The Birch

Pilates? P90-X? Cenegenics?

What? Where? Who? Who needs that stuff?

All you need is a blown-out birch, a chainsaw, a splitting maul, a garden cart, and someone to put it all together. (All of those items are probably older than anyone reading this post!)

A recent storm blew out the top of a decent-sized birch. The top was hanging in the branches of its neighbor. It was time to do something about it. It was time to fell the birch.

The felled birch

Once the birch was on the ground, it was time to clean up the work area and get ready to cut it into Jøtul-sized chunks.

The birch, ready to be chunked.

This was a good sized birch. Getting it chunked up was going to take some time and some chainsaw gas.

The birch. Felled and cut.

Well, that was a workout. Now to deploy the splitting maul to turn the chunks into Jøtul-sized billets.

The birch, split.

If the chainsaw work was a "workout", the splitting maul work was "something else"!

The colors in newly split birch are lovely. It's a shame they don't last!

Whew! All that's left is to haul this to the woodshed and clean up the area.

Done!

Felled. Cut. Split. Hauled. Stacked.  Area tidied.  !!

Time for a G&T with L&L on the deck in the shade with a good book and a soft breeze off the water! Living the good life in northern MN!

Ashfall Fossil Beds, Nebraska

Ashfall Fossil Beds, Late May 2013

On our way to attend a gathering of fiberglass camping trailers we stopped at the Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park in rural northeastern Nebraska. It takes a little doing to get to this place; it is certainly not on the way to anywhere else. But, if you have any interest in the geologic and paleologic history of North America, these fossil beds should be on your "must see" list. They are, in fact, unique in all the world!

Arriving at the park, your first stop is the visitor center where you pay the entry fee. Considering the costs of other attractions around the country, the entry fee to the fossil beds is quite modest. Be sure to allow plenty of time when you visit the park. To more fully understand what you will see later on, you should study the many artifacts and informative displays in the visitor center.

The Ashfall Fossil Beds Visitor Center

 The displays and artifacts in the visitor center are very well done. They are very approachable and easy to understand yet manage to convey a ton of information about a sequence of events that happened at the site some twelve million years ago.

Inside the visitor center

 The fossil beds themselves are located a short walk from the visitor center. They are protected by a large structure built on the side of the gully where the fossils were discovered. To give you a sense of how long ago the events that created the fossil beds occurred, each step you take on the walk takes you 30,000 years back in time.

Walking 12,000,000 years back in time

These fossil beds are an active paleontology site. From May through September, university students from around the country work to uncover more of the fossils. A unique feature of this place is that any fossil that is uncovered from the ash bed is left in place. Enough of the ash is removed to reveal the entire fossil, and there it is, just as it was when the animal died all those millions of years ago!

The majority of the fossils uncovered thus far are of barrel-bodied rhinoceros, an ancient species now extinct. Along with the rhinos, there are fossils of several species of dog, of three-toed horses, and even of birds, lizards, and turtles. All of this is in the Hubbard Rhino Barn, as the large building covering the beds is called.

Inside the Hubbard Rhino Barn

In the rhino barn, a series of trenches twenty feet apart have been dug to determine the extent of the fossils in the ash bed. Nancy and I were the only people in barn. As we walked along, studying the fossils and the displays along the walls, an older gentleman who had been clearing dirt from one of the trenches returned to the barn to continue working.  He stopped to ask if we had any questions.

We had a few and we asked them. He seemed to know quite a lot about the fossils, so we asked more questions, many, many more questions. What we got from him was a veritable seminar on the animals whose fossils are in the beds, how they came to be there, why the fossils are so remarkably well preserved, and on and on... It was fascinating.

Turns out, the older gentleman was Dr. Mike Voorhies. Dr. Voorhies is an emeritus professor of paleontology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He was the person who made the initial discovery at the Ashfall site. He is THE expert on the Ashfall site! What a fortuitous encounter!

Nancy talking with Dr. Voorhies about some of the fossils

 The animals in the fossil beds died from suffocation when very fine ash (actually, finely powdered glass) from a volcano far to the west covered the region to a depth of one or two feet.

(1) Barrel-bodied rhino, (2) Three-toed horse

Barrel-bodied rhino bull

 The volcano that produced the ash that covered Nebraska resulting in the deaths of the animals in the fossil beds was located in what is now southwestern Idaho. It was one of a series of volcanoes that erupted as the tectonic plate of North America moved to the west and south over a hot spot in the Earth's mantle. The most recent eruption in this series is the super-volcano that created the caldera that now holds Yellowstone National Park.

A map of the ash plume

As I mentioned at the beginning, Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park, deserves a spot on your "Must See" list. Although may be a bit off the beaten track, it is very much worth the effort to get to.

Some useful links:
About the Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park
http://ashfall.unl.edu/

About Dr. Voorhies's discovery of the fossil beds:
http://nebraskastudies.org/0200/stories/0201_0103.html

About Dr. Voorhies:
http://www.geosciences.unl.edu/people/faculty_page.php?lastname=Voorhies&firstname=Michael&type=ADJ

The Camera Shy Mr. Muskrat

While trudging along on my late afternoon walk on the frozen Mississippi, I was surprised to see a local resident come trundling out to meet me.

An afternoon greeter

Here's a closer look at the little guy.

Mr. Muskrat

It took me a moment to realized he really was coming out to meet me. I stopped, dropped my gloves on the snow, and pulled the camera from the camera-bag. As I raised the camera to focus, Mr. Muskrat decided he was camera shy. He turned tail and headed back to shore.

A major source of enjoyment on my winter walks is reading the stories told by the tracks in the snow. I wonder what story these tracks will tell to the next reader....

Will the next track-reader know that Mr. Muskrat was camera-shy? 

Eight Deer Walk

I went for a walk in the woods today. More accurately, I went for a walk where the woods had been.

Timber Harvest

Where once there was a narrow, overgrown road through a dense stand of popple, there was now a wide open field studded with piles of eight-foot lengths of popple.  These piles were up to fifteen feet high. A lot of wood to be hauled away.

Popple Logs

 A bit further on, I came to another harvested area. The pile of logs here was twenty feet tall. The logger has left the few scattered oak trees standing.

More logs

 A timber harvest sure changes the look of a place. If prior harvests are precedent, all the slash will be piled up and allowed to dry for a year or two. Then the piles will be burned off. What comes next will be a mystery. The county may decide the simply let the popple (aka aspen) regrow in what's known as an "Aspen Release Program", which will provide good deer-browse for many years.

Or, the county may decide to replant the are with another type of tree. In this neighborhood, spruce are often planted in harvested areas. The picture below is the same trail as above, just a few hundred yards further along. These trees are, perhaps, twenty to thirty years old.

Spruce plantation

Spruce Plantation

Sometimes, the county will replant a mix of spruce and Norway pine. The picture below was taken at the edge of an area that was harvested last year. The harvested space abuts an area that was replanted with spruce and pine.

Spruce and Norway Pine

As you can see, I was the first two-legged critter to walk on this trail. Only deer, rabbit, and partridge had walked there before me. Just after I snapped this picture I noticed the white flag of a white-tailed deer crossing the trail, right to left, about twenty yards beyond the tree line. Cool! I don't often get to see deer on my walks in the woods.

As I got to the more open area at the other end of the spruce/pine plantation on this trail, I came upon two more deer. They moved to the far side of the open area. Then, there were two more deer! They headed in the same direction as the others. They were in no hurry. They'd move a bit and stop, move a bit and stop. It amazes me how an animal as large as a deer can stop behind a scraggly willow bush in an open snow-covered area - and disappear! Unless it twitches its ears, it is nearly impossible to see!

A five deer day. One trails where I often walk and never see one, today I was treated to five of them. A special day!

To top it off, as I returned home along the road, three more deer crossed the road just before I got to our mailbox.

An eight deer walk!!