ENHS Nature Trails September 2003 Article 2

"The New Season"
By David Wagner

 This has been such an intense summer for me that I feel the need to welcome myself back to the world of the Eugene Natural History Society as much as the need to welcome the members back to another season of lectures, nature walks, field trips, and other society activities. A lot of the intensity was personal, involving organizing gatherings of various kinds. All of these, however personal, interacted with our natural environment. I invited my high school class to Eugene to celebrate our 40th anniversary of graduation. The plan was to take everybody up to the mountains, stopping to see Sahalie Falls, Clear Lake, the quaint town of Sisters, and the lava fields from the Dee Wright Observatory at the summit of McKenzie Pass. Unfortunately, the "B & B" fires started two days before everybody arrived. We had to move on to Plan B, which was to visit the Oregon coast. How fortunate we are to have such a wonderful Plan B! Pretty nice for a bunch of kids who grew up in India and went to boarding school together!

Fire season made plans to hike in the mountains difficult. Then, the week I did have time to hike, it rained. These rains in the second week of September had the beneficial effect of dousing the fierceness of the forest fires and clearing the air. It is definitely a new season, with the chill mornings and rapidly lengthening nights. I hope many of you can seize the sunny days as they come for hikes in the woods. Mosquitoes are almost all gone and so are the crowds. Mars is still bright in the night sky. Did you all see it when it was at its peak of brightness on "Mars Day," August 27? It was the dark of the moon, so the sky was really ready. I was on the east side of the Cascades, on the Modoc Plateau, where the sky is really bright (no city lights) and Mars seemed to dance with the Milky Way.

  That trip to Modoc County produced one of my Natural History high points of the summer. I spent a couple of mornings hiking up a steep ridge for exercise and to do some environmental art. On the highest point of the ridge is an ancient circle of stones that is reputed to have been used for vision quests in times past. I was inspired by the scene to build a stone altar of a fashion that might seem to fit into the landscape as if it were hundreds of years old. (If you would like to see it, visit this page on my website: . The natural history prize was on the hillside below where I built the altar. There were over a dozen big boulders that had a glassy substance plastered over them. It looked as if clear opal (if you know the mineral) had been splashed on them in molten form. After a bit of contemplation, I realized the latter was pretty close to what was the real cause. These were fulgerites, or what I like to call "lightningite." For some reason, perhaps a magnetic anomaly, this particular part of the slope attracted more lightning than other areas in the vicinity. When the lightning hit the top of a boulder, it melted the surface of the rock into a glassy coating. I've seen this at the top of Diamond Peak and South Sister. One might expect lightning to be attracted to the summit of peaks, that's why lookout towers are so well grounded with a tall lightning rod. I have never seen lightning attracted to the side of a ridge before. I was definitely in a special spot for lightning.

  One other item of natural history comes to mind from this summer. Every year I make a nature calendar; some of you get one at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural History. The week after my birthday in August there's a note that baby garter snakes are born. I forget where I got that information, probably from a book by Alan St. John. This year the timing was demonstrated in our own yard. Throughout the spring and summer I had seen a big, fat, and presumably female, garter snake around our woodpile. In the appropriate week, just like the calendar predicted, our yard was filled with baby garter snakes. They seemed everywhere because I was redoing rock work in our garden and found them under many of the rocks I moved. It was clear they were of the same litter; they all appeared at the same time and were exactly the same size. So small and cute! Barely five inches long, they were out ready to fend for themselves. I kept one to photograph and fed it an earthworm, which it ate without hesitation. I'm expecting our slug population to be dramatically reduced next summer!

  In the meanwhile, we have a wonderful series of talks and walks coming up this season. Put them all on your calendar. And for right now, REMEMBER TO SEND IN YOUR DUES!!! OUR FISCAL YEAR RUNS SEPTEMBER TO SEPTEMBER AND NOW IS THE TIME TO SEND IN YOUR CHECK. THIS YEAR WE WILL CUT OFF NON-RENEWERS IN NOVEMBER!

  David Wagner

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