Author Archives: Levi Showalter

Fire

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Everyone knows what water is: H2O, two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Air, likewise; a swirling solution of gases – chiefly nitrogen, but also oxygen and carbon dioxide, and a whole smattering of other trace elements. Earth, now that one is a little more complicated.

What we call soil is the fragmented crystals of silicate rocks and metal ions, with a sprinkling of carbon and the other N-P-K minerals that are essential for plant life. In other words, ground-up rocks and leaves. It took me an upper-level forest fire science class in college to understand what fire, physically, is. As flammable substances undergo combustion reactions, they emit light and heat as energy escapes, packaged into photons in the infrared-to-yellow range. Fire is the visible, volatile cloud of gases where this reaction is taking place at that instant. In the heart of a flame where the hottest molecules are ionizing, this means fire approaches the hidden fourth state of matter: plasma.

Rarely do we encounter such things in the outdoors; these forces of nature are usually the domain of the physicist. Blanketed in rainforest as it is, southeast Alaska rarely experiences wildfires. Our firemen are usually on assignments in the more combustible landscapes of the lower 48. But fire in Alaska still has quite a story to tell. The southern coast of the state is situated along the Pacific Ring of Fire, where volcanoes like organ pipes belch out smoke signals along the Aleutians and Katmai’s Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. (What are they signaling? To quote Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, “And all who see him cry: Beware! Beware!”) Several miniature volcanoes dot the coast of Prince of Wales Island, and the fingers of magma chambers tickle the surface under a smattering of bubbling springs in igneous rock. We took a backpacking trip to explore one such spring, before ultimately being turned around by a bear trail blocking our path. Not to be outdone, however, we climbed to the top of a mountain for one of the most incredible sunsets I had ever seen. The fire in the sky met the fire we built in our little Swiss chalet for a cozy evening above the tree line, where the three walls of our hut sheltered us from the howling alpine wind.

As fire is the emission of energy and light from a combustion reaction, it differs in an important way from the Greeks’ other three classical elements: temporality. You can hold a bottle of water, a bucket of earth, a flask of air; fire is a product, an effect that exists only as long as the reaction continues. This reaction is described by the “fire triangle”, a model that describes heat, fuel, and oxygen as the necessary ingredients for a fire to ignite. Remove any one of them, and the other two collapse – the fire gasps into a smoldering ash heap as the reaction stops. Heat is generally the limiting factor for fires on the Tongass, as too much energy is needed to warm the abundantly wet wood. We learned this firsthand as we tried to build our fire in that mountain hut. But in those rare instances where a fire does take hold, it rejuvenates the forest and turns the clock back to an earlier stage of succession, creating the conditions where our target plants are found – and where they will be planted to foster its recovery.

Taking soil samples to look for charcoal deposits from historic campfires.

Finally, fire has an intensely human dimension. We are the only species to have mastered its making. Anthropologists believe that the advent of cooking allowed our ancestors’ skulls to devote less space to our jaws and more to our brains. What is more, the temporality of fire gave them time to sit around and tell stories while they were together, weaving the first nebulous friendships that would blossom into civilizations. We worked with our archaeology crew to survey streambeds for ancient charcoal deposits – places where the Tlingit Indians sat together and told these stories long ago – and help conserve this heritage during current timber harvests for the tribe’s totem poles. I have also spent many an evening reading the Alaska Native legends from the Thorne Bay Library – tales passed down through many generations of campfires, tales of brave adventurers and daring escapes from cruel twists of fate in the wild north country. There is a special charm even today to sharing stories around a campfire, as I have had the chance to do many times this summer.

My time in Alaska will be ending shortly, and it has truly been an unforgettable experience. I dreamt of working in the Last Frontier for years, and I have learned more here than I could have ever hoped for. When my Xtratuf rain boots have been resigned to barnyard duty, when the salmon dwindle back to trout and the wind through Pennsylvania’s caves does not play the same melodies, I will still have many stories of the incredible crews I had the chance to work with and the once-in-a-lifetime sights I saw in Thorne Bay. These campfire tales of bears and salmon, caves and mountains, cumulus clouds and constellations will always bring back exceptional memories of the summer I spent in Alaska – and I’ll tell those stories with a fire in my eyes.

Water

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Hatchery Creek near Coffman Cove

I come from haunts of coot and hern,

I make a sudden sally

And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Brook” has long been one of my favorite poems, ever since my grandfather taught it to me many years ago. It tells of a quiet country stream as it tumbles endlessly out of the hills and wends its way down to the river, washing over stones and reeds all the while in an eternal turbulence. On the Tongass, our nation’s rainiest forest, water is an ever-present force that drives life in ways quite unlike the lower 48. Dozens of these streams bubble up in abundance from a sponge of karst and filter down through the mountain boulders, wedged apart by rock-brakes. They fan out into huge lakes that are fringed by little wildflowers bearing the names of Victorian-era botanists, Tennyson’s contemporaries: Packer, Tolmie, Lyngbye, Menzies. These are flanked by a sprinkling of wild salmonberries and huckleberries at the forest’s edge, where water has been piped out of the ground into their hundreds of little fruits. Collecting seeds from these shrubs requires several turns of a wash-rinse-repeat cycle; most other plants, their fruits being dry capsules, instead need dried quickly to prevent molding.

The waters slip across the backs of salmon huddled at the lake’s outlet and tumble farther down waterfalls, until they finally become tinged with salt as they near the ocean. The water sedge gives way to Lyngbye sedge and the rocky beaches are strewn with popweed, an edible seaweed that provides an excellent source of iodine.

I wind about, and in and out,

With here a blossom sailing,

And here and there a lusty trout,

And here and there a grayling.

The waters of Alaska are known as one of the most productive fisheries in the world, and for good reason. Trout and salmon, crabs and squid flutter through the streams and bays in titanic numbers, converting flies and algae into suppers for eagles, wolves, and fishermen. It is no wonder that the Tongass is sometimes called the Salmon Forest – in between its hundreds of islands swim countless millions of them. They not only sustain a subsistence lifestyle unique to Alaska, but much of the state’s commerce as well. One in ten residents of Southeast Alaska are in some way employed in the fishing industry. This includes not only commercial fishermen, but processors, shipbuilders, biologists, guides, and a host of other colorful characters.

My career plan is to become an agronomist and work with farmers to improve crops, not fish. This spring, I debated whether to come work in Alaska in a position that I thought to be largely unrelated to agriculture or the food system in general. The longer I have worked here, however, I realize that I was mistaken; Alaskans on Prince of Wales Island live off the land to an extent that I was quite unfamiliar with growing up in Pennsylvania farm country. Wild foods are a critical resource in rural Alaska, and our work in forest restoration creates habitat for the wildlife and edible plants that are the mainstays of everyday life here, and healthy forests ensure high water quality. I have learned an incredible amount about local food systems through this internship and how sustainable, carefully managed forestry will help this traditional part of life in southeast Alaska continue for many more generations.

And out again I curve and flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

A beautiful rainbow trout from a night of fly-fishing on the Thorne River.

Earth

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Georges Seurat filled a canvas with many thousands of pointillistic dots to paint the Isle of La Grande Jatte; in the same way, many thousands of isles dot the Alaskan coastline to paint the landscape of the Alexander Archipelago. These islands – some thousands of square miles, others just barely breaking the surface at low tide – are in fact the many peaks of an underwater mountain range. Further south, they march out of the sea to form the Cascades. As glaciers retreated from here thousands of years ago, they carved the tangled fractal of fjords and channels that fill the valleys between those mountains. The soil on the hills above has had only a minute to form, in geologic time, and the cool weather further slows its formation. Little more than a few inches of gray-black muck support the conifers here, and it regularly slumps into liquefied landslides.

At first, it would seem that Prince of Wales Island would be a bit dull for a soil scientist. There are no farms here, as one might expect, so there is not much of a market for soil testing – in fact, much of the area remains unmapped in the NRCS’s soil surveys of America…in reality, the opposite is the case. Soil scientists (and their more charismatic cousins, geologists) have no shortage of curiosities awaiting them on the Tongass.

The northern half of Prince of Wales is built upon a honeycomb of karst – limestone that has been fluted by the slow drip-drip-drip of underground seeps and springs. More than 600 caves have been found on the island, with many more surely lurking deep in the forest. We toured El Capitan, the largest cave in Alaska, and even in an hour saw only the entrance. Far beyond the end of our adventure lay titanic, cave rooms hundreds of feet in every dimension – an underground cathedral in a perpetually echoic Midnight Mass, sine lux aeterna.

A few hundred feet from the cave’s mouth, we performed our most unusual (and my favorite) seed collection of the year thus far. Hordeum brachyantherum, meadow barley, grows like rice in tidal flats, flooding and drying twice a day. Emma and I scurried around a patch of it – as fast as one can scurry in rain boots, sinking into 15 inches of mud and water – collecting as much as possible before the rising tide swallowed the shore again. The rippling waves of grass and seawater under a rare cloudless sky easily made for one of my favorite sights this summer.

Elsewhere on our island, the ground sinks into bottomless pits of peat moss in muskegs. These bizarre bogs are a soil scientist’s dream and nightmare simultaneously: they consist of several spongy feet of waterlogged moss and nothing else. Muskegs are the closest thing to Indiana Jones-style quicksand pits one is likely to ever encounter in real life – one wrong step could mean disappearing into a ten-foot well of slime. (The “bog mummies” of Ireland and the Andes formed in exactly this manner; the anaerobic environment slows decay almost to a standstill.) As unearthly as these are, however, they support a fascinating diversity of plants found in few other places. Bog cranberries, cottongrass and water sedge are three muskeg-loving plants we have collected thus far. And how could I forget the day that I hiked 8 miles in driving rain to one such muskeg to pick cloudberries! These petite orange raspberries, Rubus chamaemorus, are tremendously frustrating to cultivate (I have tried) and equally laborious to pick, but absolutely worth the effort. They taste a bit like a mix between apple pie and peach yogurt. If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend going to the trouble of picking them.

I am always in awe of how the forces of nature are laid bare in Alaska to create a wild landscape like nowhere else. Much like the other features of the Tongass that I have written about already, Alaska’s geology has a colorful and vibrant story to tell. It dots the Pacific coast with a dizzying array of jungle islands, and produces an abundant scattering of minerals – salt, marble, uranium, and gold – that have been integral to the island’s history and environment. It is strange to think that I will only be in the Last Frontier for just over a month yet, and I have so much of this island to still explore. No doubt, it will be full of many more adventures and things to learn.

Air

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A thick, heavy layer of clouds hugs the rocky shores and shoals of southeast Alaska, fluttering its thousand whispering notes through the Sitka spruces, soon to be carved into guitar necks and drum frames. Its mistral arms wrap round the eaglets in their nests and embrace the porcupines; it swaddles fjords in fog, entombs ships’ lights in a steely gray and swirls over the icy spires of the Klawock Range. Funneled into the steep sides of the Inside Passage, ocean winds mix and churn into a roiling silver wind of salt spray.

Many days, after gorging itself on the warm Pacific current, this layer of clouds droops with a leaden cargo of water until coalescing into the famous Alaska rain. This rain (of which southeast Alaska receives more than any other place in the country) is the chilling, soaking variety that drives bees to cower under flowers and grizzled old fishermen to sing sea shanties on the docks. It percolates through the sparse, rocky soil to bind together some particles and wedge apart others that finally collapse into enormous landslides. One curious thing I have noticed is that rain here seldom is packaged into hammering thunderstorms – the cumulonimbus clouds that electrify the Midwest require hotter summer air than Alaska receives. It arrives as a lighter, more persistent tap-tap-tap that seems always ready to drop out of the precariously perched clouds at the slightest disturbance. It is a rain that makes excellent weather for sitting on the Thorne Bay Library porch, writing blog posts like this one and drinking convenience store coffee (brewed for sailors, so strong that it has to be beaten back into the cup with a spoon).

Setting sail from Ketchikan Harbor to Prince of Wales Island

On other, less frequent days, the dome of clouds is whisked away to reveal the warm sun that encourages the treetops and teases the mosses and ferns below – even on the brightest days, the dense tangle of conifer needles that roofs the Tongass keep the forest floor cool and shaded. We spent five days in the Karta River Wilderness with this rare Alaska sunshine, where it shimmers off mirror-still lakes and the bald heads of seals in the bay. After long days of backpacking, pulling foxgloves and hacking through heavy brush, returning to our camp in the ever-shady understory felt a sweet relief. There the sun hovers long over the horizon, scattering its fiery rays over the rippling trout streams until ten at night and returning by four o’clock the next morning.

The Klawock Range that spans the middle of our island

I am always fascinated by the sublime beauty that weather can display. Alaska is a land of extremes – to borrow from folk singer Hobo Jim, “this is the country where legends are born.” The Pacific Northwest Coast is the largest temperate rainforest in the world, and I can think of no better place to see weather’s creative forces at work than a land where it raises up colossal trees like mossy pillars from six-inch-deep soil. Where fourteen-foot tides are normal and krummholz pines cling tenuously to life on the windswept mountains. And where cloudberries – of which I am trying my best to find just one good patch ­– really do grow within clouds in the cold, foggy muskegs. I am greatly looking forward to the rest of our season here in the Great Land – whatever way the wind blows.

Overlooking Karta Lake

He is Trampling Out the Vintage Where the Dogwood Seeds are Stored

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The high desert sun over the Payette has receded into misty mornings and many a rainy day, and the larches and aspens are turning to spires of gold among the evergreens. The past month has been a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure story; the credits have begun to roll for the main storyline of seed collecting, so we’ve had some time to work with a handful of other crews on a smattering of side quests.
We started off the month with a collection of red-osier dogwood seeds (Cornus sericea) that we suggested as a good way to learn to collect not only tree seeds but also fleshy fruit. The question of the hour then became: how do we get these out of the little white berries they grow inside? The answer, it turns out, was to dump them into a 5-gallon bucket and stomp them like wine grapes. They feel so, so weird between your toes – would not recommend! But after laying them in the sun for a few days to dry, we ended up with a rather bulky bag of about 40,000 seeds. Not too bad for two hours’ worth of collecting.

Why did we think this was a good idea…?


After this rather bizarre episode, we tagged along with a wildlife biologist to retrieve game cameras on the farthest-flung reaches of the forest out by Hells Canyon. We returned with a camera roll full of elk, fishers, and bears, an incredible panoramic view of America’s deepest river gorge, and a new population of a rare bitterroot flower. We spent the next week or two wrapping up collections of roses, alders and daisies before Dan took a week to visit Great Basin. I stayed behind to finish some office work and map streams in a timber sale with our hydrology crew, and then it was my turn to take a week off and drive through the gorgeous Idaho panhandle.
I spent most of my week’s vacation touring Coeur d’Alene, a quaint little lakeside city where the rain and coffee abound this time of year – and, it turns out, some large furry beasts. On the far shore of Coeur d’Alene lake, a campground is tucked away in the pines, accessible only by kayaking across the water. I paddled an evening’s worth of gear across, set up a tent, and was about to make supper and go to bed when I heard the sounds of heavy animal breaths just into the woods. Shining my flashlight in their direction revealed – two large glowing eyes staring back at me, about three feet off the ground. It may be worth mentioning at this point that Coeur d’Alene is on the edge of grizzly country. I packed my tent back into my kayak and muscled the boat back across the lake with a furious intensity that would make any Viking captain proud.


After this rather startling misadventure, I spent the rest of the week exploring the town, fly-fishing, hiking to waterfalls in the Selkirk Mountains, and generally having the best time of the summer. Not to mention all the other off-the-cuff day trips we’ve taken: I finally caught my first trout of the season in the beautiful Clearwater River and went sandboarding (!) at Bruneau Dunes State Park. It seems unbelievable that the end of our time in Idaho will be here in only two more weeks, but I’ve experienced and learned so much in the past few months. I’ll be glad to be home soon, but saying adieu to the Rocky Mountains is going to be a bittersweet farewell.

The Cookcamp Chronicles

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Our sylvan saunter sojourning for seeds has scattered us scouts though streamsides, summits, swamps, steppes and ski slopes. The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of driving up and down many a bumpy dirt road, hunting far-flung patches of plants and filling bag after bag with countless thousands of seeds. Our basement is starting to be overrun with an ever-growing tower of brown paper bags with eerie-sounding Latin labels – are we botanists or Hogwarts wizards?
Our wide-ranging adventures over two national forests mean that we’ve been camping almost every week this month to cover enough ground. After the first few days of eating only hot dogs and peanut butter sandwiches, I shifted gears and decided that if I was going to do all this camp cooking this summer, I was going to do it right. I like a good camp-cooked meal as much as anyone, so it’s a good thing I have a job that makes me hike a lot.

With enough determination, one can cook (almost) anything over a campfire or a single-burner stove that can be made at home. On one such adventure, I spent an evening frying Monte Cristo sandwiches over a campfire – a delicious combination of ham and cheese between French toast, drizzled with pancake syrup. For dessert, I wrapped two Pillsbury crescent rolls around a stick, fried them over a fire, and filled the resulting tube with pudding and whipped cream for an eclair that would make any French chef proud. .I followed it up the next two nights with French toast and a recipe from the original 1911 edition of the Boy Scout Handbook for Canned Salmon on Toast, essentially a glorified if archaic tuna salad. The recipe begins, “Dip slices of stale bread into smoking hot lard.” I’d call the result mediocre at best, with a pallid gray color unbecoming of salmon, but nothing tasted better after a long day of hiking (especially when I followed it with a round of French toast for dessert). The next week, I went out on a limb and tried a recipe for spicy potato and leek soup with shrimp that originally came out of an old fantasy book I read in middle school. It took near the entire evening to simmer over our campfire but boy, it sure tasted good! On the contrary, the recipe feeds about four people – being only Dan and myself, we awkwardly taped the pot lid closed and set it in the trunk of our jeep. The next morning, Dan was souped out, leaving me staring down a very large breakfast of seemingly endless shrimp. If you’re going to cook enough to have leftovers the next morning, make sure you have someone who will actually eat them!

How to Get Poisoned in the Woods

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By and large, seed collecting here in central Idaho has been going quite well. We’ve picked bags and bags of fleabanes, needlegrass, wheatgrass, and fiddlenecks. The season has been a bit behind so far, but the last few weeks, our plants must have finally heard the wake-up call of summer and decided to finally get in motion. All of a sudden, we went from having no seeds to gather to running all over the forest, trying to keep up with everything!

There are a handful of plants that are still evading us, of course. One of those is Lathyrus lanszwertii, the Nevada pea. We’ve followed a handful of leads for it, all of which turned out to be dead ends – including a half-hour drive on a very bumpy mountain road to be taunted by a patch of Lathyrus pauciflorus, the few-flowered pea. (Guess how much luck we’d have trying to collect 30,000 seeds from that?) And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so Dan and I have been on high alert for anything that vaguely resembles this enigmatic legume. Our curiosity (read: desperation) led us last week into a decent bit of misadventure.

Early Wednesday morning, while scouting for wild mint (Agastache urticifolia), I followed the trail a little farther up the streambank to find a string of brilliant purple flowers growing among the alders. Could this finally be our pea? I hopped over the rocks to pick a flower off and scour our field guide. It had five petals, reflexed backwards, pinnate leaves, a vining growth form – this had to be it. But the stamens grew in a dense, tangled knot around the center of the flower. That’s strange, I thought. Fabaceae has just a handful of stamens and they’re fused to each other.

We started searching the guide for any kind of purple flowers. Suddenly, Dan insisted, “Drop that thing on the ground right now.”

“What?” I said.

“Get rid of it! That’s called monkshood. Haven’t you ever heard of it?”

“No…?”

“It’s, like, the most poisonous plant in the West. Eating one flower is enough to knock you dead. It’ll absorb through skin, too.”

Aconitum columbianum – watch out for this one!

Holy moly! This stuff is no joke. I did some digging on the internet, and sure enough, the lethal dose of monkshood is about a gram. It turns out its Latin name, Aconitum, means “without suffering” because its symptoms appear within minutes, and you die within a few hours. People have actually died from just skin contact with it, although all the reports seemed to be from gardeners who planted it (!?) and were working amidst it for hours on end. We hopped in the jeep and quickly drove back to our house to shower off. After scrubbing our hands with every kind of soap we owned and satisfying ourselves that we weren’t likely to die, we headed back out to cautiously get back to work – and, as any good botanist would do, to get a picture of it for our own plant photo album.

As they say, an adventure is a story that is miserable while you’re creating it and fun to tell in comfort later. And this sure was one of those! Make sure you know the poisonous plants that grow where you’re working and how to avoid them – and definitely don’t eat things you don’t recognize!

😉

Welcome to the Jungle

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My boss’s cubicle has a quote hung on the wall from Enrico Fermi, the Nobel-winning physicist, when he once had a student ask him to recall the name of a particular subatomic particle. “Young man,” the professor replied, “if I could remember the names of all these particles, I would be a botanist.” In my first month since moving to Idaho from Pennsylvania, I have learned just how true that statement was. There has certainly been a bit of a learning curve to adapting to a whole new set of plants, most of which I had never seen before. Botanizing in a new part of the country is a bit like sticking a firehose of information in your mouth – open the valve and just try to swallow everything you can. What was this death camas plant that everyone was trying to get rid of? And why would anyone ever eat common camas, which looks almost exactly the same until it flowers?

Death camas (left) and common camas (right) – almost indistinguishable a few weeks before.

But there have been a few important things that softened the landing a little and made botany in Idaho a little less intimidating. The first was realizing just how many Western plants have close relatives in the East, plants that I was already quite familiar with. I’ve never seen Galium aparine or Trillium ovatum before, but the other species in those genera are quite common in Pennsylvania. It’s also been very helpful to work with a crew of Westerners who know what grows here and to have the colossal Flora of the Pacific Northwest to walk me through. And wouldn’t you believe, the born-and-raised Idahoans are just as unfamiliar with Pennsylvanian plants as I was with theirs. I’ve learned dozens and dozens of plants so far and more are sure to come.

We’ve scouted for many types of wildflowers so far and learned the trials and tribulations of keying out huge genera like Eriogonum (wild buckwheat) or Erigeron (fleabane). Staring through a microscope to piece apart minute details of a specimen can be exhausting, but it’s incredible to realize just how much diversity there is among the plants of the Rocky Mountains. I have a special passion for botanical Latin, and I’ve spent many an evening by our campfire reading through our flora to learn the fascinating history of why plants were given the names they were – either for famous scientists, ancient medicinal uses, or an author’s one-year-old daughter in one special case. We’ve had the opportunity to hike many a mile in search of rare mosses and onions, and seen a great diversity of other plants and flowers along the way (not to mention an incredible hike).

Lewisia sacajaweana, a rare plant we spent a day scouting for a population of. It is named for Capt. Merrriwether Lewis and Sacajawea of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

But life, just like botany, is a mosaic of little pieces that may look disjointed, but when you find the little similarities, they fit together into an extraordinary picture. When I first moved here, Idaho seemed like a whole puzzle of disassembled pieces – I dropped my dad off at the airport after our road trip and immediately found that every hotel in Boise was fully booked for a Luke Combs concert. I drove an hour out of town to find a room, and the only thing keeping me together was getting a surprise call from my old college roommate. How was I ever going to survive here?

But what a place Idaho has turned out to be since then! The forests and the fishing are incomparable, and I have met more than one person with surprising connections – the Mennonite grocers from my state, another Penn State Agriculture graduate, and many others. And imagine my surprise when I learned that my roommate, a wildlife biologist from North Carolina, was my fifth cousin! Idaho is still a bit of a puzzle, but sure enough, the pieces are starting to come together.

Welcome to the jungle, it gets better here every day.