Steiner100 Part 1: Negative Daisies, Buckwheat and Improbable Numbers

In Douglas Adams’ book the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, there’s a hyper-advanced interstellar drive called the Bistro-matic Drive. It works through the generation of incredibly improbable and unpredictable numbers, and the number-generation-mechanism it uses is a mock-up Italian bistro, with robot clients, waiters, etc. The idea is that the numbers generated in a restaurant- the number of people on the reservation, the number of people who show up, the number of entrees ordered, how the bill will be totaled, divvied up, paid, etc.- are the most improbable and unpredictable numbers in the universe.

Know what else is like that? The Steiner100. No matter how many times we do it, there’s absolutely no predicting how many people say they’re going to do it, how many people show up/start, how many people join en route, and how many drop out. Then there are the equally unpredictable numbers of how many times we’ll stop, how many junctions will be missed by at least 1 member of the party, how many times the route will change, what the final mileage will be and how many flats/mechanicals will be experienced. In fact, there are only 2 certainties of the Steiner 100: It will always end up taking around 14 hours, and OCRick and I will always show up at the start and complete the whole thing. That’s it. Nothing else is certain.

2 Sucky Things

This year’s Steiner100 was excellent but Wicked* Hot. Before I get into the ride or the amazing flowers, I’ll just state up front that there were 2 sucky things and 1 great thing about the ride. (pic right = Clean Colin, shot over the shoulder, while climbing. Seriously, how cool am I?) The first sucky thing was that the heat brought out that weird scourge of the summertime Wasatch between 7,000 and 9,000 feet: Wasatch Death Flies. No, that’s not their name. I’m actually not sure what they are. Locals call them “Deer Flies” (which would place them in the genus Chrysops) but they’re not the Deer Flies you get back East. They’re smaller, land for a bite less often, and are less “crunchy” when you squish them. But they make any rest stop annoying.

*It’s been 19 years since I lived in the Boston area, but the word “wicked” will forever be a part of my superlative lexicon.

The second sucky thing was that occasional bane of all male endurance cyclists: Chronic Weenie Chafe. If you are a male cyclist, you know exactly what I am talking about. Why it just happens on some rides and not others I cannot say. Saturday was Chafe City.

1 Awesome Thing

But the great thing was this: No Creaks. Again, cyclists know what I’m talking about. When you ride a 5+ year-old full-suspension mtn bike which you have built and rebuilt at least 17 times, and you take it out on a 100-mile off-road ride, something, sometime is going to creak. (pic right = “Ashley”, the only ever female S100 participant*.) And over the course of umpteen hot, sweaty hours that One Evil Creak is going to slowly bore its way through your ears, inside your skull, and into the Very Core Of Your Soul. Every once in a while a teeny voice of reason calls out: “It’s just a noise, ignore it!” But you can’t. You obsess and wonder and dream of ways to eliminate the creak, until you are nothing more than a quaking, scowling, angst-ridden mass of angry flesh, scheming of how to kill your bike when you return home.

*In the old days, our gang used to ride with several different women. Over time, they all gradually moved away, got busier with non-biking interests, divorced one or the other of us, or otherwise stopped riding with us. Today, with the very occasional exception of “Ashley”, we almost never ride with women. We tell each other this is because we’re such gnarly and hard-core riders, but really I think it’s because we’re a bit crude and pass a fair amount of gas.

Only this ride, none of that happened. Last Thursday night I tracked down and eliminated my last hidden creak, and Saturday my bike was a smooth, silent joy of mechanical efficiency. I swear I finished that ride with my karma thoroughly re-balanced, and feeling 5 years younger*.

*Except that I couldn’t feel my penis.

So am I ever going to blog about this ride already? Not yet.

Here’s why I love the Steiner100. (pic left= yes, yet another 1-hander while climbing) First, OCRick is 18 years older than me. So as long as he finishes the ride, I can convince myself that I have a good 18 years of epic endurance riding left in me. Second, it reminds me of why I moved to Utah. Because I can pedal out of house at 5:40AM and ride all day on amazing singletrack, through beautiful Aspen forests and along stunning ridges, back and forth across a mountain range and a tectonic fault, past stunning vistas and wildflower-filled meadows, down buff, sinewy singletrack and roll back into my suburban driveway before dark. That’s why I quit my job, chucked my stuff in a storage locker and started driving West almost 20 years ago, and the Steiner100 reminds me once again why it was oh-so worth it.

Here We Go…

The first dozen miles or so of the Steiner100 are just rolling up Emigration Canyon. We jumped on dirt at the Mormon trail at Mt. Dell Reservoir. I hadn’t ridden this trail in about 6 weeks, and was surprised by the changes. It’s lined now by massive Thimbleberry leaves, and liberally dusted with cotton. In this photo (pic right) you can see the Thimbleberry leaves covered with it, and in the next (real blurry- sorry) photo you can see it lining the trail. This drainage features plentiful Aspen and Narrowleaf Cottonwood, and I suspect the cotton may be from both. As the trail runs up the very bottom of the drainage, cottony seeds from all the trees around wind up on and alongside the trail.

Side Note: Right around here I saw my 3^rd Primrose species in Northern Utah: Hooker’s Evening Primrose, Oenothera elata (pic not mine.) This is my 1^st and only sighting of it in the Wasatch, and regrettably I skipped the photo opp, certain I would encounter more (I didn’t.)

We followed the Mormon trail up to Big Mountain Pass, where we bumped into a couple of my roadie teammates and dropped down the backside to the Jeremy Ranch road.

Tangent: I realized on this descent that in the 14 years I’ve been riding the Mormon trail, it has somehow devolved from a mildly technical singletrack to a washed-out piece of @#^%. When did this happen? Seriously, I am so done riding this “trail”. This also raises the question: what exactly is the dividing line between “technical” and “sucky”?

In mid-July, it seems as though there’s some kind of regime-change in the mid-elevation Wasatch. Clematis and Camas are gone- Groundsel, Columbine and Larkspur almost gone. But Indian Paintbrush, Scarlet Gilia and Showy Penstemon explode, and new flowers suddenly dominate meadows and clearing alongside them.

The most interesting late-summer understory flowers are these things- composites with purple ray and yellow disk flowers. Unfortunately there are dozens of species with more or less this same color scheme in Western North America, and long ago I took to calling them all, “Negative Daisies.” In reality they’re almost all either Fleabanes (genus = Erigeron) or Asters (genus = Aster) and in the case of these guys, spotted ~7,500 feet in Pinebrook, I’m pretty sure they’re Showy Fleabane, Erigeron speciosus.

The weird thing about these “negative daisies” is that they all seem to bloom in the late summer; I’ve never seen any composite with this “negative” color scheme in bloom around here anytime before the first or second week of July. For 3 months, we’ve seen one yellow composite bloom after another and then- bam!- suddenly it’s like a switch is flipped and purple composites are all over the place. So far as I know they’re pollinated by many of the same types of bees, butterflies and moths as pollinate the earlier-blooming yellow composites. Why are so many late-blooming composites purple?

In meadows and clearings Sulphurflower Buckwheat, Eriogonum umbellatum, is flowering everywhere. Eriogonum is a huge and confusing genus, native to North America, with hundreds of species all across the US (except in the Northeast), most of which are chromosomally tetraploid. Botanists suspect that the genus is paraphyletic, and future molecular studies may end up dividing the Buckwheats into 2 different genera, and/or greatly reducing the number of species.

One of the downsides of a big group in the backcountry is that you only progress at the speed of the slowest member, and that you are delayed by the difficulties faced by any one member. So the bigger the group, the more delays, and the slower the progress. Here’s a quick example. When one of our group- let’s call him “Ian”- had a wasp fly under his sunglasses, he promptly whipped them off and flung them aside and into the brush. Now if you buy all of your eyewear at Maverik, you glance about for 30 seconds, shrug and ride on. But if you ride with $400 prescription lenses, you look a little harder. Our group of (then) 11 spent the next 25 minutes scouring the shrubs for Ian’s lenses before finding them.

Tangent: This is as good a time as any to share my optimal number for backcountry adventures: 2. Although 1 is theoretically the fastest, 2 offers so much safety/redundancy in terms of tools, assistance, rescue potential etc., that it’s a more effective number than 1. But any more than 2 means the group moves slower. Of course there can be other reasons- particularly in longer undertakings- to increase the group size past 2. But any group larger than 4 almost inevitably degenerates into a dick-dance on longer, more challenging outings. Although strangely, 4 usually seems to work better than 3. I don’t know why this is.

Nested Tangent: Know what else works like this? Groups of motorcyclists. Next time you see one of those huge groups of Harley-rider weekend warriors stopped at a restaurant or an overlook, check out how long it takes them organized and rolling out of the lot- like forever.

But as long as we’re talking about looking for stuff in shrubs, this is a good time to check out another shrub. By now the Serviceberry and Chokecherry are completely done blooming, as is, with a few lingering hangers-on, the Ninebark. But there’s still one sizeable shrub that’s still flowering, especially in the better-watered draws. It’s Elderberry, genus = Sambucus. Unlike the other 3 Wasatch shrubs we’ve looked at with white flowers this year, Elderberries aren’t members of the Rose family, but are more closely-related to Honeysuckle. Their leaves are distinctly different from any other Wasatch shrub: opposite, pinnately-compound and finely-toothed.

There are 2 Elderberry Species in the Wasatch: Blue Elderberry, S. mexicana, (pic above, right) and Red Elderberry, S. racemosa (pic left). Blue grows more out in the open, and has flatter, more disk-like flower-clusters. Red sticks more to the shade, doesn’t grow as tall, and has more brush or dome-shaped flower-clusters. Later in the season, both will produce berries (of their respective namesake colors.) People have long used elderberries for wines, jams, and various medicinal purposes*, but since they contain cyanide (especially the Red elderberries), you have to know what you’re doing.

*There’s some- but not a ton- of evidence that some of the chemicals in Elderberry may be helpful in fighting the flu, not as a preventative, but rather to shorten the duration. If you Google “sambucol” you’ll find various alternative-medicine products touting these supposed benefits.

Shortly before the Canyons Red Pine Lodge, several of our group peeled off and climbed over the divide and into Mill Creek Canyon. We were down to 7.

Next Up: Heat and Venom

This Is Not A Real Post

Because my real posts have actual information in them. Plus cool graphics and meandering tangents (which oddly have turned out to be the one thing most people actually read in this blog.) But anyway I don’t have a real post today, just a heads-up/shout-out to local mtn bikers.

Tomorrow is the 4^th annual Steiner100. 3 years ago my friend OCRick (guy who never reads my blog) turned 60. In celebration of that milestone he put together a 100 mile mtn-bike ride that starts and ends at his house in Salt Lake, near Bonneville Golf Course. We enjoyed the ride so much we’ve repeated it annually, and tomorrow will be #4.

Tangent: Yes, OCRick is now 63, and he routinely rides- and hangs fine with- guys 20-30 years younger. He is the toughest old SOB I have ever known.

Nested Tangent: Here’s the best OCRick story: He was 4F’d from the army (and thus spared service in Vietnam.) I’ll skip the details, but he was deemed medically unfit for Army service, which if you know him is absolutely ridiculous, because if I were to clone just one of my friends in order to create an army of ultra-mean, tough, durable supersoldiers, who could march all day, sleep on the ground, eat crappy food and kill people with their teeth, I would totally pick OCRick.

Anyway, our route will take us over most of the best, well-known mtb trails between Salt Lake and Park City, including Mormon Trail, 24/7, Glenwild, Cobblestone, Flying Dog, Pinebrook, Mid-Mountain, Crescent Grade, Apex, Keystone, Wasatch Crest, Great Western, Big Water and Pipeline. So if you’re out on any of those trails and see us roll by (or pass us collapsed alongside the trail), make sure to say hi. How will you know us? That’s easy- those of us who rode it Year One have matching jerseys, which you can see in the photo below.

Have a great weekend. Oh, one more thing-

Update to Yesterday’s Post: Yesterday “Lance” heard back from the insurance company. The good news is that they will indeed cover Gleevec. The bad news was that the figure I gave that Lance would pay was low. Lance’s monthly co-pay for this drug will be $769 per month, for the rest of his life.

Assuming Lance retires at age 70, and could have saved that money, and let’s say put it all in municipal tax-free bonds paying 4.5%, that’s about $700,000 dollars less he’ll have at retirement. But at least he’s safe from Socialism.

The Strangeness of Cancer

To no one’s surprise but my own, I did not fatally succumb to the flu. After 2 restless nights of sweat-soaked sheets I awoke dry and rested yesterday morning, feeling largely recovered except for a lingering cough.

I make fun of a lot of things in this blog, and partly that’s because I feel that if I can keep it light, a casual reader might be a bit more likely to stick with some of the geeky stuff that I think is so cool about the living world. So if you’re a regular reader, I hope that you’ll cut me a little slack for today’s not-funny post. And yes, not only is it un-funny, but it’s got science in it. But it’s science that any motivated 8^th-grader could understand, and it’s important. So stick with it.

About 2 weeks ago a longtime friend and colleague, who I’ve known and worked with for over a decade, was diagnosed with leukemia. Before I go any further, let me be up-front and say this story turns out largely OK- so far, this is a “good” cancer story, if there can ever be such a thing.

This friend- let’s call him “Lance”*- had recently been diagnosed by an “Instacare”** physician with mononucleosis. But when his symptoms worsened, he returned to his family physician, who ran a series of blood tests. In the 2 weeks since, specialists have conducted further tests, and detected a tell-tale chromosomal anomaly indicating the specific variant of leukemia with which he’s afflicted. But I’ll explain all that in a moment.

*Unlike most of my lame-O-not-really-pseudonyms, this one really is not his real name. I’ve actually mentioned “Lance” a couple of times- under a different pseudonym- previously in this blog.

**This isn’t intended as a slam on “Instacare” physicians or facilities. I’ve received excellent care from healthcare providers in walk-in facilities many, many times.

Two and a half years ago, my favorite uncle* went to the doctor complaining of acute malaise and a nicked-while-flossing gum that wouldn’t quit bleeding. He was diagnosed with leukemia, and was dead 10 days later. By the time we all realized he had hours to live I was in Houston on a business trip, desperately trying to figure out how to get to Boston while he was still lucid. I didn’t make it.

*Twin A is named for him. And yes, I still always plug his book.

In the busy-ness and goings-ons that surround unexpected deaths and memorial services, there wasn’t really ever an appropriate time or opportunity for me to learn what type of leukemia killed my uncle, and none of my close family either asked at the right time or understood the details. To this day I don’t understand specifically what killed him, or why his earlier treatment for prostate cancer (radioactive seeds) apparently precluded what would have supposedly been the optimal therapy.

So when Lance told me he had leukemia, I quickly knuckled down and learned everything I could about it.

Cancer is the most perplexing of diseases because it’s so unlike a “normal” disease. Even in this modern day and age, here in the US most of us still latch on to the age-old concept of a “disease” being something you “catch”- like plague or smallpox or typhus or cholera. And today, with those traditional diseases largely eradicated from our first-world lives, more and more of us, and the people in our lives, manage to live long enough to “achieve” cancer.

When you talk to people about cancer, you quickly notice that most folks (and you probably) are more “comfortable” with the idea of cancers that seem to have some kind of “reason” behind them. The classic example is the long-term smoker and lung cancer. We’re sad of course for the victim, but somehow there’s a bit of comfort for us in that there’s at least some “sense” in it, some explanation, and even something that could have been “done” about it: You should regularly wash your hands if you want to avoid catching the flu, and you should abstain from tobacco if you wish to avoid lung cancer.

But those obvious cause-and-effect cancers from things like smoking, or radiation, or asbestos exposure are only a portion of the myriad forms and types of cancer, and the mysterious “causes” of so many of these cancers just add to the pain and anguish experienced by those touched by them. And yet we so want to understand the cause, because when you get down to it, cancer isn’t simply a disease; it’s a malfunction.

This blog covers a lot of ground, but its overall underlying theme is my fascination with living things. When I started the project, what intrigued me most about living things was hard for me to put my finger on; I used terms like “wonder” and “beauty.” And while those terms are certainly still worthwhile and valid, I feel now that I can better express the object of my fascination: reliable complexity. What amazes me about living things- all living things- is that something so darn complicated can work so amazingly, reliably well.

Consider my car. It’s a 10-year-old Toyota. I drive it- alone- to all kinds of remote places from which a tow would cost in the thousands of dollars. And so I take reliability and maintenance issues quite seriously. Sometimes when I’m on a long drive in the backcountry I think about all of the hundreds of parts in my car that are all working together: pistons, alternator, water pump, oil pump, radiator, clutch, tires, flywheel, various belts and joints. They all have to work, all the time, and that they do so the vast, vast majority of the time is a testament to Toyota’s fine engineering, manufacturing and quality control.

But compared to a single living cell, my Toyota is a moronically simple device. The complexity and nuances of the biochemical processes going on in a single cell are mind-boggling, far more advanced than any automobile, spacecraft or supercomputer ever designed by human engineers. And yet the cell works, and it works reliably- far more reliably than my Toyota.

Now consider a complex, multi-cellular organism, like a person. We’re talking trillions of these cells, each one a masterpiece of “engineering”, all working together in a well-functioning machine that performs tasks of dexterity and analysis unmatched by any robot or computer, running at levels of reliability Toyota engineers could only dream of, most often for several decades, with practically zero maintenance.

The instruction manual for this machine is of course the genes in the nucleus every one of your cells*, and of all the amazing tasks these instructions carry out, probably the most daunting and impressive is how they manage to drive, guide and limit the growth and development of those trillions of cells compromising your body. And when you step back and think about this awesome complexity, it makes you regard cancer in a different way. Because the strangest, most remarkable thing about cancer isn’t that it strikes so many of us- it’s that we all aren’t already long dead of it.

*With some obvious exceptions, such as red blood cells and sex cells… and I’m ignoring mitochondrial DNA here.

I once read a statistic that if humans were immortal, the average life span would only be about 600 years*. That’s how long on average it would take for any one of us to get killed in a car-wreck, bike-accident or coyote-attack. Another interesting statistic would be: if we didn’t die of anything else, how long on average would it take us on average to die from cancer? I don’t know that anyone’s done the math, but I’ll bet it’s a lot less than 600 years. Multi-cellular organisms have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to detect and repair genetic damage or copying errors that give rise to cancers, but someday, in the face of a long life plagued by tobacco, UV exposure and a gazillion other potential carcinogens, our repair mechanisms will eventually fail to keep up. If we were all to live long enough, it’d be a virtual certainty that we’d all ultimately experience cancer of some sort.

*No, I can’t remember where I read it. It was years ago, and might well be BS, but certainly there is a number, and I’d be shocked if it were greater than 1,000 years.

When you think about it, that makes sense. Living things evolve features and abilities in response to pressures, and over something like 99.99% of the time people have been around, there was never any meaningful selection pressure to evolve DNA-repair machinery that reliably worked for 70 or 80 years; people just didn’t live that long. It would be like Toyota designing a water pump that lasted for 30 years. They could probably do it- but why?

Leukemia, as most people know, is cancer of the blood or bone marrow. Most of the early symptoms are caused by excessive numbers of white blood cells- Lance’s most pronounced symptom was an enlargement of the spleen- but some types are asymptomatic for many years and are only detected through routine blood tests. Right now Lance has about 25 times as many white blood cells in a given volume of blood than you or I do. There are several different forms of leukemia, which are described as either “acute” or “chronic.” Both adjectives sound pretty bad to me, but it turns out that “acute” means “wicked bad” and “chronic” means well, if not “good”, then better than “acute.”

Lance’s leukemia is one of the chronic forms. Specifically it is chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) and it turns out that this is one of the most fascinating of all cancers for 2 reasons. First, it was the first cancer to be linked to a specific genetic cause and second, it’s one of the best cancer-research-success stories.

Like other leukemias, CML manifests itself through an abundance of white blood cells. It appears later in life, usually after age 40*, and afflicts more men than women. But though it appears well into adulthood, its origins lie far in the past, all the way back past childhood, birth and even conception.

*Lance is 36.

About 1 out of every 600 humans is born with a reciprocal chromosomal translocation, which is where some of the parts of one chromosome wind up on another non-homologous chromosome. (The real number of such translocations is thought to be much higher, but some underdetermined proportion of them result in spontaneous miscarriages.) Translocations occur during meiosis, the process through which haploid* sex cells (eggs, sperm) are created.

*”Haploid” means having ½ the “full” or “diploid” number of chromosomes. So the sperm from your father and the egg from your mother each carried 23 chromosomes, giving you your “diploid” total of 46.

Side Note: The “non-homologous” bit means that the exchange is between 2 different chromosomes in different locations. Remember, we have chromosomes in pairs, one from each parent. Homologous chromosomes- meaning the two at the same location- routinely exchange genes during meiosis through a process called chromosomal crossover. Occasionally there can be problems in chromosomal crossover, but they’re different problems than the kind of translocation problem we’re talking about here.

About 1 out of every 100,000 people is born with a specific translocation in which parts of chromosomes #9 and #22 wind up in each other’s place. Specifically a piece of chromosome # 9 known as the ABL1 gene winds up in a stretch of chromosome #22 that is part of what’s called the “Breakpoint Cluster Region”. The modified chromosome #22 is known as the “Philadelphia* chromosome” and its presence is considered a firm diagnosis of CML**.

*The research that lead to the discovery of this anomaly took place in Philadelphia.

**About 5% of CML cases don’t seem to involve the Philadelphia chromosome. The cause behind these cases is not clear, but other, similar translocations are suspected.

The ABL1 gene is responsible for encoding a protein that controls several aspects of the cell lifecycle, including cell division. On the other hand, geneticists aren’t exactly clear on the function of the BCR region over on chromosome #22. But they’re very clear on what happens when that hunk of ABL1 winds up in BCR. An alternate protein is created- a protein that doesn’t exist in the rest of us. (I pulled this graphic from the University of Bonn Medical Center site. It’s way better than anything I could’ve cooked up.)

This protein, called the BCR-ABL fusion protein, “works”, but works a little differently from the standard (ABL1) protein. It doesn’t require activation by another protein; it’s active from the get-go. It activates several other proteins related to cell lifecycle, effectively speeding up cell division. And on top of that, it seems to work against some of the very same DNA repair mechanisms that prevent cancerous cell growth.

Tangent: The various “mistakes” in genes and gene replication is in itself a fascinating topic. Translocations, copying errors, deletions and other anomalies have played a huge role in the evolution of life. Here’s a quick example from the very same chromosome- #9- that effects far more than 1 out of 100,000 of us. One of the genes on chromosome #9 is the ABO gene, which determines your blood type. People with blood type O, which includes about 40% of Europeans (including me) are actually missing a single “letter” in their ABO gene. This one-letter ancestral deletion shifted the relative positions of a whole bunch of other “letters” within the gene, and dramatically altered the way ABO is expressed; specifically our blood cells are different.

The interesting thing about blood types is why there are multiple types around. If the A/B/AB types are better than O, or vice-versa, why wouldn’t one or the other come to dominate over time? The likeliest reason seems to be disease resistance. If you have type A, B, or AB blood, you have probably stronger resistance to cholera than I do. But it seems likely that my resistance to malaria is better than yours.

CML’s probably been around forever. Most people who have ever lived didn’t make it till 40 anyway, and those of our ancestors who did presumably got their baby-making and child-rearing out of the way before then. But today most of us in the developed world make it well past 40, and as recently as a decade ago, CML was most often something of a slow death sentence. It was usually treated with various chemo-type drugs (cytarabine) and in younger patients, sometimes bone marrow transplants*.

*Bone marrow transplants can cure CML, but there’s a good chance of the transplant killing the patient.

Chemotherapy (and radiation) treatments are intended to “work” by killing cancerous cells. The obvious problem with these therapies is that it is extremely hard to kill cancerous cells without killing lots of healthy cells in the process, which is why chemotherapy is so terrible for the patient. When most people think of a cancer “cure”, they often think of some miracle drug that would somehow recognize and kill only cancerous cells, but since cancer takes so very many forms, this seems like a tough dream to realize.

In 2001, the FDA approved a type of drug called Imatnib, marketed by Novartis under the name Gleevec. Gleevec doesn’t kill cancer- or any-cells. Rather it inhibits the action of the BCR-ABL fusion protein. The development was an excellent example of Rational Drug Design, a methodology pioneered in the 1990’s of designing drugs by understanding their specific biological targets.

Gleevec therapy is not without its downsides. In its early phases the medication causes significant nausea and body aches. It’s also expensive; without insurance it costs ~$5,000/month. And you take it forever. Lance has insurance; hopefully he’ll be paying more like $500/month. So that’s like a sports-car payment for the rest of your life, which I guess isn’t a bad deal seeing as you get a life. But it’s worth thinking about what would it would mean if Lance had been between jobs, or without coverage; treatment would likely bankrupt him and his family within a few years*.

*Yes, this is my plug in support of public-option healthcare reform. If all those other little crappy** countries can do it, surely we can.

**Special Note for Non-US Readers: Forgive me. I don’t really think your countries are “crappy” at all. That’s just the kind of ra-ra jingoistic trash-talk we Americans use to get each other riled up about doing important stuff, like putting people on the moon, curing diseases or invading other countries.

But chances are (97%, according to Lance’s oncologist) that within a couple of months the Gleevec will get Lance’s renegade protein under control, his white-blood cell count will decline, and he’ll be feeling well again, quite likely better than he’s felt in a year or more.

Cost, bureaucracy and hassle aside, there are great cancer stories, and Gleevec is one of them. Lance isn’t out of the woods yet, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel*.

*His words.

Dry Foothills, 3 Big Stalks, and I Am Dying of Flu

So I didn’t do a ride yesterday, because I am pretty certain that I Am Dying Of Flu. Seriously, shakes, shivers, headache, cough, this is it. Do me a favor: if I keel over in the next few hours and you know me and come to my funeral, tell Awesome Wife that you really enjoyed this blog and it wasn’t a total waste of time.

So I’m going to use this post to catch up on some new things blooming in the foothills that I saw when I rode up there last Thursday before work.

Tangent: This is the big problem with this project- I am always behind. I’m always seeing stuff, investigating it and thinking, “Hey this is cool. I should do a post about it.” But I’m always behind. For 2 weeks I’ve been trying to work in a post about snails, and then there’s that speed-of-light post I owe Dug*.

*It’s not something I’d planned on blogging about anytime soon, but I feel a certain pressure to honor the request, particularly since if I find myself in need of any of his expertise** I could see myself calling back the favor.

** Never met the guy, but from what I hear, yes, that is his area of expertise.

Planning For The End

But first I’m going to whine about how awful I feel. Last evening I was pretty sure the end was in sight. I sat down with Awesome Wife and gave her careful, well-considered instructions for when I’m gone.

Me: Don’t marry an old guy.

AW: You’re not dying.

Me: Whatever. Don’t marry an old guy after I’m gone.

AW: What do you care what kind of guy I marry after you die?

Me: I just don’t like the idea of some old guy sleeping in my bed, passing gas in my house and using all my stuff. Marry a young guy.

AW: So then a young guy would be sleeping in your bed and using all your stuff- what’s the difference?

Me: Young guys have better control over their flatulence.

AW: You’re not dying.

Me: OK, well just promise me this- that on an ongoing basis you’ll make awkward, inappropriate comparisons between me and your next husband.

AW: Like what?

Me: Oh, I don’t know. Maybe something like, “Huh. That’s funny. My first husband never suffered from erectile dysfunction…”

AW: Dinner’s ready.

The Foothills Already

Here’s the thing about the foothills. In the Spring I’m totally in love with them. I like them in the Fall too, and even in the Winter when the ground is bare but the trails frozen.

But they just don’t do it for me in the Summer. By mid-July there’s so much going on and growing and blooming up above 7,000 feet that I come home from every ride just totally in love with the world, with a big grin on my face.

But the foothills in July are brown and dusty, the wilted grasses and shrubs a sad reminder of the explosion of green just 6-10 weeks earlier.

I always seem to return from Summer foothill rides parched and beat, even if the temps were cool and the ride easy. It’s a mental thing.

Side Note: The obvious question is: So why do I ride the foothills at all in the Summer? Convenience. I can pedal onto Shoreline from my house.

And that’s a shame, because throughout the Summer the foothills continue to change, and in fact on Thursday’s ride I saw 4 new wildflowers, 3 of them Big Stalks.

Riding up the lower part of Dry Creek right now, you may see a few of these down in the gully. It’s Showy Milkweed, Asclepias speciosa (pic left). This is the first Milkweed we’ve looked at, though I’ve referenced this family a couple of times previously, specifically the class of defensive chemicals it produces- cardenolides- to ward off predators, and 2 animals that have evolved immunity to these chemicals. The first was Monarch butterflies, who use Milkweeds as a food source, and ingest the cardenolides themselves, making themselves in turn unpalatable to predators. Second was the Black-Headed Grosbeak, who regularly dines upon- you got it- Monarch Butterflies.

There are about 140 species of Milkweed. They’re part of Apocynaceae, the Dogbane family, and not particularly closely related to anything we’ve looked at previously. Showy Milkweed occurs throughout Western North America, and is arguably the most attractive and dramatic of the Milkweeds around here. Check out these flowers! (pic right) The 5 petals have an elegant cup-like shape, and the 5 stamens arc gracefully toward the center. Even the sepals are colorful and attractive. This bent-downward shape of the sepals is called reflexed. The plant is a leafy stalk, 3-4' high, with 3 – 6 spherical umbels, each bearing a couple dozen or so flowers.

Tangent: Right after this I stopped for another photo. Now I had planned a mellow, easy ride (with a race coming up in just 48 hours) to the top of Dry Creek and back. But just then I heard a couple of riders behind me. As I started pedaling again, I heard them closing on me, and my weird, permanently-stuck-in-adolescence competitive instinct kicked in and I started hammering, clear up beyond the overlook and to the highpoint of Shoreline Trail. Which meant of course that I ended the ride both beat and late for work. Why do I do that? I didn’t even know these guys. Why on Earth should I have cared about getting “caught?” I am an idiot…

Well, my idiocy at least brought me up to the next bunch of big stalks, up around 5,700 feet. This guy is Moth Mullein, Verbascum blattaria (pic left). It’s one of 2 common mulleins in Utah, the other being Wooly Mullein, V. Thapsus, which has a similar stalk-profile, but with hair-covered leaves almost all the way up the stalk, and the flowers bunched up right at the top. Mulleins are exotics, native to Eurasia, and have long since colonized their way across nearly all of the lower 48 states*

*Woolly Mullein is in all of them. Moth Mullein is (strangely) absent from Wyoming and Minnesota. Go figure.

Tangent: I should mention that one the way up, I passed through one of these wonderful shady draws, full of Maple and Scrub Oak, that are such welcome oases in the summer foothills (pic right). Cool air pools in them overnight, and they hold just a bit humidity, providing a delightful wake-up snap on morning rides.

Mullein is a biennial, meaning it has a 2-year lifecycle. The first year it’s a low, little mini-shrublet that doesn’t flower, but builds up energy and structure for year 2. In the 2^nd year it shoots up its signature stalk, flowers, seed, and… dies. That’s it. This stand won’t be here next year- or rather the stand will, but the individual stalks will not.

This is in contrast to Showy Milkweed, which is a perennial. Unless it gets trampled or otherwise trashed, it’ll pop up in that exact same spot next year.

Tangent: Here’s something else about Mullein: the leaves, when smoked, supposedly relive bronchial congestion in early respiratory infections*. And in fact yesterday, miserable as I was, I actually toyed with the half-baked idea of pedaling my sick, dying ass up to 5,700 to collect some leaves**.

*This may be just for the Woolly Mullein; I’m not sure.

**Do they still sell rolling papers in convenience stores? Been a long time since I, er, “rolled” anything…

Back down lower, on the way home, I passed the third big flowering stalk of the ride: Common Sunflower, Helianthus annuus (pic right).

Side Note: There was actually a 4^th Big Stalk on this ride, the Evil Death Weed Musk Thistle. But since I blogged in detail about that sinister exotic last year, I’m omitting it from this post.

This guy is the classic, prototype composite flower, and so closely-related to many of the yellow composites we’ve looked at previously, Balsamroots and Mules Ears in particular. I love these flowers- take a moment and check one out close-up next time you run/walk/pedal past a stand. Each one of those little, 5-pointed yellow stars in the center is the stigma of an individual flower. The beauty and complexity of these guys never fails to impress me.

Sunflowers are different from the 2 previous Big Stalks in tat they’re annuals, meaning that they go from germinating seed, to mini-shrublet, to towering/flowering stalk to seed to death in just one short growing season. Which is pretty impressive, given that they grow up to six feet in height. This plant does not screw around.

Sunflowers are generally thought of as “weeds”, and so you may be wondering- native or exotic? To which the answer is sorta-kinda both. The Sunflowers you see here are natives, but commercially farmed Sunflowers are the descendants of Sunflowers that were brought back to Europe a couple centuries back and specifically bred to have One Big Head* as opposed to the multiple smaller heads of the native variety.

*Awesome Wife says that I also exhibit this characteristic.

That’s it for stalks, but I want to highlight just one more flower- this one a non-stalk. Yes, I know, you’re thinking, “You’ve already showed us that guy- it’s Tufted Evening Primrose!” But it’s not. Look closely- the leaves are different- simple narrow and un-lobed/spiked. The X-shaped stamen is smaller, notably less obvious. And the 4 white petals are smooth, not crinkly. It’s Birdcage Evening Primrose, Oenothera deltoides, so named because it’s post-bloom dried-out stalks collapse inward, forming a little “cage.”

I almost didn’t look twice at this guy, and a year ago I probably wouldn’t even have noticed the small differences. Even in the dry, parched dusty summer, the variety of foothill wildflowers continues to amaze me. OK, gotta get back to work on my will. I wonder who I should leave my awesome pine cone collection to?

5 New Summer Wildflowers, 3 Revelations About Me, and TdF-Related Shocker!

Ah, another great summer weekend. Racing, wildflowers, pool-time with the Trifecta and margaritas with the neighbors. Summertime does not suck. Lots to blog about, so let’s get rolling.

Sunday morning I did a nice, mellow Mill Creek mtn bike ride with OCRick. I hadn’t ridden with OCRick in a couple of weeks and we were both in the mood for something easy. Usually OCRick has zero tolerance for my stopping-and-checking-out wildflowers/moss/lichens/shrubs hijinx, but yesterday he was not only indulgent, but even encouraging, of my frequent stops. I attribute this to 2 reasons.

First, OCRick has finally figured out that frequent photo-geek stops have the side-effect of moderating my pace. I tend to be a fast climber on a bike, which sometimes means I set a faster pace than some of my friends- OCRick included- are entirely comfortable with. After 13 years of riding together, he’s finally figured out that encouraging my stops slows the overall climbing pace of a ride*.

*In marked contrast to UTRider, who figured out the same approximately 20 minutes into our 1st ride together, and cunningly loaned me his camera- as a substitute for the one I’d just dropped on the road- for the remainder of the ride.

But the other reason was that we were both beat. OCRick had just returned from a week+ combination mtn/road biking trip in Colorado and…

Tangent: OCRick (pic right), who did this trip while recuperating from recent knee surgery, managed to crash in Carbondale and received about a dozen stitches in his arm as a result. And this brings up probably the most remarkable thing about him*: out of all my circle of friends, OCRick has been to the emergency room at least 5 times as often as any of the rest of us. At age 63, his extremities are festooned with scars and held together with the help of several pins.

*Other than never reading my blog.

First Thing About Me

…and I was trashed from Saturday’s race, which brings me to the first- and only one of which I am proud- thing about me in this post. Over the last 2 weeks I mentioned my recent racing-category-upgrade to Cat3, and my ensuing self-doubts concerning both my ability and sanity in doing so. Saturday was my first Cat3 race, the Porcupine Hill Climb up Big Cottonwood Canyon, and I’m pleased to report that I did not embarrass myself: I placed 4^th.

Tangent: Because when you get right down to it, for us 99.99% of bike racers who never get anywhere near being pro, there’s really only one thing that matters- Not Embarrassing Yourself. That’s it. That’s all we really care about. Guys will tell you they like the camaraderie, they like being part of a team, they like challenging themselves, and maybe some of that stuff is at play too, but mainly we just don’t want to embarrass ourselves.

This leads me to ponder on the bizarre nature of hill climb-races. In a hill-climb, you just go up. That’s the whole thing; there’s a minimum of strategy or skill required. The experience is a little over an hour of pure suffering. This was my second year doing the Porcupine Hill Climb, and both years, around Silver Fork Lodge, I thought, “This is awful. I am so hating this. Why did I pay $40 to suffer like this?” But then you finish and everyone’s telling each other what a great job they did, and within an hour you forget how much you hated it and are already thinking about next year’s race. Why is that? Why does my memory suck so badly? Oh wait- I’m going to get to that in the second thing about me…

So anyway, back to the ride. The upper Mill Creek flowers right now are fantastic. Even if you know absolutely nothing about flowers, you can’t helped but be blown away up there right now. The trails are lined with touches of almost every color- white, blue, purple, yellow, red, pink- and every open meadow is just an explosion of color. It just doesn’t get any better than right now.

Many of the flowers blooming up there are flowers we’ve looked at already- Columbine, Wild Rose, Thimbleberry, Scarlet Gilia, Utah Sweet Pea, Chokecherry, Ninebark, Small-Flowered Stickseed, Indian Paintbrush, Sticky Geranium, Richardson’s Geranium, Showy Penstemon, Mountain Bluebells, Western Larkspur, various Arnicas, and so much more. But what’s really cool about riding in the Wasatch right now is that after almost 16 months at this project I can ride a trail I’ve ridden probably a hundred times and still pick out new wildflowers. In this post I’ll highlight 5 great ones I either hadn’t seen, or hadn’t ID’d before today.

Flower Number One

First up is one I’ve been looking for for a long time- Orange Mountain Dandelion, Agoseris aurantica (pic left.) It’s closely related to the “standard” Mountain Dandelion, A. glauca, which we looked at back on May in Round Valley, and in fact the 2 species sometimes hybridize. I’ve seen this guy in every flower guide I own, but never spotted it till yesterday, trailside up at the meadow on the saddle between Mill Creek and the Canyons at about 8,500 feet. This one is a stunner- it just might beat out Blue Sailor for my all-time favorite composite.

By the way, an interesting little anatomical thing (besides their ray-only flowers and calyx-parachutes which I explained last year when I blogged about “regular” Dandelions) about both orange and yellow Mountain Dandelions is that their “stems” aren’t really stems. They’re peduncles, which is technically the connecting stalk between the base of a plant and its flowers

Second Thing About Me

So many composites are yellow, one that’s not is really eye-catching. If you don’t pay close attention, yellow composites can start to run together. And that brings me to the 2^nd thing about me of this post, of which I’m considerably less proud, as it suggests that I’m inattentive, gradually senescing, or possibly even a little bit racist. But here goes: little blonde-haired children are all starting to look the same to me.

Twin B has 4 friends in the neighborhood. All are little girls, 7 or 8 years old, with blue eyes and shoulder-length blonde hair. And I’m starting to get them mixed up. It’s to the point now where I deliberately avoid using first names (“Hey there!” “Hi kiddo!”) because I’m afraid of making a mistake. Of course this could be attributable to my previously-blogged-about dismally low Dunbar number, but I sometimes wonder if there’s some strange sub-conscious race-recognition/categorization thing going on.

I grew up in a place where blonde kids were fairly rare. Oh sure there were blonde kids around, but they were maybe like 1 out of every 10 or 15. But here in Utah it seems like 4 out of 5 little kids are blonde. And because I didn’t grow up around so many blonde people, well, sometimes, when I’m tired, or had a couple of drinks, they all look the same to me. Is it racist or something to admit that? Oh boy, I feel terrible just writing it. I probably just lost a bunch of (probably blonde) readers. Well, all I can say is, it probably didn’t freak you out as much as the next/third revelation of this post will, which is a Total Blasphemous Shocker.

Flower Number Two

The second flower is considerably less spectacular, but one I’ve pedaled by countless times before finally knuckling down and IDing yesterday: Large-Leaf Aven, Geum macrophyllum (pic left). It’s all over the place between 6,000 and 7,500 feet, low to the ground and easy to ignore. It’s not spectacular but it’s so common that it falls into the I-really-need-to-know-what-this-is category. This little guy has an impressive range; it occurs all over Western North America, from Alaska to Mexico, and it’s yet another member of the fabulous Rose family. It belongs to that first subfamily I blogged about in the monster-long Rosaceae post I did last week, and so is more closely-related to things like Wild Rose, Raspberries or Thimbleberry than it is to say Serviceberry or Chokecherry. A good clue for this guy is its distinctive leaves (pic right).

Side note: “Aven” is a tricky name. It’s most often used for plants like this guy, which is part of the Geum genus. But it’s also used for plants like Mountain Aven or Drummond’s Aven, which belong to the genus Dryas, and are part of a completely different subfamily of Rosaceae, specifically the Cliffrose-Mountain Mahogany group.

Flower Number Three

The third flower is also yellow, but it’s a total looker: Common Yellow Monkeyflower, Mimulus gutattus (pic left). Like Penstemon (and Toadflax), Mimulus is part of the Snapdragon family, and the flowers are obviously similar in form. But in Monkeyflowers, the “face” is the showiest part, whereas the “tube” of a Penstemon flower is considerably longer than the “face” is broad. There are about 20 species of Monkeyflower in the Intermountain West, more than half of which are yellow. And there are all sorts of varieties of M. Gutattus, so this group can be a bit confusing. But there are at least 2 cool things about this flower. First, all Monkeyflowers have hinged stigmas at the ends of their styles. If anything touches it, it closes. But- and here’s the cool part- if it closes on anything other than pollen from the same species of Monkeyflower, it re-opens in a few minutes! Even cooler, it will re-open if it closes on its own pollen, meaning from the same plant, whether the same or another flower!

Side Note: Supposedly this is easy to see later in the summer, as the petals and stamens fall away, leaving the style exposed. I’ll be on the look-out for it.

The second cool thing is that over the last 60 years, Mimulus has been one of the most intensely studied plant genera. It includes tremendous variation, with different species adapted to deserts, mountains and even aquatic environments. It includes both annuals and perennials, herbaceous forbs and woody shrubs, diploids and polyploids, and best of all, it has a small genome, making it well-suited for genetic study. Anyway, even if you don’t care about that stuff, it’s got those cool red dots inside its “throat.”

Flower Number Four

Three down, two to go. This next guy is another in the category of “small, unspectacular, but I see it all over the place, so should get my act together and ID it." It has a cool name: Leafy Jacob’s Ladder, Polemonium foliosissimum (pic right). It’s a perennial, so you’ll see it in the same spots from year-to-year. Polemonium includes about 25 species and is part of Polemoniaceae, the Phlox family, and the various phloxes we saw early in the season in the foothills are the things we’ve looked at most closely-related to it.

Now here’s the interesting thing about Leafy Jacob’s Ladder: If you live in Colorado or New Mexico, or other stretches of the Rockies, you may be saying to your self, “Hey wait a minute- Jacob’s Ladder is blue!” And mostly it is. But here in Northern Utah, almost all of our P. foliosissimum is of the subspecies var. alpinum, in which the flowers are white. So if you fall out of an airplane in the night in July between San Francisco and St. Louis, and wake up* in a Mountain meadow and want to figure out if you’re in Utah or Colorado, check out the color of these flowers.

*OK I grant that it would be extremely unlikely that you would in fact, “wake up.” But it is possible. This, right here, is my absolute favorite falling-out-of-a-plane story. Seriously, how amazing is this?

Third Thing About Me – The Shocker

OK, I saved the best flower for last. But first, I need to deliver on my aforementioned third, shockingly blasphemous self-revelation. I hesitate to share this, knowing that a good portion of my readers are cyclists, and fearful that this will alienate me from them forever, but I just have to come clean. I can’t keep living a lie. Here we go:

I don’t watch the Tour de France.

That’s right. I- an avid cyclist, epic mountain biker and Cat3 road racer- do not watch the Tour de France. I don’t know what stage it is* or who’s wearing what jersey now or who’s shooting up what. Of course I admire the racers and the event and tradition and all, but I’m just not that interested in watching. Here’s the deal: I am the World’s Worst Sports Spectator. I don’t watch the Superbowl, the World Series, the NBA Playoffs** or the US Open. I’m just not interested. Part of it is probably that I come from a total non-sports-watching family, but I think an even greater factor is that I am fundamentally and inordinately self-involved; if I’m not playing, I don’t care who wins. You know, there’s 2 good tangents here:

*I think it’s either Alpes d’Huez or Omelette du Fromage…

**It’s the “Playoffs” in basketball, right? Or is there some other big event I’m missing?

Tangent #1: One of the absolutely weirdest things about me is that I am at all athletic. The rest of my birth-family is like an advertisement for poor fitness and lack of coordination. My Mom (who was and is pretty much the Best Mother Ever) always dutifully asks me about my races. She’ll ask how I did, and then ask the distance. And here’s the great part- whatever distance I tell her, say 80 miles, she’ll scream “Oh My God!” as I if I just told her I had paddled a canoe across the Pacific or derived a Unified Field Theory. The idea that someone could pedal- much less race- a distance on a bicycle that would take longer than 15 minutes to drive in an automobile is utterly incomprehensible to her.

Tangent #2: OK, so you think I’m a whack-job because I don’t watch the TdF. But can we at least agree that sports fandom often borders on complete lunacy? Here in Utah, the most bizarre rivalry is the football rivalry between the U. of Utah and BYU. Grown men- even old men- get phenomenally amped up about these games and their outcomes, which of course involve… a bunch of 20 year old kids throwing an oblong ball around. The fans profess to hate the other school and all it stands for, as if they were Jews and Arabs fighting over the Golan Heights. Which is odd because both schools are largely composed of… white, mainly Mormon, kids from Utah.

This wacky fandom extends to the Tour. All kinds of people tell me how they record and watch the Tour nightly, which is all well and good, except that many of these people- who react incredulously when I confess I don’t watch it- are people who pretty much never ride their bikes. They’re like, ‘What? You’re not watching the Tour??”” And I’m like, “Well I’ve been busy doing stuff- like actually riding my bicycle.”

Phew, good to get that off my chest. Well, if there’s a still a reader left who hasn’t clicked away in revulsion or disgust, I’ve got a great flower for you. Check this out:

Flower Number Five

It’s Case’s Fitweed, Corydalis caseana, ( pic right) and it’s a member of the Poppy Family, Papaveraceae (and in fact I think it’s the first member of this family I’ve blogged about since the rare Bearclaw Poppy, which we saw last Spring down in St. George.) Its flowers are unlike any others, with 2 white outer petals flaring out at the top, and 2 reddish-purplish petals nestled inside, joined at the tips. This species is pretty rare in the Wasatch- and in Utah in general, and occurs most often streamside in PLT forests between 7,000 and 9,000 feet, which is exactly where you can find it in Upper Mill Creek Canyon (see map above), along the Great Western Trail (pic below, left).

It’s called “Fitweed” because of its effects on sheep and cattle. Although they find the foliage tasty, the plant contains the alkaloid Bulbocapnine (diagram below, right), which is toxic to livestock. Late in the summer the fertilized flowers will transform into inch-long seedpods, which will burst explosively to scatter their seeds.

There were at least 3 other new flowers up there I could’ve blogged about, but well, you need to stop reading now and start composing your TdF-related hate-mail. But I am telling you, this week is spectacular up there. Make sure to check it out.

Goldenrain

I’m going to shift gears here and drop nearly 6,000 feet from yesterday’s post. This post- like the last valley-based post I did, on Cottonwood seeds- is something I meant to blog about last year, never got around to, and so included it on my “If I continue this project for a second year, this is one of the things I need to blog about” list. It’s the second year, I’m still blogging, and it’s blooming again, so now’s the time.

It’s been almost 5 weeks since I blogged about what’s going down in the valley, and things have changed a lot since then. The temps are starting to break into the 90’s regularly, Awesome Wife is regularly shuttling the out-of-school-Trifecta to the pool, and hillsides (and select patches of our lawn) have faded to brown. The last of the flowering trees stopped blooming 6 or 7 weeks ago. Until last week. Every year in July, there’s a tree that blooms all over my neighborhood, and in neighborhoods all over Salt Lake Valley. If you live along the Wasatch Front, you’ve probably noticed it already.

It’s the Goldenrain Tree, Koelreuteria paniculata. People plant all kinds of crazy exotics all in neighborhoods all along the Wasatch front and throughout North America, but the Goldenrain tree is really exotic. It’s native to Korea and China, and it’s one of the very few trees in North American suburbs that blooms in July. Koelreuteria is a genus of just 3 species, all native to East Asia. It’s closest (not very close, really) native Utah relatives would be our Maples- Bigtooth, Rocky Mountain and Box Elder; both genera belong to Sapindaceae, or the Soapberry family. Every year, during the first 2 weeks of July, the row of gloriously blooming Goldenrain trees along 900 South is the first thing I see on my morning drive to work, and the nearly last thing I see on my drive home. It’s bright, garishly exotic and beautiful- I just love it.

I don’t know what evolutionary pressures in the Far East led to a tree that blossoms 2 months after nearly everything else, but it seems to be doing well here. In the Eastern US it’s escaped cultivation and become an invasive (similar to our own Russian Olive, also on my Year-2-Need-To-Blog-About list.) When I stopped for these photos the flowers were abuzz with bees*.

*Only small, wild bees, so far as I could tell. I didn’t see any Honeybees, though they’re common in the gardens of our neighborhood.

Tangent: Yesterday I stopped on the way to work, pulled over and spent about 10 minutes checking out a couple of these trees in my ‘hood and taking photos. For several years I’ve been known as “the Bike Guy” in my ‘hood. People will meet me at the neighborhood summer BBQ and say, “Oh yeah, you’re the Bike Guy!” because they usually see me rolling past their window at 6AM or so.

Nested Tangent: Speaking of evolution, know what’s evolved in a great way over the last several years? Our Neighborhood Summer BBQ, that’s what. When we moved in, the BBQ was kind of, uh… dorky. We’d open with a prayer (yes, it felt a bit like the ward), ate hot dogs and jell-o, and then a bit later did a patriotic sing-a-long, like “America the Beautiful” or something. But each year it’s gotten a little cooler, and this year it was great. There was a (almost-hip*) band, the food was catered by Rico’s Tacos, and there was even- get this- a discreetly-placed cooler of beer for non-members! My neighborhood is getting so cool- if this keeps up in another 5 years we’ll be mixing martinis and conducting gay wedding ceremonies at the Summer BBQ!

*Yeah, still a little bit dorky, but getting there…

But over the last year+, I suspect my neighbors are beginning to refer to me as “That Weird Guy Who Stops to Take Pictures of Plants”, as I’ve pulled over bike or car countless times and jumped off/out to snap shots of their Pear trees, Austrian Pines, Magnolias and whatever else I was blogging about at the time.

Hey, like I always say, every middle-aged man needs a hobby.*

*And this one is far less hassle, worry and expense than the Argentine mistress/soulmate.

All About Leaf Structure

Other than its unusual bloom time, there are a couple other things to note if you stop to check out this tree. The leaves are pinnately-compound. I’ve used the terms “pinnate” and “palmate” a bit without ever defining them, so I guess now’s as good a time as any.

A pinnate leaf is one in which the veins, lobes, and/or leaflets all attach to a central axis. Elm and Oak leaves are 2 good examples. An Elm leaf is pinnately-veined, while (many but not all*) Oak leaves are pinnately-lobed.

A palmate leaf is one in which the veins, lobes, and/or leaflets all radiate from a single point, like a Maple leaf*.

*Gambel, White, Northern Red and English Oaks for example all have lobed leaves. Shrub Live (Turbinella) and Blue Oak are among those with non-lobed leaves

**Or like the bones of your hand.

Good so far? OK, now either pinnate or palmate leaves can be compound, meaning that one leaf consists of multiple little leaves, called leaflets. Though a compound leaf looks like a bunch of little leaves, it’s actually one big leaf in which the gaps between the lobes extend all the way down to the middle vein, which is called the rachis. So what at look at first glance like leaves on a Goldenrain tree are actually leaflets, one at the end of the rachis, the others branching off along its length in opposite pairs. Goldenrain leaves are oddly compound pinnate, meaning that there’s always a terminal leaflet at the end of the rachis.

Side Note: Horse Chestnut would be an example of a tree with compound palmate leaves.

The structure of the flowers is also interesting. While the flowers themselves are fairly “standard” looking little yellow 5-petaled things, they’re borne on structures called panicles, which are compound racemes. We most recently saw racemes when we looked at Chokecherry flowers. A panicle is like a raceme with smaller secondary racemes branching off of it, each one bearing lots of little yellow flowers.

Evolution-In-Action

Although they’ve been present in North America only for about a century or so, Goldenrain trees have already been at the center of a little evolution-in-action drama. Across broad areas of the South, their seeds are preyed upon by the Soapberry Bug*, Jadera haematoloma, (pic left pulled off bugguide.net) which penetrates the fruit-wall with its beak, liquefies and then sucks out the seeds inside. J. haematoloma’s native host is the Soapberry tree, Sapindus saponaria**, but it’s adapted to prey upon K. paniculata since its introduction to North America.

*J. haematoloma is a True Bug, which I explained when we looked at Box Elder Bugs. Which by the way these look a lot like…

**Soapberry trees don’t occur here in Utah. They make it as close as central Arizona.

But here’s the cool thing: The Goldenrain fruit-walls are about a millimeter thicker than Soapberry fruit-walls. And it turns out that the beaks of Soapberry Bugs found on Goldenrain trees are nearly a millimeter longer than those found on Soapberry trees. It’s a really neat, really short-term example of evolution just in the span of a few human generations.

Extra Detail: Like so many cool quickie-evolution stories the details are just a bit more complicated. Soapberry Bugs down in Florida and the Gulf Coast have another native host- Balloon Vine, Cardiospermum corundum, with even thicker fruit walls, and the Soapberry Bugs found on these vines have beaks that are a full 2mm longer than even those found on Goldenrain trees.

If you’re into these kinds of stories, I pulled this example out of the extremely informative (though pretty dry- you’ve been warned) book Alien Species And Evolution, by George W. Cox. The book details hundreds of examples of how the introduction of exotic species (plants, insects, fish, birds, insects- you name it) has dramatically altered the evolutionary course of both natives and exotics, here in North America and elsewhere.

The Goldenrain bloom typically lasts 2 weeks, so you’ve got about another week to check it out. It’s an interesting tree, well worth pulling over and checking out on your drive home from work. Really, who cares what the neighbors think?