Breakout & Burdock

Sunday morning I had a 7 mile breakout trail run. “Breakout” is my term for when you climb up and out of an inversion under your own power. From my house, depending on circumstances, I can do it by bike (road or mtn) or foot. The last month or so has been probably the most consistently inverted winter I can remember here. The pattern of high pressure has meant few storms, so the skiing’s lousy. Backcountry skiing after a couple of snowless weeks isn’t much fun, and the resorts have rocks and shrubs sticking out all over the place. In this blog I’ve gone on many times about how great it is living in Utah, but the truth is that right about now, it kind of sucks.

Tangent: Awesome Wife and I have returned to a conversation that comes up every couple of years or so- should we move? Last week Northern Utah had the worst air quality in the nation. This can’t be good for any of us, but we worry most about Twin A, who is asthmatic. He takes daily medications, and we keep a steroid prescription on hand in the fridge for emergencies. We love our neighborhood, our proximity to both city and foothills, but is living here the right thing for our kids? Should we bite the bullet and move up to Park City, or maybe even out of state?

Our concern and frustration is exacerbated by the almost complete lack of effort or backbone on the part of local and state government to do anything about our bad air. Every January our state legislature convenes for several weeks, spent driving back and forth through the smog to the state capitol, where they worry about gay people getting it on, suing the federal government for possibly, maybe, trying to do something about healthcare, and passing yet another pointless abortion law that we’ll spend years and millions of tax dollars defending before it’s finally shot down by the Supreme Court. Our politicians just love to go on about how pro-family they are. Why isn’t kids breathing clean air considered pro-family?

What’s fascinating to me about inversions is how clear the demarcation is between the inversion layer, and the warm clear air above. Here’s a shot from early on in my run, behind the U. of Utah hospital at ~5,000 feet.

Here’s the view at the mouth of Dry Creek Canyon, looking East/up-canyon. You can see I’ve almost broken out of the inversion, with clear blue sky just ahead.

Side Note: What’s interesting is that I broke out of the inversion a moment later, just inside Dry Creek Canyon. But ~45 minutes later, while returning down-canyon, I encountered the fog bank just ½ way down, or in other words, ~3/4 mile up-trail and ~200 feet higher than just 45 minutes earlier. This was consistent with my general observation that inversions seem to rise over the course of the day, probably due to the sun warming the fog…

And here’s what it looked like partway up Dry Creek. The air is clear, clean and dry. Ahhh!

I haven’t blogged much about plants lately, mainly because I’ve been sticking close to home, or traveling to other Northern climes lately where not much is growing right now. But about ½ mile up Dry Creek, I noticed several weathered brown shrubs bearing these things. You know them- they’re the little weird Velcro-thistles that stick to your bike shorts or arm-warmers when you brush by, and then stick to your glove like crazy when you try to pick them off. But if you pick them off with your bare fingers, they don’t stick at all. What are these things and what’s the deal with them?

They’re Lesser Burdock, Arctium minus, an exotic weed native to Eurasia which has been wildly successful in North America. It occurs in every state except Alaska, Hawaii and Florida, and every Canadian province South of the Yukon. It even occurs in Greenland! Arctium phylogeny is complicated*, but it seems to have originated in the Iran-Iraq-Turkey area, and have been around for at least 9 million years.

*It’s closely linked/intertwined with the genus Cousinia, which contains some 600+ weedy species originating from the same part of Eurasia. Arctium and Cousinia were originally distinguished based on morphological features, but it turns out that Arctium is paraphyletic, unless grouped with a number of Cousinia species. Together with these species Arctium can be grouped in a true monophyletic clade, all possessing a haploid chromosome number of n=18, and dubbed the “Arctioid Clade”, within the broader “Arctium-Cousinia Complex”.

I’m just curious. Does anyone reading understand what I just said in this footnote besides me, the Catalogue of Organisms guy, KB, Ted and Sally? I always wonder when I write this stuff if people are like, “Oh yeah, that’s cool stuff…” or if they’re just like “zzzz… when’s the next tangent, already?”

Like almost all thistles, it’s a member of the sunflower family. Burdock is a biennial. In its first year of life, it’s just a small, low-to- the-ground clump of leaves (a rosette.) It doesn’t flower, but just accumulates and stores energy for the year to follow. In Year 2 the plant shoots up and flowers. Following pollination and seed development, the plant dies. Every burdock you see right now in Northern Utah has already died.

In summer each purple flower-head consists of dozens of disk flowers (no ray flowers.) They’re pollinated by bees of all sorts- bumblebees, honey bees, wild bees- and also by several moths and butterflies. After pollination, the flower-heads turn brown and dry out.

One of the cool things about flowers in the sunflower family is how often reproductive hardware gets re-purposed for seed dispersal. Dandelions, Salsifies and Spotted Knapweed are all examples we’ve looked at before, and in each of these flowers, following fertilization, the calyxes of the individual florets dry up and transform into little parachutes, which are then carried away by the wind, hopefully some number to a possibly viable location for germination.

In burdock the calyxes also are transformed, but not into parachutes. Rather each dries and hardens into a stiff, thin little stalk, the end of which culminates in a tiny hook. The dried calyxes remain firmly attached to the flower-head, but the connection between the flower and stalk dries up, becoming brittle and weak. When a passing animal bearing a coat of fur brushes against the dried heads, the hooks catch firmly on the animal hairs, with a grip much stronger than the weakened stalk-connection. The heads- full of seeds- remain attached to the animal, and are borne wherever that animal wanders.

In the early 1941 George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, returned from a hunting trip and noticed the numerous burdock thistle-heads stuck to both his clothing and the fur of his dog. Curious, he examined several up of the heads under a microscope and noted the tiny hooks which had caught on the fibers of his clothing and the hairs of his dog’s coat. It occurred to de Mestral that the same mechanism might be used to bind two materials. It took him 10 years of experimentation and development, first using cotton, then nylon* to come up with a fully mechanized process for producing Velcro.

*Cotton worked, but only for a short while before wearing out. Nylon was a brand-new material at the time, and de Mestral’s biggest problem with it was working out how to cut hooks out of it.

The new fastener didn’t catch on for a number of years. NASA used it for space suits in the 1960s, but the first large-scale consumer uses were for skiwear, followed by Scuba gear. Today of course, Velcro is everywhere; I can’t think of a day where I don’t connect/disconnect a velcro connector of some sort at least ½ a dozen times.

Many angiosperms of course use animal agents for seed dispersal. But all Asteraceae fruits are achenes, which, being dry and generally small, lend themselves easily to wind dispersal, which is why so many species in the sunflower family- including Dandelions, Balsamroots, Mules Ears, Knapweeds, Asters and Salsifies- use an Agent-Wind pollination-dispersal strategy. But Burdock is Agent-Agent, and it’s interesting to think about what the relative advantages of each approach might be.

On the downside, there’s always wind, but depending on where you’re growing, there’s no guarantee that an animal will brush against you. But on the upside, when an animal does brush against you, that animal is generally going somewhere. And it occurs to me that animals generally- eventually- get around to going to places conducive to growing plants. An herbivore seeks out plants to eat, and such plants obviously grow in places where plants can grow- not on sun-baked barren outcrops of rock or sand, or in the middle of a pond. And carnivores go looking for prey in places where herbivores are likely to be found, which, again, are places where plants are capable of growing. So while it may be likelier that a breeze will brush against you than an animal, it’s likelier that the animal is eventually headed to someplace where your seed might gain purchase*.

*Always wanted to work that “gain purchase” expression into a post. I think I originally heard it in Raising Arizona, when “Hi” is narrating his fertility problems with Edwina.

I continued running up the trail, blue sky up above. It hasn’t snowed in close to a couple weeks, and the trail surface is packed snow and ice, treacherous for runners and bikers alike. Fortunately Sunday’s run was my first with a new gear acquisition: Yaktrax, which you can think of as little tire-chains for your shoes. They grip wonderfully on snow and ice, the only minor downside a small increase in foot-weight. I ran over sketchy, slippery trails for 7 miles without even a slip; I don’t know why I waited so long* to get them.

*One of 3 cool gear-acquisitions over the last week, the other 2 of which will most certainly make their way into the blog in coming weeks.

There’s another advantage to agent dispersal, which actually occurred to me last week in this same spot, when I biked past and acquired several burdock-heads on my lycra tights. As I stopped to remove them I thought, I’m dispersing seeds in January. Think about that. No dandelion is scattering parachutes now. But animals like deer, coyotes and mtn bikers pass by year-round. Burdock- dead for months- is still dispersing seeds.

Tangent: I thought about something else, too, and that was how many times over the course of this project- and before- I’ve noticed really cool things biking or running up Dry Creek. Glacier Lilies, Ballhead Waterleaf, Stellers Jays, Spotted Towhees, Mule Deer, Coyotes, a lion-kill, Oregon Grape, Milkweed, Balsamroots, Arnicas, Beardstongue, Wild Rose, Salsifies, Lichens, Mosses, Dragonflies, Myrtle Spurge, Spring Parsley, Oaks, Maples, Bitterbrush, Sagebrush and so much more- just on this little (<2 mile) stretch of trail. Think about that*. Over the past 2 years, if I’d done nothing but ride up and down Dry Creek, I still probably could’ve down ¾ of this blog.

*Better yet, search for “Dry Creek” in this blog.

I ran up the canyon, then switch-backed out of the bottom and climbed up along the side-hill to the overlook, running the last 100 yards in the bright morning sun. The air was dry and warm, the light clear and bright, and I felt like I was awake- really awake- for the first time in weeks. At the overlook I paused and looked out over the valley.

As I did so, I was reminded of the wonderful, awful irony of inversions: that something so ugly, foul, cold and downright unhealthy can be so heart-achingly beautiful when viewed from above. If there’s something prettier than looking down on a valley inversion on a warm, sunny winter morning, I haven’t yet seen it.

I lingered a while, then reluctantly turned and began the long run down. Toward the bottom of the canyon I began to feel the cold again, creeping through my jacket, my flesh and into my very bones. I exited the canyon and jogged back along the foothills toward home, responsibilities, work and another week in the smoggy valley.

I’ve found though that the sense of wakefulness and clarity from a breakout lingers for a day or two back down in the fog-world. It’s as though your brain is still carrying a bit of the clear sky around with you. After a couple of days though, the effect wanes, and your mind begins to haze over and fog up again, like the air around you.

Dan Pope Is Way Cool

Note: I had a couple of posts brewing for the latter half of this week, including one on running, and another on Scrub Jays, but I’m doing this one instead for 2 reasons. First, it’s a great follow-up to the open question from Tuesday’s post, and second, as I have warned previously, my work-life is pretty, uh, “full” right now, and will continue to be so through December, during which my available research time is pretty limited.

The Post

So after Tuesday’s post, and the excellent and insightful comments from several of you, I stewed on the Why-is-Nevada-so-damn-cold question some more. I woke up yesterday, and thought about it while I drank coffee and read the paper. I thought about it while I sat and spun on the trainer and watched the news on TV, and I was still thinking about it when the weather report* came on.

*No, no, no- I wasn’t watching the Univision/soft-porn “weather” report- I was watching a weather report in a language I fully understood, on KSL Channel 5.

And I as I watched the weather report, spinning and panting and sweating*, a thought slowly formed in my not-yet-quite-awake brain. It was: “Weather report… weather report… presented by a… meteorologist… who is a person who knows something about… weather…. Huh… I have a question about weather… Huh… Maybe, just maybe… I.. should… ask… (light bulb coming on) the… meteorologist!”

*In the running post, I want to get into the whole perspiration thing, which is really interesting.

And so yesterday morning I emailed KSL meteorologist Dan Pope with my bizarre, Why-is-Eastern-Nevada-so-cold? question, and within 2 hours he replied! Here’s Dan’s email back to me, with commentary added by me:

Note for non-Utah readers: KSL channel 5 is the NBC affiliate station in Salt Lake City.

Alex,

That’s a great, insightful question, and I’ll be pleased to answer it. But first, let me just say how wonderful I think your blog is! I'm absolutely amazing the range of topics you cover, and your Awesome Graphics are simply unparalleled. Really you have set a new standard for Informative Science Blogging.

Haha! OK, no he didn’t really say that. Here’s what he really said:

In fact, after reviewing your blog with senior KSL executives (and noting how well-informed, articulate and photogenic you are) we’d like to invite you to appear on KSL-5 News as Guest Science Specialist…

Haha! OK, really, really- I’ll quit messing around. Here’s what he said:

Last night skies cleared completely over Nevada, and clouds moved into Northern Utah. That combined with just enough air movement, kept temperatures a little warmer in Park City than what they will be tonight. As skies clear tonight, and with snow cover on the ground and with light winds, Park City will be colder. Elko and Ely were out of the wind movement last night, and both now have snow on the ground and the clear skies allowed both to drop significantly.

OK that makes sense…

Eastern Nevada can and does routinely get colder than the Wasatch Front and even Park City. Ely is about the same elevation as Park City, but the mountains surrounding Ely are higher, so the air gets puddled into the Ely Valley. Elko has mountains surrounding it as well, so the cold air gets puddled (inversion). The other thing in Eastern Nevada is that the air is often drier than near Salt Lake City (due to the influence of the Great Salt Lake there is more humidity). The drier the air, the greater the temperature spread from high to low can be. Not that Park City doesn’t get cold due to dry air. It does.

Ahh… OK, 2 good items in here. First, the lower humidity. I actually wondered about, as it- specifically minimal tropospheric water vapor- is one of the factors we talked about in Tuesday’s post that is involved in cooling cP air masses way up in Canada/Alaska. And of course the lake- with its frequent associated “lake effect” storms- is a logical source for increased water vapor along the Wasatch Front.

Side Note: Commenters cmsparks and Colin* both suggested the lake as a factor. Good job, guys!

*I know Colin (aka Clean Colin) in real life and he is Way Wicked Smart. In fact he is a Phd Organic Chemist. That’s right, both OCRick and Clean Colin are organic chemists. And in fact I have several more Phd-Scientist friends (including Vicente.) And then practically everyone else in my life (including Awesome Wife, Hunky Neighbor, SkiBikeJunkie, Young Ian, Brother-Phil, Sister-Elizabeth) has- or is getting- an advanced degree. Everyone that is, except me. I barely squeaked out a Bachelor’s degree, and am the least-educated, most ignorant person in my entire social circle. Man, what a downer. I need some new friends. If you are reading this blog and are a high-school drop-out, I would like to start pal-ing around with you.

Second, I knew of course that many Eastern Nevada valleys experience inversions, which we talked about in this post and this post last year. But what I hadn’t thought of was the height of the surrounding mountain ranges. The Snake Range, to the East of Ely, peaks out (Wheeler Peak) at about 1,600 feet higher than Twin Peaks (East Peak), the highest part of the Wasatch, along Park City/Snyderville basin*.

*But this isn’t the case for Elko. It’s at 5,200 feet, and Ruby Range, to the East of town, peaks out (Ruby Dome) ~100 feet lower than Twin Peaks.

Side Note: Commenter KanyonKris* suggested inversions, so great job, Kris!

*I also know KanyonKris in real life, and although I don’t think(?) he has a Phd, he is also Way Wicked Smart.

One final thing to think about...is that Park City Main Street is warmer than the Snyderville Basin and Jeremy Ranch. Those locations are always colder than Park City Main Street. I'm not sure where you got your morning temperature of 3 degrees from, but the lower areas of Park City...even around the Golf Course are always colder than the readings from the Ski areas.

I just looked at the final morning lows. Silver Creek Junction was -16. Kimball Junction was -14. Park City Golf Course was -7. Elko was -22 and Ely -19. Salt Lake City dropped to 2.

Another good point. I should be comparing apples with apples, and Kimball or Silver Creek junctions are both at the bottom of basin, while downtown Park City is on the slope rising out of it.

Again, I think the clouds last night made a difference in the low temperatures. It will be colder tonight in Park City, Jeremy Ranch and the Snyderville Basin.

Regards,

Dan Pope
AMS Certified Broadcast Meteorologist KSL-TV

P.S. How do I get one of those cool WatcherSTICKERS- they’re awesome!*

*OK I made up that “PS” part too. But the rest of the email is real.

So there we have it, from a real live meteorologist, who took time out of his busy day to reply with a thoughtful answer to a stranger’s question. Clearly, although meteorology is complicated stuff, one thing we can all agree on is that Dan Pope is Way Cool.

Note: Special- and serious- thanks to KSL Meteorologist Dan Pope. As always, I am exceedingly grateful to topical experts who go out of their way to help a curious amateur.

What’s the Deal with “Indian Summer”?

Wow, was that a nice weekend or what? I don’t know how it was everywhere else, but this past weekend in Northern Utah was gorgeous- sunny and 70’s.

Family Reproduction Update

But first, let’s talk about me. I’m finally an uncle. I’ve been mentally ready to be an uncle for probably a couple of decades*, but my siblings refused to reproduce until 3 hours ago, when my sister-in-law delivered a 9 lb 15 oz baby** after 21 hours of labor, including 4 ½ hours of pushing. Women are super-crazy-tough.

*Because let’s face it- every man is ready to be an uncle long before he’s ready to be a father.

**With a 15” circumference head. My family is notable for our extraordinarily large heads. No, it doesn’t mean we’re all that smart; it just means we always have a hell of a time shopping for hats.

Mom & baby are fine; I can’t wait to meet my niece.

The Post

Saturday afternoon OCRick and I mtn-biked up in Park City, riding for a couple hours on a series of lower-elevation trails that I haven’t ridden much in recent years*. The trees were mainly bare and that East-coast smell of rotting leaves was all around, but the air was warm, the sky sunny and the trails tacky. The combination of warm air and bare trees seemed rather incongruous, and the strange look and feel of the forest lent to the feeling that we were “getting away” with something- enjoying weather and riding in a place and time we normally shouldn’t be able to.

*Trails like around Masonic Hill and lower DV. I used to ride these trails all the time early and late season, but have been passing them up in recent years as all the stuff around Pinebrook and Jeremy has opened up closer to home.

Tangent: For a native New-Englander in living in the West, I’m convinced that the scent of rotting leaves is one of the strongest Flashback-Smells there is. Even though I smell it fairly often now in the relatively leafy forests of the Wasatch, the smell instantly takes me back a couple of decades and reminds me of times and places long gone. Someday I want to do a post all about smell and memory.

The sunlight seemed different, somehow soft and gold-tinged, which struck me as wonderful but odd. Usually after the leaves fall the mid-day sunlight in the forest seems harsh and an unfiltered, almost too bright. But Saturday’s light seemed strangely easier on the eyes*.

*And the skin. Almost 3 hours riding in direct sunlight, and I forgot sunscreen. No burn, no tan.

After the ride we drove back down to the valley, and stopped by OCRick’s place, up on the East Bench, for a beer. As we sat out on his deck overlooking the valley and the late afternoon sun, I noticed the haze over the valley; not a brown, polluted haze, but a whitish haze, almost like a mild inversion, but without the cold. Later at home, and throughout Sunday, I noticed a sudden explosion of insect life brought on by the warmth- Box Elder and Stink Bugs everywhere. All in all, it was a classic Indian Summer weekend.

Say what? “Indian Summer?” What the heck does that mean?

All About Indian Summer

Whenever it’s warm in the Fall, say >70F, and the leaves are down, or mostly or even partly down, people call it “Indian Summer.” But what does that mean, and what does warm Fall weather have to do with Indians? The question lead me to a search, which lead to another, which lead to… this post.

The broadest, most common use of the term seems to be what I just described above. But it seems that the term used to have a bit more specificity. It didn’t just mean a warm, clear Fall day, but also one characterized by low or no winds and a distinct haze, usually described as bluish or whitish. Traditionally, Indian Summer occurs only after the first “killing frost*.”

*Which has certainly happened already in Park City, though I don’t believe we’ve had one down in the valley yet.

The term appears to have originated as early as the late 1600’s in New England, and depending on the source, it may or may not be a phenomenon specific to that region of the country*.

*Europe has a similar condition known as “Old Wives’ Summer.” I don’t know the origin of the term, nor whether “Old” in this case specifies “Ex”, in which case I imagine the story to be quite interesting.

So the questions aren’t just what the meaning of the term is, but whether it’s real, what causes it, does it still occur, and does it, could it, might it occur here in Utah?

There are several ideas about, though no real consensus regarding, the origin of the term. Here are 3 possibilities:

1- In New England and the Northeast, Indians used to set deliberate fires* around this time of year. On warm, still days the smoke would linger.

*No, no, they weren’t pyros or anything. Indians regularly used fire to manage the composition/vegetation of forests and grasslands to optimize conditions for game and/or grown or gathered foodstuffs.

2- A brief warming period following the first frost would often present the last opportunity for Indian raids on early Euromerican settlements before Winter set in*.

*This one’s my favorite-even though it doesn’t sound all that plausible- just because of the drama and action associated with it. Check out that old engraving to the right- those guys mean business!

3- It’s analogous to the term “Indian giver”, in that the “summer” is given but quickly taken away.*

*This one’s just mean. Like the Indians didn’t get a bad enough deal from us already…

So short answer- nobody knows. OK, let’s try the second question…

Certainly there are warm periods in October and November, but is there any more to it than that? The general meteorological explanation for such warm periods is that tropical air masses get pushed Northward by South winds, and then remain in place and stagnate for several days, allowing haze to build up. But the haze was even more consistently emphasized in early descriptions, before automobiles or industrial air pollution. Certainly wood-burning caused regular air-pollution around settlements, but even in the mid-1800’s, observers noted a lack of any real correlation between significant wood-burning and Indian Summer haze. Furthermore, as the 19^th century progressed, observers noted the diminishing frequency of Indian Summers, during a period when population and industrialization were increasing dramatically in the Northeast.

During the 19^th century, an alternative explanation for the haze was proposed: decaying leaves and leaf litter released aerosols into the air, creating the haze. Aerosols are tiny particles, bigger than molecules, but still small enough to easily stay afloat in the air. Warm, still days would both hasten the decay of vegetation and allow the resultant haze to linger in the atmosphere. This idea was apparently proposed multiple times, independently. Zadock Thompson*, a Vermont naturalist, suggested it back in 1853, and Canadian G.W. Johnson** pitched basically the same idea again in 1899.

*Source: Autumn, by Peter Marchand, 2000

**Source: Science and industry, Vol. 4, 1899. Seriously, how impressive is it that I am referencing 100+ year old science journals? I keep reading this footnote over and over because it just looks so impressively science-like.

What was interesting about the idea is that it explained 2 characteristics of Indian Summer: that it traditionally follows the first killing frost, and its diminishing frequency over the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. An early killing frost causes many leaves to drop before they’re fully dried, resulting in a large amount of sudden, moist leaf litter on the forest floor. And over the course of the 19^th century New England and much of the East in general, was heavily deforested. Peak deforestation- about 80%- occurred in the mid-1800’s*, after which time coal largely replaced firewood in cities and many New England farms were abandoned for better soil in the Midwest.

*Northeast forest cover has returned dramatically since then, but as biologist Peter Marchand notes in his book Autumn, the composition and character and character of modern-day New England forests is much different than in pre-settlement times, and so even if there is a link between forest cover and haze, it’s questionable whether we still do or will experience the same Indian Summers as a few hundred years ago.

Trees, Haze and Isoprene

It was an interesting idea, even if it was only conjectural. But in recent decades it seems that it may not have been that far from the truth, and that forests may indeed be involved in the production of haze. You might have caught a news item this past summer- spurred by a paper in the journal Science- that “trees cause smog.” The truth is a little more complicated than the headline: certain trees may- in concert with human-generated pollutants- contribute to a certain kind of haze, and the idea actually isn’t all that new. Many plants emit the hydrocarbon compound isoprene (C5H8.) It’s not exactly clear why some plants emit it, but since there appears to be a significant cost in its production, it’s assumed there’s some benefit to the plant. The likeliest benefit* seems to be thermotolerance.

*The next likeliest seems to be tolerance to ozone.

Leaves are thin and can change temperature quickly. We’ve talked previously about frost damage to leaves, but they can also be damaged by sudden increases in temperature. Studies have shown that leaves which produce isoprenes are better able to tolerate sudden repeated increases in temperature, such as can be caused by direct sunlight. Unsurprisingly, leaves at the top of isoprene-producing trees emit up to 4 times as much of the stuff as partially-shaded leaves lower down. Interestingly, isoprene production appears to have evolved independently multiple times, like C4 photosynthesis.

In recent years researchers have become interested in isoprene emissions because of their interactions with nitrogen oxides (NO and NO2) and the possible effect of such interactions on ozone*. But isoprene emissions have another effect: they foster the growth of aerosols in the atmosphere, which in turn can cause haze. Plants emit isoprenes mainly during the day, and much more so on warm days. And- and here’s the kicker- some researchers believe that a frost may result in a sudden spike of emissions. So maybe those 19^th century guys were on to something.

*More detail here.

Not all trees emit isoprenes, and not all to the same degree. In fact some of the biggest isoprene-emitters in North America appear to be oaks. All North American oaks are isoprene-emitters*.

*But not all oaks are. Many European Oaks emit other compounds- such as monoterpenes- instead.

Oaks, both Northern Red Oak, Quercus Rubra, and White Oak, Q. Alba, are all over the place in New England, and so a link between oak forests and Indian Summer haze would seem to make sense. And if that link is true, then it would offer a nice tie-in to the last question about Indian Summer: is it strictly a phenomenon of the Northeast, or might it occur here in Utah as well?

The foothills and lower reaches of the Wasatch (and the Oquirrhs- pic above left. I just love that shot. Is that pretty or what?)- on both sides- are carpeted with oak, and while our scrub oaks (Q. gambelii) may be nowhere near as tall and majestic as their cousins back East, I’d bet our sprawling clonal stands are some of the densest and most uniform stretches of oak anywhere. Higher up, our oak gives way to aspen, which- as it turns out- is another isoprene-emitter. If there really is a link between oak forests and haze, then Utah probably can claim true Indian Summers. I like the idea that Wasatch forests might be creating New England-style Indian Summers. Seems somehow like a link to home from this strange little island in the desert.

Montana Part 4: Riding Through Clouds, And Awesome Wife Meets a Bear

OK, one more Montana post, then it’s time to admit that my vacations are over, summer is (almost) done and I have to get used to being back home and going to work every day.

Tangent: This was one of the toughest vacations I can remember to come home from. I’ll pick up this tangent again at the end of the post…

Today I want to blog about 2 more vacation-related things that really don’t really have anything at all in common except that a) they both happened on the same day, and b) they were both really cool. Plus the second one involves my wife, and I am always looking for excuses to blog about her.

Our last full day in Whitefish I woke early to mtn bike (what else is new) before the family arose. The weather had prohibited dawn rides every day except for the first day in Missoula, and so I was eager to get out. I had to think carefully about the ride; 3 days of rain probably meant some messy trails. So I picked the Big Mountain Ski area, North of town.

Ski areas often have wide, mellow-grade, lawsuit-proof trails, and I thought such a trail might give me the climb I was looking for and some nice views without being a total mud-fest. It turned out to be a good choice. The trail was fine, if not great, I got in a good climb and a nice long descent. But the thing that totally and completely made the ride was the clouds.

Tangent: No, this isn’t the continuation of the first tangent- that’s coming later. And it’s not nested either. It’s just a whole other tangent.

Usually when visiting a new area, ski area trails are my last choice. They tend to be excessively tame, over-signed, and often- as a result of lift-served traffic- over-used. They’re also oftentimes not very scenic or wilderness-y, traversing chopped-down slopes and criss-crossing various roads, lifts, buildings and machinery.

For the first 3 miles, the Summit Trail up Big Mountain realized those fears. It was chopped up and re-routed and overlapped with crappy, un-scenic service roads. But after 3 miles, the trail became very scenic, a nice-quality- if tame- true singletrack that rarely intersected lifts or roads and offered fine views for another 5 miles.

Being inside clouds is always cool. Sometimes, depending on where you are, you may find yourself driving or hiking through a cloud, and though it may be a bit cold and damp and spooky, it’s always a memorable experience. Being above clouds is also way cool, especially when you’re on the ground (versus in an airplane.) Looking down at the tops of clouds, you can’t help but get a “getting away with something” feeling; you’re up high in bright sunlight with clear air and hundred mile views, seeing a world concealed from the clouded valleys below.

Sometimes you end up biking through clouds, maybe on the road, maybe on dirt. But the absolutely coolest- but-rarest cloud mtn bike ride is the Complete Cloud Deck Double Traverse (CCDDT), where you start below the cloud base, climb up into the clouds, then all the way through and above the cloud tops before returning back down through the deck all over again. A real, true CCDDT is both rare and wonderful, and you don’t forget it.

Tangent: Coastal readers may be thinking, “What’s the big deal? I bike up out of clouds all the time…” Not quite. You probably bike up out of marine fog, which is also way cool, but different. In a Marine Fog Climb (MFC)*, you start out in the fog, which you climb up and break out of, into the sunlight. But in CCDDT you start out in clear air, below the cloud base, with good visibility. And when you return, you break out of the bottom of the clouds while descending, a weird-but-cool converse of breaking through the tops of the clouds on the way up.

*On a vacation in Santa Barbara several years ago I did several early morning MFCs, and enjoyed them thoroughly.

Nested Tangent: Fog is of course also way cool, and totally worth a post or two (or more) of its own. There are actually several different types of fog, including marine fog, radiation fog (forms at night, as the land radiates heat built up during the day) and inversion fog (pic right), which I blogged about last winter. Coolest, weirdest- and perhaps most dangerous- of all are the dreaded ice fogs of the Arctic and Antarctic.

The Ride

The Summit trail starts up at 5,000 feet. The sky was filled with the low, still clouds that linger the morning after a big storm front has moved through. From the parking lot I could see that the cloud base was well below the summit, and I wondered if the view would be socked in. I started climbing.

As I wound my way up across ski slopes and service roads, the cloud base loomed closer. Soon the air grew cold and damp. The tops of the Lodgepoles were obscured in mist, and a few moments later, at around 5,800 feet, I was enveloped in cloud. I thought about how mysterious and otherworldly it always feels inside of a cloud.

I thought about how beautiful the PLTs looked shrouded in fog. But mostly what I thought was the bottoms of clouds, and why, in a given area, they’re so darn flat. Seriously, why does cloud just appear at a certain level as you climb up? Why aren’t clouds just floating around at all different levels- some high, some low, some in between? Why is the cloud base in a given area at a given day/time so freaking uniform?

But before we can understand why clouds sit where they do, we have to understand just exactly what a cloud is.

All About Clouds

I conducted an experiment for this post*. I asked 4 coworkers- all smart people**- to tell me what a cloud was made of. All said “water vapor”, which is not the case. Water vapor is water (H2O) in gaseous form. It’s all around us all the time, and the concentration of it in the air is defined as humidity.

*Because even though I have absolutely no scientific background, experience or qualifications, sometimes I like to make pretend.

*The first 2 were Matt and Sid, both of whom I’ve blogged about previously. And the other 2 were IT guys, so you know they’re wicked smart.

Clouds- the big white fluffy things that you see up in the sky- are liquid water, in the form of droplets. Notice that I didn’t say “drops”- I said “dropLETS.” What’s the difference? Size, mainly. A typical raindrop has a diameter of about 2 millimeters. A typical water droplet has a diameter of 20 microns- 1/100^th that of a raindrop.

Because they’re so small, droplets are held aloft by updrafts of warmer air rising from the surface. Water droplets form around a nucleating particle, typically a micron or less in diameter, that can be anything from pollen to dust to pollutants from exhaust or fires. As more and more droplets form, they tend to clump together into larger droplets, and eventually raindrops, which can no longer be supported by the updrafts and fall to Earth, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Side Note: This “nucleation-aggregation” process is pretty much the same deal by which snowflakes form, and which I detailed in this post.

OK, so why does the water vapor condense into liquid, and why does it do so at a particular altitude? Because that altitude- the bottom of the clouds- is the altitude at which the dew point occurs on that given day, at that given hour.

What’s Dew Point?

The dew point is the temperature at or below which water vapor condenses into liquid*. This temperature is dependent on humidity, so on a humid day (>50% humidity) the dew point might be in the high 60s F, while on a dry day (<30% humidity) it might be down in the 40s F. (When the dew point temp falls below freezing it’s called the frost point.)

*Actually, this statement is pretty kiddie-simplistic, as- for that matter- is this whole explanation. In the real world water vapor is condensing into droplets, and droplets are evaporating into vapor, constantly. The dew point is really the point at which condensation of vapor out-paces evaporation of droplets. You don’t really need to know this- I just stuck it in as a CYA in case some weather-geek stumbles across this post.

Dew point can be calculated (sample graph right, not mine) through an equation which I am not going to reproduce here because a) it’s way complicated and you don’t really care, and b) I can’t figure out how to type those Greek letters on my keyboard. But here’s an approximation that’s good enough for hacks like me:

Dew Point Temperature = Dry Bulb Temperature* – ((100 – Relative Humidity)/5)

*Dry Blub Temperature = air temp with no exposure to radiation or moisture.

Anyway, as you go up, the air gets colder, and when you get high/cold enough to hit the dew point, clouds start to form. In the absence of strong winds, storms, or other violent weather, that altitude will be pretty uniform in a given area, and that’s why the cloud base (bottom) is so flat.

I climbed up through the mist. For me riding in a cloud seems to distort not only distance, but also time, and I found myself glancing repeatedly down at my watch and/or bike computer to re-orient myself time-wise. The forest thinned and opened up, with scattered stands of trees punctuating the open slopes. I passed close to one tree, a pine, and absent-mindedly expected to confirm it as yet another Lodgepole, but it wasn’t. It was 5-needled.

Botany-Tangent*: It was Whitebark Pine, Pinus albicaulis, and this was my first sighting of it*. A new pine! Whitebark actually isn’t all that unusual in the West; it occurs widely in the Northern Rockies, in the Sierra, and in several ranges across Nevada. It just doesn’t occur in Utah.

*Technically, I’m sure it wasn’t my first sighting- it was the first sighting I recognized. I know that I was in and among Whitebarks in the Ruby Mountains (Nevada) for 3 days several years ago on a backpack, but that was back when I was still plant-blind.

It looks a lot like Limber Pine, and the 2 can be tough to tell apart. The bark is slightly different, and there are a few other geeky little differences, but cones are the best ID tool. Whitebark cones look different, and they don’t fall from the tree; rather they’re picked apart by nut-seeking Corvids, particularly Clark’s Nutcracker. When no cones are present, you can hunt around on the ground underneath for old, fallen cones. If you find them, it’s probably a Limber Pine.

Whitebark Pine is completely dependent on corvids (and overwhelmingly Clark’s Nutcracker) for reproduction and the 2 share a fascinating history. As the American West’s most highly evolved Bird Pine and Pine Bird, their story is one of the best examples of co-evolution around. (A tale which I related in this post last year if you’re interested.)

*Because you didn’t really think I was going to make it through a whole post without going off about some plant or other, did you?

More Whitebarks appeared, and… Oh, wait a minute.

TIMEOUT: OK, I just realized- I’m sucking up the whole post (and running out of time) with the Cloud-Ride. OK sorry- the Awesome Wife-Meets-A-Bear story will have to wait till the next post. I’m sorry. Really. I never think these posts are going to run on as long as they do.

OK, back to the ride. Where was I? Oh yeah- the cool, breaking-out-of the clouds-science-meets-happy-karma part.

More Whitebarks appeared, and the sky started to lighten (pic left); I was approaching the cloud top. At around 6,400 feet I entered a weird sunlight netherworld of blue sky above and sun-yellowed mist all around me, which I pedaled through for another ¼ mile before breaking out into full sunlight. After 3 days of clouds, fog and rain, the direct unbroken morning sunlight was almost painful; as I pedaled I squinted, grimaced and squirmed for a moment like some nocturnal creature dragged out into the light of day.

Updrafts raise the water droplets until the warm air cools to a point where it no longer rises strongly enough to support the weight of the water. But updrafts and invections aren’t uniform, and for this reason, the tops of clouds are generally much less even than the bottoms. The tops of clouds, BTW, are where actual raindrops (or snowflakes) form.

Side Note: I’ve wondered for this reason if the air inside of a cloud shouldn’t feel damper/colder/wetter shortly before the top, but if it does I haven’t noticed.

My eyes finally adjusted, and I rode the last couple of gently-climbing miles to the summit feeling warm and happy in the bright sun. At the top I lingered for a few minutes, looking around in all directions, but my eyes were most often drawn to the East and North, to the Lewis Overthrust, to the park, to the high, jagged peaks rising above the sea of clouds, toward Canada and the unknown Northern lands beyond.

I turned around and began the long descent back down into the clouds.

Next Up: OK, I’m really going to tell the bear story next… And I’ll finish that first tangent, too.

Foothills Flora- Time To Pay Attention

Birds or plants? Birds or plants? Which to blog about today? So much is happening with both right now, I hate to wait a day on either. Let’s do plants today, birds tomorrow.

Side Note Teaser: I’m choosing plants because of the timing and changes right now, as we’ll see in this post. But I’m all wound up because Friday afternoon I saw the Coolest Bird Thing Ever, which unfortunately will have to wait till tomorrow.

Tangent: Aren’t I awful? The above reads like those stupid teasers they do for the local news. “Tonight at 10, on EyeWitness News- find out what happened at City Hall!” (Really, I have to wait until 10? I have to get up at 4:45 to blog and ride, I don’t think I can stay up that late. Couldn’t you just tell me real quick right now?) Of course the absolute lamest teasers are the weather teasers. The weather guy appears and says, “Will it rain this weekend? Find out at 10!” OK, so this is a binary question, with a monosyllabic answer: “Yes” or “No.” Are you really telling me I should tune in in a couple of hours and watch your 30 minute broadcast for that one syllable?? Seriously, who is falling for that pitch? Probably 4 old guys in Magna who don’t have Internet access and just have to know what the weather will do…

Nested Tangent for Utahns: I miss Mark Eubanks; at least he’d do the snowstorm teasers in his white temple-blazer, so as to give you a clue. I haven’t watched the TV news in a while- does his kid (Kevin?) do the white-blazer thing now?

Anyway, make sure to tune in tomorrow for my amazing bird story!

Review and Catch-Up

Things are changing fast in the foothills. It’s already May (wow- when did that happen?) First, let’s catch up on stuff we’ve already talked about. The Glacier Lilies are all but gone down in Dry Creek, and their wilting fast up at the 6,000 foot level. (But they’re still going strong up around 7,000 feet- I checked them out yesterday while biking up Big Mountain Pass.) The Arrowleaf Balsamroots (pic left) are now common from 5,000 to almost 6,000 feet, but my last week’s prediction was premature; the full-on explosion hasn’t hit yet. I’m optimistic it will by this coming weekend though.

But the most interesting catch-up is the very first-appearing native flower I blogged about: Long-Stalk Spring Parsley. In that post I mentioned how the plant was unusual for it’s well-developed “false stem” or pseudoscape. Now, already, just 4-5 weeks later, that pseudoscape growth is clearly obvious. In the photo below (with my fingers for scale) you can see how the entire plant is being lifted off the ground, as the pseudoscape elevates it to optimize temperature and moisture for photosynthesis. I’m reproducing the graphic from that post here, just so you can appreciate how freaking SPOT ON I was…

I know I blog about a lot of geeky plant stuff, but this is both cool and easy to check out- well worth getting off your bike and lying on your belly in the grass for 2 minutes to check out. And besides, if you’re ever going to lie on your belly on the grass, why not now? It’s lush and green and lovely (pic left, 5,900 feet), and all the high spiky, brushy stuff (woad, thistle, etc.) hasn’t yet grown up over it. And as long as we’re talk about green grass, make sure to look up at the foothills from I-15 this week- look how green they are! They’re only like this for maybe 6 weeks tops; by late June they’ll be sun-burnt and brown, so get your green-fix now.

More New Wildflowers!

Last week also saw several new flowers pop up in the foothills. First is this guy (pic right), It’s a Cryptantha, a member of the Borage family, and a little guy, like the other borage, M. brevistyla, we saw last week. This one occurs several hundred feet lower though; it’s common right now along Shoreline trail at the 5,000 foot level, behind the U. of Utah hospital.

There are dozens and dozens (over 100?) Cryptantha species, several of which occur in Utah, so species ID is a bit tough. My best bet for this guy based flower, leaf and range match is either Roughseed Cryptantha, Cryptantha flavoculata, or Scented Cryptantha, Cryptantha utahensis, but I’m not certain.

Tangent: The genus ID was made for me by another blogger over at A Plant A Day, whose excellent blog I’ve added to my blogroll. Gretchen aka “Desert Survivor” has blogged for some time at her Desert Survivor blog, and has recently embarked on a new blog project at A Plant A Day. She lives in the Baker, Nevada area, a fascinating and beautiful part of the Great Basin, and blogs about many of the animals, plants and geological features of that area, as well as further afield.

Side Note for Mountain Bikers: Nearby Ely, NV has an excellent and growing singletrack network in Cave Lake State Park (pic right, from last August), and another in-town network which (supposedly- haven’t yet done it) now links into the Ward Mountain trail complex. I don’t know that it yet merits a weekend-trip from Salt lake just for riding, but if you’re going to be within an hour of Ely, it’s well worth bringing along the bike.

I am always in awe of bloggers like Gretchen, Ted, and Sally who are able to maintain multiple blogs. It is all I can do to keep up with this one, and even then, I find myself constantly challenged to stay on topic.

The second newbie last week was this guy, a Phlox (pics left & below, right.) There are over 60 species of Phlox, which come in various shades of pink, white, red and blue. I’m thinking this fellow is Longleaf Phlox, Phlox longifolia, but it could also be Stansbury’s Phlox, Phlox stansburyi. All phlox flowers are characterized by 3 fused carpels (ovaries), 5 petals, 5 sepals, and 5 stamens. Phlox thrives in sandy, generally dry areas with wet Springs (I mean the season, not the hydrological feature…) It flowers in the wettest time of year (which is RIGHT NOW in case you haven’t noticed- seriously, is this rain driving anyone else totally crazy? I’ve been rained on during 3 of my last 5 bike rides…) and then goes to seed in the hot, dry summer. The flower’s nectar is located at the base of the floral tube, and so its main pollinators tend to be long-tongued insects, like butterflies and moths.

The 3^rd newbie is this showy looker, Tufted Evening Primrose, Oenothera caespitosa (pic left & below, right.) I love this one: elegant, languid, sensual- it is the Selma Hayek* of Wasatch foothill wildflowers. There are ~125 species of Oenothera, all native to the New World. The genus is thought to have evolved in Central America several million years ago, and spread northward into what is now the US. During the last 4 ice ages and interglacials, the genus repeatedly migrated, retreated and hybridized with other Oenothera species, leading to the large number of species today.

*Part of my ongoing and shameless campaign to increase traffic via recurring references to Ms. Hayek, and the inclusion of gratuitous, not really relevant, holiday-themed photos.

There are a bunch of really, really cool things about Primroses. First, they all have a common and very recognizable structure, with an X-shaped stigma and 8 (I think always, but not sure) big, honking stamens. Second, the pollen seems “sticky”. This is because the grains are held together by little teeny-tiny threads, and it means that most bees can’t effectively collect the pollen. Instead, Primroses are pollinated by moths and specialized bees who can handle the sticky/stringy pollen, which leads us to the third cool thing about Primroses: they are pollinated at night. Primroses open at night and wilt in the morning. The best time to see and photograph these flowers is at dawn (when I snapped these photos) and their pollinators are nocturnal.

The fourth cool thing is supergeeky- it’s a chromosomal thing, called Ring Meiosis, which is way complicated, but is probably the weirdest/coolest thing about these flowers. If you’re interested I described Ring Meiosis last year in this post, while blogging about the closely-related Yellow Evening Primrose, down in the desert.

Foothills Tree Action

But as exciting as all these new flowers are, none of this is the Big Plant News of the last week. No, the Big News is this: the Scrub Oak is flowering and leafing out.

Scrub Oak, or more properly Gambel Oak, is the dominant tree of the Wasatch Foothills. I’ve blogged about it repeatedly in the past- you can check out this post for the basics, and I also used it to explain How Angiosperms Work*. But this is a good week to take a closer look, because this is the week it blooms. Already it’s leafed and blooming down around 5,000 feet, and over the coming 2 weeks the bloom will rush upwards to 6,000 (and by around 5/15 – 5/20 or so) 7,000 feet. And if you’re going to pay attention to any tree in the Wasatch, I submit that this is the one, for the following reasons:

*I still believe this was my absolute best- if least-read- post.

1- It’s all over the place. Super-common, easy to observe.

2- It exhibits clearly visible sexual and asexual reproduction.

3- Even if you don’t live anywhere near Utah, if you live in the Northern hemisphere, there’s a good chance you live near Oaks, and much of what is cool about Gambel Oak is cool about all Oaks.

4- It has a bunch of cool competitive, mutualistic, or parasitic relationships with everything from Jays to Squirrels to Maples to Mycorrhizal Fungi to Weevils to Lichens to Ponderosa Pines.

5- Here in the Wasatch, as plentiful and common as it is, we are at the very brink of its Western limit (range map right). A mere 20 miles West (and ~50 miles North) it stops cold, and no naturally-occurring Oak is to be seen again till the far shore of the Great Basin.

6- Its cool side-story of past hybridization with Shrub Live Oak (which I blogged about extensively last Fall) is probably the clearest, coolest*, easiest to check out story of past climate change in Northern Utah.

*Well, coolest botanical story anyway- it’s hard to beat the terraces of Lake Bonneville.

In short, I really don’t think you can get the living, natural world of Northern Utah until you get Gambel Oak.

The Bigtooth Maples have been leafing out for a couple weeks now (pic left = new leaves, flowers), and are well ahead of the Oaks; the difference is super-clear when viewing the foothills from a distance (pic below, right.) But now the Oaks are catching up. A couple of months back I blogged about Gambel Oak buds, and how they’ve been set and ready since last Fall. Right now you can catch them in the moment of unfurling, that enigmatic, almost-momentary transition from bud to leaf. In the photo below (below, left) you can see the tiny, expanding leaf primordia swelling, expanding and pushing aside the bud scales. Even as they unfurl, the leaflets bear the distinctive lobed form of an Oak leaf, and in the coming weeks their chloroplasts will kick chlorophyll production into high gear, darkening as they expand and firm up.

Already the flowers have bloomed. All Oaks are monoecious, with imperfect flowers, meaning that each tree bears 2 types of flowers- male and female*. The flowers are wind-pollinated, which means the male flowers (pic below, right) are catkins, like on Cottonwoods, and therefore not much to look at compared with the nearby Balsamroots and Primroses, but when you start noticing them, they’re everywhere. Their anthers don’t appear quite open in these shots; in days they will be, and if you find yourself sniffling and sneezing over the coming weeks, these guys may well be the culprit.

*Actually, sometimes Oaks just bear male flowers, often when stressed, but let’s stick with the classical story for now.

Once leafed out, the character of the foothills will be altered for months, and the trails we bike and hike will be transformed into little green corridors. But all of the really exciting stuff- the flowering, the blast of pollen, the incredible improbability of wind-pollination and the resultant successful fertilization of female flowers and the beginning of the summer-long development of the next crop of acorns- it all starts right now, and it all happens this month.

Last year when I was blogging about hybrid oaks in the Wasatch, I mentioned that the first time I met Professor Chuck he said to me, “People who are interested in plants tend to be nice people.” And as I’ve highlighted time and again in this blog- from Rudy Drobnick to Tom Ledig to Lloyd Stark to Larry St. Clair to the Pintero Brothers and Miguel Lara down in Zacatecas to Sally on the other side of the Rockies, this has absolutely been the case in my own experiences with plants and people.

And now I’ll go one step further, with this corollary: Learning about and understanding something- even a little- about plants will make you a nicer and even better person*. So maybe, if you can find time this year, you might just consider checking out a tree or two.

*No, I’m not- for once- kidding around.

If you’re going to pay attention to just one tree in the Wasatch, make it this tree. And if you’re ever going to pay attention to it, do so this month.