findings and observations as we explore the North Cascades landscape.

As the spring months of April and May have greeted us, so have the birds. Our winged residents have returned to the North Cascades and many of us have been eagerly watching. A major perk of living in North Cascades National Park for a year is the opportunity to live deep in the mountain landscape under Colonial and Pyramid peaks, and keep close watch of the changing seasons throughout our year-long residency in this place.

With my home at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center in close proximity to the forest, I have found myself in the midst of an ironic naturalist’s moment with birds. For several months, I have closely observed web cams zoomed in on an eagle’s nest located in Iowa, and another located on Hornby Island near Vancouver Island. While immersed in close observations of the intimate lives of eagle parents feeding and caring for their chicks, I noticed a red-breasted sapsucker prospecting a lodgepole pine right out my back door.

» Continue reading Birding Tools of the 21st Century

Two weeks ago I headed down valley on my spring break. Somewhere around Everett, it suddenly hit me that the world was GREEN. I realized that the ‘green’ had probably started happening before I got to Everett, but I was so accustomed to a landscape dominated by the darker shades of evergreens that suddenly noticing the pale greens of new growth was a shock to me. Although we had started noticing signs of spring over the last month, we were also still getting some snow, and spring was moving rather slowly.

I got a nice preview of what was to come while down in Oregon and the Seattle area. But I was glad to see that even when I returned to the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center on May first, leaf buds were still just beginning to open. In the last week-and-a-half, we have had enough sunshine and warmer temperatures that we can finally say that spring is here. In addition to a plethora of new vegetation, the Learning Center has been swarmed by an increasing number of birds. The robins, dark-eyed juncos, warblers, thrushes and wrens have been joined by rufous hummingbirds. And they are not messing around. Staff and Mountain School students who are wearing brightly colored clothing must be wary of these tiny avian fighter pilots dive-bombing them in search of nectar.

Red-flowering currant, a favorite target for the hummingbirds

Yellow wood violets add some color to the forest

Swordfern fiddleheads poke up like upside-down seahorses

Salal is one of the slowest budding plants, with only tiny new growth visible

Colts foot, one of the earliest new plants to emerge, is now more than a foot tall

The new growth on Devil’s club looks like an alien weapon

Kinnikinick has tiny pink and white flowers that will become red berries in summer

What will become Oregon grape berries are just beginning to emerge

Red huckleberry leaves are popping out from pale pink buds

Tiny leaves are emerging from one of the few beaked hazelnuts on campus

An unusual black lichen sprout amongst some moss

Before we know it all of the trees will be fully leafed out and three feet of snow will be a distant memory. In the meantime, we will continue to delight in the surprises of walking down a trail with a group of Mountain School students and seeing what new sign of spring has popped up.

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Institute writing instructor Ana Maria Spagna’s new collection of essays Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness. Join us at Mount Vernon’s Libation Station on May 6 for a free reading and author reception — more information on this and other readings in Seattle, Concrete, Darrington and elsewhere at www.ncascades.org.

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All summer the threat of a catastrophic wildfire had cast a pall over the valley. Ferns browned up and bowed over. Twigs snapped under Vibram soles, and we winced.  I’d spent so much dread on wildfires that I’d forgotten completely about floods. Besides, after that 100-year flood eight years back, didn’t we have a 92 year hiatus coming?

“Come on,” Laurie said.

She pointed to my boots strewn where I’d left them after my last day of trail work. I pulled them on, and we headed out. The extension cords in the yard were now completely submerged and barely visible. The earth had been too dry for too long, and now it would not accept water, but repelled it, dust-like, so that the whole forest floor was filling up like a series of plastic kiddy pools. Hydrophobic, people would say later: the soil had gone hydrophobic.

Laurie and I splashed on through. As we neared the river, the puddles began moving in rivulets that divided and spread like a crowd racing for their cars after a ball game. We stood on the bank with our camera and waved at neighbors and schoolkids standing on the opposite bank. Laurie jumped up and down and clapped as water sprayed over the top of a small log jam, like surf over tide pools. The kids mimicked her.

I stood still.

The air buzzed with excitement, but I resisted. Sure, as a seasonal laborer on backcountry trail crews, I’d been free to give in to it. We cheered when trail bridges washed out; if it meant more work for us, so be it. Nature wins! we’d say.  And we believed it. The river not only had more might than us, I figured back then, but more right, too. Once, when I worked in Canyonlands in Utah, a visitor had knocked at my door in the middle of the night to tell me about a rattlesnake she’d seen in the backcountry. Someone should do something about it, she said. The park belongs to the rattlesnakes, I said, and I shut the door. For many years I believed something similar about floods. The valley belongs to the river. The difference, of course, was that now that we’d settled down and bought land and built a home, we belonged to the valley too.

On our way back home, a familiar pickup slowed next to us.

“I think it’s gonna get wild,” the driver said.

» Continue reading Ana Maria Spagna’s “Spawning in the Mud”

I recently had the opportunity to join Megan McGinty, North Cascades Institutes’ Climate Challenge Program Coordinator, in Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a meeting with representatives from several other environmental learning centers that will all be offering trainings this summer on how to teach climate change in the classroom. The meeting was hosted by Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, which is located near Cades Cove in the national park. The meeting included representatives from NatureBridge’s Headlands Institute (Golden Gate Natural Recreation Area) and Santa Monica Mountains Institute (Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area), as well as from Will Steger Foundation/Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, all of which will be leading teacher trainings over the summer.

The trainings are being sponsored and supported by the National Park Foundation’s Parks Climate Challenge program. In addition to the meeting being a great opportunity for me to learn more about the trainings that will assist roughly 120 teachers in effectively teaching their students about climate change in the context of our national parks, I was also able to learn more about the different national park-based environmental education organizations and how they share their natural resources with students.   While at Tremont, we had the opportunity to observe students participating in their school program, as well as participate in a citizen-science phenology plot activity, studying where different plants are in their seasonal life-cycle.

» Continue reading Spring in the Smokies

Several weeks back, North Cascades Environmental Learning Center was abuzz with talk of an animal kill on campus near the Peninsula Trail behind the dining hall.

A chunk of fur found on the peninsula by Remote Medical International instructor and former North Cascades Institute staff member, Adam Russell, was the first clue to the kill. Adam had found the hair while observing a rescue scenario conducted by Wilderness EMT students who were staying at the Learning Center at the time. What was unique about the hair Adam found was how it was clipped from the missing carcass in clean cuts, as if it had been cut by scissors. Naturalist sleuths made hypotheses that it was a feline kill, as cats use their incisors to clip their prey’s fur in chunks.

Adam and several others did a brief sweep of the peninsula to look for further signs of the kill, but none were found. Several days later, Institute staff member, Katie Roloson, and some friends were out for a canoe on Diablo Lake when they noticed a deer skeleton splayed on the rocky shore of the peninsula. The clues were starting to fit together, but the mystery remained. Many thought the carcass was less than a week old based on its condition, but no one knows for sure.

With the excitement of the new discovery, I decided to examine the evidence for myself.

» Continue reading Unsolved Mystery: Dinner on Diablo’s Shore

Last summer, during the first quarter of our graduate program, our professor John Miles had us read several excerpts by author Kathleen Dean Moore, a philosophy professor at Oregon State University. One of the first articles was “The Truth of the Barnacles: Rachel Carson and the Moral Significance of Wonder” from the journal Ethics & the Environment. The article was the perfect start to North Cascades Insitute’s M.Ed. in Environmental Education, as it gave us a perspective to view the art of naturalizing that we worked to perfect throughout the summer. One of my favorite quotes from the article was:

“Meanwhile, Earth turns, birds fly north or south, fish rise or sink in the currents, the moon spills light on snow or sand. And we, do we think we turn the crank that spins the Earth? A good dose of wonder, a night of roaring waves, a faceful of stars, the kick in the pants of an infinite universe, the huge unknowing these remind us that there is beauty that we didn’t create.”

» Continue reading Poking Around in Wonder

During my winter break back in the Midwest, I decided to visit a family place near a lake in northern Michigan for a few days for some “nature time.”  As much as I love seeing family and friends in the Chicago area, after a few days I start craving the abundant nature I have been spoiled by in the NorthCascades.  Fortunately, there is such a place that I grew up visiting every year, and only six hours away.

I arrived in northern Michigan late afternoon to a world coated by an inch of fluffy snow, which created a lovely winter wonderland.  My first step upon arrival is to always visit the lake to say hello and pay my respects.  The lake was not yet frozen, though there was a slushy ice ring around the shoreline, tinkling like little bells.  I took a short walk down the path along the lake and came across some tracks in the snow.  It was still lightly snowing, yet the tracks were distinct, so I knew they had to be relatively fresh.  As I bent down to examine them, I could not believe it—they were clearly bobcat tracks.  I had never seen bobcat tracks (or the real thing) here before, though perhaps I had not known what to look for in the past.

Back home at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center, I had gone on a few tracking hikes in early December and had been ecstatic to find bobcat tracks several times.  However, even though this house in Michigan is in a semi-rural area, I did not expect to find tracks here.  There are certainly plenty of deer, some turkeys, a very occasional bald eagle, and a few beaver that make their home in these woods. But I had never thought of the fauna to include bobcats, which I have always wanted to see.

» Continue reading Tracking Bob

The sheer power of water was apparent in the North Cascades this last weekend after a recent Pineapple Express hit the Northwest. Warming temperatures combined with a significant amount of rainfall fell onto several weeks worth of snow in the Cascades. Consequently, mountain creeks filled to the brim and several landslides covered Highway 20, closing a stretch of this road between the towns of Diablo and Newhalem. Several M.Ed. graduate students and our graduate coordinator were staying at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center and in the town of Diablo, and got to see this dynamic shift in nature first-hand.

At the Learning Center, the recent weather demonstrated how quickly land is shaped by water as we watched Sourdough Creek quadruple in size Sunday afternoon. This was an amazing shift to see as Sourdough typically runs as a trickle in late summer to a swiftly-flowing mountain creek in late spring. Sourdough Creek runs next to the Learning Center’s parking lot under a “Texas dip,” a removable piece of roadway designed to prevent washout. But this road feature was barely recognizable as the creek filled with brown, fast-running water that undercut the bank, causing large chunks of earth to collapse and wash away into Diablo Lake.

» Continue reading Natural Shifts in the North Cascades