Moonrises &
Leaf Collections
May 8, 2004
I made several nice trips to the woods in
the last week. Around mid-day on Sunday the 2nd we all loaded
up in the truck then went by to pick Brad up to help him find
leaves for his Biology class leaf collection project. I figured
it would be best to go after trees that you don't find around
town, so we followed Highway 215 East beside the Mulberry then
turned up toward Lick Branch. What we found there included
Cucumber Tree, Umbrella Magnolia, Basswood, Beech, and the
Hornbeams. (I picked up Smoketree on the way to Thunder Canyon
the day before.) I think Stacey got more into it than I did.
She drove Brad around town the next afternoon to get a lot of
the local tree leaves.
Tuesday after work I drove up to White Rock
Mountain for my first ever scheduled watching of the moonrise.
I needed a reason to get out and become more familiar with my
camera. I had planned on zooming-in more but once the orange
moon popped up I was overwhelmed with all the camera bells and
whistles and actually didn't notice that I'd forgotten to
increase the zoom on the lens. So I wound up with a lot of
fuzzy mountains and a tiny moon.
It was pretty dark on the hike back to the
truck. Along the trail I noticed several tiny objects glowing
brightly in the leaves. I've read about things glowing in the
dark out there, but had never seen any. I managed to pick them
up and put them in my shirt pocket. The next night I showed
them to Cliff and he was excited to have something to look at
under his microscope. The objects looked like grains of rice
except they were flat and only a sixteenth of an inch in
length. And they no longer glowed in the dark. Under the
microscope they appeared to be some kind of insect larvae.
Friday after work I drove up to White Rock
again, this time hoping to get some pictures of the pink
Mountain Azaleas I'd seen on my last trip. The wind made that
impossible, but I got to see a great sunset. There were some
light clouds out on the horizon, that along with the haze made
for a pinkish-purple glow that lasted thirty minutes after the
sun went down. I just sat down on the rocks and enjoyed the
views, the peace and quiet, and the warm breeze.
I enjoyed Friday evening so much that I had
no problem getting up early the next morning to be out again.
I left the house at 5:30 Saturday in hopes
of being somewhere along Highway 23 North when the sun came up.
I pulled off the road beside a fog-covered field and got to see
the sun light up the fog for a few fleeting moments.
After that the plan for the morning was
just to drive up Morgan Mountain Road, collect more leaves for
Brad and stop and take pictures of anything that caught my eye.
Over the last couple of weeks much of the time I've either been
in too much of a hurry or too tired to care to stop and take a
close look at things along the way. I felt I had some catching
up to do.
Up by our deer camp site I stopped to pluck
a few leaves from the only Ozark Chinkapin that I know exactly
where to find. I was only a few miles from Saint Paul by then,
so I figured what the heck I might as well drive up to Kings
River Falls to the only Hazelnut trees I know where to find
also. This was my fourth trip to the falls since I finally
found out how to get there a few years ago, and this was the
first time the falls were running. There were a bunch of
azaleas in bloom there too, and they filled the air with a
thick sweet perfume.
