Boreal B[l]og

The campsite had not looked special, on a point along a channel of Basswood Lake, a mile south of the Canadian border in the Boundary Waters.  The site we had set our mind upon in the bay was occupied, and another had a difficult climb up from the water which was fine, if one were having lunch, but not so fine if one wanted to go places and come back. Or just get water for dinner. Long climbs carrying water or packs get old. The site we were on had one good tent spot, all we needed, and had views north to Canada and sunrise views over American Point.

The first night a pair of beavers swam by about 5 yards off shore, on their way to the swampy area right off the east side of the site. This would be repeated every night we were there, and one morning we watched as a beaver felled a tree. Pretty neat. On the second night, we saw an aurora, and while it wasn’t as bright the green curtains I saw hanging in the Canadian sky a half-century earlier, any aurora is worth seeing.

The third day, we saw an otter as we travelled out of the bay on a day trip. He was having a great time going in and out of the water. That night, we heard wolves howling, too far away to try to find—but we wouldn’t have seen them anyway.

The final day, we took a trip to the Canadian border and Basswood Falls, passing a campsite where we had stayed in 2004, a day after a bear on Crooked Lake got our food during a howling storm. Eating our fifth consecutive meal of mash potatoes, I had seen something that looked like a windmill churning water moving across the lake from Canada. I had no idea what it was for about five minutes, then realized it was a moose swimming with a large bush stuck in his antlers. Nice memory. 

After we returned from the border, I sat in camp and said to myself the only thing we hadn’t seen on this particular trip was a moose. I had no complaints; it was a great trip.  An hour later, I heard a noise in the marsh behind me, turned and there he was, a bull moose, fifty yards away, chewing on a bush. We stayed quiet, and he didn’t leave for a good ten minutes, then disappeared through the back of our campsite.

What a great world we live in!

*********************

Eight years ago in late January, the 28th according to the picture I have of it, back when I lived in Arizona, there was a brief rain storm, and near noon, the Sun came out.  Recent rain and sunshine mean rainbows, and I love them, both the colors and why they occur, which makes me doubly lucky.  I have seen a rainbow after sunset, when the zenith is still getting sunlight, and the rainbow spans the entire N-S plane of the celestial sphere over us. Astronomer Steven O’Meara has seen them up to I believe 14 minutes after sunset, but he lived in Hawai’l and had a lot of practice. My record is still seeing one 7 minutes after sunset.

The Sun has to be fewer than 42 degrees elevation to see a rainbow. That’s why we usually see them early morning or late afternoon. The sun is usually too high at noon, unless it is winter.  I did the math in my head: In late January, the Sun is at declination (sky latitude) minus 18, or 18 deg. S. The North Star is at 32 elevation in Tucson, so overhead in Tucson is 58 deg N. On the solstice, the Sun was 23.5 deg south latitude, and 23.5 from 58 was 34.5 degrees above the horizon at local noon, which in January is about 12:35-12:40 pm.  Add in the difference of 18 deg S from 23.5 deg S, and the sun would be about 40 deg high at noon. This was going to be close, but I thought it ought to be possible to see it.  I went out to the driveway, looked north towards the top of Catalina mountains but saw no rainbow. Hmmm. Then I thought, silly me, it’s on the ground. I looked down right to where the base of the mountains met the desert.

There it was.

A beautiful rainbow was flowing along the base of the Catalina mountains. That was SO COOL to see. I found something I would have missed otherwise by knowing a simple fact about rainbows then when the time came remembering that I just might see a rainbow at noon.  I did, on the ground against the mountains.

Is this an interesting world, or what?

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In 2007, I hiked the South Rim Trail in Big Bend National Park, out to where the cliffs drop into the Chihuahua Desert. It was humid, late June, and Big Bend was part of my national park odyssey.  It was an 11 hour drive to get there, during which I saw my first Scissor-tailed flycatcher. You can’t miss them. I left the Chisos Basin early, nobody was out there, and when I reached the cliffs, I could see the desert a couple of thousand feet below me. A south wind was blowing into my face, which was pleasant, after all the climbing.

Up ahead I saw what I first thought was smoke, then realized it was water condensing into a cloud. It’s the same phenomenon I saw 20 miles from Victoria Falls from a train back in 2001 when I went to the Zambia eclipse. I couldn’t figure out what it was until I realized the sheer amount of water formed a cloud.

What I saw at Big Bend that day was a demonstration of orographic lift, the phenomenon that explains why mountains get so much more precipitation than valleys. The water vapor hits the mountains, is forced upward, cools, and condenses when it cools to the dew point. That day in Big Bend, the south wind was ferrying humid air that struck the cliffs, forced upwards, and condensed right in front of me. It was incredible.

It truly is a remarkable world.

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I read last week about the shock wave that went around the world for 2 1/2 days after the Tonga eruption. What I didn’t know was that the wave was measurable, and we have proof of the compression and the expansion of the atmosphere when the wave passed.

The graphics in the New York Times were excellent, and when I read about the barometric pressure changes, a couple of mb or a few hundredths of an inch, I decided to look on my own.  Not every place had a clear brief rise in late morning of 15 January, or a brief clear drop that night, and some places had active weather occurring that would have overwhelmed any small signal from the shock wave. But I was enthralled by barometric pressures in places \that showed a clear brief rise followed by a drop in the late morning and a clear brief drop, followed by a rise around midnight the next day.  This absolutely fascinated me, enough so that I showed my wife, who doesn’t share my rabid enthusiasm for such trivia. She liked it, too. How could you not? 

Moose, wolves, beaver, otter, and an aurora, same trip.  A rainbow practically on the ground at noon in the desert, because that is where it has to be. Orographic lift happening right in front of me.  And barometric pressure showing a change from a shock wave from a south Pacific volcanic eruption many hours earlier.

Minneapolis

8:53 AM	4 °F	-2 °F	76 %	E	6 mph	0 mph	29.64 in	0.0 in	Fair
9:53 AM	5 °F	-1 °F	76 %	VAR	3 mph	0 mph	29.65 in	0.0 in	Fair
10:53 AM	7 °F	2 °F	80 %	VAR	3 mph	0 mph	29.64 in	0.0 in	Fair

Eugene

7:54 AM	42 °F	39 °F	89 %	ESE	6 mph	0 mph	29.95 in	0.0 in	Cloudy
8:45 AM	42 °F	40 °F	92 %	CALM	0 mph	0 mph	29.95 in	0.0 in	Cloudy
8:54 AM	42 °F	40 °F	92 %	CALM	0 mph	0 mph	29.96 in	0.0 in	Cloudy
9:14 AM	41 °F	39 °F	93 %	ENE	5 mph	0 mph	29.96 in	0.0 in	Mostly Cloudy
9:54 AM	41 °F	39 °F	93 %	SE	6 mph	0 mph	29.95 in	0.0 in	Mostly Cloudy
10:25 AM	40 °F	38 °F	93 %	SE	5 mph	0 mph	29.95 in	0.0 in	Mostly Cloudy

I like the axial tilt of the Earth.

It gives us seasons, a gradual change in the amount of sunlight—or darkness—we experience throughout the year. In Arizona, where I lived for 37 years, there were easily noted gradual changes.  In June,  sunrise hovered over the Pontatoc Ridge, viewed from my kitchen, for several weeks, and I could actually notice a few seconds difference each day after June 10th, as the sunrise gradually became later.  Sunrise was later than the official time, because of the horizon, it was about 5:15 am, 45 minutes earlier on the valley floor.  About five days after the solstice, I could just notice that the sunrise was a little further to the south than it had been.  You can’t tell the exact solstice by looking at the horizon each day, but you can be close.

At sunset, the changes weren’t quite as visible since the horizon was neither raised nor sharply defined, but starting in early July, the sunset gradually became earlier, after 11 days in a row at 7:34 pm.  After twilight, it was dark by 9 pm, without the long twilight I was used to in the northerly latitudes where I grew up. Darkness comes earlier in the lower latitudes, even more dramatic near the equator. This is because the ecliptic, or the path of the Sun, Moon, and planets as seen from the Earth, is more vertical at the equator, and has a smaller angle with the horizon the further north or south one goes.  That smaller angle is why twilight lasts longer, because after the Sun sets, it is moving significantly north as well, so much of its motion below the horizon is transferred northward and not westward away from the horizon. That results in long twilights.

Now, with the Senate having passed a bill mandating universal daylight savings time, I wonder why we can’t just have universal standard time. As Brian Brettschneider, Alaskan climatologist, posted, “amount of daylight saved: 0.”  We would be better off using the German term “Sommerzeit,” or “summer time.”  We’d be even better off using standard time. That is why it is called standard. 

Arizona will not likely change from being on MST; I never heard an Arizonan complain that there was no daylight savings time. The last thing anybody in the desert wants in June is sunset at 8:34 pm, or in January sunrise at 8:24 am. One of the few pleasures about living in the desert in summer is that it gets dark by 9. It may still be—and it usually is—hot, but with darkness comes hope for cooler temperatures. I live in a world where sun is generally considered good, rain bad, light good, dark bad, and days with rain are dreary and bad whereas sunny days, even with wildfire smoke, are good. To me, summer in the 21st century is overrated, overheated, “overdry,” and “oversmoked.”

In Arizona, I always knew when GMT was—7 hours ahead of local time. Here in Oregon, I can never remember if it is 8 or 9 hours, and I don’t like the sudden change of more darkness in the morning when it had been slowly getting lighter, and more light in the evening, when it had been getting gradually lighter. It grates. I like the gradual change in light throughout the year, especially the gradual lessening of daylight in summer, for up here, summer is no longer on July 5, which is what people told me when I moved here. It’s a five month stretch between May 1 and October 1, just like Arizona, only drier and a little less hot. Unless we have a heat dome.

In Arizona, I knew June 10 that the Sun was going to rise later for the next 7 months. In 11 more days, the solstice would occur, when the Sun would stop getting higher in the sky.  Two weeks later, the Sun would start setting earlier, and I had the sense at least that summer was moving along astronomically, even if not meteorologically.  

I’m not alone. I commented in the NY Times a couple of years ago about an article written near the winter solstice, looking forward to more daylight, and wrote what became one of my 35 “Times Pick”s.  While I didn’t include the replies, they all agreed with me. I struck a chord.

I will be a contrarian and say I like the rain and the dark days. They belong, too.

I think summer is overrated; last summer came with wildfires, smoke that kept me in the house for 10 days, and a concern of evacuation. Three of the last four years there have been significant west Cascade fires. I led a volunteer crew yesterday into the damp woods to repair a trail, creeks and rivers roaring with the water that finally came.  It was lovely.

Mind you, I counted 65 different species of wildflowers on my spring walks, I am an avid canoeist, and autumn is my favorite season. But leaving the trail yesterday with dark clouds overhead, an early sunset, and rain starting to fall, I was happy.

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In Oregon, the end of standard time will mean that for 3 1/2 months a year, from mid-October to the end of January, sunrise will occur on or after 8:30 am. Children will be walking to a school bus with a flashlight. True, sunset will be later, but what is wrong with sunrise at 7:30 and sunset at 4:30? Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, whom I otherwise deeply respect, dislikes the 4:30 sunsets in Rhode Island. Well, he lives in a northern state at the eastern end of the Eastern Time Zone. Go to New Brunswick, the next stop east of Maine, and you are on Atlantic Time. That’s why it is dark there early. There is no way you can change the fact that there are 9 hours of daylight. Please stop trying to.

“White man thinks if he cuts off a foot from the top of the blanket and puts it at the bottom of the blanket, that somehow the blanket is longer.”

I take my canoe trips near the autumnal equinox. When I base camp, I can watch the change and time in sunset and sunrise location nightly, weather permitting. It’s interesting to see it, and viewing is an important part of each day on the water.

In January, the sun runs slow relative to the clock. That is why sunsets are noticeably later in early January than they were in December. But it is also why sunrise is delayed and it is dark in the morning. Add another hour to this already delayed sunrise, and it is going to look more like night than it will morning.  Not only does the white man think the blanket is longer, he (and probably should be he, here, since women are smarter) thinks sun time and clock time are the same, when they are most definitely not.

“Let’s leave our packs here and go ahead down the trail to get the last one. It isn’t far.”  My crew leader motioned me to go ahead of him.  I left my pack, and I felt strange without it.

Worse than strange.  Not right. 

I walked ahead anyway.  We were doing a simple logout of the Betty Lake Trail, a flat, 2-mile long popular hiking and winter trail that connects the Waldo Lake Road to the trail that goes around Waldo Lake, so this was a power saw job, although earlier I started to remove with my hand saw a small 4 inch log dug into ground, and when that bound up, used my axe. The log ahead was our last log of what was going to be an easy day.  

Power saw logouts are easier in some ways for me, harder in others. I have not been sworn at on a crosscut logout. Well, almost. We were pulling a stuck saw up out of a log a couple of months ago, not stuck because of what I did, and my partner, the saw’s owner, freaked out that I was pulling too hard and would break the saw. (It wasn’t too hard and I didn’t break it.)  I have been sworn at and publicly shamed on a power saw logout. Everything there is potentially more dangerous. There is a fast moving chain with teeth, rather than a slow moving piece of steel with teeth. One can damage a power saw faster and easier than a crosscut by hitting a rock or ground, and if a bind is not properly appreciated, one learns very quickly, as opposed to much cracking and splitting that precedes the answer when a crosscut is used.

But break any log under a great deal of tension with either, and the speed of the released log and its kinetic energy, a function of the mass and the square of the velocity, is unchanged.  A large log can move 15 feet in a split second. I’ve seen it.

I hadn’t swamped for several months with a power sawyer, but the rules were unchanged: I stayed 12 feet back; some sawyers want me back as much as 20. Each has his or her own rules. I checked overhead, looked around. It’s easy to get focused on the cut, but I needed to look where the cutter wasn’t looking to make sure there were no snags that could come down, no hikers coming up the trail, the log being cut wasn’t moving inappropriately from some other log we hadn’t seen.  If wedges are needed, I have them available and the axe to pound them in with. A year earlier, as I went by a log a sawyer was going to cut, I noticed another log on a slight incline perpendicular to to the one we were going to cut. When the cut log fell, the secondary might roll, and if so, there was only safe way to deal with it. The cutter didn’t see the secondary log, which was partially hidden from his view, so I yelled to him to move over to my side. Being a bit gun-shy, I couched my words carefully, “You might want to be on this side when you cut.” The cutter moved over, cut the first log, and immediately the second log, much larger, rolled down over the trail where he had just been.  I got thanked for that one.

As I walked, I became more uncomfortable.  The trail went downhill, and the “short” distance was longer than I expected. I didn’t like being without my pack out here. Eventually, I reached the log in question, forty vertical yards below and five hundred trail yards further from where I started.  The log was cut, and there were no problems.

I was relieved and could not wait to get back up the trail to my pack. I had just made a bad decision and had gotten away with it.  Such a result doesn’t retrospectively make the bad decision good. It wasn’t. The probability was low there would have been a need for my pack, and everything worked out.  But it might not have. That was the second bad decision I made with my pack this year, leaving it to go elsewhere.  I dropped it to power brush, because carrying extra weight plus a power brusher, going uphill, was fatiguing.  A mile later, I had no pack and the group was still ahead of me. I had to go back, retrieve my pack, return, then have lunch. It was a short day, and the group was returning after having eaten, so I had to again return along the trail. Bad decision. I don’t like making bad decisions.

Not having a pack with me meant if my partner had an accident, I had no radio, no pressure bandage, no Pulaski (I did bring my axe), no way to get help. A simple day, a simple log, would have just become a major problem, preventable and frankly inexcusable.  I should have spoken up, or at the least gone back and put my pack on. I know better.  Out there, we all do. The only decision I should make is whether to fasten the belt buckle and the chest strap when I put the pack on or leave them unfastened because the distance to the next log isn’t far.  In either case, I have a pack right near me with everything I need. It’s difficult enough to do first aid in the woods; it’s shameful to have brought everything out then not have had it accessible because one was lazy and didn’t want to carry a small weight a quarter mile further.

So from now on, the pack stays with me. I will listen better to my gut feelings and act upon them.  Yesterday, I had a planned personal “this is a drill, this is a drill, saw accident, saw accident” moment in the driveway at home, where I emptied out the first aid bag from my pack to see what I have and don’t have. I really didn’t know for sure.

Turns out that I was in decent shape, but I had a few things I could add to the bag which would make it better: I didn’t have scissors or a knife, I discovered an ice pack I could use, a tube of antibiotic ointment, and some mole skin.  The clotting powder, splint, dressings, two Israeli bandages, and wraps were all there.

First time I ever wore an N95 in the woods, I thought, puffing my way up the steep trail out of Blue Lake in the Diamond Peak Wilderness.  I was carrying a Pulaski, my work pack with 3 liters of water and lunch, three different hand saws, work clothes and heavy boots.  We had to climb 1000’ vertical to the ridgeline, where we were going to log out the central part of the Diamond Peak Trail in both directions from the junction. It was not Covid, but smoke that was the issue; humidity, heat, and exertion made wearing the mask impossible. I finally took it off.

One of the first logs was 5 feet above the trail, which I wanted to ignore. But the Crew leader wanted to take it out. When he put the saw over it, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to cut that without a step stool.  I looked left, saw a much lower place where the log was resting, and convinced my partner we should cut there first.  We did, and the log eventually dropped.  We then worked on the original part, finally cutting it and moving it off the trail. 

The rest of the day included a great deal of difficulty in cutting out each log, which I learned, only the following week, was due to the saw’s not having been sharpened in 3 years. The issue wasn’t necessarily that I was weak; I certainly was affected by the heat. And using a dull tool.

When a 2-man crosscut sawyer bucks (cuts), the blades cut when pulled towards oneself. When the pull is complete, ideally when the opposite handle on the other side is near the log, the sawyer relaxes and lets the partner pull the saw the other way.  Relaxing doesn’t mean letting go but gently guiding the handle back to the log, like the heart in diastole, as the partner pulls. It is important to pull in a straight line, so the saw cuts straight. If one pulls to one side, the saw, being flexible, will bend, but the kerf or cut is narrow, and the saw teeth will no longer cut in the groove made by the rakers or mini-chisels that are on the blade with the teeth.  Used properly, the saw cuts smoothly and sounds better, too. The saw sings when all is right.

It is easy to pull to one side if one gets tired, the sawing position is sub-optimal, the log is difficult to cut because of bind or type of wood, or the saw itself is not sharp.  Most of the time I cut, it was a good day when nobody commented about my cutting. The most common comment I heard is “you are pulling,” which I took to mean I was pulling right or left. 

I have had a great deal of On the Job Training—OJT—but little teaching, and as a teacher myself, that bothered me. I had no mentor, the logs were plenty, and cutting them out was the priority.  I was then and even now usually the junior member of the Crew. Additionally, I was a newcomer to the state. Oregonians, I learned early from one person in the hiking Club, care about length of time here. In Arizona, where I previously lived, we joked that a native had been there 10 or more years. Nobody cared really how long one had lived there, and I don’t remember anybody’s talking about third or more generation Arizonans, but one hears often about multi-generational Oregonians. For the record, I am a native Californian, when the state was tied with Pennsylvania for second in population, and Kentucky had more people than Florida.  

I did my work, tried not to pull to one side, stayed quiet even when I could see, across the saw, that others were pulling to one side. I thought of mentioning that but stayed quiet, because perhaps I was wrong. Finally, on Diamond Peak Trail last year, I was cutting with my Crew leader while he was trying to carry on a conversation with someone else.  The cutting became more difficult, I saw my partner’s saw pulled far to his right, no question now, and said, quietly, “Hey Boss, you are pulling right.”

“Really?” Oh yeah. He was.

This year, two other issues came to light, both again on the Diamond Peak Trail. The first was dull saw. We proved it the following week when four of us were tackling the same log at the same time, I was on the dull saw, and with a head start, the pair with a good one finished before my partner and I were two-thirds done.

A month later, I was out with a crew member who joined a couple of years before I did, native Oregonian, mentored by one of the most experienced sawyers in the area.  We were cutting a large enough log so we couldn’t see each other, and at one point he told me that I was pulling.  I muttered something, relaxed my stroke slightly, and wondered how he could know I was pulling when he couldn’t see either me or the saw.  It didn’t make sense. I thought about that incident the rest of the day, wondering whether I had reached my maximum level of incompetence for the job, since I seemed to be doing better a year earlier, and 53 days out with the crew on a crosscut event ought to have made me fairly experienced.  

A week later, we were near the same spot, since there was an enormous tangle of downed trees to remove, along with some 30-inch diameter ones on either side. My group started with a pair of logs, one large and near the ground, a smaller one about 4 feet above the trail. Beginning with the smaller, I thought the cut was too close to the trail, thinking it was obvious if we cut there, when we cut the next log, the first would get in the way. We needed to cut it about 2-3 feet further away from the trail. My partner, an experienced C level sawyer, moved the saw a foot, not enough, I felt. We cut the log. 

We then began cutting the bottom log on the opposite side of the trail, finished it, and turned to where we had been cutting earlier. It was obvious now to everybody, not just me, that the end of the first log we had cut was blocking the exit for the one we would be cutting. The other two in the saw crew took care of it, cutting it 2 more feet away from the trail.  

Sort of like I had suggested.  It’s like a doctor’s not listening to a nurse. Sometimes, the junior person is right. 

A more significant incident transpired on the following log, 30 inches in diameter. I was sitting as I pulled, and looking back on the incident, the saw was angling slightly towards the ground, rather than horizontal. For some reason, my partner corrected me using a phrasal verb for once: “You are pulling down.”

A light flashed. A voice in my brain, the part that runs mathematics so well, said, “z-axis.”

We were, after all, working in three dimensional space. It’s just that my pulling examples had always meant the xy-plane, left or right, and I equated pulling with that plane.  I was pulling down, and I might do that when cutting if I were sitting. It never seemed to matter. For the rest of the day, and there would be a lot more cutting, whenever I sat or knelt, I let the saw ride horizontally across the kerf, or the cut. Standing, I was fine, automatically.  Sitting or kneeling, I was not. That was the problem I was having.  Maybe there was hope, after all.

Pull is a transitive verb. It has an object that may take an adverbial prepositional phrase.  We live in 3-D space. Wood has three dimensions.  Please give clear directions. I am competent in both English and math.  With time, I may even graduate from an A sawyer to a B one. But I’m old; I can’t keep hiking up hills with a lot of tools and cut out logs many more years, N95 or not.