Camping!

I just got back from a great camping trip with my family and Lost Rocket's family, although Lost Rocket wasn't there. We rented a Forest Service cabin around Cottage Grove. We were hoping for sun, but it was at high elevation and it was tremendously foggy. This was fun in itself, though.

I thought I'd brought my phone, but once there I couldn't find it, so I rarely knew what time it was. We all got up very early (once in a while someone else with a phone revealed the time to us) except for Lost Rocket's 13-year-old sister. I'd have preferred to sleep in longer, but I was woken by the cold. That's the thing that sucks about camping sometimes: you wake up cold, and as soon as you get warm, you're sleepy again because you didn't actually sleep enough. I read lots of Atlas Shrugged, but I'm still only about 15% of the way in, because as stated before, it is fucking long.

I went on two beautiful walks on the same trail: one by myself, in which I appreciated the ecology of the forest, and one later with everyone else, in which we focused on the geology of the area.

On my solo walk, it was still very foggy. I loved looking at the diversity of plants; there were rhododendrons, a trillium, a pretty deciduous plant I didn't recognize, a funky fungus I've never seen before, and the usual smorgasbord of Oregonian evergreens trailing a lichen my sister says is called Old Man's Beard. Tiny Douglas firs grew in the middle of the trail and something not quite a nurse log flaked apart like salmon. I thought about how much damn life is tied up together in a forest like that; even a little piece of fallen branch on the ground is an entire ecosystem. There's the wood and needles from the tree, and then invariably there are at least two kinds of lichen, each of which is a fungus and an alga meshed together; it's caked with dirt and bugs crawl in it, not to mention all the prokaryotes that are constantly mediating every living system that exists. Eventually I came to a nice bit where the edge of the trail looked out over a steep hill and there was an empty space in the closest trees. Looking down the hill one particular tree was visible and one could imagine being sucked down by its very presence. Looking any further out or up, impenetrable fog. To all sides, trees stood tall with stringy lichen swaying in the mist, and I could hear myself breathing amongst brief birdsong into the chilled atmosphere. The overall effect was of a localized enchantment, shrouded from the rest of the world by vapor.

On the group walk, we discovered that the area has been mined, and there were a couple of abandoned mine shafts. The miners were likely looking for gold, and in the process pulled giants chunks of rock out of the earth, many of which had veins of quartz. We split a particularly large rock to reveal a plate of tiny quartz crystals. Some of the quartz crystals appeared to have rotted, and it made me wonder what in the natural world can dissolve silica. There were plentiful colored rocks on the path, and a robust iron content was betrayed by the patterns of red and orange across white. Interestingly the red and the orange rocks had different characters; the red seemed to appear in solid patches, while the orange meandered and swirled looking like an orange creamsicle. One orange rock had sharp straight lines, where fine cracks had conserved water in the rock and oxidized it into an X pattern. I wanted to keep that rock, but it was too big to justify and I brought home a swirly one instead, along with a red one that looked like a pumice stone and was flecked with white, a plain one that looked greenish when wet. Some of the rocks on the trail were not especially pretty, but amazingly complex, with reds and greens and stripes and spots. The prize beauty was a small piece of the crystal plate that snapped off while I was handling the big rock.

Nine people and five dogs fit in that cabin. My parents want to rent the place for a week during a hotter time next summer. I'm looking forward to it.