I went to Muir Woods yesterday, on the other side of the Pacific, and had that same feeling. The trees were certainly larger, but I looked at the clover that grows in the shade of the trees, the pine needles coating the floor, the babbling brook, the ferns and mushrooms, and I thought of home.

Convergent ecology is when biomes converge on the same collections of similar plants following similar roles, and that explains at least some of it. All three of these places — Busan, San Francisco, Duluth — have heavy fogs that roll off a large body of water, and so the mosses can grow everywhere, and the ferns are plentiful. They're cooler places, so you get firs.

I kept looking at the rocks in Muir Woods, which are mostly hidden beneath the soil and pine needles. Duluth sits in one of the most geologically unique places in all of North America, the Midcontinent Rift, where a billion years ago the entire continent threatened to split apart, then didn't, leaving behind volcanic bedrock, dark basalt and red rhyolite. In the Muir Woods, it's the Franciscan Complex, a jumble of ocean-floor rocks, chert, graywacke, and serpentinite, all scraped off the bottom of the Pacific Plate. Very different, but both result in thin, nutrient-poor, damp soils that encourage the growth of specific kinds of plants.

When my wife and I hiked the Igdae trail in Busan, I kept being amazed by the similarities, seeing the same basalts, the same rhyolite, the same way that these rocks jutted out into the water and were shaped by erosion, covered in lichens, with the trees hanging off them. I chattered with my wife about it, and briefly thumbed through my phone to find pictures of home, to make sure this wasn't a traveler's pareidolia. And later I would read about the geology of South Korea, and how these hiking trails went along rock formations that were formed by a very different sort of geological cataclysm from the Midcontinent Rift. There, I loved it, the way everything seemed to echo what I already knew.

[ID: Two photos of a male snowy owl perched on top of a metal sign in front of a gray sky. End ID]

Snowy owl (bubo scandiacus)

February 14th, 2026

August 30th, 2025

if you’re going to miku expo DULUTH…my friend and i are hosting a RANDOM DANCE!!!!!!!! AND YOU SHOULD COME!!!!!!! sunday may 3 at 4pm!!!!!!!

Superior Street