Grand Canyon Part 4: Alcoves & Hanging Gardens

From our camp at the junction of Tuckup and Cottonwood Canyons, we day-hiked up Cottonwood one afternoon. The lower part of the canyon involved a bit of scrambling and meandering around and through various jumbles of boulders. There were pools and trickles of water the whole way up. After a while we reached a pour-off with a couple of cottonwoods at the bottom, which we had to leave the canyon bottom to get around. The slope on the Northern side was loose and full of talus; we climbed it one at a time to avoid setting off a rockslide on each other.

Arizona Steve ascended first. As I followed, I could see that the sidehill placed us at the base of a second, higher pour-off that was recessed into an alcove, which Steve had already detoured into. As I paused scanning for a route on up, he called for me to come check it out. The alcove was fronted by a stand of small cottonwoods, behind which lay a pool backed by a wonderful hanging garden.

All About Hanging Gardens

Hanging gardens occur across the Colorado Plateau where continual seeps of water emerge from rock/cliff walls, creating little oases of moisture, and often shade, which support a community of plants quite different from the surrounding desert.

The reason for these seeps has to do with the hydrology of the rock layers. When you’re traveling across slickrock, it’s easy to see it as dry and waterless. In rainstorms water quickly runs off the rock surfaces (leading to flash flooding). What water does linger pools in pockets and potholes that generally dry up after a time*.

*That time of course varies by the size, depth and aspect of the pocket. Exceptionally large/deep pockets are known as “tanks” and are often year-round effective water sources.

But the rock layers are full of cracks and crevices, and some portion of rainwater trickles down into these hideaways, working its way downwards, leading to the creation of effective reservoirs or even modest aquifers within the rock. Where the crack/crevice network leads to a sidewall or cliff, the waters seep out in tickles or drips. The seep works slowly to weaken and break apart the structure of the wall underneath, causing just to break off and fall away, gradually forming an alcove.

Often this happens when the water encounters less permeable rock below, such as less fragmented/porous rock or a layer of shale, and is forced sideways. In canyon country a likely place for this to happen is at the interface of 2 distinct geologic layers. Further North in Southern Utah, this often happens where the Navajo and Kayenta formations meet. Down here in the Grand Canyon, those younger layers are nowhere to be seen, and so the Cottonwood Canyon alcove-garden, which is also a transition-layer garden, occurs among very different- and older- rock layers.

Extra Detail: Almost all hanging gardens in the Western US occur in/on sedimentary rock layers. And interestingly, some types of sedimentary rock are better “hosts” than others. Specifically layers like the Entrada and Navajo Formations, which have strong cross-bedding, which creates frequent, horizontal layers of increased impermeability, are common host formations. But Wingate- just a little below Navajo- has thinner, less clearly-defined cross-beds, and almost never hosts hanging gardens.

*For non-geology-minded Utah mountain bikers: Navajo is what you’re rolling across on Moab’s Slickrock Trail. Entrada is what you’re “surfing” up at Bartlett Wash. I did a geology-mtn biking post early this down around Gooseberry Mesa, but would love to do a broader mtb-geology post across Southern Utah. We’ll see.

When I learned this, I thought about my absolute favorite hanging garden, at the head of Twin Corral Box Canyon, which I will describe further on down in the post. Twin Corral Box, when you hike into it from the Dirty Devil, is walled with massive Wingate cliffs. But at its upper end, higher up, the cliffs are Navajo. Higher up-stream on the Dirty Devil BTW, the side canyons are overwhelmingly Navajo-walled, and as a result many of them, like the Robber’s Roost system, host wonderful hanging gardens all over the place. (One of the most rewarding things about this whole project has been the numerous ah-ha! moments when something I noticed years ago suddenly makes sense…)

Immediately above the garden is the bottom of the Redwall Formation, which we looked at in the last post. Our hike led us up through the Muav, but in between appeared a narrow and very different layer, which I believe was the Temple Butte Formation (and which I’ll describe later in the post.)

Floor

An alcove-hanging-garden- which is a specific type of hanging garden- supports an array of plants roughly divided into 3 zones. At the bottom of the alcove, by the base of the wall and often alongside a pool, are the most “normal” plants, by which I mean plants that root in soil and grow upwards. The soil is formed very gradually from fragments of the collapsing rock wall. Because the soil is limited and forms so slowly, alcove-gardens are fragile places. If the limited soil gets excessively trampled, peed/pooped in/on or otherwise abused, the plants community in this bottom layer can be disrupted or destroyed. (Exotics- like Tamarisk or Ravenna Grass, Saccharum ravennae, can also mess up this zone.)

Plants here include not just rushes and grasses, but also ferns and alcove-specific species of Columbines, Orchids and Death Camas.

Wall

The middle zone is the “wall” zone, up against the flat, damp, soil-less vertical rock wall of the alcove, and this zone supports mainly algae and cyanobacteria.

Most of the algae species that live on alcove walls are not endemic to that environment, meaning that most occur also in other environments. In a study in the late 1980s roughly 204 species of algae were found on Utah hanging garden walls, out of ~1,900 known statewide*. Of those 204, only 16 were not known to occur in any other environment than hanging gardens.

*I don’t know if this number has increased significantly since then.

But what is different about the algae in hanging gardens is the mix of species. Many are Chrysophytes, Golden Algae (pic right, not mine). The times we’ve looked at algae in this blog, we’ve generally been talking about Green Algae, which are sort of like really, really simple plants- either unicellular or multicellular- that have no specialized or differentiated cells.

Like Green Algae, Golden Algae are generally teeny-tiny photosynthetic creatures, but they’re not at all closely-related to them. In fact they’re likely about as distantly-related to Green Algae as we are. The systematics of these guys are still unsettled (and the group itself appears to be polyphyletic), but it now appears that they belong to a completely separate kingdom, the Chromists, Chromista*, which includes Brown Algae, Yellow-Green Algae and Diatoms, in addition to a few other things you never heard of.

*Way unsettled. In the 2005, an alternative kingdom, Chromolveolata, was proposed, and then in 2008 it was proposed that this group be split into 2 kingdoms. I can’t keep up. In any case, they’re way, way different from Green Algae, and they’re most certainly not plants.

Tangent: This is what is so cool about life at the microscopic level. Up here on the giganto-macro level where we reside, we perceive only a little fraction of the diversity of living things. The “kingdoms” or “kinds of living things that we can see and touch- animals, plants and fungi- appear to be just 3 of 6, 7, or maybe 11(?) kingdoms of eukaryotic creatures. And then of course there are the kazillions of prokaryotes…

Most of the time, most Golden Algae species behave more or less like Green Algae- sitting around, mostly in damp/wet places, and photosynthesizing. But here’s something cool about many of them: when deprived of light, or when they find themselves in the presence of abundant alternative food, they can switch to a predatory mode, feeding upon bacteria and diatoms. Golden Algae are sort of like little alternate-universe plants that can turn suddenly and opportunistically carnivorous.

Chrysophytes are common in fresh water, and important in lakes, where they’re believed to be a main source of food for zooplankton. Hanging garden walls seem to be a good environment for them: Roughly half of the 1,900 known algal species in Utah are Golden Algae, but they account for about 70% of the species on hanging garden walls. There’s more happening on those slimy walls than meets the eye.

Ceiling

But the most interesting and eye-catching plants occur in the uppermost zone, at the top of the wall or on the “ceiling” of the overhang, rooted directly on or right by the seep itself. Small bits of soil do form and accumulate here, providing nutrients and helping plants to root/attach. But oftentimes the substrate in this uppermost zone is neither bare rock nor soil, but tufa, specifically calcareous tufa. Tufa is a type of porous limestone created by water depositing carbonate minerals. A very dramatic example of tufa is the huge columns ringing Mono Lake in California. Calcareous tufa, the type found in desert seep-alcoves, is a type of freshwater-deposited tufa with a specific laminate structure and is less porous than most tufa types. Tufa of all types can contain lots of organic matter from debris trapped in its formation. In alcove hanging gardens calcareous tufa often forms a thin, flaking layer on the “ceiling” and sloping upper walls of the alcove.

The common plant at the seep zone is Maidenhair Fern, genus = Adantium. There are more than 200 species of Adantium ferns* worldwide, many of which have adapted to rock walls, seeps and waterfalls. Our species here on the Colorado Plateau is Adantium capillus-veneris, known alternately as Black Maidenhair or Venus-Hair Fern (pics left and above right). A. capillus-veneris has atypical, sort of “un-ferny”-looking fronds, which look almost like little Gingko leaves. They root well on calcareous tufa, and form thick, lush, bright green, hanging “mats” within the alcoves, decorating the upper walls like draperies.

*I covered the basics of Ferns, and their freaky-cool haploid-diploid generational pattern last year down in Costa Rica. Man, it is like I have a post for everything.

Another seep-zone plant was in flower. When it first caught my eye I thought it some type of Gilia, but it was actually Scarlet Lobelia, Lobelia cardinalis (pic right*). Lobelia belongs to the Bellflower family, Campanulaceae, and probably the most closely-related thing to it we’ve looked at previously was Harebell last summer up in Glacier NP. Scarlet Lobelia favors moist environments such as stream banks, bogs and meadows in addition to alcoves. Its red, deep and narrow-tubed flowers are pollinated by Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds (like Gila). It was used medicinally by Indians to treat bronchial ailments (including asthma) and supposedly syphilis.

*Sorry- for some reason I only snapped this one rather low-quality shot. I have no excuse except that I take lots of photos when I hike, and don’t really know at the time what- if anything- I’ll blog about.

Tangent: I say “supposedly” because I can’t count how many plants I’ve read about that Indians allegedly used to treat syphilis. Seriously, it has to be dozens. What I wonder is whether any of these plants actually eased the symptoms of the disease (certainly none of them cured it) or whether the Indians were just so desperate that they pretty much tried anything. And in fairness, Syphilis appears to have been a much more virulent (and horrible) disease during its first recorded few decades in Europe than it was by the later 16^th century, by which time it was basically the disease it is today.

Syphilis BTW has a fascinating and still unsettled history. For a long time, it was cited as a classic example of a New World disease spreading to the Old World. But other researchers believe that it was already present in both New and Old Worlds. Still other researchers hypothesize that it evolved in the Old World, was carried across the Beringian land-bridge with Paleo-Indians, and then re-encountered by European explorer. The timing of the disease’s history in Europe is tricky; the first major outbreak was in 1494, which would mean that if it was a New World pathogen, it pretty much would have had to arrive in Europe via Columbus’ first voyage.

Nested Tangent: I sometimes pick up a tone of explanation or justification in traditional New-World-Origin accounts of Syphilis. Yes, we gave the Indians Smallpox and a whole bunch of other diseases, the story goes, but hey, they gave us syphilis, as though it somehow balances things out.

Today in the age of AIDS, syphilis is farther down on the list of most folks’ STD-worries, yet another of the multitude of terrible diseases that’s largely been beaten in the First World, allowing so many more of us to live long enough to succumb to cancer. I wonder, if they ever cure cancer, what we will start dying of next?*

*I’m reminded of the old Red Foxx line (paraphrasing): “All these health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in a hospital bed, dying of nothing.”

Scarlet Lobelia’s medicinal properties- whatever they are- likely are a result of the plant’s alkaloids, which can be toxic, and probably shouldn’t be messed with. BTW, you won’t find this flower in hanging gardens up around Moab or Canyonlands; though it’s common in them around the Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon NRA and Zion, it doesn’t appear in hanging gardens further North.

Alcove hanging gardens always seem quiet, contemplative places. When I’m in one I always feel as though I should speak softly and be respectful somehow. I don’t know that this feeling stems from any karmic-greenie Earth-vine or anything, so much as they half-consciously remind me of cathedrals, with their dim light, still, cool air and vaulted ceilings. The Cotton Canyon Alcove is small- maybe 30 feet high, but I’ve stood in others that are huge. The side canyons of the Dirty Devil in particular contain a number of spectacular ones, the largest and most amazing of which lies at the head of Twin Corral Box Canyon, with a ceiling of well over 100 feet high.

Alcove-gardens are cool, refreshing places offering a break from the sun and heat of the surrounding desert. In the really large ones, the cool, damp air can induce a deep chill within 15 minutes or so, driving you to fumble around in your pack for an extra layer, or retreat back into the sun. Our small alcove was just perfect though, and we found ourselves lingering for a bit. These places have an out-of-time feel to them; it’s easy to be surprised at how much time you’ve dawdled away if you get distracted or don’t keep an eye on your watch.

Tangent: Yes, I backpack with a wristwatch. I do almost everything with a wristwatch. Once on a trip along the Dirty Devil about a decade ago, Steve and I decided we wouldn’t bring a watch. After all, we were backpacking, we had all day, why be constrained by something so civilized as a watch? Why not wake when it gets light and go to sleep when it turns dark? Isn’t that the right, “natural” way to live?

It turned out to be a terrible idea. The trip was in October- a time of shortening days- and we spent most of the trip in deep-walled canyons under overcast skies. We never could never tell what time it was, and as we didn’t want to get stranded out day-hiking away from our base camp after nightfall, we really needed to know what time it was. As a result, we must have asked OCRick- who accompanied us on the trip but abstained form our little back-to-nature-wristwatch-rebellion- the time at least 30 times a day.

Continuing up around and above the alcove was the only tricky part of the hike, involving an exposed scramble up a series of ledges on the North side. Fortunately the rock of these ledges was distinctly different from that below or above- an extremely rough-surface, abrasive stone that was wonderful for free-climbing*. I’m pretty sure this was the Temple Butte Formation, a relatively narrow band between the Muav and the Redwall, that tends to be thicker in the West End of the Grand Canyon**.

The Temple Butte Formation is interesting in that it appears in channels in the underling Muav layer. The channels may have been streams or estuary channels within with deposits accumulated that became the Temple Butte rock some 350 – 400 million years ago.***

*But would be awful to fall or slide on.

**And which I either missed (entirely possible, as this geology stuff is still pretty new to me) or is absent in the main drainage of Tuckup Canyon.

***Different sources give really different ages for this layer.

After ascending 2 sets of ledges and crawling between 1 more (pic right), we were atop the alcove* and back in the Redwall, through which we continued up a drainage full of gullies, chutes, pockets, plazas and pour-offs. Every bend revealed some interesting little plaza or pool or minor obstacle (pic below, left)**.

*There’s a bolt at the top of the alcove. Rappelling down would be easier and safer than the ledgy down-climb

**This, BTW, is why hiking narrow canyons is so great to do with kids. The constant surprise-around-every-corner aspect and frequent scrambling opportunities distract them from the mundane-ness of trudging along for hours.

Eventually we broke out of the Redwall and the canyon, now just a shallow gully on the giant Esplanade terrace lined on either side by low shale hills. A short while later we crossed the Tuckup trail and arrived at the Cottonwood Spring. The Esplanade is dotted with a number of springs like this one. Here the hard capstone creating the terrace* serves at the hydrological barrier forcing the water to the surface.

*Which I described in Part 2 of this series.

The Spring was marked by a stand of young Cottonwoods (pic right). Standing snags suggested that much larger Cottonwoods used to shade the spot and we wondered why none of the giants still lived. At several point on our hike up we’d come across huge old trunks, even below the alcove, reminders of the force of floods that must scour the canyon.

The ground all around the spring was damp and grassy, and the grass here had a strange appearance, almost hazy, as though you couldn’t focus on it. On closer examination the “haze” was an abundance of super-fine stalks bearing seeds, like nothing I was familiar with.

Back home later I learned this was Western Panicgrass, Dicanthelium acuminatum (pic left, not mine), which is common across much of the US, but which I’d never before noticed in such concentrations. Panicgrass, BTW, belongs to the same grass sub-family, Panicodeae, as our old friend Crabgrass. While Crabgrass is an Old World native that has become a naturalized pest in the New World, Western Panicgrass is a New World native that has become naturalized pest in the Old.

Arriving at the spring we suddenly felt beat, and lazed for a while in the shade before heading down. After the Temple Butte down-climb we stopped in at the alcove again to pump some water, then picked our way down-canyon through lengthening shadows back to camp.

Next Up: The River.

Note About Sources: Geologic info for this post came primarily from Bob Ribokas’ Grand Canyon Explorer site, Stephen R. Whitney’s A Field Guide to the Grand Canyon and Wikipedia. Hanging Garden Info came from David Williams’ A Naturalist’s Guide to Canyon Country, and On The Distribution of Utah’s Hanging Gardens, Stanley L. Welsh, from the Great Basin Naturalist*. Welsh’s paper provided the algal species distribution info, but was apparently published before(?) the classification of Chrysophyta as Golden Algae, for which my primary source was the University of California Museum of Paleontology site. Panicgrass info came from the Master’s thesis, A Morphological Invesitagtion of Dicanthelium Section Lanuginosa (Poaceae), Justin Ray Thomas, Miami University.

*Now the Western North American Naturalist. Man, there is like a publication for everything.

Wasatch Berries, Trails and Food Storage

So it’s the end of the summer already. How did that happen? While I was blogging about the Grand Canyon and the Paunsaugant and the Markagunt and Idaho and Montana and Maine and old girlfriends and strange neurological conditions and South American megalopolises, the summer here in the Wasatch just zipped by. I haven’t done a real Wasatch post (excepting the Gumweed/Darkling Beetle/Wolf Mouse post) since June!

I’m actually OK with that, because I’ve done a half-decent job covering a lot of the Wasatch stuff the past 2 summers. In 2008 I covered most of the major trees of the Wasatch, and in 2009 I hit the wildflowers in a big way. This summer- well this year, really- has been a bit different, as readers who know me in real life know, and so I’ve “coasted” a bit on the Wasatch in recent months.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been out and about in the Wasatch. Over the past couple of weeks and weekends since I returned from Brazil I’ve been camping and biking with family and friends. Here’s a quick clip from Sunday along the Wasatch Crest, which follows the ridge dividing the Big Cottonwood and Park City- side drainages.

Tangent: I’ve also explored a couple of “new” trails in the Wasatch recently. New to me, anyway. One very nice stretch is the connector between Guardsman and Scott’s Passes.

Another is the modest network of trails above Summit Park. Most of the easily-bike-able trails are pretty tame, though they pass through nice long stretches of Douglas Fir forest. This would be a great place to ride/hike in the heat of summer. The “recommended for hiking” trails are lot sketchier on a bike, with many mandatory hike-a-bikes, but they get to some really cool, remote-feeling places. Here’s a stretch along the ridge separating Summit Park from Toll Canyon, a ridge I’ve driven below hundreds of times without ever knowing what was on top.

When I hike or bike a new trail in the Wasatch, as often as not I mentally kick myself. “What?” I’ll think, “This cool place has been here all this time and I never got around to checking it out all these years? What’s wrong with me?” Next summer I’m checking out more new places in the Wasatch…

Being back home in the Wasatch has reminded me of something that I meant to blog about- but missed- the last 2 years: berries. All these flowers I bog about all the time- what happens to them anyway? Well, assuming they get fertilized, they turn into a fruit of some sort. Many of those “fruits” are achenes or follicles and not all that eye-catching, but several common Wasatch shrubs produce brightly-colored “berries” and right now is a great time to check them out.

Side Note: There are still flowers blooming, mainly Negative Daisies, Showy Goldeneye, Rabbitbrush, Snakeweed (lower down), Sunflowers (lower down), and patches of Common Yarrow. But none of these flowers will produce anything remotely berry-like. Anything that was going to spend the summer growing berries necessarily bloomed back in May or June.

Berry-O-Rama!

For about the last 3 weeks, if you’ve been hiking or riding down lower in the foothills, you may have noticed “blueberries” ripening on the floor of the Oak-Maple woods. This is Oregon-grape, which I blogged about last Fall. The Holly-like leaves are evergreen, so these patches up green will linger long after the oaks and maples are bare.

The berries- which are not grapes- are edible, but are extremely tart and have big seeds inside. They’re sometimes made into jam, or even wine.

Another “blueberry” all over the place up around 7,000 feet and up right now is Serviceberry, which I blogged about last summer. Finesse Trail outside of Pinebrook, which was carpeted with delicate white blossoms back in June, is now covered with ripe serviceberries. These berries are also edible. Like Oregon-grape, they’re full of seeds, but the flavor is way less tart. The key to snacking on them is to pop a couple into your mouth, gently mush them up with your teeth and tongue, and spit out the seeds. Some tasters describe serviceberries as tasting faintly of apple, cherry or almond, and in tasting the ripest I sometimes think I pick up a hint of apple, but that may be self-suggestion… Incidentally this year I finally figured out how to pick sweet serviceberries: they’re the ones that look just about to go bad- deep purple and starting to wrinkle. Any younger/fresher and they’re too tart.

Over the next couple of weeks up around the high rangelands bordering the brush around Park City and Kimball Junction, the trails will start to be dotted with little purple poops. I’m not sure which animal(s)’ scat it is, but it’s all over the place, and critters chow on the berries. Speaking of which, a serviceberry is not actually a “berry”, but a pome, like an Apple or Pear, to which Serviceberry is closely-related. A pome is not a “true” fruit, but rather an accessory fruit, which I explained when we looked at Strawberries. (Though a pome is a very different type of accessory fruit than a strawberry.)

In shadier areas around the same altitude, you’ll see downward bunches of slightly larger, almost cherry-like berries. These are Chokecherries, which I also blogged about last summer. The fruits are “true” fruits, but they’re not berries. Like real cherries, they’re drupes, with a hard stone or pit inside that has grown out of the ovary wall of the flower. People make pies and jellies out of chokecherries.

They’re also edible raw, with a bit of a caveat: the seeds can contain high concentrations of the poison hydrogen cyanide. You’re supposed to avoid eating the seeds, and optimally, any cherries that taste too bitter. In past years most all chokecherries I’ve tried randomly taste “too bitter”, but this year I’ve found plenty that taste nice and sweet, with only a hint of tartness. I suspect that an early frost sweetened up both the chokecherries and the serviceberries.

Serviceberry and Chokecherry both belong to the Rose family, and another family member in the same locale that’s fruiting now is of course, Wild Rose, which I first blogged about 2 summers ago. The fruit of Wild Rose is the rosehip, which is actually another pome fruit. Eaten raw they’re supposed to taste like extra-tart crabapples, and are also alleged to sweeten up a bit following the first frost, like other wild fruits. Rosehips are used in jams, pies and herbal teas, and are packed with vitamin C. Supposedly in Hungary they make a brandy out of them.

Kitchen-Craftiness & Food Storage

Tangent: The only jam I ever remember my mother making was Rosehip jam, which she tackled after coming across a bunch of ripe hips during a late summer weekend on Cape Cod. I must have been maybe 6 or 7, so my memory of the event was a bit foggy. What I do remember was 1) picking them seemed to take a long time 2) making the jam seemed like a huge, complicated, labor-intensive production, and 3) the jam tasted awful, but that may have been because of my age.

Nested Tangent: That’s probably because, growing up, my family wasn’t very, er “kitchen-crafty”, I guess. When I moved out to Utah, suddenly I started meeting all these people who were making jams and jellies and bottling and canning and making sausage out of things they had killed and what-not. Seriously, it’s like everybody here grew up on The Waltons or something. We never did any of that. We ate tuna casserole, frozen veggies, and once a month we went to Friendly’s. Sometimes Mom would make chocolate pudding. I imagine part of the kitchen-craftiness out here is the more recent connection people have to agriculture in this part of the country, but I think the big driver is the whole Mormon-food-storage thing. Which I should say doesn’t sound like a bad idea. About once a year or so I think, “Hey, we should store a year’s supply of food…” But I’m not about to start canning and bottling and all that, and when I envision myself in the supermarket checkout line with 300 boxes of instant oatmeal and 500 cans of kippered herring, I always start to feel embarrassed and put it off another year…

But rosehips have frustrated my snacking attempts to-date. Supposedly you just slice them in half and remove the hairy-coated seeds. But with this many seeds, what does that leave you? The skin and a bit of rind (pic right), both fairly tasteless…

Side Note: Speaking of the Rose family, plant-aware and/or long-time readers may wonder what’s up right now with our other 2 common Wasatch shrees in the family- Curlleaf Mountain Mahogany (CMM) and Ninebark.

CMM produces achenes, so no jams or jellies to be made there. Earlier in the summer the long, feathery plumes of the achenes give the trees a sort of light and hazy look as I’ve posted previously. Now only a fraction of the feathery plumes remain on the trees; it’s as if CMM trees come back “into focus” as the summer wanes. Stop by one though and you’ll notice the ground below littered with small “feathers”. And looking closely at the trees branches you’ll see countless empty “sockets” where the wind has picked up and swept away the achenes.

Ninebark fruits as a cluster of follicles, which is a type of dry fruit containing multiple seeds which splits open to release them. Larkspur, Milkweed and Magnolias are some other plants with follicle-fruits (all of which have evolved them independently.)

Before leaving the Rose family, there’s one more berry blooming right now that’s actually kind of tasty. I first blogged about Thimbleberries 2 years ago, but didn’t manage to come across (and eat) ripe ones until about a week ago. They look like little raspberries, and like them their fruits are actually aggregations of multiple separate fruits, each one of which is a little drupe, or “drupelet”*. (So a raspberry/ thimbleberry/ blackberry is sort of a cluster of micro-cherries…)

I’ve been tasting them regularly over the past week and a half or so. Most are still a bit tart, but every third or so one I pick is nice and sweet, like an extra-fine little raspberry.

*No that’s not a made-up Watcher-Word. It’s a real botany word.

Extra Detail: An easy place to find and pick Thimbleberries right now is in upper Mill Creek Canyon. Take the Big Water trail up from the lower trailhead. Immediately after the 1^st switchback, there’s a big patch on the uphill side of the trail. Several more patches occur over the next ¼ mile. Probably 500 hikers/bikers pass by here every Saturday, but no on else ever seem to stop and pick them…

So what else is fruiting? For nearly a month now the Wax Currants have been ripening. I blogged about them first last summer down in the Henry Mountains, but this summer have been noticing it more and more around Jeremy Ranch and Pinebrook.

It seems to do well near rocky, open outcrops and minor summits. The fruits- which are real berries- are edible, but pretty tasteless. Indians used to mix them with dried meat to make pemmican.

More common though- all over the place right now- are these clusters of red berries. They’re Elderberries, which I blogged about last summer during the Steiner100. We have 2 kinds of Elderberries here in Utah, Red (pic left) and Blue. Blue elderberries are edible, used in jams, candies, sauces and even wines. But all the berries I’ve seen around her are red (or orange-turning-red) and they are definitely not something you should go around snacking on, as they contain cyanide. Some sources I’ve read say never to eat red elderberries, period. Others say they’re OK to eat after boiling (which is also recommended for blue elderberries.) But all the really good elderberry stuff seems to come from the blues (or blacks.) If you do manage to ingest elderberries without poisoning yourself, they’re rich in vitamins A and C.

Elderberries BTW aren’t true berries, but drupes. Elderberry used to be considered a member of the Honeysuckle family, Caprifoliaceae, but is now broken out into a separate family Adoxaceae, all of whose members have 4-petaled flowers and drupe fruits.

And speaking of the Honeysuckle family, there’s another super-common berry right now in the Wasatch up around 8,000 feet. It’s lower down, on a small shrub, so easy to overlook, but once you start looking down, it’s everywhere. And this berry’s easy to pick out, because it’s bright white.

Next Up: Stuff you fall on.

Things That Grow Around Ponds

I have 2 more posts I want to do about Maine- this one on aquatic freshwater plants* and then one on memory. It’s been tough to crank them out this week as I’m down in Brazil on business. If I get time this week I may do a completely off-topic random- observations-about-this-place-type-post, but in the meantime I’ll just share this one snippet of Sao Paulo street life. If any Portuguese-speaking reader can tell me what this guy’s saying**, they get a WatcherSTICKER.

*Yes I know, not the most exciting topic for the non-plant-lover. But as I’ve mentioned before, I have a list of things I feel I need to cover in this project, and watery weeds are on it.

**Is it just me, or does he seem tense? I feel as though he could use a stiff drink, a massage, or perhaps some aromatherapy. Maybe all 3.

The Post

This post is about ponds and plants, but first let’s talk about something else: snorkeling.

I love snorkeling. When I go on tropical vacations, it’s one of my favorite things to do. You put on a mask, look down and see this whole other world below you. With a good breath of air and a few strong kicks, you’re down 10 or 15 feet below the surface, peeking at fish, echinoderms and all sorts of cool creatures hidden among the rocks and coral. I also enjoy scuba, and certainly the world opened up by scuba is even more fantastic than that sampled by the casual snorkeler. But snorkeling has a relaxed, low-risk casualness about it that somehow captures the essence of vacation: Start and stop when you want, do it with friends or alone, minimal gear, hassle and safety checks, and if you’ve had a beer or two already, well, no big deal.

So a few years back, as we were getting ready for a Maine vacation, I thought, “I like snorkeling, and I’ve always wondered what’s down on the bottom of the lake below the drop-off*. Why don’t I bring snorkel and fins along to Maine?”

*The “drop-off” is sort of the generic term we use for “when the water gets over your head.” In many parts of the 5 Kezar Ponds there is a distinct true drop-off: the lake depth goes from about 2 feet to >10 feet in a horizontal span of only ~6 feet. But in front of our cabin there no true drop-off, just a gradual, steady deepening till you can’t touch.

So our first day at the cabin, I donned snorkel and fins and waded in. I kicked out to about 15 feet of depth and dove down to the bottom. I did so about a dozen more times, moving a few hundred feet along the shore then swam back, walked out of the water, and left the snorkel & fins indoors for the rest of the vacation. There was pretty much nothing to see. Hold that thought.

A few weeks ago I posted about Lily Pads up in Idaho, which led to my learning about Floating Pondweed. Canoeing around the ponds this year I kept an eye out for it and quickly located it in plenty (pic right). But in doing so I finally paid attention to something I’d mostly ignored over close to 4 decades of canoeing, sailing and swimming in the ponds- the stuff that grows in them.

When I was younger I found weeds and pads and such growing in the water sort of icky, and always favored sandier areas, or shorelines of exposed granite, where pond-plants didn’t grow. What I didn’t realize then is that these areas are the “deserts” of ponds, relatively poor in life (including fish). Aquatic plants are a sign of a healthy lake or pond, and their presence helps to keep the pond cleaner.

Tangent: When I was a teenager, acid rain was a big worry in the Northeast. One of the side effects of acid rain is to make it difficult for freshwater aquatic plants to live, leaving “bare” lakes and shorelines. At the time, being pretty much enviro-clueless, I actually thought, “Hey that doesn’t sound so bad…” I’m even more embarrassed to admit that around that same time I first heard the idea of global warming, and thought, “Oh that sounds nice, these New England winters kind of suck…”

How Ponds Are Like Mountains

On land, the types of plants that grow are largely determined by altitude. Here in the Wasatch as you move up from ~5,000 to 11,000 feet, you pass through Sagebrush and Rabbitbrush, to Scrub Oak and Maple, to Aspen and Douglas Fir, to Subalpine Fir and Engelman Spruce, clear up to alpine tundra. What’s cool about plants in ponds is that they work sort of the same way, but in reverse, and on a way smaller scale.

Water depth impacts aquatic plants in a few ways, probably the most important of which is that it blocks sunlight from reaching the bottom. When the amount of sunlight reaching the bottom of the pond gets down to around 1% of that at the surface, plants can no longer photosynthesize effectively. The depth at which this occurs varies depends on the lake in question and the clarity of its water, but in most lakes and ponds in Western Maine it’s probably somewhere around 12 or 15 feet.

Extra Detail: Parts of Lake Superior near Duluth are clear enough to support photosynthetic algae down at over 80 feet deep. Lake Tahoe supposedly used to claim the same down to over 300(!) feet, though shoreline erosion and other human-induce factors have decreased that depth over the past half-century.

The zone between the water’s edge and this 1%-of sunlight-at-the-bottom cutoff is called the Littoral Zone, and that’s why you see things like lily pads around the edges of ponds, but not out in the middle, unless the pond is really shallow. Within the Littoral Zone are 3 distinct plant “sub-zones”, which are pretty easy to pick out from a canoe.

Tangent: I’ve been mentioning canoes a lot, because that’s how I usually poke around on the ponds. Canoes are quiet and aquadynamic*, cutting through the water gently and easily, which is nice not only because it makes paddling easier, but it creates minimal water disturbance, which is good for looking down at stuff underwater, like weeds and fish and turtles.

*Is that a word? Because if it isn’t, it totally should be.

Nested Tangent: One of my pet peeves BTW is people who can’t paddle a canoe. You know, they do 2 or 3 strokes on the left, then 2 or 3 on the right, over and over again to keep the thing going in a straight line. What’s up with that? Paddling a canoe correctly- via the J-stroke- requires about as much coordination as buttering a piece of toast. You twist the paddle away from the hull of the canoe at the end of each stroke. (Oddly, paddling a canoe is the only thing I do left-handed.)

Kayaks are even better for poking around, as they’re even more aquadynamic plus you sit lower to the water. But my favorite way to get around on the ponds is by sailing. My parents keep an old (30+ years) Sears Roebuck sunfish-type clone up at the cabin that only I ever break out. Winds on small ponds are gusty and fickle, and sailing them requires a sort weird sort of patience. You have to be willing to inch along, becalmed or with the slightest of breezes, lazing back with a sort of Zen-like calm. But when a gust kicks up, you have to snap to life, aggressively tacking upwind to get into hard-to-reach spots. Middle Pond is my favorite- long and narrow, with prevailing length-wise winds and an island* in the middle to mix it up. On a good day I can sail clear upwind to the falls, tacking at the end every 15 or 20 feet. I love it.

*Where the Loons nest.

The most amazing, counterintuitive thing about sailing is that you can sail into the wind. Doesn’t that seem like it shouldn’t work? Like you’re cheating somehow? I think the lateen sail is one of my all-time favorite human inventions. Not just because it changed the course of history*, but because it was an innovation of such significance that required no advancements in materials science or other enabling technologies; they just starting cutting sails differently, Makes you wonder what other “lateen”-type ideas are sitting right in front of us, waiting to be discovered…

*It arguably did, enabling the European age of worldwide exploration, expansion and dominance.

The Plants, Already

The first plant sub-zone is the Emergent Plants sub-zone. Here plants are typically rooted on the lake bottom, but grow up and flower above the water’s surface. An example right on our beach is Rushes. I explained the differences between Grasses, Sedges and Rushes last month up in Idaho, and as you can see, these rushes are round in cross-section. I think these may be Common Rush, Juncus effusus, which is widespread across North America. They grow just above or just below the shoreline; their bases don’t have to be underwater, but the soil/sand they grow in has to be nearly water-logged.

Moving out just a few feet from shore is a much more prominent emergent plant- Pickerelweed, Pontederia cordata (pic below, left). Like rushes, Pickerelweed is a monocot, and is native throughout the Western hemisphere, ranging from Canada to Argentina. It has thick, waxy leaves and succulent stems. But the easiest way to pick it out is by its stem spike of blue flowers. Blue-flowered plants are unusual in North American lakes, ponds and waterways, so when you see a spike of blue flowers, it’s likely you’re looking at Pickerelweed.

Side Note: The other common blue-flowered freshwater plant you’ll see, particularly in the Southeast, is Water Hyacinth, Eichornia crassipes, (pic right, not mine) (a member of the same family, Pontederiaceae) which is not native to North America but has been introduced from South America and is a pesky invasive.

The blue flowers are usually busy with Bumblebees, who collect both the pollen and the nectar, and are visited by other bees as well, including one monolectic species*. P. cordata also grows vegetatively via root-cloning, and so when you see a patch, it’s likely one big clone. Although the individual flowers last for only a couple of days, a given stand/clone will flower throughout most of the summer. Pickerelweed is native, but can be a pest both here in North America and in other parts of the world where it’s been introduced, clogging waterways and crowding out other plants. But it plays an important positive role in keeping lakes and ponds clean, filtering pollutants out of the water.

*Doufourea novangliae.

Extra Detail: Sunfish seem to love Pickerelweed on 5 Kezar Ponds. Cast your line into a stand of the stuff, and a sunfish is the only thing you’re pulling out. Pickerelweed stands also seem to be the favored locale for extensive green algal colonies, probably because the stems help make still waters even stiller, by blocking currents. These colonies always grossed me out as a kid; I swam in constant, low-level dread of sticking a foot in one*. Interestingly, down at a single-celled level, most ponds go through an annual succession of peak-bloom cycles of diatoms, algae and cyanobacteria. Another day, another post.

*Though not as much as I dreaded getting bit by a leech. I never did get bit, though I saw friends and siblings get nailed. Interestingly, Brother Phil noted this year that none of us have spotted a leech for several years. Wonder why that is?

The next sub-zone, starting at ~ 3 or 4 feet deep on our ponds, is the Floating Plant sub-zone, dominated by Waterlilies, and- as I was pleased to notice- Floating Pondweed. The Pondweed leaves are much smaller, which may be part of the reason I never noticed them before.

Both Waterlilies and Pondweeds use the buoyancy of the water- rather than the support of their stems- to position leaves and blooms on the surface and both- as I mentioned in the Idaho-Lily post, evolved this “Lily-Pad-Schtick” independently. Waterlilies are ultra-“primitive” dicots, having branched off from nearly all the other angiosperms way early in the history of flowering plants, while Pondweeds are monocots, more closely related to the nearby Rushes and Pickerelweeds. 5 Kezar ponds BTW supports both genera of common North American Waterlilies: the white/true-petaled Nympheae and the yellow/sepals-as-petals Nuphar blooms..

As you paddle away from the shore and clear the Waterlilies, if you look down right away, before it gets too deep*, you’ll see other plants below the water. This is the Submersed Plant Sub-Zone, characterized by plants that grow and flower entirely underwater.

*Polarized sunglasses help. But if you buy your cheapie-eyewear at Maverik, using the shadow of a canoe paddle to cut the sun’s glare off the water works fairly well.

There are a number of cool submersed plants growing down in this zone. One of the more interesting is Common Hornwort, Ceratophyllum demersum. Hornworts are entirely submerged, free-floating plants, from 3 to 9 feet in “height”, rooted in mud on the pond-bottom. “Rooted” is a bit of a misnomer; the plants have no real roots, but modified leaves that anchor them to the bottom. They do well in still waters in mud/soil rich in nutrients, and provide shelter to fish-spawn and snails.

Hornworts have completely submerged lives. Not only are they “rooted” underwater, but unlike plants of the Emergent and Floating sub-zones, they flower and are pollinated underwater. Hornwort pollination is a weird analog of wind-pollination, pollen grains carried slowly through the waters in the incredible, one-in-a-zillion chance that they’ll wind up at a female Hornwort flower, which of course, a fair number of them manage to do.

Side Note: Plant People will get why this next part is Way Cool. If you’re not a Plant Person*, you may need to go back and read this post and the “Botanical Spotlight” in this post to get it.

*Oh don’t be like that. You know what I’m talking about. You’re rolling your eyes and thinking “boooring.” Let me tell you what: We Plant People see a whole world the rest of you Plant-Blind folk don’t see. Plus we make fun of the rest of you when you’re not around.

When describing plants in this blog, I usually try to mention what kind of plant it is and give some idea of what it’s related to. When describing flowering plants, part of this includes IDing the plant as dicot or monocot. But I can’t do this with Hornwort because botanists haven’t agreed on what it is. For some time it was though to be a basal offshoot of the angiosperms, similar to Waterlilies. But more recent genetic analyses have suggested that it’s a basal offshoot/sister group of either the monocots or eudicots. In other words, when the monocots/eudicots branched off from the “primitive” dicots way back over 100 million years ago, and then broke off into monocots and eudicots, Hornworts may have been part of a third branch that subsequently broke off from either the monocot or eudicot line. Today there are tens of thousands of species of both monocots and eudicots, but just 6 species of Hornworts worldwide. Isn’t that freaky? These watery weeds growing out of the muck may be the sole survivors of a 100M+ year-old line of life as ancient as monocots or eudicots.

Tangent: We’ve come across several of these “lone survivors” of ancient lines before, including Mormon Tea, Gingkoes and Cycads. These living fossils are fascinating not just in and of themselves, but because they highlight the common recent ancestry of the vast majority of living species. Think about angiosperms (flowering plants). It’s thought that they evolved once, from a common ancestor*. Today, maybe 150 million years later, they rule the world. And there are similar stories for everything from songbirds (Passerines) to bats to primates. When each of these lines got its start, there were thousands of other living things around whose lines have since dead-ended. A few dozen crucial splits/breaks have defined so much of the history of living things. And if one of those splits/breaks offshoots hadn’t worked out, or if another that almost worked out did work out, well it makes you think about how the world might have turned out. (Or how other worlds maybe did turn out.) The 6 species of Hornwort range worldwide- they’re not in obvious danger of extinction anytime son. Makes you wonder if there the last of their line, or the bridge to some future, diverse order that will dominate the world.

*Because of the pollination-weirdness described in this post.

The Hornworts and other submersed plants seem to give out at somewhere around 10 or 12 feet of depth around the ponds, marking the end of the Sumbersed sub-zone and the entire Littoral Zone. Beyond this is the Limnetic Zone, marked by a lack of higher plants on the lake bottom. But the Limnetic Zone in turn is in turn divided into 2 horizontal zones. The upper waters, extending down to the ~10- 15 foot depth of the end of the Littoral- are mark the Euphotic Sub-Zone, where photosynthesis is still carried out by free-floating algae and cyanobacteria. Below this level is the Benthic Sub-Zone, where no plants grow.

When I snorkeled down to the bottom, I was diving down to the pond equivalent of alpine tundra; the little light that reached there was too meager to support any plants. That’s why the scenery was so uninteresting. On the deep lake bottom, there is life, but it tends to be teeny things- arthropods and such- that work their way through the mud, some feeding on the detritus that falls slowly from the living world above, others on each other. It was also a bit spooky down there- dark, cold and quiet. On the deeper dives I felt out of place and unwelcome, and kept catching myself kicking quickly back up toward the growing light above.