#cheat river

A stormy late spring day is the perfect time for a hike in Cheat River Canyon. The tumultous sky over the gorge following a storm is always breathtaking. Poke milkweed (Asclepias exaltata), a glorious, shade tolerant species that lives in rich, moist woodlands, is now in bloom around the canyon. Tall and with broad leaves reminiscent of those of pokeweed, this is a great wildflower to give height and foliage interest to a shady spot in a native plant garden. Great rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum) blooms concurrently with milkweed and looks stunning where it clumps in the boulder-strewn hollows at the flanks of the canyon. Finally, timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) are active in the canyon at this time of year. I came across three, newly-shed individuals at a denning site on Snake Hill, two of which were curled up together under a rock (above). The back-on-tan chevron patterns in their scales were stunning. Timber rattlesnake exhibit color variations throughout their range. On Chestnut Ridge, they tend to be darker-patterned overall with black heads, and sometimes (rarely) are completely black (melanistic).

But some spectacular remediation is underway, especially in Appalachia. Consider the rebirth of West Virginia’s Cheat River.

Note: this hauntingly beautiful butterfly, a flitting ghost in Appalachia's April forests, is in serious decline because it confuses invasive garlic mustard for its host plant, Cardamine. Garlic mustard is toxic to its larvae. Another example of how an invasive species can wreak havoc on the vital lifecycles of our native ecosystems.

Short vid of the storm clouds over Cheat River Canyon on Sunday. I went mushroom hunting up at Snake Hill Wildlife Management Area, but the wet, muggy, hot weather took most of the joy out of it. The Cheat River is running high and brown with sediment from the storm runoff. Not quite ideal for the whitewater rafters, I would guess. More rain coming later this week.

I'm forever drawn to places where the Earth's geologic past has been thrust up from the mantle and opened like a crusty, craggy history book for all to read. The act of simply touching a rock formation that is hundreds of millions of years in the making and simultaneously connecting with the continent's primeval origins is both sacred and profound. Every layer of rock tells a story of its own. Against these accumulated histories, our mayfly existences barely register. Rock City at Coopers Rock State Forest is one of those very special places where the Earth has revealed her deepest secrets. The Pottsville Formation that underlies this part of Central Appalachia is estimated to be 300 hundred million years old. The massive slabs in the photos above are Connoquenessing sandstone, an erosion-resistant sedimentary rock that evokes the incredible drama of Earth's formation wherever it breaks through the crust.

I snuck in a late spring hike in Cheat River Canyon yesterday, before the dreaded heat dome builds in early next week. Between Brazil's Pantanal going up in flames and the massive heat spikes in North America and elsewhere, I wonder what will be left of this planet's beautiful wild places in twenty to thirty years. For now, I celebrate and cherish every day the glorious diversity of living things that nature has gifted us. This includes the magnificent poke milkweed (Asclepias exaltata), a shade tolerant member of the dogbane family, which feeds and hosts a great many of those living things, such as the extraordinary Himmelman's plume moth (Geina tenuidactylus). Or the comical-looking rock harlequin (Corydalis sempervirens), which clings to the rocky outcrops of the canyon. And the exquisite downy skullcap (Scutellaria incana), a gregarious summer mint that associates with wild bergamot and tall thimbleweed at forest edges. And how about the peculiar dangling flowers of Indian cucumber (Medeola virginiana) or the pale, ghostly stems and bracts of the parasitic Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora), just now emerging from the forest floor? In a couple of weeks, the rhododendron bloom will start in the canyon and summer will be in full swing.