Daily Archives: 30 September, 2024

Berry Pickin’

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Summer in the Pacific Northwest means berry season. While some, like the red baneberry, are highly poisonous, a lot of them are edible and quite tasty, making seed collection go by a lot faster. Whenever I get a little hungry, I just “test” one of the seeds for ripeness by assessing the flavor. In my free time, I return to populations too small for collection, but just big enough for personal use. I take the blueberries and bake a scrumptious, yet tart, blueberry pie, and the huckleberries are perfect for muffin making.

Vaccinium membranaceum (Thinleaf huckleberry!)
Vaccinium membranaceum muffinaceum ft. Katius Skelteum

I’ve never felt this provided for in an ecosystem before. While I’m sure my beautiful southeastern home has ample vegetation to meet my needs, I was never taught anything about that. Most of my background is in agriculture. Working on farms and in fields, you develop a certain relationship with the land. It’s almost a parental role. You give the crops what they need – water, sun, nutrients – and watch as they take the provisions to grow and mature. You love your crops (except for maybe that tricky relationship with the bad seed who got influenced by the wrong crowd (aphids)), and you feel a sense of pride because you shaped them. You take their fruits, but those fruits are partially a product of your labor. 

With seed collection though, I’ve developed a whole new relationship with the plants. There is no sense of pride with seed collection. I contribute nothing to the success of the plants. I play no role in their growth. I don’t give, I only take. 

Berries in the bag!

The roles are reversed – now the plants are taking care of me. I didn’t have to earn it, I just had to appreciate it. The term mother nature takes on a whole new meaning. While I’m well aware that every material thing I own comes from nature, I’m so separated from the raw materials that it’s hard to appreciate. But, when I pick the berries off the branch and pop them in my mouth, I know exactly who to thank. The book I’ve been reading, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, has been teaching me to express gratitude to every part of nature. The berries that I collect are pure gifts. I’ve been trying to keep in mind the lessons from this book as I collect my seeds. Kimmerer talks of how she always leaves an offering for plants and thanks them when she collects from them. My inner treehugger comes out, but it feels joyous to thank the plants for their gifts. Even when I bake with my personal collection, I feel more inclined to take my time because I know that I’m using gifts, and there’s nothing more hurtful than wasting a well-thought out present. During work hours it feels even better to know that I’m using these gifts to help the plants back. The seeds that we collect will primarily be used for meadow and fire restoration, so everything I take goes right back to earth – a neverending cycle of gratitude and giving. 

Tree huggers

P.S. My two fellow interns and I have been working on an album to put into song what is so hard to convey with typical prose. Below is an attempt to explain how I feel when I’m picking berries.

Berries in the bag

Well I was drivin my load down that gravel road
Yung Gravy blastin through my speakers
Windows down, sunglasses up, 
Sending a thanks to my good lord Caesar
Passin bracken ferns and heck maybe even cedars (I dont know my trees)

I’m cruisin right along, apartment K on my mind
When I hear a ‘stop’ yelp out the back
I get out the truck (there’s nothing here, wait what?)
As I grab my pack, I see em

Berries to my left. 
Berries to my right.
Berries up and down. 
Berries everywhere in sight.
I grab a ziploc, grab my walky talk
And I start grabbin those 
Berries off the branch.
Berries in my hand.
Berries in the sky
Berries in my eye
But first..
Berries in the bag. (Yee haw)
Berries in the bag 

Sittin in these bushes, got dirt for a cushion
Hands stained purple from the fruit of my labor
Bees swarm, birdies dive
Everyone wants a taste of my berries to savor
Karma blessin’ for my good behavior

My stomach gives a rumble, gives a grumble
She don’t like seein’ what she can’t have
I decide to brave it through, clench those ab muscles (shoutout Shaun T)
But that’s when I realize I got

Berries to my left. 
Berries to my right.
Berries up and down. 
Berries everywhere in sight.
I grab a ziploc, grab my walky talk
And I start grabbin those 
Berries off the branch.
Berries in my hand.
Berries in the sky
Berries in my eye
But first..
Berries in the tummy. (Yee haw)
Berries in the tummy

Huckleberries. Thimbleberries. Blueberries. Snowberries.
I’ll take em all, take em anyway
Blackberries. Black cap raspberries. Elderberries. Red baneberries.
Bake them berries in a pie. Berries in the sky
Berries on my tongue. Berries when I’m on the run.
Keep me fed. Keep me full. Got my girl nourished too
Berries...
I love youuuuu!

Berries to my left. 
Berries to my right.
Berries up and down. 
Berries everywhere in sight.
I grab a ziploc, grab my walky talk
And I start grabbin those 
Berries off the branch.
Berries in my hand.
Berries in the sky
Berries your the love of my life
But first...
Berries in the bag. (Yee haw)
Berries in the bag 
Berriieess
Beriieees
Berries get in my bag!!!

Cup Lake Draba

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This month brought a fun change to the seed collecting routine. We were sent out on a three day backpacking mission to check in on a rare endemic, the Cup Lake Draba!

Draba asterophora var. macrocarpa only grows between two small, granite-lined lakes in the Desolation Wilderness. The terrain is rugged and difficult to access. Whitebark pine and gnarled hemlocks hug windswept ridges and a diversity of alpine flowers cling to granite cracks. On the north facing aspect of this ridgeline is where the Cup Lake Draba makes its living.

We began our trip by stuffing as much gear as we could fit into our packs. Tents, sleeping bags and pads, food and stoves, as well as many non essentials such as cameras, moth lights, binoculars, bug nets and UV flashlights. We’re a group of nerds, what can we say!

The Jepson is always worth bringing!

With our absurdly heavy loads, we began up the 2,500 ft climb; taking it slow and observing the wildlife and plants along the way. As we reached the summit and entered the whitebark pine zone, we were greeted by an exploratory pika, great views of Lake Tahoe, and a very surprised family of sooty grouse.

Cup lake is a tiny body of water situated in a deep granite bowl. The water is cold, and there are several alpine plants who live along its edges. Before setting up camp, we hiked down to the lake and did a preliminary search for the Draba. It was easy to locate the historical polygons, but sadly there were no flowers present.

Cup Lake

The next day we split off into two groups. Beth and Allie stayed to remap and survey the main lakeside population, while Tori and I hiked along the ridge to map out a series of populations that hadn’t been visited since the early 2000s.

Lakeside lunching

As we moved along the ridge we began to get a feel for the Draba’s habitat preference. We only encountered it on the north side in slightly sheltered areas. It seemed to thrive in decomposed granite surrounded by bigger boulders and protected from the elements. We were excited to find thousands of plants thriving in these unforgiving conditions. We even found a handful in full flower! If conditions allow, we will be revisiting these populations to make conservation seed collections from this rare plant.

There it is!

Overall, the trip was a great success! We have another backpacking trip to the wilderness coming up to survey for whitebark pine, and I’m excited to get back out there. The season of flowers is coming to a close, and it’s nice to get up high and catch the alpine ones before fall comes.

Eriogonum lobbii
Gastroboletus turbinatus var. flammeus, a rare mushroom

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.