There is something special about getting photographs of the delicate snow trillium and harbinger of spring covered in ice and snow. It’s like winters final goodbye before everything is awoken during the thaw and the warmer soils break dormancy. Ramps are flooding the woods right now as we speak and the blue bells have started to make flowers along with the members of Papaveraceae, specifically the fumewort tribe. The next month is my favorite time of the year, Davis memorial, RRG, Chateau Nivale, Clifton Gorge, Versailles, and Clifty Falls all start waking up. If I get a chance I’de like to go to Adams county, Ohio and Louisville Glades to look for little glade cresses, Each major glade system is different and has it’s own specific species of glade cresses that managed to manifest themselves about 15,000 years ago, which is fast in terms of evolutionary time. The seeds themselves are theorized to have arived in these glades via the extinct Giant Woodland Bison of the late Eocene through the early to mid Anthropocene. The Lower Dryas period is when the Clovis were the most active and caused the first mass mega fauna extinctions of North America. We did the rest, eliminating mating regions and prairies, and lets not forget about the time of Andrew Jackson Jihad, a sort of pre-eugenic christian(not real Christianity based, but the bastardization of it that was spurred on by zealot like interpretation of whats supposed to guide morality loosely, similar to the same Christianity that allowed for crusades and our modern systems of war to manifest in imperialist conquest for some resource.) crusade that also applied to land development conquests. During this period, under Andrew Jackson idealism, we took open port style trains out west and just fucked up entire bison populations by shooting them trainside with rifles to fuck over the Native American’s who used bison for food. The Great Bison War, is what we called this.
Right now is a critical time to study ecology in forest relics and virgin habitat, the winter thaw and freezing not only spurrs on vernal dam, a nutrient dynamic critical to plant survival, but also aerates soil by moving roots and plants to the surface by frost heaving, I want to see how much this frost heaving effects our native glade species in comparison to normal contractile root ephemerals whom’stv’e adapted to large frost thawing.
. Since travel is limited, in a week or so I will be not able to see this valley come to life, I am also going to try not to make it down to rrg as much as I would like after this week due to covid 19 so my content is most likley going to be lacking, I plan on doing words of the day, or educational text posts with a few pictures to not become to stagnant.
