Nature – Page 9 – New Hampshire Green Leaves Blog

The Flume

On May 3rd 2003, a major tourist attraction in northern New Hampshire known as the Old Man of the Mountain finally crumbled away in a landslide. This was not really an unexpected event as everyone knew that eventually the rocky ledges which created the profile would give way.


Old Man Before	Old Man After

The Old Man was a natural formation produced by several granite ledges that lined up to create the famous craggy profile only when viewed from the side. If you had looked at it directly ‘face on’, you would have only seen an odd jumble of rock ledges. However because the Old Man was composed of granite which contained feldspar, it was particularly vulnerable to weathering. Numerous efforts were made over the years to shore up the ledges of the profile, but the end was never really in doubt. Gravity finally overcame human ingenuity and the ‘face’ collapsed.

The outpouring of anguish, especially from local tourism boosters, may have puzzled out-of-staters. The fact is New Hampshire is a small state lacking the outstanding vistas that many western states can boast of, such as the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming or the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. The Old Man was the only spectacular attraction that drew large numbers of summer tourists into the area. With him gone, the feeling was that the tourists would vanish as well.

Well, actually they didn’t. They’re still coming. Even without the Old Man, there are many places in New Hampshire attractive to tourists. In the winter, there is downhill skiing, snow-boarding, cross-country skiing, snowmobiling and snow shoeing. In the summer, there are lakes for boating or swimming, rivers to canoe on, camp grounds, hiking trails and dozens of small scale attractions that are family-friendly and just plain interesting to visit. One of these is the Flume.

Located at the southern end of Franconia Notch, the Flume is a narrow gorge about 800 feet in length and varies between 12 and 20 feet in width. While Native Americans were likely quite familiar with it, it was not ‘officially’ discovered until about 1808 by a remarkably spry 93 year old lady by the name of Jess Guernsey who was looking for a good place to fish (anglers take note: your hobby is conducive to longevity!) . Millions of years ago a huge blob of molten magma pushed up under the overlying rock though never breaking the surface. As it cooled slowly, vertical fractures formed into which basalt oozed and also cooled. Over the eons, weathering eventually exposed the granite and since the basalt dikes more easily eroded, this created the narrow gorge that is the Flume.

Like all natural formations, the Flume is constantly morphing under the influence of rain, frost and snow. When Jess first came across it, a huge boulder could be found wedged in the narrow gorge.

In June of 1883, a heavy rainstorm triggered a landslide which swept away the boulder and deepened the gorge, creating Avalanche Falls. While the boulder itself was never found again, the damage left by its passage has since healed over, leaving a beautiful series of small waterfalls, an excellent subject for videos and photographs.

Another point of interest is the Sentinel Pine Bridge, a pedestrian bridge constructed in 1939. The bridge is so named because originally a huge pine by that name, 90 feet tall and five feet in diameter, once grew in the area. The Great Hurricane of 1938 uprooted this venerable plant so the tree was cut up and used as the base for the foot bridge bearing its name. The trunk of the old pine is still visible if you walk across the bridge and up the trail a short distance and look back.

The Flume Gorge is open during the late spring and summer into October. A series of walkways allow visitors to stroll through the gorge itself as well as the surrounding woodlands. There are a few caveats; mainly it requires you be a reasonably good walker as the full loop through the area is about two miles, which can be hard on the elderly and the handicapped. Also pets are discouraged. The entry fee of $16 for adults and $13 for children over 6, may discourage those of limited funds, but the walk is well worth the effort and money.

It is possible to access the Flume during the winter though the wooden walkways going through the gorge are removed when the weather chills, so you are better off not trying it alone. However a view of the Flume during winter is truly spectacular and hardy souls not afraid to brave the cold and ice will appreciate its beauty.

In recent years movements have cropped up in reaction to the corporate effort to control every aspect of our lives. Slow Food arose in reaction to the industrialization of food production and its accompanying loss of quality. Slow Democracy is an effort to help citizens regain control of politics especially on the local level. Now we see efforts to create Slow Tourism. While this may be a bit of overkill, the idea of simplifying travel, reducing its expense, distance traveled, avoiding canned tours, is beginning to grow in popularity.

A visit to the Flume fits in very well with this. Take a stroll through this small but scenic gorge. Take an opportunity to see nature close up, instead of flashing by while you are driving down the freeway. If you’re ambitious enough, visit it in both summer and winter, and get a real feel for the ever changing face of the world you are a part of.

Spring Equinox 2016

Well, spring officially arrived at Sunday March 20 at 4:30 Universal Coordinated Time or 12:30 AM EDT for you locals. We modern humans insist on having a definite official signpost to clue us in to the change of the seasons hence the above date and time for the moment when day and night become equal lengths (apparently we can’t be bothered with looking out the window).

In reality the transition from winter to spring is rather amorphous with balmy warm days switching over to chilly late winter conditions teasing us with the promise of pleasant weather then firmly reminding us we’re not quite there yet. Sap begins flowing in the trees during warm days and receding when the night temperatures fall below freezing, a process that makes for good maple sugaring when these temperature fluctuations occur. Birds begin migrating and early spring flowers like crocuses and snowdrops begin poking out of the ground.

The recent record El Nino has made for a very weird winter here in northern New Hampshire. Temperatures were well above normal multiple times this past winter, pretty much annihilating the snow pack we usually have up here. Any snow that did fall was less than 6 inches (at least where I live) and quickly wilted away under rains that followed. While we may yet get an early spring surprise snow storm dumping a respectable amount of snow on us, it definitely won’t last. The ski areas are hurting and I have not seen any snow mobiles this winter even though the town hopefully graded the snow paths they usually zoom around on. The warm temperatures only made the snow trails vanish under rain.

While many animals have benefited from the low snow fall, such as deer, moose and turkeys, there are animals that depend on heavy snow cover and suffer when there is a lack of it. One of them is a small mammal called a vole , a small rodent similar to mice and often confused with them or with moles which are small insectivores, not rodents, adapted for burrowing underground. Voles do tunnel but do not have the specialized digging feet that moles have. Voles average between three to five inches in length and have very short life spans, usually less than a year, reproducing frequently to replenish their numbers. During the winter they depend on a good snow pack, so they can safely tunnel through it, hidden from predators. Dependent as they are for snow cover, this winter has likely been a disaster for them. Without snow to hide them, they are vulnerable to hungry owls, foxes, cats and other animals looking for a quick bite of protein

Last February I looked out an upstairs window after rain showers had eaten away at the meager snow and spotted the tunnels that a vole had dug.

The meandering structure was clearly visible and seemed to lead to a circular area, visible at the left in the upper half of the picture. Curious I went out to look more closely at it.

Judging from the bird seed scattered about the edges, this was a storage area for the vole. A grey squirrel was cheerfully helping himself to the bonanza when I came out with my camera. Since it was almost all sunflower seed, I knew the vole had been scavenging fallen seed from my birdfeeder and carefully storing it in a chamber he had dug out in the snow where he could feast in safety. Alas, the unseasonable warmth undid all his hard work.

While one can feel some sympathy for the voles, those of us who are gardeners can only sigh in relief. Voles can be very destructive of plants, bulbs and root crops such as potatoes. A neighbor who lived many years ago down the street had a cat who was a terrific mouser (and voler apparently). She didn’t realize how good he was until after he had passed on to Kitty Heaven. Suddenly she began to find her garden potatoes getting gnawed on by the little varmints. Like mice, these troublesome rodents can make the life of a gardener difficult as we try to plant crocus bulbs or seed potatoes. The market as usual offers a vast array of rodent removers that, judging from the reviews, are more effective in separating you from your money than getting rid of the little beasts. As usual the old fashioned methods are the best.

Weird Places To Visit

At this time of year when the snow and cold have (finally!) settled around us, it doesn’t take long for cabin fever to set in. This is when many people plan vacations to far off (and hopefully politically stable) places that are warm and offer interesting things to see.

If I had the time and money to travel, there are any number of places I would like to see. The Hawaiian Islands, Great Britain, perhaps Italy. Rather than visit the usual tourist haunts, I might check out some off-the-beaten-path places where you don’t have to jostle with crowds of people.

Then there are the places where there are truly weird and wonderful things to see. However for various reasons, they are off limits or inaccessible due to distance, war, or extreme environments.

One of the odder places I might like to see is in Tanzania. It’s a very weird volcano called Ol Doinyo Langai volcano.

This curious creation of some rather bizarre geologic processes is associated with the East African Rift, an area that is slowly being torn in two by plate tectonics. Rather than erupting the silicate type of lavas we are familiar with, it spouts a natrocarbonatite lava, a gumbo of carbonate minerals, that makes for a very runny lava. National Geographic ran a story on this volcano an number of years ago and showed pictures of a bizarre landscape of carbonatite lava that makes intricate formations that quickly deteriorate and crumble away, once exposed to the air. Why go see this? Well, it’s one of a kind. Conventional volcanoes are a dime a dozen. This rare beast stands apart from them all and would definitely be worth a look.

Another weird place I’d like to see is a little harder to get to. It’s located deep underground in Mexico and is called Cave of the Crystals.

The crystals are made of gypsum and were deposited as the result of chemical action between ground water and water saturated with sulfide ions. Cooked over a long period of time by a magma chamber underneath, these enormous crystals, some nearly forty feet in length, are over 900 feet underground and were discovered by a Mexican mining company. As the temperatures in the cavern average a toasty 130 degrees Fahrenheit with over 90 percent humidity not surprisingly it remains largely unexplored. With my hot flashes this is definitely a deal breaker in terms of paying a visit, but still fascinating to think about all the same.

A little more tolerable is a place located in southern Libya. I happened to spot it on Google Earth when doing some arm chair exploring. A strange anomalous dark spot in the middle of an orange desert caught my eye and zooming in on it I discovered, much to my astonishment, a volcanic caldera. It is known by the charming name of Waw an Naumus which in English translates as the Oasis of the mosquitoes.

While it may look strangely anomalous, in fact it is part of the Haruj, a large field of ancient volcanoes that erupted periodically over the eons leaving a generous sprinkling of calderas and lava flows.

Though the caldera of Waw an Naumus looks very fresh, it is not known to have erupted in recorded history and is considered extinct. It has certainly been quiet long enough for water to collect in small lakes and vegetation grow undisturbed along their banks. It has been a stop for caravans going through the desert and its voracious mosquito population (however did they get there?) earned it its distinctive name. If Libya ever stabilizes, it certainly would be an interesting place to visit as long as you bring along a generous supply of insect repellant.

But perhaps the most unusual place I would like to see is also the most inaccessible, largely due to the fact it is located in orbit around the planet Jupiter. That would the moon Europa.

If ever there was a place with an ‘Earth monkeys keep out’ sign, it’s this distant little globe. Scientists have been salivating over this moon and what may lie under its icy crust, since Voyager and later Galileo sent back pictures. Current evidence suggests there is an enormous liquid ocean possibly as much as 60 miles deep beneath an icy covering ranging from 6 to 19 miles in thickness. Since life here on Earth got its start in the oceans, it’s not difficult to surmise that conditions suitable for life may very well exist in the mammoth depths of Europa’s ocean.

However a number of things stand in the way of scientists (and myself) satisfying their curiosity about this place. One is the sheer distance of Europa from Earth. It’s hard to convey to the average person the enormous scale of outer space as there is nothing in our mundane existence that would give us any meaningful context to grasp it (though Bill Nye gives it a pretty good try).

Conditions on Europa’s surface are not very congenial either. It’s a toss-up over whether you will be frozen or zapped to death. Temperatures are around -260 degrees Fahrenheit, not exactly on the balmy side. Unless you were really well insulated, you would likely freeze solid in seconds and become another chunk of the frigid landscape. Not only that, the radiation emitted by Jupiter is a lethal 540 rem per day (100 rem is usually fatal for most humans).

Europa may be an interesting place to visit but you wouldn’t really want to live there. Robot proxies are the only way we will get to see the surface of Europa. There’s an argument currently going on as to whether the crust is thin or thick. I don’t think it really matters. Given that ice at these low temperatures is as hard as iron, the proposal to try to drill into Europa to see what’s underneath is very likely undoable as well as prohibitively expensive.

However we humans are an incurably nosy lot, so I suppose eventually a multi-billion dollar lander may make its way to the surface of Europa to send back breath-taking vistas of this strange place. Sadly we will have to satisfy ourselves with staring longingly at photos and exercising our under-used imaginations to visualize what lies beneath.

Christmas Eve 2015

Today is December 24, 2015. Here in northern New Hampshire the average temperature for this month is usually 34 degree Fahrenheit. Today’s high (for southern NH at least) is projected to go into the 60’s exceeding the old record set in Concord back in 1871 of 57 degree Fahrenheit. Usually snowfall by this date is usually about six inches or more (it varies from year to year of course.). Today – nada. When I went for my morning walk today, I found one dinky little patch of snow by the side of the road (likely thrown up by a plow) in a shaded area which given how warm it felt will probably be gone by the afternoon.

After doing a bit of last minute grocery shopping (yes, I know, I’m crazy to go out there today), I drove through Main Street just before noon today. I stopped only long enough to snap this picture.

Fifty four degrees Fahrenheit is definitely above the norm for up here and since we tend to be about 5 to 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the state with the White Mountain range close by, it’s a safe bet the southern half of the state is pushing 60 easily.

My snowdrops are clearly confused by the gyrations in temperature. I snapped this picture today when the warm temperature prompted me to take a peek and see if they were doing anything.

I planted them a little too close to the foundation of the house so the warmth of the concrete makes some of them bravely poke up in early March or mid-February, depending on the weather. I have even seen them push the envelope in mid-January (usually the coldest month up here, followed by February). But never, NEVER have I seen them start to emerge in late December. They have been growing in this spot for nearly twenty years and this is a first.

Climate change deniers can huff and puff and bloviate all they want but the oscillations in temperature we have been seeing recently show no sign of going away. In fact some troubling reports indicate things may get worse in the near and far futures. The Climate Change Summit in Paris this past month with its “Paris Agreement” promising yet again to begin implementing reductions on green-house gas emissions ended with the usual rounds of praise, mutual back patting and other forms of congratulations on this ‘historic’ meeting. However as many of us are sadly aware, very little of what was agreed to will be implemented or amount to a hill of beans if it is.

John Michael Green pointed out in his latest blog posting that many of the changes the Paris Summit was supposed to address and find solutions for, are already occurring and will continue to accelerate while bureaucrats fumble and procrastinate as they have always done. Mother Nature feels no obligation to wait while we mill around trying to make up our minds what to do. Given this disheartening prospect, what are we to do?

Well, we do what living organisms have always done. We adapt. This won’t be easy of course given that the countless unknowns of climate change make it difficult to precisely anticipate what’s to come. However today’s living organisms (which includes us by the way) are the heirs to millions of years of perpetually adapting on the fly to unexpected circumstances such as previous climate changes, continental drift and the occasional asteroid strike or methane burp. All this was done without the benefit of large brains. Are we with our 1.5 kg brains really going to sit around wringing our hands because we don’t know what kind of future to plan for?

There is enough information out there to give us a rough idea of what to expect even if there is no real certainty. Human ingenuity, not in the form of high tech gimmicks that break when you look at them cross-eyed, but in the form of what our hands can build, our minds think up, is what will help us muddle through whatever Nature tosses at us. It will mean junking many of our treasured toys and simplifying our life style in a way a fair number of people might find hard to swallow. This does NOT mean going back to caves but it DOES mean living at a slower, lower-tech, less complex pace. One that, while it will not allow us to fly to the stars or zoom around wearing jet packs, will allow us to live in modest comfort, help us get the exercise we’ve always been meaning to get, eat locally produced food that, not having lost its nutritious qualities, has the surprising side-effect of producing better health. Oh, yes and rediscover the myriad benefits of direct social interaction that our current madcap life style has deprived us of.

Change is going to happen whether we do anything or not. To paraphrase a quote from All About Eve: Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy future. How bumpy it will be depends on how well we can adapt.

Mousecapades

Now that the weather is chilling down, a common problem for people (myself included) is the fall invasion of mice seeking warm places to hang out for the winter. This year has seen a lot more activity due to the heavy fall of acorns and other mast goodies (as reported in one of my earlier posts) which has led to a population boom. Already I have caught six mice and can still hear activity inside the walls or up in the ceilings. As this is an old house, there are plenty of spaces for them to sneak into and it’s not easy to find them or get at them to seal them up to keep the little pests out.

The enormous fecundity of mice is an adaptation to the unhappy fact that they are number one on the menu for a surprising number of creatures: cats, foxes, coyotes, weasels, hawks, owls, skunks, snakes, crows, blue jays, even occasionally herons, and oddly enough, squirrels. The mouse has out of necessity adopted a secretive life-style and it is possible to have mice in your house and not realize it. Of course if the population is large, a fair amount of scuffling ensues when they are moving in and begin competing for living space. There are a variety of signs that mice are sharing living space with you and it’s a good idea to learn what they are, if you are determined to make your home as mouse free as possible.

What kind of mice can you expect to find? There are a variety of species, but here in New Hampshire, the mostly commonly found in houses are the house mouse, white footed mouse, and deer mouse .

All are cause for concern as they can carry a variety of diseases such as Hanta virus, salmonellosis, Lyme Disease and a variety of less common diseases. So far bubonic plague, which is in the western US, has not made its way to the east coast (knock on wood…). While the likelihood of contracting some of these illnesses is fairly low, the risk is always there and needs to be kept in mind when dealing with these pests.

Which naturally brings us to the matter of getting rid of them. The search for a better mousetrap seems unending. Best avoided are the poisoned baits for mice. While they may get rid of the mice, it’s the kind of gift that keeps on giving as any predator (including the neighborhood cat) are likely to ingest these toxins themselves if they happen to catch and eat these mice before the mouse has been killed by the poison. I did try using poison bait once a very long time ago, but found that the mice often rather than immediately eating the bait would take and store it in various places, such as my clothing drawers, which I definitely did not appreciate. Also there’s a good chance the little creatures will expire in an inconvenient place (which of course you will not be able to reach) and create an unpleasant reek.

Glue boards and traps catch the mice but do not kill them. That apparently is left up to you. If you don’t mind bludgeoning mice to death, be my guest but don’t expect me to invite you to any parties. If you are too chicken to kill them, the alternative to let them die of thirst and starvation and… yeah I thought so. I guess there is a way to get them off the strip without killing them but it’s a bit of an operation that’s stressful for both the mouse and you. So unless you enjoy being exposed to mouse excreta ejected by panicky mice (and the diseases that go along with them) glue strips are definitely out.

Some people like to use humane traps which catch the mouse but do not kill it. They then can be taken away and dropped in an area far from your house, leaving you feeling virtuous but the mouse utterly terrified as it is now in a strange place it does not recognize. Now then, if a giant idiot grabbed you and dumped you off in a strange place, what’s the first thing you would do? Well, yeah, you’d tried to get home! Which is likely what the mouse will do. If you haven’t taken it far enough away, the mouse will eventually make its way back to your place. If not, it will probably get snagged by a predator somewhere along the way. The odds that the mouse will just shrug its shoulders and contentedly take up residence where you place it are pretty low. Even if it were inclined to do so, in all probability a mouse already resides there, and as they are very territorial, it will quickly give the intruder the heave-ho.

This leaves the old fashioned snap trap. The wooden ones made by Victor are still available along with a wide variety of plastic snap traps and electronic traps which zap the rodents. I have tried a good number of them as I have arthritis and find it impossible to set the wooden ones. Success varies quite a bit with a number of traps failing to trigger when the mouse comes along and blithely eats the bait. The single electronic trap I tried, killed one and only one mouse and never again caught anything. The Victor quick kill trap seems to work as well as any of them, provided you position it so the mouse has to come directly at it and not from the side.

I’ve read the various reviews people have given of the different traps available and get the impression success depends as much on luck and the ability of the user to follow instructions, as it does the trap itself. Of course there is one mouse trap that rarely fails and has yet to be improved on. It’s the one that likes to sit in your lap and purr. The only drawback to this one is that it will occasionally present one of its catches to you, sometimes still in wriggling condition. Oh, well….