Musings

The other day I swept the house. If you’re thinking of moving furniture and the motor noise of a vacuum cleaner, you have the wrong idea. No, I swept the building exterior, that is, the cobwebs and what they’ve caught away from the eaves and windows and sidings…a quite different activity. And now I see I need to do it again. We have a lot of gnats (which do NOT bite or sting, thankfully), and their little gossamer bodies get caught in the webs.

While the above is clearly lupin, I don’t know what this is. I found it on the edge of a wet ditch (essentially a swamp environment). I was too confident that I could ID it from the blooms. Nope. I’ll have to go back and look for the vegetation.

Posted at 7:08 PM | Comments Off on Micro-environments

We are back in northern Michigan early spring—frost overnight, and probably tonight, too. Apple blooms look okay (so far).

Offshore breeze means quiet waters (here).

Herd of deer by tree. If you can discern two dark shapes just a bit closer to me than the deer—those are a pair of sandhills…I’ve been hearing them and previous years I’ve seen them in this field…good to find them here again.

Posted at 6:55 PM | Comments Off on We are resilient

I know this as forget-me-not. [Internet search….] Taxonomically, they are the Myosotis genus. I think this is M. sylvatica, and native to Europe, however frequently I find it around here. Probably another escapee from the great-grandmother garden. Like the lupins.

Totally different scale; could be a farm complex on the prairie during the green season. But, no; up here by the sub-tundra, under a threatening sky that only produced a few drops of rain and no storm.

Posted at 9:52 PM | Comments Off on Shades of blue

Our beach isn’t the only one vastly remodeled for spring 2021. This is the mouth of the Au Train River, which flows into Lake Superior. This year the mouth is farther west than I’ve ever seen it. The water cut deeply into the bank I’m standing on, which usually slopes down to a beach zone bordering the water. No longer. In fact, the park people built a new path farther west than they ever had had one, as the old ones end in an abrupt and dangerous drop into the water. On the other hand, the lake level is not as high as it has tended to be. On the other other hand, the fire danger is HIGH because it is dry dry dry.

Posted at 7:27 PM | Comments Off on Gitche Gumee data

Leaves are still emerging by the pond.

The marsh marigolds (Caltha palustris) are blooming in the swamp.

The lilacs are just opening in the stand that shields the outhouse.

The lupins are just beginning to show color in the orchard.

The Canada geese are unsettled and still flying north in Vs.

This venerable cedar shows damage from the spring ice break-up, which coincided with two days of strong (like 40-mph) winds that drove giant ice “cubes” way up above our beach, like I’ve never seen before. Trillium is for scale.

Posted at 9:15 PM | Comments Off on Signs of spring

This trio and our neighbor duo welcomed us to the cottage. We made it! Great fun taking “the long way” via Seattle. Especially enjoyed being two days ahead of a foot-and-a-half of snowfall at Glacier.

Posted at 9:22 PM | Comments Off on Whew

Today I walked around the old economic heart of A Real City.

The Beating Heart was these falls, the Upper Saint Anthony Falls, now marred? by a lock and dam.

The power the river generated, and this is the Mississippi so it is a mighty generator, ran the Gold Medal Flour mill on the south/west side…

And the Pillsbury mill on the north/east side. This is the underbelly of the mill complex. [Note fisher-person.] Now the mills are no longer milling, and this sacred place of the people who were here before the EuroAmericans arrived is irretrievably altered.

I quite enjoyed walking across the curving Stone Arch Bridge that seems to connect the two mills. It’s a pedestrian bridge now, although it was built for rail cars. The water on the left is the lower end of the Pillsbury millrace (it seemed to me), and the bridge crosses the main channel of the Mississippi.

And all this? Yup. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Posted at 10:28 PM | Comments Off on Layers of history

Steady eastbound motoring brought us from pastured beef with oil drilling, to pasture plus some row-crops (seemed almost exclusively wheat), to less and less pasture and more and more crop-fields.

Somewhere in there, the oil machinery disappeared, and then we got a few wind turbines. A few of these old-style windmills were scattered throughout.

Now, no photo, we’re in almost entirely row-crops, and no cattle/pasture whatsoever. Rain expected overnight, which is good as it is a bit dry; however, accompanying tornadoes are not desirable.

A more precise title might be along the lines of “Central continental longitudinal topographic and land use drift,” but, duh, too unwieldly.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Crossing the plains

View south down lake from north end of Flathead Lake.

No sky in this shot, but JOHNS Lake! We only got a few more miles up Going to the Sun Road before we had to turn back, as it is not yet open for the summer season.

McDonald Falls, through vegetation.

Random view from east side of Glacier National Park. [Apologies; forgot to color correct.]

Vernal lake/pond on upper plains, with mountains in the right distance.

Penguin at Cut Bank.

Rainbow in far eastern Montana. Not caused by fracking.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Great skies

Sometime today, yesterday’s Cascades became today’s Rockies. These long lakes are all fake, or perhaps more kindly, they’re reservoirs. With abundant power generation. I’ll take the reflections.

This murder scene welcomed us to tonight’s overnight housing.

When I first arrived, as part of the dying fish tableau, I watched a male mallard preen before departing. And among the plants, several Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, which I know as kinnikinnick (from the Algonquian referring to the plant’s use as a smoking substance).

If I understood the weather prediction correctly, places we’ve been today and will visit tomorrow will have snowfall Wednesday after we are out on the Great Plains.

Posted at 7:37 PM | Comments Off on Clear skies