The Accidental Naturalist

The Water Cycle to the Rescue

2012-02-03T09:52:00.000-08:00

Not your mother's water cycle.

So there I was, trying to get a handle on The Water Cycle and its many graphic renditions when The Book Structure suddenly appeared. I had been standing in front of my laptop for a while now, messing with chapter files, cutting and pasting things, dragging files into folders, rearranging folders, and never feeling quite certain that all my notes on clouds would ever flow into a unified whole.

Over the weekend, I left the laptop behind, took up pencil and paper, and worked my many chapter headings into a new order. After three days, I had circled a lot of words and drawn a lot of arrows to move them up and down on the paper.

Because my book on clouds is not plot driven, I needed an overall structure that would allow me to get from A to Z gracefully. My book is a funny hybrid--that personal narrative non-fiction genre--that is not exactly a collection of essays, a thriller-paced adventure in the clouds story, or a look-what-I-saw-today-whilst-wandering-and-musing natural history. Organizing my book by the ten cloud types seemed forced as there are some cloud types (altostratus for example) that didn't beg for their own chapter. I thought about a four-season approach, but the clouds don't want to cooperate. I studied the tables of content of some of my favorite books on clouds and natural history to see what I could steal. Nothing made my fingers itch so I switched gears and ended up on the floor with all the books I could find that contained an illustration of the water cycle (below).

But probably your mother's shag carpet.

I sat in the middle of all of these books, ignoring my cup of coffee (upper right), the clock without batteries and my laptop which decided to hibernate, and my prize-winning terrain model of western Washington (all top). Because there were so many books, I had to lunge onto my knees to reach each one from my spot in the middle of the floor. It was sure easier on my back than sitting at a big table or standing at my laptop and, after a few hours of lunging and squatting and reaching and stretching, I realized I was kind of doing yoga.

The physical part of yoga (the postures) I am told, is intended to prepare your body for the mental part of yoga (the meditation). Move your body for an hour and you can more easily sit still for another hour. During the second hour you will more easily experience inner calm, an insight, or an epiphany. Here is what my epiphany looked like:

Writing a book is child's play!

Maybe "epiphany" is too strong here. "Idea" is probably more suitable. What I had to say about clouds, it seemed, fell naturally into a pattern or structure that resembled a water cycle. I got out my scissors and tape and colored paper and chopped up my chapter titles, my list of themes, meteorological principles,cloud types, and geographic locations and then grouped them into the water cycle functions: Evaporation, Transport, Condensation, Evapo-transpriation, Precipitation, and Run-off. I shuffled things around a bit and then taped all my pesky little pieces of color-coded paper onto large yellow cards. By the end of the day I had arranged these cards into a funky but functional water cycle.

I was feeling really good about my work until my 17-year-old son appeared in the doorway to my paper-strewn office and said without the least bit of curiosity, "What the hell, Mom?"

I looked up, smiled proudly, and said, "It's my book."

The Water Cycle

2012-02-01T12:35:00.000-08:00

Winner for most artistic and mist-like arrows. (Source: National Geographic Society, Exploring Your World)

   Certainly everyone remembers their very first Water Cycle poster from elementary school. Typically, the poster featured a body of water, a land mass, and some clouds with three wide curving arrows showing how water moves (evaporates) from the ocean or lake, becomes (condenses into) clouds, which then rain or snow (precipitate) onto the land and then flow underground and/or back into the ocean or lake. Three arrow--ocean, cloud, land--right?--kind of like the plastics recycling logo.
   I am sure many of you are nodding your heads, happy to have remembered this much. And, I am sure many of you are shaking your heads and saying, "Ah, if it were only that simple!"
   Yesterday, I went in search of the water cycle illustration. I pulled several books from my book shelf, flipped to the index looking for "water cycle" or "hydrologic cycle." The first one I found (above) is the work of Robert Hynes and comes from my go-to geography books published by the National Geographic Society in 1989. The illustration is beautiful, misty, round, and feels fluid like a water cycle. However, it includes not three arrows but five. Or maybe two. Some of them are double headers. Naturally, because this is a product of the NGS, all you need to know is packed into a text block/caption adjacent to the illustration.
   Before reading that text, I went to my next favorite book and found another lovely misty scene (below) and was surprised to see that there were seven arrows and they did not move in the continuous cycle imprinted in my mind from grade school. Huh! I grabbed another book.

Pretty darn artistic, but the labels kind of ruin the mood. (Source: Ahrens, Meteorology Today)

That book was a college biology text book for a community-college class I signed up for fifteen years ago and then remembered I had two pre-schoolers at home and would have much homework, a lab, and an hour commute to the campus. I withdrew and kept the book--despite the fact that its water cycle looks more like a design for a water elevator (below). Rectilinearity aside, this illustration includes some enormous numbers--such as 425,000 cubic kilometers for the amount of water evaporated from the world oceans every year. Looking at water cycle maps without such numbers makes it easy to be lured into the notion that a big fat arrow is going to dump 425,000 cubic kilometers of water back on the earth. Do not be so lured. An estimated 385,000 cubic km of that evaporated ocean water falls as precipitation back into the ocean; and 111,000 cubic km falls onto land. That makes 496,000--not 425,000. The "extra" 71,000 cubic km of precipitation comes from evaporation from land plants (evapotranspiration).

(Source: Starr/Taggart, Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life)

I reached for my least popular cloud book, Cloud Physics: A Popular Introduction to Applied Meteorology, which included an illustration I mistook for a water cycle diagram (below). It is not, but you can see my confusion.

A cascade impactor may move water, but it does not seem capable of producing clouds. (Source: Battan: Cloud Physics)

I almost missed this diagram (below) in my best-present-ever-from-my-husband-that-wasn't-butterfly-larvae book. The coastal landscape was unscenic, the clouds were not lovely, it was black-and-white, and the the cycle just didn't flow the way I wanted it to. This diagram resembles a cascade impactor (above).

(Source: Allaby, Encylopedia of Weather and Climate)

A few books on my shelf are too smart for me. There were no color pictures in it. Nor were there any diagrams that represented the water cycle. I did wonder if this equation (below) might be the water cycle in code, but decided to turn the page.

Huh? (Source: McIntosh/Thom, Essentials of Meterology)

And I saw this:

I really like this, but it is a diagram of the exchange of air in the troposphere. (Source: ibid)

And then this:
These caught my eye, but represent convergence, divergence, and vertical motion of something called "flow" I think that's air. (Source: ibid)

And then, from yet another book, this:

A little something from the HR Department? (Source: Barry/Chorley: Atmosphere, Weather & Climate)

Lastly, in a most wonderful book, I found a water cycle lacking in artistry, color, and clouds (!) but one that depicts with elegant simplicity my local, Puget Sound water cycle (below). In fact, the vantage point of the reader, the Olympic Mountains are on left, Cascades on the right, and where I live, right in the center. And it has a dizzying array of arrows--about two dozen of them. This water cycle gets under my skin. In a good way.

Source: Kruckerberg, The Natural History of Puget Sound Country

  At this point, dear reader, you are probably wondering where I am going with all this. Perhaps you are dreading a somewhat longish explanation (in words) of the water cycle according the Accidental Naturalist. No, this would be too much at the end of an already longish posting.
   What I want to tell you is that after my unplanned and exciting foray into The Water Cycle, my arrow counting, my analysis of straight and curving lines, I seem to have discovered the perfect way to organize my book on clouds.
   More on that in my next posting.

Note: All photographs of illustrations from books paid for or borrowed by the Accidental Naturalist.

Storm Damage in Olympia

2012-01-21T09:09:00.000-08:00

Mountaineer-approved footwear? I think not.

Without power for a second day, I set off for downtown Olympia yesterday under they gray and over the slush. I found a free electrical outlet at Traditions Cafe and worked on my laptop for about twenty minutes before the power went out downtown and my battery blipped out. So I headed back home along Capitol Way. What a mess.

It looked like a tornado had hit. The ten inches of heavy, wet snow combined with freezing rain had split trees down the middle, ripped off branches left and right, and felled quite a few.

I thought about hopping on a bus, but wanted the exercise and adventure of seeing the damage from the storm first-hand. I walked mostly--on and off the sidewalks--and listened carefully for cracking branches.

Walkers near Sylvester Park--not quite safe on the street or sidewalk.

Misty rain, low clouds, and air pollution from wood-burning stoves cast a pall over the city.

Trees along Capitol Way will likely not survive this kind of damage.

Many of the large old trees on the Capitol Campus won't either.

Thick ice coated every twig and leaf bud.

Footpaths around downed trees put pedestrians onto the street.

A bit of color in a bleak landscape.

Downed power lines lay across the sidewalk.

This beautiful weeping cherry off Carlyon Rd. is--was--a local landmark in spring.

Neighborhood roads were deep in slush and fallen limbs.

Air quality was poor.

Sagging power-lines under the weight of this snow-laden tree.

Home again, safe and sound, to feed the birds. I wonder how their nests fared the storm.

Sublime Snowmen

2012-01-18T17:42:00.000-08:00

   What a delightful afternoon of skiing through my neighborhood. Thanks to the ten inches of snow we got in Olympia, I was able to step into my skis at my front door and schuss down the middle of the road, across main thoroughfares, on the sidewalks, and across playing fields and front yards. I never had to take my skis off to portage over pavement.
   There were quite a few Nordic skiers out today as well as one Alpine skier (what a workout!), several snow-shoers, many sledders, one man cutting big square chunks of snow out of his front yard. I asked him if it was an igloo. No, he said. It's an addition. I'm putting in a half-bath.
   My ski-tour brought me past several snowmen--each adhering to the time-honored form of two or three large balls of snow for the body, twigs for arms, and faces made out of whatever material is available. Thought the classic snowman features carrot nose, a "corn cob pipe and a button nose and two eyes made out of coal," I found some very creative variations on this theme.

The SnowVegan: Eyes of broccoli, nose of carrot, mouth of cucumber.

This classic snowman would look foolish with a snow blower.

Deciduous leaves give this snowman's eyes an unusually human expression.

Tootsie rolls give this one a slightly demonic look.

  Speaking of sublime, let's talk about sublimation. Our ten inches of snow will be gone soon, due to basic melting as our temperatures rise above freezing. In this scenario, water in its solid form (ice/snow) changes to its liquid form (liquid water) and soaks into the ground, trickles into streams, flows into our storm sewers. But some of the snow will not melt. When the temperature is below freezing, the snow may change from a solid directly into gas or vapor without first melting. This process is called sublimation.
  What is happening at the molecular level is this: in its solid state, the H20 molecules are locked into specific positions that create a hexagonal-shaped crystal. While the "frozen" molecules are unable to move about freely, they do vibrate. In the case of sublimation, some ice molecules gain enough energy (usually from the sun) to break away from neighboring ice molecules and change directly into an invisible vapor molecule.

Snow Clouds in Olympia

2012-01-17T11:17:00.000-08:00

Olympia this morning at 9:30, five inches of snow and counting.

It's been like being in a snow globe here in Olympia this weekend. Big fat snowflakes for hours and then many tiny ones and near-whiteout conditions. And lots of time to check Cliff Mass's weather blog where you can stay up to date on the latest predictions for what was referred to as "Snowmageddon" earlier this weekend. While we've been focused on accumulation amounts, road conditions, and school and business closures, we may have overlooked the clouds themselves and the snowflakes they have brought us.

Here was what was happening in my neighborhood this morning:

Really huge snowflakes. As you probably know, snowflakes do not fall from clouds composed of ice crystals--the high cirriform clouds. Ice crystals falling from these clouds usually evaporate or sublimate in the air before reaching the ground. We can observe this as "virga" or "fallstreaks."

The clouds that bring us snow are the same clouds that bring us rain--the lower cumulonimbus, nimbostratus, and sometimes altostratus clouds. In summer, much of our rain actually begins as snow then melts on the way down--usually when it falls below freezing level (about 12,000 feet). In winter, however, freezing level is much lower and falling snowflakes have a much better chance of staying frozen on their journey to the earth. The general rule of thumb is that snowflakes will survive 1,000 feet below freezing level. Thus, if freezing level is at 1,500 feet, snow level could be as low as 500 feet. For us to get snow in Olympia (all the way down to sea level) freezing level needs to be at most 1,000 feet.

Here is what Meteorology Today author C. Donald Ahrens says about big, fat flakes: "Snowflakes that fall through moist air that is slightly above freezing [our current conditions in Olympia] slowly melt as they descend. A thin film of water forms on the edge of the flakes, which acts like glue when other snowflakes come in contact with it. In this way, several flakes join to produce giant snowflakes often measuring several centimeters in diameter."

Meanwhile, take advantage of this "wet snow." It makes great snowpersons and snowballs, but it's stickiness makes for clumpy cross-country skiing. Yesterday, my husband and I took to the Chehalis-Western trail in our Nordic skis and had only two other beings for company on our five-mile jaunt.

Signs of our Nordic companions: a lone cyclist (whom we saw) and a mammal (whom we did not) that was not a dog. I am thinking fox judging by the pad size and shape and the pairing of tracks.

Snow, it turns out, isn't a good medium for identifiable animal tracks, but is ideal for tracking an animal a long distance.

Mima Mounds for Cloudspotters

2012-01-13T14:34:00.000-08:00

Strange Sightings: Mounds of Mystery and Flying Saucer Clouds.

   This past Sunday I went cloud watching at Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve just south of Olympia. Most visitors to this 637-acre site are there to see and the mysterious naturally formed earthen mounds that cover this Puget prairie grassland. The landscape is strange to be sure, so strange that scientists have been unable to determine exactly what caused these mounds to form.
   Theories of origin include seismic activity, wind, retreating glaciers, swelling and shrinking clays, and (a favorite of the press) burrowing of pocket gophers. Most people discount the gopher theory, but it's fun to see wide-eyed children imagine the out-sized creature living in these mounds, many up to 8 feet tall and 30 feet across.
  While gophers do burrow in the these mounds (and everywhere else in Thurston County!), they are not likely to be the architects of Mima Mounds. Dissected mounds show they are composed mostly of loose sand, fine gravel, and decaying plants. These mounds are the official type specimen for other such mounds found elsewhere in the U.S., China, and Australia. They may be called mima mounds or pimple mounds, hog-wallow mounds, or prairie mounds.
   But last Sunday, I was out to see the clouds without the distraction of the wildflowers that blanket the prairie here in April and May. Flowers would have kept my gaze earthward, not skyward where the clouds were processing by. I spent well over hour strolling the trails and lolling at the preserve, watching one large cloud band take shape ever so slowly.

Lower altocumulus lenticularis ("lennies" or "flying saucer clouds") and higher cirrocumulus clouds.

Mima Mounds makes a great cloud-watching site because this open prairie is carefully preserved through prescribed burns, eradication of invasive Scots broom, and removal of aggressive Douglas-firs (a species thriving on the land surrounding the preserve).

A distinct band of altocumulus clouds, perhaps 30 miles wide, stretched across the sky .

At home later, I went to the National Weather Service website and saw this exact cloud on their satellite imagery. The cloud was skirting the edge of the high-pressure system we've enjoyed earlier this week. Fun!
And this morning, heard on KPLU radio a report on Mima Mounds. Fun!

Click here for more information and directions to the preserve.

Birds? What Birds?

2012-01-11T12:59:00.000-08:00

Wednesday morning birders at Nisqually NWR.

The first hour of my Wednesday morning did not go well. I slept through the alarm, had to cancel my first appointment, was already running late for my second, and forgot a third. But nothing was going to keep me from joining the birders at Nisqually. So what if it's 27 degrees Farenheit?
Every Wednesday morning at 8, a genial band of birders gathers at the refuge Visitors' Center for a three-hour birding walk with Phil Kelley or another Nisqually NWR volunteer. Usually there are several refuge volunteers in the group all with spotting scopes, field guides, and much knowledge to share with beginner as well as experienced birders. The weekly walk is organized through the Black Hills Audubon Society; there is no fee for the walk, just the $3 refuge entrance fee. Tip: spend your first $3 of the day at Nisqually instead of Starbucks.

Pintails, snow goose, mallards, shovelers, mergansers, buffleheads, Canada geese, and goldeneyes are commonly seen in the refuge ponds. Luckily, they did not distract me from the cirrus sky above.

Until this month, I have been going to Nisqually to walk, usually very fast, out to the end of the new boardwalk and back. Nisqually was exercise with a great view, maybe some bald eagles, a harrier, or other large bird I could see without binoculars. Now I go to walk very slowly and just to the start of the boardwalk looking at birds. I cannot call what I am doing "birding." I am looking at clouds while birding. I am chatting while birding. I am not pulling out my field guide or making a list. I am hearing the names of the birds and watching them fly and perch and hunt. Being in their company is marvelous. As is being in the company of a group of people who seem to want nothing more than to make sure everyone sees what they do--and delights in it.
There is a generosity of spirit that infuses this group and that seems to build during the walk. The volunteers and birders set up their Swarvoski spotting scopes and newcomers are invited to take a look. Birds are identified, genders noted or guessed at, behaviors marveled over, plumage admired. Everyone will see something common such as a bald eagle (usually several) and everyone will see something unusual or something few have seen before. This morning, in addition to many eagles, we saw one cryptically colored American Bittern crouched down in the grass, it's feathers fluffed against the cold. We watched a red-tailed hawk perched in a small tree warming itself in the sun--its wings spread like a cormorant, its tail fanned out so that we could see individual feathers. Common or rare, it was all stunning. And unphotographable with my l'il camera that is better suited to big skies.

Here are the cirrocumulus clouds. There is a bald eagle in the top of that Douglas-fir.

Altocumulus lenticularis forming above the pond where waterfowl dabbled.

This January sky holds so much more than I will ever know.

To find out for yourself what's in the sky and waters of Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge (8 miles from Olympia) follow this link: Black Hills Audubon. Or better yet, cancel all your Wednesday appointments and go the refuge at 8.

Relief

2012-01-06T15:17:00.000-08:00

Low-tech Model Trumps Google Earth. Ha!

  After creating my Western Washington relief map in modeling clay yesterday, I was not left with a great sense of accomplishment. I had spent about three hours spreading clay around on an old white-board, spread maps all over the kitchen table, and had bright-green clay under my fingernails. Was there any value to what I had done?
  I cleaned up my mess, stored my map out of sight of my GIS-cartographer husband, and got in the car to drive to my book club meeting. No sooner had I turned out of my neighborhood onto the main east-west road when I suddenly felt the success of my project: I was driving through my terrain model.
   I knew where I was in all the spread-out clay, I could feel where the Black Hills were, how far Gray's Harbor was west of the hills, the shape of the harbor, it's distance from Willapa Bay. When I turned north and the road began to slope toward Puget Sound, I could feel that, too. I could feel the Cascades on my right, the Olympics ahead and a bit to the left.
  For some, Google Earth offers this same sensation (much enhanced) to users as they zoom over the 3-D map of the earth on your computer screen. But for whatever reason, this tool doesn't work for me. I just get dizzy and lost. To internalize my landscape I needed to create the hills and lakes and mountains and rivers myself and with my own hands. The three hours or so I spent shaping clay in total silence--no music, no speaker-phone calls, no talking to myself--seems to have gotten into that part of my brain that makes maps make sense. I am not sure a few mouse-clicks could have done same.
   Though my awkwardly shaped Olympic Mountains is barely recognizable (above), I can now see in my mind's eye the location of the Quinault Ridge. I know where it is vis-a-vis Cape Flattery, Port Townsend, and Olympia. I can imagine the clouds moving in from the Pacific Ocean and bending around the southwest flanks of the Olympics. I can feel the low, heavy clouds funneling into the Quinault Valley. I can hear them drenching the forests. It's a beautiful sound.

Terrain Modeling for Dummies

2012-01-05T17:07:00.000-08:00

The start of what was going to be a long day.

The territory for the book I am writing on clouds has been in flux these past few months. I had originally planned to write exclusively about the clouds I could see from Olympia. Then I wanted to go to Costa Rica and visit the Monteverde Cloud Forest and to the Southwest because the clouds were different there. Eventually, I focussed on writing about clouds in Washington State--my book being a natural history of how the state's topography influences cloud formation.

I selected several sites in the state's physiographic provinces, but time flew by and I made but one trip. I thought about planning more, but you just can't schedule a cloud-watching vacation the way you can a bird-watching or whale-watching vacation. What if I got all the way to the southeast corner of the state and it was (gasp!) sunny! And did I really need to travel that far to see a cumulus cloud I could very well see from my back yard? Part of my book is to encourage people to enjoy the clouds right over their heads; no one needs to travel great distances to accomplish this.

So, after a bit of hemming and hawing, I've decided to focus on a swath of Western Washington where I spend most of my time, the places I have been drawn to over and over, the nearby places that I can walk or bike to and the far-away places where I go for a day trip or weekend.

This swath is convenient and I have gerrymandered into territory I am calling a "Mega Hydrologic Cycle Unit." The clouds I see from Olympia appear and disappear within this territory. What does this territory look like? I tried to draw it in my notebook:

I could see the territory--but I couldn't feel the terrain. I have a relief map of Washington State, but many of the places I am planning to write about are not on it. I needed my own personalized, customized, relief map of my territory. So I bought some kiddie modeling clay, found a old whiteboard in a closet, sketched out the territory, and started ~~smushing~~ modeling the clay.

Luckily, there was coffee.

In case you didn't recognize it, this is southwest Washington.

Apparently, south Puget Sound is very complex and cannot be easily rendered without the help of glaciers and a millennium or two. The peninsula of land at center where Olympia is situated is roughly the size of Florida. It is not.

In fact, there are several peninsulas of land in South Puget Sound. None look quite like these.

Except from a distance.

Now the water--bays, lakes, canals, a strait, and some generalized water.

Problems develop with scale and realism. The Black Hills looks like a wad of wasabi; the Nisqually River has overflowed its banks and several miles of floodplain; Mount Rainier and the Cascades look like...a lot of wasabi.

It is okay to laugh at this one. The chewing gum atop Mt. Rainier is actually a snow-cap made of clay. That blue thing is not the tail of a mouse hiding under the snow, but the Nisqually River flowing from the Nisqually Glacier through/above what appears to be a landscape of Gulden's Mustard toward Puget Sound. But you get the idea.

Shortly after this sensitive rendering of Lake Quinault and the rain-forested valleys of the Olympic Peninsula, I decided to call it quits for the day. Now, a watering can and some cotton balls and--voila!--nimbostratus!

The Fruiting Body of the Violet Cortinarius

2011-12-16T09:10:00.000-08:00

  Pojar and MacKinnon is a field guide to Pacific Northwest plants. Most of what I saw on my hike in Olympic National Forest last week were plants, but we also saw an array of fungii.
   Taxonomically speaking, mushrooms and other fungii are not plants. They do not possess chlorophyll and do not make their own food via the process of photosynthesis. Fungi are parasitic and live off a host plant via thread-like filament called hyphae. Most of the fungus on earth is underground. What we see on the ground is the fruiting body of the fungus.
Click here to see a beautiful photograph of the spectacular fruiting body of the Violet Cortinarious, also known as Cortinarius violaceus. This mushroom could really use a nickname.
  Still with me, cloud lovers? In his book, Tales from the Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean Life, David W. Wolfe of Cornell University writes this:

"...in 1992 genetic analysis of samples of wood-eating fungus Armillaria bulbosa, collected in a Michigan hardwood forest over an area equivalent to several football fields, showed that it was a single organism that had been alive and remained genetically stable for more than 1,500 years."

And, he continues, the weight of that organism was estimated at 220,000 pounds--the size of a Blue Whale! Something to remember when you are walking in the forest.
Here are some other things to remember about fungii. They reproduce through spores (not seeds and pollen); fungi are the decomposers (not producers) in the ecosystem; and the cell walls of fungi are made of chitin, not cellulose.
Happy Trails!

Pojar and MacKinnon

2011-12-14T11:16:00.000-08:00

I woke Monday morning and turned on the radio. NPR was airing a story about a hot new kids toy--a spinning top called Bleyblades. Apparently it's the rage among six year olds. Unlike the old-fashioned wooden spinning top, these tops are plastic, come with interchangeable parts, and are designed for stamina or to attack. Bleyblades appeared in the U.S. in 2002, but were conceived by Hasbro as a "three-year brand" meaning, I think, that in three years they would lose their appeal and fade from popularity. Imagine--built-in obsolescence for such a classic toy! Now, a bit later than planned, the tops have been "relaunched" in the U.S. with their own website for virtual battles over the Internet and their own show on the Cartoon Network.
  Where, oh where is Richard Louv when I need him? Go Play Outside, America!
  I switched to PRI (Public Radio International) for what I hoped was some real news--something pithier than a product promotion spun as a holiday news story. I tuned into a story about the outraged residents of the Los Angeles neighborhood near the HOLLYWOOD sign. The nine 45-foot-tall letters have been hard for tourist to find until now when GPS-equipped cars guide them into the winding hills without a hitch. Though the sign is on public land, the neighbors are complaining that the traffic and gridlock is "...dangerous. This is all unsupervised. It's like the Wild West, " according to one woman. Uh-huh. My heart goes out to them. I turned off the radio.
   I had yet to read the Sunday Review section of the New York Times. So I made a cup of coffee and settled in with that. Everything was going along just fine pith-wise until I hit Delia Ephron's "If My Dad Could Tweet." Really? Have we all completely lost our perspective here? I needed some news from the outside, from the bigger world. I needed Pojar.

If you are a member of the flora cognoscenti here in the Pacific Northwest (I am not), this is how you refer to a well-loved and indispensable field guide, a book the rest of us call Pojar and MacKinnon's. The guide's official title is Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast: Washington, Oregon, British Columbia & Alaska, but I have never heard anyone call it that except in print. This book is known by it's main authors and compilers, Jim Pojar and Andy MacKinnon, two research scientists from the British Columbia Forest Service--job titles that do not do justice to the wealth of knowledge these men have in the fields of botany, ecology, ethnobotany, and forestry. Bringing Pojar and MacKinnon along with you on a hike is kind of like bringing Pojar and MacKinnon along with you on a hike. I have never met these men, but it seems that they are right there with you, describing all the beautiful and functional things about the trail-side plants in their friendly and engaging style.
Pojar and MacKinnon were not with me on the hike I took with two friends last Friday around Spider Lake in Olympic National Forest. The two friends were plant savvy. They both had a copy of Pojar. They both left their copies in the truck at the trailhead intentionally--to be consulted after the hike. I left mine at home accidentally.

   Spider Lake sits in an old-growth hemlock forest. The trail around the lake is flat. It is a two-mile loop. It took us two hours. Plus a half hour for lunch. We walked slowly because there was so much to see. We walked slowly and stopped often. Every thirty feet or so, to look at something green. We looked at moss, we looked at ferns, we looked at lichen. My friends identified everything. They spoke Latin. We examined mushroom gills, fern sori, growth rings, tripinnate fronds, spent seed pods, winter twigs, bud scales, newly fallen trees, a nurse log carrying a miniature forest of inch-high hemlocks.
   If my friends came upon a familiar plant, they would find something new to tell about it. If they weren't certain of their i.d., they'd describe it out loud to each other. All three of us had forgotten our cameras so we had to rely heavily on our minds, our minds' eyes, and our minds' ears to help us remember what we saw. Being the novice botanizer, I offered my services jotting down plant names in my little waterproof notebook...until the ink in my pen froze.
   The slower we walked on this cold and sunny day, the more we saw. The slower we walked, the more beautiful everything was. The slower we walked, the slower we walked. My feet were frozen and my fingers were numb, but I am not complaining. I am full of gratitude. I have seen this forest in a way I have not seen other forests. I know who lives beneath these ancient hemlocks in winter. I know one hairy woodpecker and a few Pacific wrens that live here, too. I can feel this forest.

   On the way home, one friend drove, I navigated (sort of), and another read Pojar aloud from the back seat. I tried to take it all in. That was last Friday.
  Monday morning, I was curled up on the sofa with a cup of coffee and my own copy of Pojar and MacKinnon. In 528 pages, Pojar and MacKinnon describe 794 species of plants--2 per page. Each entry includes a general description of the plant; details about its leaves, flowers, and fruit; its ecology; and extensive notes about its habitat, range, and traditional uses. There are 1100 color photographs, 1000 line drawings, and 794 range maps. This is the latest, 2004 revised edition. When it was first published in 1994 by Lone Pine, I doubt anyone was thinking of this field guide as a 10-year brand, nor of relaunching it with its own website and TV show. The revised edition, much like the original, is a lovely, hefty, sturdy, round-cornered paperback that weighs in at 1.7 pounds. It is full of news. It is full of amazing stories.
  Here is what was happening at Spider Lake on December 12: Lobaria pulmonaria. Pterospora andromedea. Asarum caudatum. Vaccinium ovatum. Gaultheria shallon. Tusga heterophylla. Polystichum munitum. Blechnum spicant. Adiantum pedatum. Lycopodium clavatum. Petigera neopolydactyla. Oplopanax horridus. Ramnus purshiana. Linnea borealis. Alnus rubra. Thuja plicata.

Snowy Owl at Nisqually

2011-12-02T16:22:00.000-08:00

All photos courtesy Dennis Ellison, Nisqually NWR Volunteer. These photos were taken in 2005.

I was out for clouds on Wednesday morning, completely happy with just the clouds. Until a volunteer pointed out the snowy owl, sitting on a hummock out in the estuary, bout 100 yards north of the trail. Once I saw the owl through the spotting scope, I couldn't take my eyes off this beautiful bird of the tundra--the Arctic tundra, the dry, frozen, treeless land between the northernmost forests of Alaska and Canada and the icy Arctic Ocean. Using an online "as the crow flies" mapping tool, I figured this snowy owl could have flown about 2000 miles to Nisqually from a randomly chosen tundra location--Atqasuk, Alaska. Distances to other areas of the tundra would be comparable. Incredible.

Snowy owls are adapted to spending the entire winter on the tundra, but not all snowy owls spend every winter there. Some regularly migrate in winter to southern Canada, and the northern US--the plains, New York, and New England, notably. Once every four years or so, winter irruptions bring snowy owls much further south--to the Pacific Northwest and even as far as California, Texas, and Florida.

Irruptive behavior is linked to the food supply and, in the case of the snowy owl, this means lemmings, a year-round resident of the tundra. Lemmings are rodents that dig vast networks of tunnels beneath the snow where they survive the harsh winters by eating plant roots.

Snowy owls pick off lemmings when they emerge from their tunnels for fresh air. An adult snowy owl will eat three to five lemmings a day; a breeding male will spend hours catching dozens of lemmings to pile up in front of a female he is courting. If the female accepts him, they will fly off together, the overjoyed male may catch another lemming and pass it to his mate with one foot in mid-flight.

In a boom lemming year, the snowy owl may raise a dozen chicks, feeding them up to 2000 lemmings before they can hunt on their own.

After a 4-5 year cycle of successful feeding and breeding, the lemming population reaches a peak and soon deplete their food supply. Yes they panic. Yes they become hyperactive. Yes they run across the tundra in all directions (and once in a line stretching 30 miles long). Yes they drown trying to cross large rivers. They are desperate, and behave like proverbial lemmings. Exposed, the lemmings are either hunted or starve, and their population crashes. This starts a chain reaction through the tundra food web. Snowy owls are forced southward in search of new sources of food.

Two snowy owls perched on snags at mouth of the Nisqually River.

So, the snowy owl I was seeing--likely a juvenile male, according to the refuge biologist--was likely exhausted and starving. Nisqually is abundant with food sources for the owl, but the owl has at least two things going against it. There are numerous birds of prey at the refuge competing for the same food: while I was watching the owl, I spotted bald eagles, a harrier, a red-tailed hawk, and possible a kestrel (the birders out that morning recorded 71 species, so I know there were more raptors out there). And, because snowy owls hunt on the tundra, the biologist tells me, they are not adapted to hunting where there are trees or other obstacles. They face the ground when they hunt for lemmings and so may crash into buildings, barns, trees, and other large objects while hunting in our landscape.

In the absence of lemmings, snowy owls will prey on small mammals and birds including rodents, rabbits, squirrels, songbirds, water fowl, wading birds, and...oh no...alcids. That could mean marbled murrelets.

Does one snowy owl an irruption make? No, but the birding community is all a-flutter with online postings about snowy owls right now. Earlier this week, snowy owls were spotted in Washington State in Douglas and Okanogan Counties as well as at Ocean Shores; owls were reported in Oregon--one at the airport; birders posted sightings in Minnesota and Michigan and a whopping 100 were spotted in Wisconsin. You can go to a recent irruption map to see how widespread the irruption is this year.

You can also go out to Nisqually. The snowy owls might not be there, but I guarantee something wonderful will be.

Clouds with Back Bend

2011-11-30T16:53:00.000-08:00

Photo by M. Ruth

The sky this morning looked as if it had been watercolored. The clouds looked soft, watery, and out of focus. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, but the clouds were still fuzzy. I am not sure why, but I know these were stratus clouds mixed in with some stratocumulus that were blowing in from the NNE. I spent about an hour taking photographs and then decided to spend the rest of the morning at Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.

I dare to say there isn't a better place to get more sky in South Puget Sound. It had to keep reminding myself that I was not inside some celestial dome with clouds stuck on, but standing on a flat piece of earth with clouds moving overhead in a parallel plane. As I walked I had to keep detaching the earth from the clouds at the horizon to ruin the illusion that the two were actually meeting.

The earth and clouds here occupy parallel planes like two slices of sandwich bread with you in the middle.

I took several still photographs of the clouds, some with flocks of Canada geese.

Some without.

The mix of cloud and blue sky seem changed every few seconds. As I was walking, I was twirling around, trying to take it all in, taking pictures, walking backwards, taking more pictures. No matter how many photos I took, I just wasn't getting enough of this dynamic sky into my camera. I needed a fish eye lens, but didn't have one.

So I decided to try something a bit unconventional (below). Turn down the volume on your computer (it was a windy day) and click on the arrow below to watch a horizon-to-horizon, north-to-south 20-second video clip.

I was pretty sure no one saw me doing these back bends (or heard me groaning at the end). But I was being watched. One of the refuge docents pulled out her spotting scope and focused it on a lone snowy owl. It was beautiful--a juvenile with dark bars across its breast--resting on a hummock. While my tiny Canon Elph does well by clouds, its zoom lens turns a decent-sized snowy owl into a piece of popcorn (below). It's the really tiny white dot, but a confirmed snowy owl sighting--my first.

A snowy owl resting on a hummock at Nisqually NWR.

More on the snowy owl and its journey from the tundra in my next blog.

Marbled Murrelets Ground Wind Farm

2011-11-17T15:30:00.000-08:00

Little bird, big impact: A marbled murrelet chick.

"Green energy is only green energy if it's good for fish and wildlife, not the Fish and Wildlife Service, fish and wildlife."

--Doug Zimmer, US Fish & Wildlife Service

   Energy Northwest scrapped its plans for a 32-turbine wind farm in southwest Washington yesterday due to our favorite scrappy little seabird, the marbled murrelet.
   The 32 turbines were to placed on Radar Ridge, a windy and logged over spot near Naselle. That ridge is located on the flight path of the murrelet's twice-daily commutes between the ocean (where the birds forage for fish, roost, and socialize) and the old-growth forests (where the birds nest and raise their chicks). Murrelet biologists have identified 89 murrelet nests in this area and provided research to show that the wind turbines would impact (aka kill) this critical population. Accordingly, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the organization responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act, placed restrictions on the wind farm that Energy Northwest found "untenable."
   Despite the murrelet's status as a protected species under state and federal threatened and endangered species legislation, the 2009 Fish and Wildlife Service review of the species showed the population from San Francisco Bay to the Canadian border has declined as much as 34 percent between 2000 and 2008. In the Washington, Oregon, California, about 18,000 birds are estimated to remain.
   In addition to the potential mortality from murrelet-turbine encounters, the murrelet faces threats from oil spills, oil pollution, bycatch, increased predator populations (crows, ravens, and jays), and logging of its nesting habitat.
   What do we make of this news?
   While I applaud effort to move our country toward alternative and green energy solutions, these solutions cannot come at the expense of the marbled murrelet and other wildlife. While the murrelet has the spotlight in this story, keep in mind that this secretive little seabird is an indicator species in the old-growth forest ecosystem. What's bad for the murrelet is bad for the salmon, the owls, the songbirds, the tree voles, the Douglas squirrels, the Doug-firs, the hemlocks, the red-cedars, the streams, the soil, the fungii, and all the macro- and microscopic life forms in these ancient forests. An old-growth forest without murrelets is a degraded forest. Just drive around the Willapa Hills in southwest Washington and you'll see what degraded looks like.
   Wind farms are not the right alternative, not at Radar Ridge and I venture to say not anywhere else. These giant, passive-seeming pin-wheels in the landscape look clean and green and harmless. They don't look like oil derricks or oil platforms. They don't look like coal mines. They don't come with belching steam towers. But they do harm wildlife and the marbled murrelet in particular--a species we have driven to the brink of extinction.
   Reducing our dependence on foreign oil is critical, but it should not mean increasing our dependence on domestic oil. Nor should it mean increasing our dependence on domestically harvested coal, corn, or wind if the extraction, growing, or harvesting of these resources further degrades our environment.
   My thanks to Energy Northwest and to the Public Utilities Districts of Pacific County, Grays Harbor, Clallam County, and Mason County for thinking green. Thanks to the Fish & Wildlife Service, the Pacific Seabird Group, Seattle Audubon, Willapa Hills Audubon, Grays Harbor Audubon, the Columbia River Alliance for Nurturing the Environment, and other conservation groups for believing there is a greener solution.

Curious about the murrelet? My book, Rare Bird, is now available on Kindle. This is not ad. I will never see a penny from Kindle sales. I just want you to love this bird as much as I do.

Raining Cats and Dog Food

2011-11-16T12:31:00.000-08:00

Take the car! My favorite!

  I hope some of you made some money betting on Day Two of car eschewment by the Accidental Naturalist. I had good intentions, honest I did.
   Last night I took the bus to and from a class in downtown Olympia--turning a 10 minute drive into an hour of walking and busing each way. This decision was empowering and invigorating and I was quite proud of myself. But pride cometh before a fall. Rainfall. Oh darn.
   This morning I was getting ready to take the bus in the chilly pouring rain meet some friends downtown for breakfast. Easy bus ride. A straight shot. No problem. But there, on the kitchen counter, was a little tiny note written by my husband (who bikes to and from work every day): "We need dog food." Ack.

! ! ! WARNING: EXCUSES UP AHEAD ! ! ! !

Our dog is diabetic and we've been testing out different kinds of special grain-free dog food available only from a store that requires me to take a second bus from downtown. It's not far, but getting to the store would add another hour+ to my day. Should I make time to run this errand? Hmmm...Should I spend half of my breakfast looking at my watch to make sure I don't miss the bus? Hmmm....Aren't I supposed to be writing a book instead of fetching dog food all the live-long day? Yes! Don't waste time! Take the car! It's right there in the driveway! The keys are on the rack where you left them! C'mon drive---it's the American Way!

So I did. I even used the seat warmer. But...I did bring the dog along with me. We did walk in the rain in the park afterward (park not walkable from my home) with my friend and her dog. I did get dog food. But guess what? Instead of buying a 5-pound bag as I usually do, I committed to 25-pound bag, thus creating an air-tight alibi: There is no way I could have carried that heavy bag on the bus. I had to take the car. Plus, now I cut 4 car trips to the dog-food store out of my life. Yay!

Such a Herculean struggle to do so little. It shouldn't be this way. Moreover, Puget Sound shouldn't have to suffer because of 4.1 million people like me are unable to break a bunch of teeny tiny habits that serve convenience over everything else.

Tomorrow--back on the bus, rain or shine.

Olympia Intercity Transit

Sound and Vision

2011-11-15T10:22:00.000-08:00

   Yesterday afternoon, my husband and I went to the Capitol Theater for a screening of Eric Becker's "Sound and Vision"--a documentary film about Puget Sound.
   If you have a pulse, you cannot get too far into a film or conversation about Puget Sound without including "health of," "clean-up of," "toxic waste in," "death of." This film was no exception, though the filmmaker did a skillful job and not making this a "downer" movie, though there were plenty of scenes of polluted run-off, oil tankers plying the Sound, and beaches strewn with trash.
   The film most effectively addresses run-off--all the contaminants that flow through storm drains into Puget Sound and its tributaries. What gets into the storm drains? Everything that the rain washes off our streets, highways, parking lots, sidewalks, rooftops, and yards. This means everything from gasoline, motor oil, fertilizers, pesticides, pet waste, to chewing gum and tobacco spit.
   An estimated 75% of the pollution in Puget Sound is from run-off. The film made it clear that we need to move way past the finger-pointing era; Big Farms and Big Industry are not the culprits here. We are. We being the 4.1 million people living in the counties surrounding the Sound. And, I am very reluctant to realize that the really big problem is the car.
  In the oil, gas, and coolants that leak out of our cars are heavy metals--nickel, copper, cadmium, lead, and zinc--and other chemicals that affect reproductive cycles of bottom-dwelling species in the Sound and create lesions and tumors on fish (including salmon). Possibly more injurious that these fluids is our tires. When we talk about "wear and tear" on our tires--are we thinking about where the worn-off rubber goes? Until yesterday's film, I hadn't given it much thought. Tiny particles of our tires are left behind on the roads we drive and end up as run-off. Which means, bit by bit, our tires end up in Puget Sound. Let's see, 4.1 million people multiplied by a conservative 4 tires (more likely 8) results in bits of 16.4 million tires bound for the Sound.

   What does this look like? Yesterday's film showed us in a four-minute segment featuring scuba diver Laura James. Click here to watch the video and Laura's articulate description of her discovery.
   The central image of her discovery has been playing over and over in my head. Playing this morning as I drink my coffee and look at a map. Playing as I debate whether or not to take advantage of a gorgeous day to drive to the coast to watch the clouds, to make notes on the Pacific Ocean for my book on clouds. Playing as I wonder when I am going to hide my car keys from myself, plaster an Olympia Transit bus schedule to my fridge, put some wear and tear on my walking shoes and bike tires.
   Today, I am not going to Westport to watch clouds roll in from the Pacific Ocean. I am not going to explore how clouds behave in the Willapa Hills physiographic province as I had planned. I am not going to pull off the highways to photograph the clouds. I am not even going to drive to the gym for a swim. I am going to pout.
   For most of the day, I will be pouting about denying myself the pleasures of the automobile (oh, just one little trip to the beach--and then I'll stop), about the constraints of sidewalks and bus routes, about missing whatever I think is happening in the places I think are accessible only by car.
   Eventually, I will get quite tired of myself. Tired of feeling spoiled and entitled. And then I will start laughing. And then, if all goes well, I will forget where I put the car keys.

Defining Cloudy

2011-11-14T19:09:00.000-08:00

Chart from Meteorology Today, 8th Ed., by Donald Ahrens.

The chart above shows the official symbols used by meteorologist on weather charts and maps. This is a pretty funny chart; it reads like a joke--one that doesn't make much sense, but has a great punch line. I understand the symbol for clear, 4/8, and overcast. The others aren't instantly comprehensible.

Looks more like 1/2 to me.

Looks like international symbol for an information kiosk.

And then there is the big M for Missing. I am sure this refers to missing data, but I had to laugh. Where would you look for a missing sky?

Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do.

But seriously...when used in combination with the table below, these symbols make you realize that it doesn't take many clouds to make cloudy. A sky ~~covered by~~ graced by--more than 25% clouds is cloudy. And "cloudy" has such negative connotations. Which is too bad. Cloudful would be more a better adjective.

I took this photo around 3 p.m. Monday. A classic example of altostratus clouds over Budd Inlet. The National Weather Service report from Olympia Airport listed the clouds as Few and Scattered (SCT). Hmmmm....

This photo shows the western edge of the cloud bank above--skies starting to clear. The National Weather Service did not mention the crows--few and scattered.

Backyard Skies

2011-11-11T14:39:00.000-08:00

Under your roof, it's always overcast.

No matter how many CFL or standard light bulbs you switch on, it's going to be gloomy in your home. Your roof can turn even a gorgeous day like yesterday into a dim, gray affair--one that drives you to the Internet looking for vacation deals in Hawaii, San Diego, Tuscon, anywhere but the Pacific Northwest. The remedy? Get outside.

Eschew the shingles! Look at these gorgeous virga! These are ice crystals, 10,000 feet up, floating in the sky.

Did anyone notice how peachy the sky was Friday morning? Or were you just whining about the clouds?

What a lovely ceiling of clouds over Budd Inlet! I am not certain, but I believe these are altostratus clouds lowering rapidly to become nimbostratus clouds--the rain clouds. Think how much Pacific Ocean is in these clouds.

This photo was not taken at an arboretum, but at the local dog park just minutes before the rain started on Friday. These are nimbostratus clouds. Isn't the gray a perfect backdrop for the foliage? You know it is.

Even if it's pouring all weekend, make sure you layer on your gear and take a walk.The rain that sounds like torrents on the roof of your house sounds wonderful in the woods dripping on the big-leaf maples. The rain that pounds on your metal car roof appears as rooster-tails on the highway, and makes driving hazardous, falls gently on the grass, on the path, on the field. Find yourself a nice pervious surface and listen to the rain soak in.

Cliff Mass Uses the B Word

2011-11-09T11:32:00.000-08:00

Never never never describe the weather as boring.

  I have to take issue with Cliff Mass's recent blog post entitled "Boring with a Hint of La Nina."
  Mass, a many of you know, is a professor of meteorology in University of Washington's Department of Atmospheric Sciences, author of The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, regular guest on KPLU public radio, and enthusiastic blogger on local weather phenomenon.
   Mass's blog included a snapshot of this week's weather from the National Weather Service--each day represented by a little postage stamp illustrations of clouds, sun, and rain in varying proportions. Mass summed it up this way: "Some clouds, some sun, a few light showers, temps reaching the 50s and dropping into the mid to lower 40s. Enough to drive a meteorologist mad."
   Boring? Boring?! Since when was the weather in the Pacific Northwest "boring?"
   Will only the Perfect Sturm und Drang excite our local meteorologists?
   I think we have a jaded meteorologist on our hands, folks. Just look at what beautiful weather I have seen in the past week:

Impressionistic sunrise and fog along the Deschutes River.

An hour later, these fleeting cirrocumulus lacunosus appeared.

Several layers of clouds make a dramatic, aka "partly cloudy," skyscape.

A gorgeous mix of stratocumulus and altocumulus clouds.

Probably not too exciting on a radar screen, though.

Well, okay, I have to admit these clouds are a teensy bit not-too exciting. But boring? No. It's cirrostratus just ahead of the rain. The Perfect Norm.

The Souls of Clouds--Part Three

2011-11-03T17:14:00.000-07:00

On September 11, 2011, this photo appeared in the New York Times.

This is Part Three. Read Part One and then Part Two

Because I had spent the better part of day reading the New York Times--"The Reckoning" and the front-page feature stories on 9/11 memorial events, I was primed to believe everything I saw in that Sunday's paper was about 9/11.

A dramatic black-and-white photograph (above) was placed in the very middle of the Op-Ed page. Glancing quickly to the titles of the three articles surrounding the photo, I could not immediately tell which article it belonged to, which author was going to do some free-wheeling reckoning of life a decade after the terrorist attacks. The editors surely wanted readers to look at the photo and believe for a split second that it was billowing smoke. I did, but it was not.

It was Old Faithful, the ever-erupting thermal geyser in Yellowstone National Park, captured on film by American photographer Ansel Adams in 1941. The “smoke” was actually water and steam. The article that wrapped its columns around this image was written by Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristoff and titled “We’re Rich! (In Nature.)”

On September 11, 2011, Kristoff Rightly Reckons We're Rich

The article was not about Yellowstone or Wyoming, but about something much bigger and grander.Kristoff begins his article this way: "At a time when Americans fret about terrorism and aware and are afflicted by the worst economic downturn in 70 years, let’s embrace a remarkable treasure possessed by every citizen of our country….It doesn’t count in our net worth, but its value is incalculable: our national parks, national forests, and other public lands.”

Oh, joy! How refreshing! I was so ready to stop fretting about wisps and embrace the earth! I had been feeling bad, sheepish, guilty, and disrespectful about my euphoric hike with my husband and son in Mt. Baker National Forest on September 11—a day whose arrival I unintentionally failed to acknowledge until September 12^th. Maybe I wasn't so un-American after all.

The author on September 11, 2011 (unbeknownst to her).

I continued reading: “Particularly in the grim post-9/11 era, Kristoff writes, "—an age shaped by anxiety and suspicion—there’s something profoundly therapeutic about reconnecting with simplicity and nature….The wilderness trims our bravado and puts us in our place. Particularly in traumatic times like these, nature challenges us, revitalizes us, humbles us, exhilarates us and restores our souls.”

The clouds have parted! I love this man!

Perhaps I had been in the right place on September 11 this year--on Mt. Baker--doing exactly what I should have been doing: being in the company of my family, enjoying America’s remarkable treasures, loving the outdoors, greeting every single hiker we passed, lying in snowfields, sunning on a scree slope, photographing alpine wildflowers, looking at the sky, wondering about the clouds, feeling the contours of the earth in my feet and legs and lungs.

The inspiration for Kristoff's article had apparently come from his family backpacking trip this summer--not geyser gazing in Yellowstone National Park, but hiking in Oregon's Mount Thielsen Wilderness Area. Like Mt. Baker, Mt. Thielsen is a volcanic peak in the Cascade Range. There's nothing like a little well-earned elevation to give you perspective. Shame on the New York Times for not running one of Ansel Adams' photographs of a peak in Glacier National Park or Yosemite! Or a photo of Mt. Theilsen by a lesser photographer. What were they thinking?

On September 10, the day before his article ran in the Sunday Times, Kristoff posted this on his blog:

"Part of me felt that I should write Sunday’s column about 9/11, for the 10th anniversary. But frankly, I figured that readers by now would be sick of backward-looking reviews of this painful decade. So if you were looking for an evaluation of how we handled the aftermath of 9/11, my apologies – and go take a hike in the outdoors to get over it!"

I love his frankness and his "apology" and his advice to get over it. Why could the rest of the New York Times not have done the same that day? Not to be disrespectful, but it is time to get over it. It's time to de-friend 9/11 and move on.
Kristoff clearly has. His Op-Ed piece wasn't just about his happy hike nor about his homeopathic Rx for the ills of 9/11. He used his column to exhort readers to fight against the proposed opening of 50+ million acres of federal lands to logging, grazing, and other uses. And he encouraged every reader to get outside, to love their national parks more than their video games, to find solace and joy in our communal wild and open spaces.

   I applaud Kristoff's activism. And give him a standing ovation for his elegant conclusion that nature "reminds us that we are part of a larger universe, stewards rather than masters of our world."
   After returning from the Mt. Baker National Forest on September 12, I struggled with what to do with the happiness, pleasure, peace, satisfaction I experienced on our hike. Sure, I shared stories about the trip with my friends, I shared photographs of the spectacular views with my family. I felt good about America. I posted a blog about it. I used to think that wasn't enough. But now that the New York Times has forced an existential crisis on the Accidental Naturalist, I think it is enough.
  After two months of thinking about the meaning of 9/11, I have done what N.R. Kleinfield predicted might happen in "Getting Here from There:" "Ultimately, he writes, "each person attaches an individual meaning to 9/11, if possible."
   It is possible: there is no meaning.
   What is meaningful is that we have shared an experience of 9/11. We have talked about it, written about it, cried about it, debated about it, lost sleep about it. We have felt loss, horror, terror, anger, compassion, depression, sorrow. This is what makes us human. It is the act of sharing our experiences that confirms our humanity. Directly and from a distance, we have all responded to 9/11. And that is meaningful.
   And now, back to the top of the Mt. Baker on September 11, 2011. Here, with my family and other hikers, we all felt the joy, peace, exhilaration, and well-being that comes from hiking into scenery of the American wilderness that takes your breath away. Had I hiked there alone, the experience would have been incomplete; I needed to share this. Luckily, I had my husband and son to ooh and aah with, to admire the terrain with, to puzzle over strange clouds with. And I was in the presence of other grateful hikers, including the young man who said, "Now I feel I've been to America."
   To that I would like to add, with thanks, "Now I feel I've been human."

The Souls of Clouds-Part Two

2011-11-02T17:33:00.000-07:00

Before I settled into my critique of the New York Times, I want you to know that clouds figure into the story as a metaphor for ambiguity and deception. Clouds, even the loveliest of them, are guilty of being cloudy when it comes to meaning. I do not think clouds have an intrinsic meaning and therefore, it is up to each of us--meteorologist, accidental naturalist, or poet--to give them meaning. This does not mean we fully understand them.
Clouds can also deceive or obnubilate meaning. Obnubilate means to cloud over, obscure, or darken. It is from the Latin ob (in the way) + nubilare (to be cloudy)--which is from nubes (clouds).

It is our responsibility as readers to de-obnubilate--to clear away the clouds, to look behind the clouds, to understand the meaning of what we are reading. Had I not been studying clouds in nature for the past few years, I probably wouldn't be noticing how clouds are used in film and print media. Sometimes clouds are used in subtle ways to evoke happiness, the passage of time, a mystery, or a heavenly mattress. Other times, less subtly such as during last May's Rapture That Went Bust when some nice happy clouds were turned into menacing, churning, apocalyptic clouds through manipulation by time-lapse photography, color enhancement, and a very scary soundtrack. I am a little sensitive about our friends, the clouds.

Which is why, perhaps I was was ready to pounce on the New York Times on September 12. Which is why, perhaps, I took the photo of the Twin Towers in the clouds (above) for a birds-eye-view of the more familiar image of the Twin Towers in smoke (below).

I felt tricked by the image and by the editors of the paper. I was curious about why the editors would have chosen such a low-quality image (enlarged from grainy 35-mm film) when they must have had access to thousands of more iconic, high-res images of 9/11. What were they up to? What did the inclusion of this photograph mean? What do the towers mean? What do the clouds mean? What does our memory of that horrific day mean? What was this bank of clouds hiding? Was the New York Times messing with me? With my curiosity bordering on suspicion, I began reading the special section, "The Reckoning: American and the World a Decade After 9/11."
I am sorry to say that the lead article, “Getting Here from There,” could have been subtitled 9/11 BFF. I read it three times and can tell you that no one knows how to develop a long-term and meaningful relationship to 9/11. In the same way, teenage girls don’t want to do the work to maintain their friendships with other girls, unless you consider their using their cell phones to text “BFF” (Best Friends Forever) work.

   The article, beautifully wrought by N.R. Kleinfield, was essentially a series of paragraphs composed of meaningless phrases intended to make everyone in the country feel united again, the way we did in the wake of 9/11.
   "It was called the saddest day in American history. It was called the worst day in American History."
   "People repeated the same thing: My life will be changed forever."
   "The memories remain fresh and overwhelming."
   "People shake their heads when they think back."
   A disaster psychologist is quoted: "Human history is full of tragedies, and within these tragedies, there is room for growth."

Paragraphs in the article are dedicated to ordinary folk recalling exactly what they were doing when they “heard the un-heard of” (“They were on their way to teach music…sitting at a red light…getting car loan…about to fill a lower-molar cavity…”) as if the very ordinariness of their lives should have guaranteed that nothing extraordinary would happen that day.

This is an illogical but understandable human response, a fallacy of faulty cause and effect. It’s what causes us to blurt out, “But I saw him last week at the grocery store!” when we learn of the death of neighbor. Do we actually believe the person shouldn’t have died because he had been alive when we last saw him? Is this about us?

   Now I'm irked and need to push this a little further. The September 11th terrorist attacks killed thousands of people and left behind a group of grieving families and friends so enormous as to be inestimable. I think it accurate to say that everyone who witnessed the attacks in person or through the media was affected, some more seriously than others. Most of us, however, cannot directly connect ourselves to the victims or their loved ones. Nor can we connect ourselves to the World Trade Centers, the field in Shanksville, or the Pentagon—places most of us have never visited.
   We grieve because we are connected to other people and other places through our humanity. But when we are done our grieving, when the faces are forgotten, the ruins are swept away, when the horrific events are compressed into a four-character symbol—9/11—and reduced to an iconic image of two towers, one plane, and one smoking gash, we have only this: the memory of a moment. That memory is of ourselves that morning—and what exactly we were doing the moment we first “heard the unheard of.”
   What was I doing? I was cleaning my kitchen and listening to NPR on my clock-radio—my white Dream Cube that matched my white-tiled counters. I remember.

Remembering what we were doing misses the harder question—what were we not doing? Outside my immediate family, I was not working to end hatred, terrorism, petroleum-based consumerism, pollution, war, greed, prejudice, extremism, jingoism, crime, disease, poverty, starvation, and the thousand ills that plague our planet. I was not working hard for social justice, tolerance, or peace. I did not start or join an interfaith group. Sure, I was nice to my neighbors and strangers alike, volunteered in the classroom and community, planted school gardens, showed up once at an Iraq war protest, voted in elections, and recycled. But I was doing that before 9/11. So were a lot of other people. Obviously it wasn’t enough.

In fact, it is never enough. And neither is all of our remembering, pausing, honoring, in memoriamizing. What does it mean when, in the New York Times this same Sunday, twenty prominent Manhattan corporations (including Chanel, Calvin Klein, Tourneau, Brooks Brothers, Tiffany & Co, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, and Lord & Taylor), each took out an "in memorium/advertisement" that was a 3 1/2 x 6 1/2 white space containing a short phrase--In Remembrance, Time Will Never Let us Forget, We Honor Those We Lost, We Pause to Remember, Together We Remember, We Will Never Forget, In Memorium, or similar sentiment? The ads appeared to be competing for title as most spare, most restrained, most respectful...most lacking in meaning. Only Macy's, bless its upbeat little corporate heart, suggested we remember and "give back, volunteer your time, lend a hand, thank a hero, thank of a friend, be a good listener." It took 3000 lives to get to advice we got in kindergarten? Some Reckoning.

I was feeling agitated, furious, and semi-livid. I should probably have put myself in Time Out.

Instead I re-read N.R. Kleinfield's article. I hoped that my reaction to it would be different. It wasn’t. I did circle one paragraph, the only one that rang true for me: “Ultimately, each person attaches an individual meaning to 9/11, if possible. Outside of the families of the victims, most people’s lives may not present themselves as remarkably different. But there is residue, lingering wisps of Sept. 11.”

This made me think of fog and clouds with wispy edges that evaporate as they roll across the sky. I wonder if we will find any meaning in the wisps of 9/11 before they vanish altogether.
I looked at the grainy photograph of the Twin Towers in the clouds again. I looked for meaning and found none. And then I picked up the Op-Ed section of the paper and found another ambiguous cloud. This one, it turned out, had a silver lining.

TOMORROW: The Soul of Clouds--Part 3

The Souls of Clouds--Part One

2011-11-01T16:41:00.000-07:00

Many of you may remember this photograph (above) from a previous post about a hike I took along the Skyline Divide Trail near Mt. Baker. It was here, on this idyllic top-of-the-world knoll, that I overheard a hiker say, "Now I feel I've been to America."
What we all saw and felt that day was America the beautiful. I have kept his words in my heart because they, too, were beautiful and true and they made me love the mountains, valleys, and sky even more. And because, when I arrived home the next day and picked up the day-old Sunday New York Times from my driveway, his words became more poignant: They had been spoken on September 11, ten years after the terrorist attacks.

I had forgotten about this “anniversary” during my weekend at Mt. Baker. My internal clock is precise, but my internal calendar is off by a day most days of the week. We had no TV or internet to bring 9/11 into our lives at the cabin we rented. But now I knew. Now I walked into my house with an extra-heavy newspaper with a not-so beautiful America inside.

I unfurled the paper on my kitchen table. A photograph of the Ground Zero Memorial ran large on the front page. Unless you had been following the construction of the memorial, you might have thought you were looking at a rain-splattered tombstone carved with many names. The photo depicted one of the memorial’s bronze panels where the names of the nearly 3,000 who died in the attacks have been etched. The panel in the photograph appeared bluish-gray and was covered in drops of water (rain? water splashed from the memorial pools? tears? what are we to think?). Beneath the arresting photo, the large type read “The Reckoning: A Decade After 9/11.” This was the title of the special 40-page supplement inside the paper.

But I wasn’t ready to tackle any of this Sunday’s paper. Not because I had lost family, friends, or colleagues in the attacks (I hadn’t) or because I didn’t have strength to bear the deep sorrow that those forty pages would undoubtedly hold (I had). It was because I didn’t like the word “reckoning.” It had biblical, apocalyptic, rapture-y, overtones. Now I was feeling cynical and un-American. I wanted to be in the right frame of mind when I read this decadal review. I felt it was my duty to be moved to tears, even idle ones.

A grainy color photo spanned both the left and right pages. It was a bird’s-eye-view of the World Trade Center towers jutting through a solid blanket of smoke. The image was arresting. The proud towers that dominated the Manhattan skyline, that symbolized double-strength American power and wealth, now seemed diminutive and vulnerable—here moments before their collapse. But something wasn’t right. This was not the way I remembered the smoke looking after the hijacked planes hit the towers. And the towers were intact and plumes of smoke were not billowing from the gash in their sides.

I looked to the caption for an explanation. “BEFORE: The towers in spring 2001.” The photograph was taken by Katie Day Weisenberger, a college student flying into New York one April morning. She was shooting 35-mm film of the sunrise and clouds from her window seat. Suddenly, the towers appeared above the clouds.

So those were clouds, low stratus clouds, blanketing Lower Manhattan—not smoke from the towers. Just moments ago, the scene was toxic and heartbreaking. Now the clouds transformed the photograph into something ethereal, beautiful, and poignant. But still heartbreaking. I am sure I wasn’t the only reader duped by this ambiguous image, an odd, low-quality image—familiar, but strangely not. The New York Times editors had likely chosen this photograph so that readers look twice. And think twice.

TOMORROW: The Soul of Clouds--Part 2

Where There's Smoke...

2011-10-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

This, dear readers, is a pyrocumulus cloud. Photo courtesy Art Rangno.

...there isn't always a pyrocumulus.
Some of you may recall a previous posting about the supposed pyrocumulus cloud over the Big Hump Fire on the Olympic Peninsula last month. It turns out that what we were seeing in Dale Ireland's time-lapse video was not a pyrocumulus cloud, just a puffy plume of smoke. The Accidental Naturalist is guilty of wishful thinking; I am studying clouds, not smoke, for my next book.

I got the full explanation of pyrocumulus from my meteorologist, cloud maven Art Rangno, who kindly sent me the two photographs of real pyrocumulus posted here.
The image above was taken at a controlled burn in what Rangno referred to as "the god-forsaken town called Hornepayne" in Northern Ontario, Canada in 1989. In this photo, you can clearly see the difference between the smoke from the forest fire and the pyrocumulus cloud--the smoke being gray (likely from the fluids used to ignite the fire) and the cloud being white (because water droplets in the clouds are large and scatter light that appears white to our eyes). The smoke has provided tons tiny particles that became condensation nucleii; water vapor condensed on these and eventually became large water droplets and cloud.

The image below was taken during a research flight over the Puget Sound area conducted by the University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences (Rangno's pre-retirement workplace). You can see the white pyrocumulus cloud in or above the stratiform layer of smoke. You can also see some natural clouds above the peaks of the Olympic Mountains in the background.

Smoke--vertical and horizontal and a pyrocumulus cloud.
Photo courtesy Art Rangno.

The flattening out of the rising smoke is something I did observe in the video of the Big Hump Fire plumes. Here is how that happens: The air heated by the fire rises in the surrounding cooler air. As it rises, it cools and then reaches a level where it is the same temperature as the surrounding air and is no longer buoyant. It then settles where it can remain buoyant and then spread out horizontally--as you can see clearly in the photograph above.
What is "fun" about this smoke (and,by the same token, smoke stacks or steam plants) is that you can actually see the warm air rising and eventually leveling out. The same kind of thing is happening to the air beneath clouds--but we can't see the air during this part of the process: the sun warms invisible parcels of air near the surface of the earth, the warmed air rises then reaches a level at which is is no longer buoyant. In the case of water vapor, this is called dew point or condensation level--the point at which the water vapor in the air condenses and forms a visible cloud. The base of that cloud rests at this level. Depending on the type of cloud, it may continue to lift (creating cumiliform clouds) or it may spread out horizontally (creating stratiform clouds).

The dark bases of these cumiliform clouds are at the same altitude--the condensation level or dew point--but the height or thickness of the clouds themselves vary. The cloud height indicates the altitude of cloud's base above the ground.

   Either way, the base of the clouds remains constant. When you read that altocumulus clouds are typically 6,500 to 26,000 feet high, know that those numbers refer to the height of the bases of the clouds above the earth. Altocumulus clouds rarely rise more than .62 miles above that. Cumulonimbus clouds may rest their bases at 2,000 feet (the condensation level or dew point) but grow vertically to 39,000 feet.
   So, when you next go cloudwatching, imagine all the warm air rising beneath each of the clouds. Just beneath the cloud base, there is invisible water vapor; once it reaches condensation level, becomes visible cloud.
   While I am not a fan of forest fires, smoke stacks, or steam plants, they do give us a visual impression of what the atmosphere is hiding...which is, as always, more than we can imagine.

The Problem with Clouds...

2011-10-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

...is that there are no type specimens or field markings to positively identify them. There are basic guidelines for identification--the general shape, altitude, and opacity of the cloud--but only sometimes does a description or photograph of a cloud in a field guide really match the cloud you are studying in the real world.
Take the photograph above, for instance, taken by my niece in Washington, DC. Judging by their layered, clumpy form, shading, and estimated altitude (low), these beautiful clouds are, I believe, stratocumulus perlucidus clouds. Stratocumulus are one of my favorite types as they usually move with some urgency across the sky almost like a time-lapse video. And we have plenty of them here in the Pacific Northwest. Here are some other examples of stratocumulus perlucidus clouds.

You can see that they are all generally similar--low clouds which, according to Michael Allaby's Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate, appear in "patches, sheets, or layers of gray, white, or both gray and white cloud. There are always dark areas, shaped as rolls or rounded masses. These sometimes merge into larger masses."

But stratocumulus always seem to be changing from or to another type of cloud such as stratus, cumulus, or altocumulus, so you'll see characteristics of these clouds in the stratocumulus. That makes them hard to i.d. But that is part of their charm. Just go with "stratocumulus-ish" or "stratocumulus-esque" and you'll be fine...ish.

Glory in Clouds

2011-10-17T16:08:00.000-07:00

An image of a "glory" on layer of cloud.
Photo courtesy Northern Ireland Amateur Astronomers Society

   On a rainy October 7, I began my first trip to the East Coast since my mother died in early June. I was looking forward to the trip to see my father and extended family, but knew this visit would be hard. I had been flying across the country to visit my parents for a decade, ever since I moved West. In the past few years, as my own children have become more independent, I've been making the long trip more frequently and alone.
   I had developed a good system: public transport to the airport, one carry-on roller bag, one book for pleasure reading, several books on clouds, a camera, and a window seat to watch the skies. The journey took all day, but ended at the home where I grew up, where my parents had lived for nearly forty years. My father would pick me up at the airport, my mother would come out on the porch to greet me. Depending on the time of day, we'd have hot tea or a glass of wine and spend the next few hours catching up. It was not until my plane took off and we rose steadily through the layer of clouds over Seattle that reality hit. My mother was not going to be there.
   My face pressed to the window, looking down on the sea of lumpy gray clouds, I began to cry. And then I turned my shoulders toward the window so my seat mates wouldn't hear me snuffling. My mother took great pleasure in my interest in clouds and had sent me several books, post cards, and photographs from the newspaper of clouds over the past few years. She had a special fondness for the high cirrus clouds that reminded her of angels. Though she didn't like to fly, I know she would have enjoyed the view at 30,000 feet.
  As we crossed the Cascades, the nimbostratus and stratocumulus clouds thinned and I got peeks at plots of farmland and stretches of the Columbia River. The clouds looked more like altocumulus now but were still thick, still blanketed much of the landscape below.

I couldn't help but stare. Perhaps because I was staring, crying, scrunched up in the window almost looking straight down below the plane, I saw something I had never seen before: It was the tiny, perfectly formed shadow of our airplane cast on the layer of cloud below. Encircling the entire shadow was a rainbow. Only I knew it wasn't a rainbow.

Through my tears, I watched the shadow and the concentric circles of colored light for several minutes. It was beautiful, even comforting. When the clouds thinned over the Columbia Plateau, the whole thing vanished and I reached into my bag for one of my cloud books.

Never leave home without it.

According to my favorite cloud book (a gift from my father), I had been watching the "glory." It is not a cloud, but an atmospheric optical phenomenon seen only when the sun is directly behind an object as it casts its shadow onto a layer of clouds. But not just any clouds--clouds composed of water droplets, not ice crystals. And not just any water droplets--droplets less than 50 microns in diameter. That's 50 millionths of a meter--about half the average diameter of a human hair. The altocumulus clouds we were flying over were made of these droplets.
Around 11:30 a.m., when I saw the glory, I was sitting on the left side of the plane (facing north) and the sun was high and shining from the right side of the plane (the south). As the wavelengths of sunlight entered the small water droplets in the cloud, they slowed, and were refracted (bent) along the edge of each droplet. When that light hits the back of the droplet, it is reflected to the other side of the droplet where it refracted again before leaving the droplet. Had this been all that was going on in these droplets, the sunlight would have separated into the ROY G. BIV colors and I would have seen a rainbow. But I did not see a rainbow. That's because the wavelengths of light actually cling ever so slightly to the edge of the droplet. This clingy type of bending is called diffraction--a bending of light as it passes around the droplet.

Graphic courtesy the University of Illinois WW2010 Project

     Thanks to refraction, reflection, and diffraction, the sunlight was doing 180-degree turns inside the water droplets. Sunlight that does 180s inside a water droplet creates faintly colored rings of light--a variation on the rainbow theme. That light--the glory--can also form around the shadow of a person's head if he or she is standing above a bank of clouds or fog, back to the sun. The circles of light then appear like a halo, hence the name "glory."
   I learned all of this science later, after I returned home from a wonderful visit with my father. But while I was there, I remained happily ignorant of all of this, wanting to hold in my heart the image of our tiny plane--a shadow floating on the clouds and embraced by an ethereal light of a distant star.

Youngest Brother's Mammatus

2011-10-05T13:34:00.000-07:00

Pouchy mammatus clouds.

   Only four seconds passed after I posted my last blog before my youngest brothers e-mailed me another of his cloud photos (above). The subject line in the e-mail was "Update the Brother Blog!!!!"
   Because we are a competitive bunch of siblings, I am expecting cloud photos in my inbox from Brother 1 and Brother 2 shortly.
   However, the photo above will be hard to beat. It is an East Coast sky roiling with mammatus clouds discussed in a recent blog by The Accidental Naturalist. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the mammatus pouches appear to be on the underside of some cumulonimbus clouds just before or after a whopper of a thunderstorm. Mammatus do not linger, so they are difficult to capture with a camera--especially with this fabulous light and just the vivid green trees in the foreground.

Detail of small mammatus pouches in photograph.

Clouds My Brothers Sent Me

2011-10-05T12:43:00.000-07:00

Modern architecture enhanced by clouds

There are only so many clouds a girl can see in a day. Thankfully, I have three brothers who are either genetically predisposed to admire clouds or have caught the cloudspotting bug from their favorite sister.

Either way, I am grateful to them for sending me photographs and stories about the clouds they hang out with at home and on their travels. Here are a few from the Gallery of the Nebulous Fraternity.

Clouds over Inverness, Scotland on June 25th at 8:45 p.m.

A satellite photo of cirrus? No--detail of slab of granite.

Clouds over Somewhere

Stratocumulus Clouds over different Somewhere

Cloud over Washington DC on supposed Day of Rapture in May.

Clouds over Washington National's Stadium on 9/11/2011

And then this about a stratus cloud known as fog...

   I have been rowing a lot. I was out in the single this morning and it was foggy, and still dark, but flat, so I went way out into the Sound. Probably a bad idea because I had no bearings and the fog made it feel like I was rowing inside a chamber. I was beyond the islands, sculling comfortably and alone.
   All of a sudden, the puddles started swirling with green luminescence and there was a neon contrail billowing off the stern. No light, no depth, just darkness and this freaky green stuff bubbling everywhere. Then it was over.
   Is it ok to find the best moments of your life alone in darkness, while playing in primordial ooze?

Mammatus Clouds

2011-09-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

Saturday's mammatus clouds posted on KIRO TV

A local cloudwatcher asked if I had these unusual clouds on my list. They are very strange, often eerie, mammatus clouds, and were featured on KIRO-TV's website Sunday after they made appearance over Seattle on Saturday when our weather did a swift, tumultuous, seasonable 180. It was summer on Friday, fall on Monday.
Unfortunately, KIRO 7 Meteorologist Morgan Palmer explains them this way:

"It's a pocket of mammatus, forming because it looks like a small deformation axis, or area has developed. That's where the typically laminar air flow is being interrupted or 'held up' as air is moving through. This is causing billowing as the air stream is buckling a bit. It probably resulted from a combination of topographic effects and the increasing instability late Saturday. Air pockets were bouncing up and down all over the place ahead of the front."

   I have no idea what this means. The Accidental Naturalist is here to help you out. Here is my understanding of how mammatus clouds are formed.*
     The clouds, named mammatus (Latin for "having breasts") resemble strange udders. Mammatus do not form in isolation, but are what is called a supplementary feature of other clouds. Mammatus "hang" from the underside cumulonimbus clouds. How did they get there?
   As you may recall, clouds are formed as warm air rises and the molecules of invisible water vapor condense and become liquid droplets. This change in phase--from vapor to liquid--releases hidden (latent) heat into the surrounding atmosphere. This warms the air gives the molecule a tiny lift.
   Our water molecule now comes to a fork in the sky: evaporate back into water vapor or join with other water molecules. Our molecule takes the fork toward Joinersville. If a billion(ish) water molecules take this fork, they eventually grow to the size of a water droplet. Multiply that by a number too obscenely large for this family friendly blog and, under the right atmospheric conditions, the water droplets develop into a cloud.
   You probably knew where this was going, eh?

Now, let's say our cloud stays the course, and more and more water droplets form and we get a cumulus humilis cloud (below)--the youngest and humblest of the cumulus clan.

A stack of cumulus humilis--wider than they are tall.

The cumulus humilis continues to grow as more and more water vapor condenses, the latent heat from the condensation keeps the cloud rising, as it rises into cooler and cooler air, the rate of condensation increases. And the amount of released heat increases within the cloud. Our cumulus humilis becomes a larger cumulus mediocris (was unavailable for photo at posting time), then even larger cumulus congestus (below). Now there is strong genuine updraft within the cloud.

Cumulus congestus--cauliflower-like tops.

Now it seems to take on a life of its own. The water droplets grow to the size of rain droplets, the release of latent heat sustains the convection, and our billowy cloud rises to the tropopause--the boundary of the troposphere and the stratosphere--where the top of the cloud flattens out. Now we have a cumulonimbus with an icy incus (Latin for "anvil") at the top (below).

A cumulonimbus with incus.

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about the breasts.

As you can imagine, great updrafts are created within a cumulonimbus cloud. These updrafts can transport large quantities of rain-dense air rapidly from the base of the cloud toward the top. At the top, they become ice crystals. If the ice crystals come into contact with the dry air above them, they evaporate without first melting into water. This process is called sublimation.

Recall that condensation of water vapor releases heat into the atmosphere. Sublimation does the opposite: it absorbs heat from the atmosphere around it. This chills local areas in the cloud. The cooler air becomes more dense and then sinks through the bottom of the anvil. When this air reaches warmer air, it condenses and appears as these eerie, pouchy, mammatus. They are typically 1-3 km in size. Their life span is about 10 minutes.

Mammatus are rare. They form when cold air sinks into warm air. This is exactly the opposite/upside-down of how convective clouds form--warm air rising into cold air.

   Mammatus are rarely photographed. Predictive models have yet to be developed. Observations are serendipitous. You'll increase your chances of seeing these if you look up.
   I hope this has been helpful. If not, here's something to contemplate:
  The mermaid (above) is the personification of a cumulonimbus cloud with supplementary incus and mammatus. Her body being the cumulonimbus, her arms being the flattened incus, and, well...you can figure out the rest.

* Shortly after the Accidental Naturalist finished a draft of this blog, she discovered a scientific article in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences titled "The Mysteries of Mammatus Clouds: Observations and Formation Mechanisms." She got a sinking feeling when she saw the word "mystery" and read the list of possible ways they are formed:

"...anvil subsidence, subcloud evaporation/sublimation, melting, hydrometeor fallout, cloud-base detrainment instability, radiative effects, gravity waves, Kelvin–Helmholtz instability, Rayleigh–Taylor instability, and Rayleigh–Bénard-like convection."

Click here to read the article...or just to ogle the great photos of mammatus clouds.

Big Hump Fire

2011-09-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Dale Ireland for offering an archived time-lapse video of the Big Hump fire on the Olympic Peninsula. The video, taken September 11, captures the eruption of the pyrocumulus cloud and the eerie smokey sunset.
   The best way to view it is to expand to "full screen" and move back a bit from your computer screen. There are several seconds of black screen, then dawn, then, about 20 seconds in, you can see the pillar-like cloud of smoke on the horizon.
  Yes, I am a bit obsessed by these clouds and by Dale Ireland's daily video of the sky over the Olympic Mountains. That's why I have a permanent link to his website at right. Please don't try to tell me there is something better on television.
  Enjoy!

Pyrocumulus Cloud

2011-09-19T15:46:00.000-07:00

   Last week I posted a BLOG about the smokey skies of the Big Hump fire that started in Olympic National Forest on August 31. I included a link to Dale Ireland's fabulous time-lapse video of the fire from September 8, showing the pyrocumlus clouds, but the link to that footage no longer works.

   CLICK HERE if you want to try another route to Dale's footage, via the Kitsap Sun newspaper.

    As of today, the fire is still smoldering but is expected to be contained by September 30th. Interestingly, early on in the fire, low clouds slowed the spread of the fire, but also prevented helicopters from dropping water or using infrared equipment to map the fire's boundaries.

Rare Bird on Kindle

2011-09-16T17:54:00.000-07:00

  For the amazing low price of $9.99 you can now read my book, Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet, on Kindle. Click here to order on Amazon...and to see that copies of Rare Bird in classic hardback form are an even-more-amazing bargain. Birders, can you spare a penny? Yeesh.
   It's a good thing I have a sugar daddy when my royalties could actually be a negative number.
   The Accidental Naturalist is mostly about clouds (the subject of my next book), but if you want to read more about the marbled murrelet before you invest, please visit my website, www.mariaruthbooks.com.

The fluffy and unwitting protagonist of Rare Bird.

Thought for a Day

2011-09-14T22:29:00.000-07:00

An archipelago of water droplet clouds in a sea of water vapor.

After a spectacular spate of sunny, 80-degree days, our cloudy gray skies are returning as we slip into Autumn here in the Pacific Northwest. I'm glad the clouds are back. I missed them and the thoughts they made me think, such as: Clouds are maps of atmospheric moisture.

Big Hump Clouds

2011-09-13T10:05:00.000-07:00

View of Mt. Baker from Skyline Divide Trail. Oh, and a wee contrail cloud.

An open weekend and a spectacular weather forecast lured 3/4 of my family up to Mt. Baker to hike and catch a glimpse of the alpine wildflowers in bloom. We hadn't been keeping up with the news, but thought we smelled forest-fire smoke in the air as we left Olympia Saturday morning. It was a distinctive smell we had come to know quite well from our five years in Southern California.

The skies around us were blue, but hazier than they normally are this time of year. I put forth the idea it might be the snow sublimating--changing from solid ice/snow to vapor--and then condensing. I had spent the past few weeks writing about water molecules, condensation nuclei, and scattering; my answer to everything was water's molecular structure.

Haze? Smog? Volcanic dust? We were clueless.

And there was a bit of brownish-pinkish tinge to the haze. We thought it might be smog. But we couldn't imagine the source--Bellingham? Seattle? Abbotsford, B.C.?

On our hikes to Artist's Point and along the Skyline Ridge Trail, we didn't see any big billow clouds from a forest fire on the horizon. These clouds, known as pyrocumulus (pyro=fire) clouds, look like strange forms of cumulus congestus clouds. Here is how they work: the heat of the wildfire creates a thermal (rising parcel of warm air) that is loaded with bits of ash and other particles that serve as condensation nuclei. When the rising, smoky warm air rises high enough, it cools, and the water molecules in the air condense and create a cloud.

Pyrocumulus are often easy to spot because they are the only clouds visible on a an otherwise blue-sky day and they do not rise and float above the horizon the way a "normal" cloud does; the base of a pyrocumulus stays attached to its source--the fire. However, it is often difficult to distinguish the border between the billowing smoke and the billowing cloud.

What I am writing about but did not see was The Big Hump fire--a 1,150-acre Olympic wildfire that started on Thursday, September 8th along the Duckabush River just west of Brinnon. (It's been named Big Hump after a point on a hiking trail nearby).

Mt. Shuksan from the trail.

Meanwhile, we were on top of the world. None of the other hikers we passed or chatted with mentioned the fire. We were all too enraptured with the scenery, which did not include the sky (mostly because there were no real clouds in it--only that mysterious haze). We are all admiring the alpine meadows at our feet and the snow-capped peaks of Mt. Baker, Mt. Shuksan, and every ridge in between. I was glad there were no clouds to distract me.

The reward for an hour-long ascent on the Skyline Divide Trail

It was at this idyllic spot (above) that I overheard a tourist say to on of his friends, "Now I feel I have been to America." I smiled, happy for him, and grateful to be alive and on that mountaintop.

The Accidental Naturalist cooling off on a former cloud.

Hikers: A detailed description and more photos of the hike can be found here: Skyline Divide Trail

Labor Day Amusement

2011-09-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

  I celebrated Labor Day this year by trying to fall asleep in my hammock. It helped that I didn't sleep well the night before and was ready for a nap around 11 that morning. So, I positioned the hammock on my back deck--half in the sun and half in the shade--and climbed in.
  The hammock is a Brazilian-style hammock--large and made of light cotton canvas. I grew up with the Pawley's Island kind of hammock, but there was always one twist in the rope that hit an elbow or shoulder just the wrong way and made it difficult to relax. My new hammock has a soporific design. Or at least I thought so.
  After about ten minutes of resting with my eyes closed, I realized I wasn't asleep. I brought out a pillow and tried again. I breathed deeply and imagined myself in a yoga class during the final relaxation. My wakefulness would not abandon me so I spent the next hour opening my eyes and then closing them in the slowest, laziest way I could. My feet were warm in the sun yet I could feel the cool early-fall breeze blowing over them, stirring the wind chimes I had hung from the hammock.
   A line came to mind from Second Harvest, a dreamy little book written in 1930 by Jean Giono: "He had stretched out his bare feet in the warmth and was amusing himself by wiggling his toes."
   Stretched out in my hammock, I wiggled my toes. The universe became very, very small.
   A big-bodied dragonfly hovered near the end of the hammock and then darted away toward the edge of my yard where it hovered, turned, and flew back toward me again.
   The flies and bees were buzzing in the planter boxes on the deck. I could hear the difference in their buzzes.
   My feeder was full of chirpy little birds--chickadees and nuthatches mostly.
   Behind a brightly illuminated leaf from a shrub in the yard I saw the complete silhouette of an insect on the other side of the leaf.
   I closed my eyes and watched the bright spots of light dancing on the inside of my eye lids. A small scratching noise came from beneath the hammock--likely a junco or chickadee searching for seeds scattered from the feeder nearby.
   The Douglas-fir was dropping it's small, brown needles like a light snow. One landed on my shoulder.
   I opened my eyes. The dragon fly kept up its back-and-forth, getting inches closer to me each time. I wondered if he was curious about my necklace--a small, silver, diamond-studded dragonfly. Was it a potential mate?
   The wind chimes played three of its six notes.
   Small ragged clouds--cumulus fractus--floated past.
   The sun moved behind the roof peak of my house. My feet cooled in the shade. I shifted to keep them in the sun and then wiggled them, amused and happy to be awake.

What Does it Mean?

2011-09-06T13:04:00.000-07:00

This is a photograph of a painting from a gallery somewhere in Maine.

This is a photograph of my car windshield being sprayed with soapy water at

a car wash somewhere in Olympia.

Fog Blog

2011-09-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

Inland: Blue skies, a scattering of cumulus humilis, ripening grapes viewed from atop a glacial erratic near McMinnville, Oregon.

I had heard rumors about the late-summer fog pattern (thick, persistent) along the Pacific Coast beaches, but got to experience it first hand a few weeks ago in Oregon. We had picked up friends at the Portland airport on an 90+-degree day and headed southwest through the beautiful and sunny Willamette Valley (above) toward the coastal town of Neskowin.

We knew our rental house didn't have a view of the beach, so before checking in, we drove a little ways past the house to get a lay of the land. What we got was the lay of the fog (below) over every inch of ocean as far as the eye could see. Can you hear the sucking sound of the warm, inland air?

On the coast: a sunny day above, but not on, the beach at Neskowin.

What is happening here is this: The lovely, hot, and harmless looking air we enjoyed in Portland had been rising during the day. And as the hot air rises, it creates a kind of vacuum quickly filled by the surrounding air around it at ground/sea level. As the warm air lingering over the ocean is sucked inland, it passes over the relatively cooler water and condenses. The condensed water vapor becomes visible water droplets--fog. This type of fog is called advection fog. This type of fog forms when warm, moist air is carried horizontally across a cold surface by a wind of about 6-10 mph. This gentle wind is responsible for carrying the cool air and fog to greater heights along the coast. According to the Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate by Michael Allaby, advection fog can be 2000 feet deep.
Advection fog is "world famous" for its photogenic presence around San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and for making Cape Disappointment, Washington, the foggiest place in the Lower 48.

Advection fog created this lovely Coppertone-free afternoon at the beach for my friend, Mary.

We lingered a while on the beach, watching the fog take over the beach like it owned it. It was quite a show, the highlight being my first-ever fog bow (below).

Fog bows appear as albino rainbows.

Fog bows form under certain conditions: the water droplets in the air must be very tiny--less than .05 mm--the size of droplets of this fog. The sunlight is reflected, refracted, and diffracted by the droplets in such a way as to create white light. Larger water droplets (rain droplets) in the air separates sunlight into the classic ROY G BIV-colored rainbows.

Here my friend, Kevin, looking for the pots of white gold at the end of the fog bow.

To see these fog bows, the sun has to be shining from directly behind you and into the fog. We did this for a while, then turned toward the ocean to see what appeared to be several layers of clouds moving rapidly inland. The fog was sliding in just over the water, and a thick, gray bank of clouds (I am thinking stratocumulus) were forming well offshore and condensing further into altocumulus as they floated up over the warm air, bluffs, and interior hills that rose to 1500 feet in less than 2 miles.

Proposal Rock could not steal the show from these advancing clouds.

The clouds seem to float on a layer of invisible warm air once they encountered the land. The receding tide may have had something to do with the cloud pattern.

After the sun set and the inland air began to cool, there was less air moving inland and therefore, less fog blanketing our beautiful coast line (below).

This cloudscape could almost be a painting were it not for the awkwardly placed and uncroppable tree.

The following day was as dramatic but with more blue sky. A perfect day for a gourmet picnic featuring a dessert I knew from my East Coast childhood as "Twinkies." I probably would not have bought these at the Neskowin market had they not been renamed. They were, like the clouds and the company, as fabulous as ever.

Cloud Wash

2011-08-18T18:24:00.000-07:00

The Accidental Naturalist found herself in a commercial carwash today. After five years in Olympia, our car was sporting a nice outcrop of moss and hadn't had a proper bath in years. We live on a hill and any driveway washing would inevitably send gallons (100 on average) of soapy, gritty, mossy water directly into Budd Inlet.

So, while I was out running errands, I pulled into the Go Green Carwash, forked over some cash, put the car in neutral, and rolled up the windows. In seconds, the car started getting stuffy and hot and I was hoping I wouldn't have to open a window mid-wash for fresh air. And then the soap hit and distracted me from my claustrophobia and sweaty brow.

I looked out my front windshield and then pulled out my camera to record what appeared to be a major meteorological event:

Here are the altocumulus clouds moving in.

The clouds are thickening on the horizon.

Now the nimbostratus unleash a turbulent fury of rain to the parched land.

The sun--low in the sky--attempts to penetrate the thick layer of cloud.

The front passes, I survive the tempest and drive out of the car wash.

So, not only was my carwash fun, I was able to support a local green business that has a water reclamation system (eight underground tanks with a storage capacity of 9000 gallons) designed to keep waste water from carwashes from entering our watersheds. Go Green also stores rainwater and uses that prior to drawing on City of Olympia Water. Just in case you are on Olympia's West Side looking for cheap, clean, fun this weekend, here is your ticket:

Sunday's Southern Clouds

2011-08-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

  This Sunday evening's cloud show was spectacular and strange. The beautiful cirrus you see here were coming from the south and taking the form of mare's tails that seemed to fly across downtown Olympia. I usually look West or Southwest to watch the clouds move in, so the southern approach was a new experience for me.
  I was watching these clouds by Capitol Lake where the annual Bon Odori festival was happening. But I couldn't take my eyes off the clouds to watch the kimonoed dancers, so I watched the clouds and enjoyed the bizarre soundtrack of traditional Japanese music. Adding music to cloud watching was interesting and I decided to add something to each of the next several cloud photographs.
   I included the infamous Mistake on the Lake building in one shot (above) and liked the contrast of the wispy dynamic clouds and this dark chunk of architecture. In fact, I prefer it to the photo (below)--clouds with predictable strip of landscape.

I've set up a few decent photos of people with clouds, but think this one (taken by another than myself at my direction) doesn't work. I was hoping it would appear as if the clouds were blasting out of my head Medusa style but it looks more like I have an enormous rack of antlers and a headache. This might have worked with a wide-angle lens, fill flash, and some other tricks that I do not have up my sleeve. I'll keep working on it and will make sure I am not dead center in the photo. (Thanks for trying, honey!)

Next, I zoomed in a bit to include a clump of trees in the landscape strip (below). This is an improvement and I like the shape and color contrast and the reaching feeling of both trees and clouds.

Moving a bit more toward the abstract and jaunty...a study in light (below). The now squirming ice-crystal clouds scatter sunlight in a way that makes them appear white to our eyes. The energy of this same sunlight is absorbed and reflected by the green leaves at the top of this tree. And, well, there's the lamp-post looking like someone sticking his head into the photo at the last minute to get into the light show.

And, zoomed in as far as my Digital Elph would let me (below) is a view of the cloud no object or music could enhance. Within the two mare's tails was this fantastic spiraling pattern that looked to me like the double helix of a strand of DNA. Oh, the universe! When will it stop playing tricks on me?

The most wonderful aspect of Sunday evening's cloud show was that I caught it serendipitously while wandering around a pretty deserted downtown with my husband, shopping for a dinner picnic (spring rolls and red wine!), and searching for a place to sit by the water. Digital Elph: Don't Leave Home Without It.

Wild Skies of Summer

2011-08-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

July 23rd

Though it looks as if this man (my husband) is standing waist deep in a lake with a stick, he is actually in the stern of our canoe, paddling furiously to escape the attack of these cloudy Valkyries.We'd all like a little more sun and heat right now, but I am glad for the clouds that have been enhancing the blue skies of the Pacific Northwest this summer. Blue skies just don't make very interesting photographs.

Some of the strangest clouds I've seen so far are the cirrus uncinus (above) during a beautiful late-afternoon canoe trip on Henderson Inlet and Woodard Bay. These are high, wispy ice clouds and, from what I could tell, were forming in the eastern sky in the direction of Mt. Rainier. I couldn't see the mountain from the bay, but I could detect a distant layer of clouds from whence these strange tufts seemed to generate. Clumps of them rose from the east and "flew" across the sky, gradually dissipating as their icy tails lengthened and evaporated.

July 29

Here is my bike, Cloud Chaser, (above) on board the ferry to Lummi Island. Thanks to the Whatcom County Transit System, we were able to take our bikes on the bus from downtown Bellingham to the ferry terminal at Pigeon Point ($7!). Our panniers and buckets held our clothes, birthday presents, a bottle of champagne, olives, cheese, and a baguette. Once off the ferry, we biked to the north end of the island to a yurt for the weekend.

Oh, but the clouds.The cumulus congestus rising over my handlebars, Bellingham, and the North Cascades remained low and distant. They did not do what they might have on the East Coast: continue their convective fury and turn into dark and stormy cumulonimbus.

At dinner one night, while we were grandly amusing our bouches, we had quite a spectacular show of altocumulus lenticularis, the lens-shaped clouds (below), over the Strait of Georgia.

July 30

The best show of all took place atop Mt. Rainier (below) where my father (visiting from the inferno of Washington, DC) and I planned to stroll amongst the alpine wildflowers and bask in the sun like marmots. Well, the trails at Paradise were still deep in snow and therefore closed to anyone without crampons and an ice axe. My dad and I wore sneakers just to make sure we didn't get corralled into some group summit climb.

August 2

Happily, we strolled around in the sunny parking lot and just stared up at the mountain, looking through binoculars at the blue-ice crevasses of the Nisqually Glacier (in lower right quadrant of photo above) and watching the peak. While we were there, a distinctive cloud started appearing--a cap cloud--one most often seen on high mountaintops, especially isolated peaks. The cloud appears to be stationary, stuck on the peak like a cap on a head, but that is an illusion. Up close, you can watch the cloud forming on the windward side and dissipating on the leeward side. As air moves up the mountain flank, it cools and condenses. As it descends, it warms and evaporates. The cloud was continually "appearing" on our left and "disappearing" to our right in equal measure.

August 4

And to top off two weeks of partly cloudy skies was this (above), the Cloud of Freedom produced by the Blue Angels during Seattle's annual Seafair. It is an artificial cloud, called a contrail, produced by condensation of warm moist air and particulate matter from jet-airplane exhaust. Great cloud, but unfortunately it is accompanied by the nerve-jangling, ear-drum-bursting Sound of Freedom.
Me? I like my clouds silent and tyrannical.

Fragile, Liquid, Perishable?

2011-07-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

   I spent spent most of yesterday reading my meteorology book about what drives the weather of the Pacific Northwest--the semi-permanent Aleutian Low, the Pacific High, the Kuroshiro Current, the North Pacific Drift, the California Current, the jet stream, the Coriolis Effect, the Ferrel Cell, the Polar Front, the Ekman Spiral, and La Nina.
   Our local weather guru, Cliff Mass, wrote a blog asking his readers to have the patience of Job as we wait for summer weather. A friend said it would likely be snowing on her Mt. Rainier camping trip this weekend. Another friend bought spinach starts (about 3 inches high) at our farmers' market yesterday; foot-high tomato plants are just a dollar. Friends and family back east are sweltering in hundred-degree heat. One of them is wearing flip-flops and linen shorts to work.
   And then I read a poem by Brendan Constantine, "Poem Ending On A Line By The Department Of Water And Power." It is a series of lines out of their contexts, the last line being, "If you disagree with water and electrical charges, please call."
   This line bounced around in my head all day long as I tried to imagine the Pacific Ocean, the clouds, the hydrogen, the oxygen, the ions. It must have worked its way into my subconscious, the way poem do when you're not looking. I woke up around 3:38 this morning with the image of a local postal clerk asking me "fragile, liquid, perishable?"
   I thought of the earth and the clouds and answered yes.

The Way Water Moves

2011-07-19T15:06:00.000-07:00

These are clouds painted by Georgia O'Keeffe. This small canvas, called "Celebration," captures the clouds near Lake George, NY, and in O'Keeffe's imagination. This painting is on display at the Seattle Art Museum. I've been visiting it and buying post cards of it for two years.

These are the inlets and passages of South Puget Sound, north of Olympia, depicted in four USGS topo sheets. The four individual sheets cut up the Sound in an unsatisfying and unhelpful way. Recently, I trimmed the white borders off each sheet, taped them together (badly), and thumbtacked them on my kitchen wall. I stepped back and suddenly the pattern ring a bell.

Clouds at the Edge

2011-07-18T13:35:00.000-07:00

The Accidental Naturalist at the July 10th SRO "kick-off" of the Tour.

The Accidental Naturalist's Live Cloud Tour 2011 has begun! This is not an organized tour; there are no sign ups, no buses, no souvenir cloud tote bags for participants, no cloud identification handbook or checklist included with a box lunch.

   It is organized (last minute) and does have participants (my husband and cloud-oblivious dog) and I do bring along Cloud Tour Kit: polarized sunglasses, camera, binoculars, maps, compass, windbreaker. The Tour is essentially a series of road trips across Washington State to observe how the clouds and the terrain influence each other.
   This is an unorthodox way to travel, but we all have something we want to see when we hit the road--national parks, wilderness trails, fly-fishing rivers, blooming wildflowers, rare birds, wineries, lakeside campgrounds, casinos, local brew pubs, outlet malls. My something is clouds.
  Yes, I could just lie in the hammock and let the clouds come to me, but I got my hands on a physiographic map of Washington State this winter and it had the same effect that the Burpee's Seed Catalogue does when it arrives in the mail: I wanted everything. I wanted to explore every inch of our state's nine provinces: Puget Lowland, Portland Basin, Willapa Hills, Olympic Mountains, Southern Cascades, Northern Cascades, Okanogan Highlands, Columbia Basin, and Blue Hills (which I had never even heard of).
   Since I wasn't planning to start my Cloud Tour until late spring (aka July), I ordered a raised relief map (below) so I could run my hands over the hills and plateaus and try to imagine how clouds worked their way across the landscape, moving according to atmospheric laws and in response to geologic forces that shaped and are shaping the land.

Order a raised relief map of Washington State. It's an enhancement to any home. Clouds not included.

Because our Pacific Northwest clouds are born over the Pacific Ocean, however, I first needed to observe the clouds moving over the water. First stop: Cape Flattery, WA, the northwestern-most spot in the Lower 48 and just 2 hours west of Port Angeles. Cape Flattery is within the Olympic Mountains physiographic province, which takes in the entire Olympic Peninsula--an area known more for its spectacular mountains, lush rain forests, beaches, and lakes than for its continentally extreme cloud-viewing platforms.

Reaching the very tip of Cape Flattery is easy. It's just a 30-minute walk along a beautiful wilderness trail and cedar boardwalk that winds its way through the forest and wetlands on the Makah Indian Reservation.

At the end of the trail are four viewing decks. The one my husband and I spent two hours faced Tatoosh Island to the northwest, but covered a good southwest to northeast swath of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the sky above it.

Here is our topo sheet showing Cape Flattery and Tatoosh Island. I am standing on the cape, photographing the island. Too bad I didn't orient the map correctly. But you get the idea.

We savored the scenery--the sea cliffs, blue-green water, bald eagles, Vancouver Island (above), sea lions, pigeon guillemots by the hundreds in cliff nests and in cooing pairs on the water. I took photographs of clouds. My husband took photographs of me looking at the clouds. I looked at everything through my binoculars and polarizing sunglasses. I watched the clouds. I looked West. And then I started traveling.

I followed the surface of the ocean with my eyes west to the horizon, then followed the bases of the clouds from the horizon back toward me until I was looking overhead. And then I followed the clouds back to the horizon and the ocean surface back. These look to me like cirrostratus clouds--high, icy clouds--that were forming somewhere out there on the Pacific. And this is why I have been so late in posting this blog. I had started my Tour at a place where the landforms have no influence on the clouds, a place where I had to tackle the Pacific Ocean. I nearly drowned.

Luckily, I have figured out all you need to know about the Pacific Ocean to enjoy this blog. Here goes.

The Pacific Ocean is 63.8 million square miles and is larger than all the earth's land areas combined. It holds 159 million cubic miles of salt water. I will not ask you to imagine how many swimming pools this is. Even a really huge swimming pool is incomprehensible. Human beings have problems imagining the very large and very small. Let it suffice to say that the Pacific Ocean exerts an enormous, profound, powerful influence on the planet.

The surface temperature of the North Pacific Ocean in our neck of the woods (Alaska to southern California) typically ranges from 45-50 degrees F year round. While not exactly warm, these waters are considerably warmer than the masses of air that flows over it from Asia and the frozen polar regions of the globe. These air masses are known as the continental Arctic (cA) and continental Polar (cP).

These air masses are cold and dry where they originates, but they doesn't stay at home. They move eastward and southward along the polar jet stream--one of several undulating currents of air that circle the globe. These jet streams are thousands of miles long, hundred miles wide, and several miles deep. In other words, unimaginably huge. They travel 100-200 m.p.h. at 5-8 miles above the earth. They are invisible. (hey are not to be confused with contrails produced by jet planes.)

So, imagine an unimaginable mass of cold dry air speeding its way eastward over the unimaginably huge Pacific Ocean. Over thousands of miles, this mass of air picks up warmth and moisture from the Pacific Ocean. It becomes a Maritime Polar Air Mass (mP) and may cover many thousands of square miles. Also unimaginably huge and aiming for the Pacific Northwest.
As it happened on July 10, as this mass of warm, moist air moved inland, it encountered a mass of cooler, denser air. The front edge of the invading air, in this case, is known as a warm front. As this front advanced, it began rising up over the cooler, denser air. Thanks to Eric Sloane's illustration below, you can see how this works. (The clouds first appear at the leading edge of the front above the man's head).

from Eric Sloane's Weather Book (Dover Publications, 2005)

And, thanks to the photographs I took, you can see a predictable progression of clouds showing a gradual "lowering" of the sky--from high wispy cirrus down to thick altocumulus. These four photos move from east to west and over a period of about four hours.

Cirrus clouds greeted us at Cape Flattery at 10:30 a.m. This photo was taken toward the east a bit, indicating the warm front was already inland a bit by the time we arrived.

The cirrus clouds begin to thicken to cirrostratus. This photo was taken to the north.

To the west, over the Pacific, thickening, lowering altostratus clouds

Four hours later, a blanket of altocumulus clouds covers most of the sky. This photograph was taken just south of Cape Flattery at Shi Shi beach; camera aiming to the southwest.

As it turns out, this particular front brought more clouds, but not nimbostratus (the rain clouds) inland to Olympia. There was another mass of wet air right behind this one, and another, and another, and another.

Can't you just taste that salty Pacific Ocean water in the rain?

Here's how to find Cape Flattery

Floating the Nisqually

2011-07-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

Paradise started here on Saturday morning. This is the put-in point for the six rafts that carried nearly fifty of us down a remote 13-mile stretch of the Nisqually River. Thanks to the work of the Nisqually Land Trust and its conservation partners, the photograph above captures just one of the many variations of river, trees, rock, and sky that greeted us with every gentle meander. From the Nisqually-Mashel State Park near Eatonville to Wilcox Farm near McKenna, there were no signs of development or human habitation.

Oh, but there was actually one sign--a home we might have missed had a young girl not waved and shouted hello from her back deck. We waved back and the Meriwether-wannabees in our boat shouted a hearty "Which way to Puget Sound?" and "What county are we in?" She responded with a befuddled "Huh?" We left it at that.
I'm glad she didn't answer. Though we had good maps of the territory, I was happy just being on the Nisqually, floating, meandering, feeling its course, riding its riffles, lingering in its pools, imagining the whole river from the its source to its mouth, and being there in the middle of it for a wonderful while.

The Nisqually River is 78 miles long. It begins 5,300 feet above sea level at the toe of the Nisqually Glacier in Mt. Rainer National Park and ends in the newly restored Nisqually Delta, where it meets Puget Sound in the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. The headwaters and the mouth are protected. Some 3,400 acres of the Nisqually Watershed is protected by the Nisqually Land Trust. Great care is being taken to protect this river, its forests, floodplains, and wildlife. You can feel this care and protection. You can feel the joy when someone in your boat points out an osprey nest, a water ouzel, a western tanager, an especially regal Douglas-fir, or tells of previous sightings of bald eagles and river otters.
Over thirteen miles of any river, you would expect to see a fishing camp or two, a derelict shack, a picnic table, a pile of rusty appliances, a new tent, an old mattress, a cigarette butt. I looked hard, but saw nothing that shouted or even whispered "careless."

Though I wished for a blue-sky day for our float trip, I found the spitting rain, mist, and spongey gray clouds relaxing. The light was soft, the wet green foliage gave off its own rich light, the water didn't sparkle as much as it glowed. No one was squinting or turning pink.

After a leisurely catered lunch on a wide gravel bar, the clouds (perhaps sensing I was falling in love with the river) put on a show that was, well, distracting. I was a bit irritated at having to juggle my camera and my paddle, but I figured out that I could do both if I only took photographs in the calm pools after we had successfully navigated the raging Class .5 whitewater.

And here are the clouds that, for a long while before anyone can remember, have been blowing in from the Pacific Ocean, moving eastward across the lowland, rising up the flanks of the mountains, becoming rain and snow, and then, under its own frozen weight, glaciers that carve a paradise drop by drop.

Everyone should learn more about the float trips, conservation work, and volunteer opportunities of the Nisqually Land Trust .
Everyone should see the toe of the Nisqually Glacier on the easy 1.2-mile "Nisqually Vista" loop walk at Mt. Rainier National Park.
Everyone should visit the Nisqually Delta on the new boardwalk at the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.

Everyone should fall in love with this river.

High Pressure

2011-07-05T16:50:00.000-07:00

   This, my friends, is what high pressure should look like! No cloud good get off the ground under this kind of atmospheric pressure; hence our spectacular blue skies--so blue, in fact, that photographs of them look like squares of sky-blue paper unless you include something else in them (such as a crescent moon).
   As you may recall from my previous posting, Writer Under Pressure, I have been struggling with understanding the basics of atmospheric pressure. I pored over many a book to try to find the right metaphor, image, equation that would set off the "aha!" for the Accidental Naturalist. The problem with metaphors and similes, I found, is that they don't hold up under scrutiny. Atmospheric pressure is sort of like blue Jell-O, sort of like a bag of potato chips, sort of like balls bouncing on a pool table, sort of like an ocean of air. But not really and not if you want to add all sort of other necessary ingredients to your atmosphere--heat, wind, aerosols, moisture, clouds. Adding heat to blue Jell-O is not a pretty sight.
   Thinking that I needed to knuckle down and understand the physics of atmospheric pressure, I began reading about gravity, mass, weight, temperature, volume, Boyle's Law, Charle's Law, and the essential behavior of air molecules.
   In no time, I was confronted by "force per unit area," 14.7 psi, hectopascals, V a P,  V a T, and the like. Eventually, I understood what all of this meant, but I certainly do not want to write a book about clouds using this kind of language. Nor would you want to read it.
   Nobel-Prize Winning physicist Richard Feyman said "The glory of mathematics is that we do not have to say what we are talking about." The more I knuckle down, the more I believe the atmosphere works in such glorious ways that describing it is beyond words and mathematics equally. This last statement is the equivalent of a Hallmark card that starts out "Words cannot begin to describe...." and then goes on and on ad nauseum.
   This morning, I found two descriptions of the behavior of air molecules that worked for me. Neither metaphor nor equation, they are are simple descriptions that rely on well-chosen verbs and adjectives. And, most importantly, the authors write about air with a sense of awe and a light touch.
  John Suchoki writes this in Conceptual Chemistry:
   "Think of the molecules of air inside the inflated tire of an automobile. Inside the tire, the molecules behave like zillions of tiny Ping-Pong balls, perpetually moving helter-skelter and banging against the inner walls. Their impacts on the inner surface of the tire produce a jittery force that appears to our coarse sense as a steady outward push. Averaging this pushing force of a unit of area provides the pressure of the enclosed air."
     Pure poetry! For me, this entire paragraph behaves like air molecules inside my enclosed brain: zillions, Ping-Pong, helter-skelter, banging, jittery.

    In Meteorology Today, C. Donald Ahrens writes this:
   "Air molecules are in constant motion. On a mild spring day near the surface, an air molecule will collide about 10 billion times each second with other air molecules. It will also bump against objects around it--houses, trees, flowers, the ground, and even people. Each time an air molecule bounces against a person, it gives a tiny push. This small force (push) divided by the area on which it pushes is called pressure."
   And this:
   "Air molecules not only take up space (freely darting, twisting, spinning, and colliding with everything around them) but...these same molecules have weight. In fact, air is surprisingly heavy. The weight of all the air around the earth is a staggering 5600 trillion tons...The weight of the air molecules acts as a force upon the earth."
   Darting, twisting, spinning, colliding...I get it!
  And, in describing the differences in density of air molecules between the troposphere (the "bottom" 11 km of our atmosphere, the layer closest to earth) and the thermosphere (the "top" layer above 85 km), Ahrens writes:
   "The low density of the thermosphere also means that an air molecules will move an average distance...of over one kilometer before colliding with another molecule. A similar molecule at the earth's surface will move an average distance of less than one millionth of a centimeter before it collides with another molecule."

Need a real-life visual? Here (above), from Conceptual Chemistry, is an illustration of the collision course one particularly delicious air molecule traveled. For the first whiff of this pie to reach this woman trying to read was circuitous, involving some 8 billion particle collisions per second.
Now I am beginning to see and feel the invisible atmosphere. It is making my head spin. And, it is making me hungry.

Cumulus Gelatinous

2011-06-26T14:46:00.000-07:00

Dessert created and photographed by M. Ruth

   Who, you are wondering, gets to devour this fabulously whimsical dessert tonight? Luckily, it's not you. And due to bad planning (or a stroke of luck), there are only two of these Jell-o-brand-instant-gelatin filled goblets instead of four. Not only did the Accidental Naturalist accidentally halve the Jell-o, but I doubled the whipping cream. So, it looks like I will be having cream clouds in my coffee all week.
    If you would like to re-create this dessert (boss coming to dinner?), I recommend actually following the recipe provided in my previous blog.
   Mmmmmmm.....

On the Lighter Side...

2011-06-24T09:16:00.000-07:00

The wonderful yet occasional Cloud Appreciation Society newsletter arrived in my inbox this morning. I am just one of 26900 CAS members from 85 different countries reading this fun-filled missive.
I may be the only one making a very silly cloud-related dessert this weekend. Click here for a laugh, a groan, a recipe.

A Cloud is a Cloud is a Cloud...

2011-06-22T17:40:00.000-07:00

Because my recent foray into meteorology has revealed a black hole of understanding of chemistry—the structure of a water molecule (the building blocks of clouds), for instance—I have borrowed my son’s college text book on Conceptual Chemistry, a book he acquired from a textbook rental company called Chegg until August 1. It is June 22. I must hurry.

I put the book on the small table next to the chair where I write in morning. I love the cover: a cloudless blue sky in the background, a snowy Yosemite National Park in the middle ground, and a sky-blue, computer-enhanced river in the foreground. In the water are the reflections of the snowy landscape and submerged models of water molecules—two small white balls attached to one red ball. I get it. Water as a solid, water as a liquid and…uh oh…where is the gaseous phase?

I turn the book over and see that the entire back cover is dedicated to explaining the front-cover photograph. The gaseous phase is not shown, because, water vapor is invisible. (Remember, visible steam is not water vapor—it is liquid water, condensed water vapor). The back cover explains that when skies are clear, as in the Yosemite scene, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is relatively low. “This, in turn, makes it easier for the water molecules of snow to scatter directly into the gaseous phase. This process, called sublimation, explains why much of the fresh snow seen on dry sunny mountain peaks soon disappears without ever melting.”

And then the best part of this book, the part that makes me know this book and I are going to be friends: “These molecular perspectives enhance our ability to see beauty, rhyme, and reason in the world around is. This is the premise upon which this book you are now holding was written.”

I love the fact that I am holding a book, an actual paper book of considerable weight (I am sorry about the trees, but am cutting back on paper consumption elsewhere in order to avoid e-books.) I love the fact that by holding this book—and also reading it—more beauty, rhyme, and reason will come into my life.

I love the fact that a few years back, I was in Yosemite National Park in January to give a talk on marbled murrelets. My husband and I arrived at the park on a rare warm and sunny day. There was plenty of snow on the ground--just like in the photo above. It was stunning and perfect. The afternoon before my talk, we took a hike. I hadn’t walked on snow in a long time. It felt good. My head was down, watching my step, looking for the trail. It occurred to me that I was walking on former clouds. These were clouds in their packed down, solid, crunchy form. The waterfall across the valley was a former cloud, too. So was the river that has cut its way through the granite. As we hiked up the trail, my warm breath condensed with each exhalation. The visible vapor was a kind of cloud and I, therefore, was a cloud maker. As we followed the switchback up the mountain, I warmed up and started to sweat. My skin was moist. I had the potential to vaporize. All the liquid inside my body, my organs, my blood cells could vaporize. Then I remembered my skin had pores. I hoped they hadn't forgotten how to close. I really didn't want to be part of the water cycle--literally.

This morning, I opened Conceptual Chemistry. Naturally, I do not start with Chapter 1, but Chapter 4, which is the chapter my son told me would be most helpful. It is about subatomic particles—electrons, protons, and neutrons—and how we understand these parts of the atom through conceptual, not physical, models. The two small white balls attached to the sides of one larger red ball is a conceptual model of a water molecule, the white balls representing hydrogen, and the red representing oxygen. We cannot create a physical model—a large-enough-to-be-visible replica of a water molecule—because we cannot actually see individual water molecules. Nor can we see the atoms of hydrogen or oxygen. Nor can we see the atoms’ electrons orbiting around a center of protons and neutrons the way planets orbit the sun.

This planetary approach--the pretty darn good conceptual model I grew up with, has, according to the author of Conceptual Chemistry, become outdated. In new and more accurate conceptual models of the atom, electrons appear as…you guessed it…a cloud.

Cloud of the Week #13

2011-06-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

   This is Cloud of the Week Number 13. I don't know what kind of cloud it is or what it means in terms of weather. And, honestly, I don't much care right now. Sometimes clouds are metaphors. This is one of those clouds and this is one of those times.
   I spent the past few weeks saying goodbye to my mother who had a heart attack on May 20th. My extended family and I spent nearly three with her in the hospital, holding her hand, putting cool cloths on her forehead, talking to her, looking deep into her eyes.
  Hour by hour, we followed her progress. We asked a thousand questions of each and every nurse, cardiologist, pulmonologist, infection disease doctor, and intensive care specialist who cared for her. We listened to their answers. We asked follow-up questions. And follow-ups to the follow-ups. We called on our friends who were doctors to translate. We learned much about her failing heart and our breaking hearts.
   We watched the vital signs monitor over her bed--the one that measures blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate, and several other functions. The black screen flashed color-coded numbers and wave lines that rose and fell in distinctive patterns in bands across the screen.
   The information on the monitor offered no comfort. Nor did what we learned from the nurses and doctors with each passing day. I looked elsewhere for solace--first to the sky and clouds, but the humid hazy sky was bereft of clouds. The morning birdsong lost its beauty. So, too, did the beautiful branching trees in their summer green, the yellow lilies and "knock-out" roses in the garden, the splashing fountain, the deer and fox on the lawn, the meadow of grasses blowing in the wind. For once, Nature could provide no solace, comfort, or metaphor for my sadness. Everything was what it was and nothing more.
   Flying back from my first visit, however, I photographed the cloudscape (above) from 38,000 feet. I thought it was some kind of joke and shut my window shade.

Flying back from my second visit, the last with my mother, the clouds were different.

They looked like they were trying to be comforting, trying to look like the kinds of clouds that an Italian painter might try to capture in a fresco, the kind of clouds where angels, gods, and goddesses could dwell, the kind of clouds you might want your mother to settle into for eternity--but only if she had not been so happy down below on the earth. And she was.

Leave Me Behind...Please!

2011-05-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

Rapture Cloud or just plain ol' Cumulonimbus? Photo taken at 8:14 p.m. in Washington, DC, by an alert cloudspotter who will likely be in heaven three hours ahead of me accounting for the time difference and all.

  As some of you may know, Saturday--May 21, 2011, is rumored to be Judgement Day, the day of Rapture that precedes the End of the World which is scheduled for October 21 (I am not sure exactly what time). But don't take my word for it, there are plenty of web sites with proof, many using big scary clouds like this one enhance the "truthiness" of the claims.
  Me? I am just going to relax and enjoy our Pacific Northwest blue skies tomorrow. I hope you do the same. But, if you're worried about anything happening in the next six months or so, take comfort in the fact that there are plenty of "Left Behind" services being offered by entrepreneurs. You can find out which services--and pay for them in advance on the Internet. Think about it! Who is going to feed your dog?

The Accidental Cloud Spotter

2011-05-18T14:46:00.000-07:00

What a glorious morning! I woke early and decided to bite the bullet and ride my bike to the Co-op for a the first time. The Co-op is just 3 miles from my house, but is not along a scenic route or full bike-laned, so I usually drive. But today, I need just a few things and I needed to get out. I attached the buckets to the back of bike and set off.

I am kind of a wimpy bike rider, but it's Bicycle Commuter Month here in Olympia, and I needed to rack up some miles doing errands. I work from home and do not commute, but errands count. Recreational biking does not. On Mother's Day Sunday my husband dragged me on a seemingly endless 19.8-mile ride and, because I was in agony, I begged him to let me stop somewhere and buy something, dammit, so I could count each and every mile. "That's not the point," he said.

I dreaded my ride to the Co-op and half expected to be run over by a car when I hit the short, uphill stretch of road with no bike lane. But, on this morning, the car traffic was light; I had timed my ride (accidentally) to occur after the 8 o'clock school rush and before the 9 o'clock school rush. It was a breeze and I was at the Co-op in less than 20 minutes. I was in agony-free ecstasy.

I parked my bike, bought a few essentials that make me sound like I live on a Tuscan commune (olive oil, milk, yogurt, Dr. Bronner's soap, kale, polenta), and then strolled into the Co-op Garden to drink my coffee and call a friend to wish her a Happy Birthday. I pulled a few clumps of weeds, found someone's sunglasses, set them on the picnic table, talked for half an hour. I was home before 9 and still ahead of schedule for my 12-5 writing day.

So, I loaded up my car with things to recycle, donate, and dispose of responsibly--you know, the things that had been piled in the front hall for two weeks. To save on gas, I decided to drive a loop that would take me to the county landfill where I would dispose of my many compact fluorescent light bulbs at HazoHouse, drop some things off at the on-site Goodwill, walk my dog at the on-site dog park, then visit a friend for a walk on our wonderful rails-to-trails path.

I set out thinking I knew where the landfill was. When the right turn onto the road leading to the landfill failed to appear again and again and again, I turned the car around. I was going to be late to visit my friend. Oh, but the dog! There he sat in the back, with a full bladder, panting. Luckily, I hadn't mentioned the D-o-g P-a-r-k. He would just have to endure a fast-paced leashed walk with me and my friend.

The hour-plus walk was wonderful despite my dog having to mark his territory every twelve feet one way and having to be dragged back by his leash the other.

After our walk, I consulted my map and set out for the landfill. About ten minutes into the trip, I pulled the car over, whipped out my cell phone and called my husband.

"Can you check real quick to see when HazoHouse is open? I'm on my way there, but am thinking they close mid-week."

Less than a minute later my suspicions were confirmed. I headed home, passing the Co-op as I did, bummed out that my eco-plan du jour had bombed.

The silver lining of my tiny cloud was that my driving around allowed me a view of the sky I would not have gotten from my bike. Well, I could have gotten it from my bike, but it would have been agonizing.

What I saw was the celestial dome covered in cirrus clouds--long, long cirrus "mare's tails," the hooked cirrus uncinus, cirrus intortus, and cirrus fibratus, and the thick cirrostratus cloud from which most seemed to originate to the north. The sky was spectacular, almost like fireworks. And, of course, I had not brought my camera.

When I got home, I found my camera, went outside and could not see the "mother cloud," but captured this:

And this:

Which is just a tiny, tree-hampered view, a slice, a glimpse, a fraction of the sky en route to the landfill. But isn't it wonderful?

Cloud of the Week #12: Cirrocumulus

2011-05-11T15:11:00.002-07:00

Cirrocumulus (on the right) All photos by M. Ruth

I hope everyone was outside yesterday watching the skies clear for our 24-hour high-pressure respite from the rain. I walked out the front yard just after high noon and, what to my wondering eyes did appear, these miniature clouds and no sign of rain, dear.

I ran back inside for my polarized sun glasses and my camera, then my chair and my laptop, then some meteorology books and articles. I was going to camp out and watch the show of these tiny little ice-crystal cloudlets called cirrocumulus--our long-overdue-but-worth-the-wait Cloud of the Week #12.

From what I could see from my front yard facing west (below), the lower, thicker stratocumulus clouds were moving eastward over the Black Hills and were lifting, eroding, scattering as they traveled inland.

Around midday, upper-level clouds started moving in aloft--these cirrocumulus at chilling heights of 16,500-45,000 feet. It seemed as if they were condensing into ice-crystal clouds in the swath of sky between the Black Hills and my home 20 miles to the east. Because these cirrocumulus clouds appeared in bands (below) they are called cirrocumulus radiatus.

I had never seen--or perhaps never took the time to see--the very irregular shapes of the individual cloudlets that made up these clouds (below). These cloudlets are often described as "rice grains" to distinguish them from the much larger and lower altocumulus cloudlets which are more "bread-roll" sized. But calling them rice grains makes it sound as if the cloudlets were uniform in shape and size. The clouds yesterday were neither. They were more whimsical and energetic, kind of like what would happen if you dipped a cat's paws in white paint and set him loose on a blue tarp with a moth.

Because I am trying to understand what really made these clouds, I consulted the National Weather Service forecast report for Olympia yesterday and its seems that we were enjoying a weak high pressure ridge. This is what that looks like on a weather map:

For more details on this and a time-lapse of yesterday's clouds, go to www.cliffmass.blogspot.com

What's funny (to me) is that the National Weather Service report predicted "Just scattered clouds this afternoon..." Just scattered clouds? I think not. Here they are (below)

Now, you can see in the left side of this photograph the faint trails of ice crystals, called virga, in the wake of the cloudlets. And then, because I couldn't go inside (or stop looking up), I watched a jet fly through a thickened layer of cirrocumulus (cirrocumulus stratiformis), cutting a dissipation trail (distrail). At first it looked like this:

And then it began to deteriorate into a cloud from I believe few people would recognize (below). Had I not been out in my front yard not writing, I would not have see the jet (the smoking gun) and the initial disstrail to know what this weird fanged cloud was. Oh, just scattered clouds.

And then the whole show ended with another set of undulating clouds (below) lining up like sardines in first class--not too crowded. What a day.

Still Life at SAM

2011-05-09T14:27:00.000-07:00

Banquet Piece c. 1675 Abraham Hendricksz van Beyeren (Seattle Art Museum)

   Still in the afterglow of reading Mark Doty's Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, I visited the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) last week to enjoy the experience of standing in front of the museum's one still-life painting. Days beforehand, I imagined myself there at the museum, overwhelmed by light and color and richness and intimacy and meaning just like Doty was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Did I forget somehow that I was not a prize-winning American poet--or any kind of poet at all?
  I arrived at the museum knowing that the painting was European, but not knowing which floor or gallery held this painting. I wanted to wander the three floors of art and walk myself back in time from contemporary and post-Modern to the 17th century; I wanted to travel from Seattle to Africa to France to Italy and to Holland.
Ah, there it was, in a beautiful gilt frame. I stood before it looking looking looking.
   It was a busy painting, a bit too busy for my taste, so it took quite a while to explore the canvas, to identify all the components, to begin to figure out how one thing related to another. I looked and stared and gazed. And I waited for something to happen. Niets. I was not having the Doty experience. I was disappointed. I paid $15 admission plus parking to have an experience. I had sent copies of Doty's book to a family and friends. I just stood there wishing someone would come in and clean up this mess of a feast. What a rube. What a fool. I knew better.
   So I planted my feet and kept looking. I pulled out my camera, disabled the flash, and took many close-up photographs. I needed to look for myself to see what I saw not what Doty had prepared me to see.
   Here, then, is the gold watch and pomegranate:

And here is the figure of the artist reflected in the curved shape of the silver pitcher:

And here is the lemon and its tendril of peel somehow "talking" with the folds of the burgundy and white table cloths to its right and the cluster of red grapes to its left:

And here is a goblet of white wine catching the light from the window:

And here is Beyeren's oysters and lemon (left)--for certain an acknowledgement of Jan Davidsz de Heem's Still Life with A Glass and Oysters of 1640 (right).

And then...I could hardly believe my eyes. There were the clouds! There! Look! Out the window behind the thick green drape:

Clouds never appear in still lifes! Neither do windows! There's always some invisible source of light illuminating the objects arranged on the tables. Look at this "classic" still life. See what I mean?

Still Life with Gilt Cup by Willem Claesz.

The window is never in the painting. But here was a window showing actual clouds, not just a wash of blue sky or butterscotch-colored sunlight. Still Life with Clouds!

And then I starting seeing how the light from this window was reflected in all the shiny objects on the table. Look!

Now the painting was alive and my eyes were dancing all over its surface looking for the reflection of the window. And, strangely, it was an asymmetrical light--three panes of a four-paned, two-over-two window. And, even stranger, this could not be the reflection of the window with the green curtain and clouds. That reflection would take a different shape and would, based on the location of the window, be reflected on the backsides of the objects on the table. There was another window somewhere "off stage" being captured, curved, elongated, truncated, and bent by the artist in every vessel in the painting.

What does it all mean? Why did Beyeren include the window here? The curatorial notes next to this work offer no clues, but I can think of three reasons: 1) it balances the very dark space behind the arched doorway next to it, 2) it provides a visual "breath of fresh air" to a claustrophobic table setting--an escape of sorts for the viewer, 3) he wanted me to be happy.

Archaic and Passe? Dang.

2011-05-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

   Well, Cloud of the Week fans, I've suffered a major set back. Shortly after visiting the University of Washington library to see the 1939 edition of the Atlas International des Nuages (International Cloud Atlas, I wrote to my favorite cloudman to tell him I was planning a trip to see the 1896 edition of this atlas at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. He was, he wrote back, envious. And he admired my persistence in tracking down these early editions.
   He himself had written a piece on cloud classification years ago but, he admitted, he didn't consult this atlas--the "bible" of cloud classification published by the World Meteorological Organization. "Frankly, he wrote, "the ID-ing for clouds has become a bit passe." Ouch! "I think it's seen as archaic now." Double ouch.
   Just as I was feeling comfortable pointing to the sky and saying "Look! A cumulus congestus capillatus!" Just as I was ready to post another Cloud of the Week (after a weeks off) here. Just after I had laminated a two-page cloud key for my personal enrichment in the great outs of door.
   Tossing aside cloud identification, he suggested beginning students of meteorology focus on learning just a few things: 1) Being able to tell ice clouds from droplet clouds, 2) recognizing the signs of an advancing storm, and, 3) because we are in Puget Sound, recognizing the Convergence Zone. This can be accomplished without books, laminated keys, or blogs--just "by eyeballing and nothing more."

Ice clouds.

This is a way more practical approach to the clouds. It is, however, an approach from a Real Scientist interested in weather and not an Accidental Naturalist with quirky passion for archaic Latin nomenclature, the poetry of clouds, and old atlases published in French.

"Nuages isoles, delicats, a texture fibreuse,
sans ombres propres, generalment de
couleur blanche, souvent d'un eclat soyeux."

Fortunately, there is room for both on my blog and in my book. So, I will post more Clouds of the Week and will begin to tackle the three essentials listed above. I would hate you to feel outmoded by what you learn here.

Be a Lorax! Please Write Today!

2011-05-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

Due to format incompatability, this image cannot be expanded. I have summarized it below.

Once again, the marbled murrelet and our old-growth forests are on the chopping block. Tomorrow (May 3) two nearly-hundred-acre parcels of old-growth Douglas-fir in Wahkiakum and Pacific Counties are being considered by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources for clearcutting.

Despite the fact that this is marbled murrelet nesting habitat.

Despite the fact that the murrelet population in Washington State is just 5,600 and is declining at 7.4% per year.

Despite the fact that the murrelet has been listed as a threatened species under both federal and state endangered species legislation.

Despite the fact that the 1997 Recovery Plan for the Marbled Murrelet mandates conservation measures to stabilize and recovery the marbled murrelet populations.

Despite the fact that a team of murrelet scientists recommended in 2008 that the state should specially manage or set aside 100,000 acres of older forests on the Olympic Peninsula and in Southwest Washington for this bird.

Public Lands Commissioner Goldmark and the Board of Natural Resources are essentially ignoring this advice and are postponing the adoption of long-term conservation plan until 2013, continuing to clear-cut marbled murrelet habitat until that time.

Clearcutting is a short sighted, unsustainable way to cut timber.Not only does this practice completely remove all trees, but it creates open edges into remaining forest surrounding the cut; this provides easy access for marbled murrelet nest predators such as ravens and jays which do not traditionally hunt in old-growth forests. In addition, it destroys habitat for other species by the removal of the trees, destruction of the understory vegetation, increased soil erosion, and increased sedimentation of streams (salmon habitat).

Clearcutting is not management. It is not stewardship. It is not wise. But you are. Please take a minute of your day to write Commissioner Goldmark: Peter.goldmark@dnr.wa.gov and the Board of Natural Resources bnr@dnr.wa.gov. Ask them to defer clearcutting of all marbled murrelet management areas until the State adopts a long-term conservation strategy consistent with its 2008 science report.

Thank you thank you from me and the murrelet. To read more on this bird, go to www.mariaruthbooks.com

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon...and Clouds

2011-04-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

From the moment I started reading Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, I knew I was going to start re-reading this book the minute I finished it. Poetry is like that and, apparently, so is this lucid memoir and meditation by poet Mark Doty.

I quoted from Doty’s book in an earlier blog about my unwieldy collection of cloud photographs and the strange new art of virtual collections. Though Doty does not write about clouds per se, his thoughts on still life painting are of interest to me as the working title of my next book is Still Life with Clouds.

I have never heard of Doty until I read a New York Times article by Rob Walker, which quoted him and mentioned his book. Though Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon is ostensibly about a still life painting by 17^th-century Dutch painter Jan Davidsz de Heem, Doty moves gracefully from the canvas to explore the art of seeing, intimacy, beauty, and life.

I began reading this slim seventy-page essay on the runway before taking off from Seattle to Denver and finished its last sentence as my connecting flight touched down in Washington, DC. Travel time was about eight hours, but I lost all awareness of time as I read sections of Doty’s beautiful book, contemplated his ideas, stared out the window, took notes, read several more pages, napped, read some more, thought of all the people to whom I would give copies of this book.

And now my problem. Explaining, paraphrasing, summing up, describing Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. What I would really like to do is start with page one and retype the entire book here for you to savor. It’s that beautiful and irreducible. However, I will start with a quote.

“…I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held with an intimacy with things of this world.”

Still Life with Clouds (photo by M. Ruth through a sailboat window)

Strangely, this is what comes over me when I look at a cloud. Strangely, because a cloud is not still, not alive, and too distant really for intimacy.
Yet, I find the clouds as compelling and inviting as the painting Doty has fallen in love with--a small canvas composed of shucked oysters, curling lemon peels, a cluster of grapes, and a shining goblet of wine—not water droplets and ice crystals constantly moving, constantly changing form. Jan Davidsz de Heem’s painting captures a table set 350 years ago, forever fixing the relationship between carefully arranged object. The curls of lemon peel will always curl just so, the lemon wedge will always rest on the grapes, the glistening oysters will never stray from the edge of the brown wooden table, everything will remain clustered around the sparkling goblet, the light will never change, and decay will never taint the soft, ripe air.

Yet still-life paintings are never still, even though the living things in them have been stilled—the lemon and grapes plucked, the oyster shucked, the greenery cut, and the wine long ago separated from the life-giving vine. Our restless imaginations go to work changing them—warming wine, shriveling the oysters, drying the lemon, browning the grapes. We hear the buzz of the fly, smell the fragrance of decay, see the hands of servant or artist himself clearing and resetting the table, shaking out the tablecloth.

We keep the still life moving by adding the element of time to the painting. And though the stories of the artist and his feast are lost to us, we enliven the feast with our own stories. We reach for the goblet, taste the wine, recall our first oyster (maybe also our last), think about the oyster beds, the ocean bays and inlets, the vineyard, the window where the sun pours in from the left, what is outside the window. We break the serene silence of the still life with sounds of the market, the clopping horses on the cobblestones, the gulls, the fruit vendors, and (because we cannot help ourselves) fish mongers and huge wooden clogs. I am looking at Jan de Heem’s painting now, the one on the back cover of Mark Doty’s book, and this is exactly what happened.
So what exactly happened? A kind of intimacy. With the painting, with the eye of the painter. And with the "I" of the painter. We inhabit for a brief time the soul of the painter. We see through him.
From the experience of looking at this particular painting, Doty moves to wonderful stories of his grandmother's striped peppermint candies, of other still-life paintings, lost loves, yard sales, of chipped blue-and-white platter, and new loves. And they all express the highest value: intimacy.

“...what we want is to be brought into relation, to be inside, within...But then why resist intimacy, why seem to flee it? A powerful countercurrent pulls against our drive toward connection: we also desire individuation, separateness, freedom. On one side of the balance is the need for home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world.
A fierce internal debate, between staying moored and drifting away, between holding on and letting go. Perhaps wisdom lies in our ability to negotiate between these two poles. Necessary to us, both of them—but how to live in connection without feeling suffocated, compromised, erased? We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.”

This is the banquet Doty lays out for his readers--a feast for a cloud watcher studying themes of restlessness and sense of place.

Wells Tower Nails Redwoods

2011-04-25T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Accidental Naturalist feeling "disheveled, crooked, and mortal."

   A few Sundays back, an article called "The High Life" appeared in the New York Times magazine. I was lured in by the lush photograph of a redwood grove and the article's subtitle "How Tall Trees, Tree Huggers and Pot Farms are Transforming a California Backwater." That backwater--Humboldt County, California--is one of my favorite places to observe marbled murrelets. Because of the county's large concentration of old-growth redwood forests, it is also a favorite nesting place for the endangered murrelet.
   But this isn't a blog about murrelets, nor really about redwoods, old-growth forests, of the marijuana in Humboldt County. It is simply an appreciation for another writer, the article's author, Wells Tower.
   Though Towers has published many a prize-winning short stories in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, I had not read his work until his book, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned was selected by my book club a few months ago. Tower deserves prizes for his verbs alone. "High Life," however, should earn him a prize for ending the epic struggle by writers to describe the experience of being in a old-growth forest.
   While researching my book, Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet, I read countless descriptions of these trees, most collapsing under the weight of adjectives and superlatives, all falling short. Wells succeeded in two paragraphs. And here they are:

  "Perennially fattened on a diet of Pacific Ocean fogs, many of the trees in the state park (and its counterpart in northern Humboldt, Redwood National Park) casually top 300 feet, and the oldest specimens have been growing for two millenniums. In my touristic career, I've grown numb to the presence of hammerhead sharks, giant tortoises, grizzly bears, blue-footed boobies and pilot whales, but in the awe department, coast redwoods seemed to have no point of diminishing returns. Each tree revealed some astounding new characteristic of girth, bark tone, branch anatomy or moss couture. The forest's crisp, misty air made breathing a thrilling novelty. It seemed to inhale itself. I tried not to think about a distressing spate of recent studies wondering how these trees will survive what looks to be a worsening, climate-change-related shortage of coastal fogs. Instead, I tried to marvel gratefully that there were still thousands of these trees standing,not just one on a museum lot enclosed by a velvet rope.
   The trouble with redwood forests, though, is that they are hard on the human ego. You can't spend much time among all of that primordial rectilinearity without starting to feel disheveled, crooked, and mortal. I'd had every intention of going for a hike, but you cannot maintain a pace staggering around with your neck craned, guffawing like Jed Clampett seeing his first skyscraper. Back at the car, the dashboard clock said it had taken me two hours to walk a mile."

Click here to read the full article in the New York Times.

Happy Earth Day

2011-04-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

This image and prayer from the fabulous Grist.org--a "beacon in the smog."

Prayer to St. Cloud

"O Benedict of the ozone, protector of the stratosphere, I weep for the gaping hole in your gaseous layer of love caused in part by me. I call upon thee, sweet saint of the clouds, and plead forgiveness for my selfish western ways. I vow this day to reduce my obscene Andre the Giant-sized carbon footprint and no longer make you weep acid rain. With a contrite heart I will gladly endure the inconvenience of chatty carpoolers, hair spray, and hippie cleaning supplies. Grant me the strength to swear off my inconsiderate ways and always carry the common good of my fellow mortals and Mother Earth in my heart. Amen."

Please go to grist.org for more very useful, insightful, often hilarious advice on living on the planet. Then go outside.

Cloud of the Week #11

2011-04-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

Formerly Lovely Cloud Enhanced with Fear (photo by Maria Ruth)

   I am probably going to get in some hot water for this blog, but a cloud-alert reader sent me a link to a whopper of a YouTube video to promote our National Day of Prayer, celebrated in our oh-so-tolerant national on May 5th.
   Sadly, the filmmakers have portrayed our friends the Clouds as death-and-doom machines (cue "Jaws" theme music) seem capable of destroying our fine nation if we forget to pray on this one special day (cue "O, Fortuna" from Carmina Burana or an unhappy cut from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack).
   Click here to endure the blessedly short video.
   I have nothing against prayer. But, I take offense at the attempt to nationalize what I consider to be a private and personal time of self-reflection and focus and the maligning of the meteorological phenomenon that makes life on Earth possible. Without clouds, we are, in fact, doomed. The Weather Channel does a pretty good job of giving clouds a bad rap, but to turn these glorious forms into a symbol of wrath and a back drop of the Apocalypse is dangerous.
   So, this week's Cloud of the Week (#11) is cumulus manipulatus eupteron. (BTW: "eu" is Greek for "right" and "pteron" for wing).

My Cloud Collection

2011-04-04T07:38:00.000-07:00

Keep?

Cut?

Keep?

Over the past six months, our family computer has come under attack. Viruses have found there way in and it now, it takes twenty minutes to open an e-mail from the time I fire up the beast in the morning. Finding my way to any to any website became a battle as I was redirected several times the no-man’s land of Tazinga, Viagra, and Trojans.

At first, I thought it was simply a matter of having an older computer, so I kept a few books by the computer and read poetry or literary style guides to pass the time. My teenage sons, however, felt entitled to a computer that responded instantaneously to every keystroke. I suggested they use the library or school computer for Internet access. They declined. So did their time sitting in front of the computer downloading music (which I was convinced was the vector for all the viruses).

When the computer ceased to function, we downloaded three or four different anti-virus and malware programs, switched search engines, and called pc-savvy friends for advice. Nothing helped for long.

This past week, faced with the prospect of getting through both “Beowolf” and “Paradise Lost” in the glow of the screen, I unplugged the computer and took it to 4^th Dimension for a diagnosis.

I got a call the next day. Viruses? Too many iTunes? Crashing hard drive? Computer senescence? No. The problem was too many clouds.

I have apparently loaded so many photographs of clouds onto the computer that our Windows operating system had no room to update itself and keep things running smoothly. This, in turn, made it possible for viruses to make their way into the computer. And, because we didn’t know any better, the software we downloaded to vanquish the viruses were working against each other and creating a quagmire in our computer. Now what?

I brought the computer home and set it near the tangle of cords and cables. I am dreading plugging it back in. I know that as soon as I do, I will be faced with the painful task of deleting most of the 1583 photographs I have taken over the past two years of clouds. Sure, I could buy an external hard drive, or store them “on the cloud” as one friend suggested with a laugh. But I know it is time to go through my collection of clouds, pick the best, and delete the rest. This means I will have to go through them, one by one, decide which is more beautiful than the next, which is unusual or rare or unique, which one has sentimental value or also includes friends, family, or a landscape I cherish. And there’s the rub.

Is there a “best cumulonimbus?” A “most meaningful family portrait with altocumulus?” A photograph featuring a combination of cloud types that has never been seen before and will never be seen again—something with potential scientific significance that I should send to a meteorologist for analysis?

No. It is time to make a thousand decisions. I need to figure out what the clouds in each photograph mean to me, why I value one over another, how my perception of clouds has changed over two years. All of this will inform each tiny bit of pressure on the delete key. A thousand keystrokes will send my clouds into the ether.

But one of the marvelous thing about clouds is this: They are ubiquitous, common, and unique. And living in the Pacific Northwest, I know where to get more.

Cloud Collector's Handbook

2011-03-29T18:22:00.000-07:00

   This handy and very portable little book should be in everyone's handbag, backpack, manpurse, or glove compartment. The Cloud Collectors Handbook is a full-color field guide that encourages users to get outside, look up, and have fun identifying the clouds...while you rack up points. Author Gavin Pretor-Pinney is the founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society and is out promoting this book and the sheer pleasure of cloudspotting.
   "Collecting" is a virtual activity (where would you put your cumulus congestus anyway?) and really means you are collecting points for identifying as many clouds as you can--each with a number of points reflecting its rarity of commonness. It's a bit like birdwatching in that we no longer need to shoot or physically have something in order to collect it. Your checkmarks or your points eventually add up to awareness, happiness, beauty, fun. What more could you ask for?
   Pretor-Pinney's philosophy is similar to mine: clouds are the best free show on the planet--available to everyone equally all the time. If only people would get outside and look up!
   Pretor-Pinney's mission to encourage cloud appreciation was featured in today's New York Times and on PRI (Public Radio International) "The World." Follow links to learn read or hear these stories. Click here to learn more about The Cloud Collector's Handbook from the Cloud Appreciation Society--a great website for the cloud photos, artwork, poetry, and science from around the world.
   And, after a day of struggling with the physics of turbulent flow, eddies, dew point, and lapse rate as deep background for my book on clouds, I was soothed to read that the University of Reading (England) is hiring Pretor-Pinney to become a fellow in meteorology despite his complete lack of training in the subject.
  "You just need to look and observe," he is quoted saying in the New York Times. "Sometimes getting too trained up in something narrows your vision."
   I am getting pretty squinty eyed of late.

The Force of Fiction

2011-03-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

This is a work of fiction on par with Joyce's Ulysses in terms of complexity, style, mastery of language, and inventiveness. I am two-thirds of the way through. I do not think it is about clouds. (I bought it because I judged a book by its cover).
In my present struggle with atmospheric pressure, I had to laugh at this:

"Funny, thinks Milton. Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible."