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In which Layla makes up for her LJ-nonupdating with a really long post
I'm almost done with the typesetting for the new TPB, except for figuring out what to do with that one frikkin' issue I accidentally drew at the wrong (too-short) page dimensions ... the infamous issue #6. Just to make the mess even messier, I originally "fixed" it in the minicomic by adding a series of page decorations at the bottom of each page, but the result (too-short page + decoration) is too tall to fit the style of my TPB pages. So I either have to come up with new page decorations, redraw/refit the art at the correct dimensions (which would be hard; instead of being modular, that ill-conceived issue has a lot of artsy pages with complicated layouts), or just ignore the fact that it doesn't quite match the other pages.
I'm tired. We climbed the hill across the valley today. We didn't make it all the way to the top; it was 80+ degrees and we didn't bring water, so we turned back due to a combination of heat and bugs. The mosquitoes were AWFUL. We weren't expecting them to be too bad, since it's a bright sunny day and we were going to be hiking on a dry hillside rather than in a swamp, so we doped ourselves up lightly with repellent and wore T-shirts, and didn't bring the bug dope with us. Egad. It started off bad and just got worse and worse as we picked up an ever-larger cloud, until we were inhaling bugs and spending all our time swatting and swiping bugs off our arms and any other exposed skin. Poor Orion's upper arms are now a patchwork quilt of bugbites. For some reason, I don't react to mosquito venom like he does; the allergic reaction that causes the itchy mosquito-bite reaction doesn't affect me much unless the bug stays on me long enough to fill itself up. So I have a couple of bites and that's it. But they were certainly annoying enough at the time. Even the dogs were being driven crazy; they were rolling on the ground and scraping their heads and muzzles along the forest floor, trying to wipe away the bugs.
We didn't find any old cabins and gold rush junk, like on the corresponding hill on our side of the highway, but we crossed a number of old ditches and what I guess was a roadbed or two, now completely overgrown. And we found a squirrel condominium...
This is the second one of these things that we've found in our woods explorations of the last couple of weeks. This is a mound of spruce cone scales. It's about five feet high and 10 or 15 feet across, riddled with squirrel burrows. (You can kinda see the holes in the picture.) There are squirrel HIGHWAYS leading to it through the moss -- they look like a deer or rabbit path, only they're just 3 inches wide.
In northern boreal forests, spruce seeds are the red squirrels' main food. When I was a kid we'd often find piles of spruce scales (you know, the brown sticky-outy parts on the seed cones) that they had shelled, but I had no idea until this summer that they congregate like THIS. You can get an idea of this monstrosity's size from the trees growing out of it. (Those are small trees, but STILL.) When we found the first one last weekend, I couldn't believe that it was really made up entirely of spruce cone scales, so I plunged my hand into it (Orion told me I was going to stick my hand into the nest of an angry squirrel) and good God, it really IS entirely spruce cone parts, although they're starting to compost a few handfuls down.
Here is Orion standing on the edge of the biggest ditch we found. It was about 10 feet deep and 10 or 15 feet wide. We followed it for a little ways to the northeast, which led us to a ravine where the ditch turned into a dike about 20 feet tall, apparently a dam meant to divert the water down this and a corresponding ditch on the other side.
I forget if I've talked about these ditches before. We have one on the backside of our property (on the other side of the highway). I actually know more about them now than I did last fall, because one of my coworkers at the News-Miner actually used to work on the gold dredging operations up in this valley in the 1940s. These ditches running from all the little creeks up in the hills were used to create a high-pressure stream of water that would be blasted from a hose and would wash away the 20-100 feet of swampy muck down in the gravel bottom of the valley. They had to do this in order to get to the gold-bearing gravel with the dredge. The hydraulic hoses used a gravity-feed system rather than a pump: basically, you take a lot of water running from a creek, and you channel it through smaller and smaller ditches and hoses, until you end up with a really high-pressure spray from a small hose at the other end.
... and here is Orion standing at the bottom of the ditch. The creek is dry now, so we don't have to worry about flash flooding or anything like that.
Most of the upper parts of the hillside were like this -- a lovely, open, parklike aspen forest. It doesn't look like it would be horribly infested with mosquitoes, but there you go.
We came to an odd part of the aspen forest where at least half to two-thirds of the trees were lying on the ground ... and pretty recently fallen, from the look of things. I have no idea why, but they were a bugger to climb over.
Lots of the aspen trees had these bite marks on them. I assume that moose use them as an emergency food supply in winter. The hillside was otherwise very open and didn't have the brush that moose normally eat.
This ditch wasn't quite as spectacular as the deeper one, but it was very clear-cut, and had the look of having been scooped out on a single pass.
This pretty meadow actually turned out to be an old roadbed or perhaps an old telephone or power cut. We came to this conclusion because it was very straight, cutting through the trees about 40 or so feet wide, and...
...it had old power poles, or something similar, laying in it.
I'm tired. We climbed the hill across the valley today. We didn't make it all the way to the top; it was 80+ degrees and we didn't bring water, so we turned back due to a combination of heat and bugs. The mosquitoes were AWFUL. We weren't expecting them to be too bad, since it's a bright sunny day and we were going to be hiking on a dry hillside rather than in a swamp, so we doped ourselves up lightly with repellent and wore T-shirts, and didn't bring the bug dope with us. Egad. It started off bad and just got worse and worse as we picked up an ever-larger cloud, until we were inhaling bugs and spending all our time swatting and swiping bugs off our arms and any other exposed skin. Poor Orion's upper arms are now a patchwork quilt of bugbites. For some reason, I don't react to mosquito venom like he does; the allergic reaction that causes the itchy mosquito-bite reaction doesn't affect me much unless the bug stays on me long enough to fill itself up. So I have a couple of bites and that's it. But they were certainly annoying enough at the time. Even the dogs were being driven crazy; they were rolling on the ground and scraping their heads and muzzles along the forest floor, trying to wipe away the bugs.
We didn't find any old cabins and gold rush junk, like on the corresponding hill on our side of the highway, but we crossed a number of old ditches and what I guess was a roadbed or two, now completely overgrown. And we found a squirrel condominium...
This is the second one of these things that we've found in our woods explorations of the last couple of weeks. This is a mound of spruce cone scales. It's about five feet high and 10 or 15 feet across, riddled with squirrel burrows. (You can kinda see the holes in the picture.) There are squirrel HIGHWAYS leading to it through the moss -- they look like a deer or rabbit path, only they're just 3 inches wide.
In northern boreal forests, spruce seeds are the red squirrels' main food. When I was a kid we'd often find piles of spruce scales (you know, the brown sticky-outy parts on the seed cones) that they had shelled, but I had no idea until this summer that they congregate like THIS. You can get an idea of this monstrosity's size from the trees growing out of it. (Those are small trees, but STILL.) When we found the first one last weekend, I couldn't believe that it was really made up entirely of spruce cone scales, so I plunged my hand into it (Orion told me I was going to stick my hand into the nest of an angry squirrel) and good God, it really IS entirely spruce cone parts, although they're starting to compost a few handfuls down.
Here is Orion standing on the edge of the biggest ditch we found. It was about 10 feet deep and 10 or 15 feet wide. We followed it for a little ways to the northeast, which led us to a ravine where the ditch turned into a dike about 20 feet tall, apparently a dam meant to divert the water down this and a corresponding ditch on the other side.
I forget if I've talked about these ditches before. We have one on the backside of our property (on the other side of the highway). I actually know more about them now than I did last fall, because one of my coworkers at the News-Miner actually used to work on the gold dredging operations up in this valley in the 1940s. These ditches running from all the little creeks up in the hills were used to create a high-pressure stream of water that would be blasted from a hose and would wash away the 20-100 feet of swampy muck down in the gravel bottom of the valley. They had to do this in order to get to the gold-bearing gravel with the dredge. The hydraulic hoses used a gravity-feed system rather than a pump: basically, you take a lot of water running from a creek, and you channel it through smaller and smaller ditches and hoses, until you end up with a really high-pressure spray from a small hose at the other end.
... and here is Orion standing at the bottom of the ditch. The creek is dry now, so we don't have to worry about flash flooding or anything like that.
Most of the upper parts of the hillside were like this -- a lovely, open, parklike aspen forest. It doesn't look like it would be horribly infested with mosquitoes, but there you go.
We came to an odd part of the aspen forest where at least half to two-thirds of the trees were lying on the ground ... and pretty recently fallen, from the look of things. I have no idea why, but they were a bugger to climb over.
Lots of the aspen trees had these bite marks on them. I assume that moose use them as an emergency food supply in winter. The hillside was otherwise very open and didn't have the brush that moose normally eat.
This ditch wasn't quite as spectacular as the deeper one, but it was very clear-cut, and had the look of having been scooped out on a single pass.
This pretty meadow actually turned out to be an old roadbed or perhaps an old telephone or power cut. We came to this conclusion because it was very straight, cutting through the trees about 40 or so feet wide, and...
...it had old power poles, or something similar, laying in it.