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I read last night in the New York Times that they're working on creating an Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail to commemorate the huge floods in the Pacific Northwest that occurred multiple times in prehistoric times, which I'd read about before in a Stephen Jay Gould book. Imagine a lake in the area of Missoula, Montana, with the volume of water of Lakes Ontario and Erie, suddenly breaking through an ice sheet and draining -- all the way to the Pacific Ocean -- in about 48 hours! What I hadn't realized before is that much of the topsoil scoured off bedrock in Montana, Idaho, and eastern Washington actually was swept up into the Willamette Valley as far as Eugene (which is a hundred miles south of Portland), which is one reason our valley is so fertile. I had thought it was just from the volcanoes. Anyway, the proposed trail starts in Missoula and has two ends, one at the ocean and one in Eugene. Here's a nice map of the floodplane and proposed trail.
Today my mom and I picked a pint of wild blackberries behind her back fence, and a prodigious amount of wine grapes from the vines on that fence. Blackberry vines run rampant everywhere they can get a foothold, which is a bane to gardeners, but picking the berries is an Oregon tradition. Free roadside food! I also had a brief but fun chat with DO about the book she's writing, and the aggravation of discovering that the copy I'd bought of the third Recluce novel was printed too far into the page, so that the inner characters are difficult to read. Grr!
Out of the blue, I got these pictures today from a distant cousin previously unknown to me. They are my grandma's great-grandparents, James Thomas Scott and his wife Isabelle Long Scott, who lived in Liberty, Missouri. Personally I think he looks rather wild, while she looks, well, "dour" and "plain" is putting it mildly. I'm told that smiling for photographs is a recent thing. Hard to picture these two together, frankly, but I suppose the pictures were also taken at much different ages.
Today my mom and I picked a pint of wild blackberries behind her back fence, and a prodigious amount of wine grapes from the vines on that fence. Blackberry vines run rampant everywhere they can get a foothold, which is a bane to gardeners, but picking the berries is an Oregon tradition. Free roadside food! I also had a brief but fun chat with DO about the book she's writing, and the aggravation of discovering that the copy I'd bought of the third Recluce novel was printed too far into the page, so that the inner characters are difficult to read. Grr!
Out of the blue, I got these pictures today from a distant cousin previously unknown to me. They are my grandma's great-grandparents, James Thomas Scott and his wife Isabelle Long Scott, who lived in Liberty, Missouri. Personally I think he looks rather wild, while she looks, well, "dour" and "plain" is putting it mildly. I'm told that smiling for photographs is a recent thing. Hard to picture these two together, frankly, but I suppose the pictures were also taken at much different ages.