My Secchi Disk

On Monday we drove up out of the ravine of Lake Billy Chinook to head into town (Culver, OR).

This is where we had our first sprinkler-sighting. The cows were quite fond of them... as are Boiseans, we later found out.

In the daylight, we got to see the fields we'd driven through the evening before, and discovered that we were staying in a Neutral Milk Hotel lover's dream...

Yes, those are carrot flowers! Fields and fields of them! Notice also the smoke rising in the picture above. At first we thought one of the Three Sisters was erupting, but it was a forest fire, beginning our new tradition of always camping within a few miles of forest fires.

These fields emanated an absolutely delicious smell. We had stopped the night before to sniff, but hadn't been quite able to identify it. Today, however, we realized it was cilantro (!), and stopped to sniff some more.

The reason that the carrots and cilantro were flowering, we surmised, is that Culver is producing seeds.

In Culver, population 802, I plopped myself down at the local wireless hot spot for five hours and churned out the final version of my professional paper, thus completing a good 18 years of schooling, hopefully the last of it.

I rewarded myself with a Beetle Baily Burger next door. The waitress told us she was going on a road trip this summer with her sister, who was moving, and she was hoping to stop in Minneapolis.

Back in the park, we need a stretch after all that sitting in front of the computer, so we decide to take a hike in true Amy-Laila style, heading out on the climb to the top of the ridge at about... what would you say from this photo?

...oh I think it was about 7:30pm.

We saw all sorts of neat things, of course, including this flower with such stiff leaves that they felt like they'd crack if you bent them. Amy identified it as a compass flower.

Then there was the mysterious ant-spider. Meaning it had the legs of a spider, but was shaped like an ant and was a neon orange color. It didn't want to be photographed.

The ant-like spider is not to be confused with an antlion. Although we didn’t see any antlions, we did spot some antlion pits. I was familiar with antlions from the Moomintroll books. In particular, I remembered how evil antlions can be, in sucking small creatures into the sand and gobbling them up, and I remembered how Moomintroll and his friends got the better of the antlion by capturing him in the hobgoblin's hat where the sand was turned into water, and the antlion was transformed into a very soggy, sorry-looking hedgehog.

The antlion traps:

We arrived at the top of the ridge after about an hour's hike when the light looked like this, and decided it was about time to head down.

But by fiddling with the camera, we still managed to get a nice photo of the view.

More soon...