Writing
Come summertime, life is nonstop for those living and traveling in Bend. Central Oregon’s mountains, cold rivers, and inviting people represent a rainbow of colors in the community—activities and symbols beloved in the region rise like the sun.
I got a chance to prepare a color-coded guide chock-full of outdoor experiences, new ways to imbibe, and how to best relax at home for the sweetest summer yet.
Read the July 2018 issue of Bend Lifestyle Magazine's Colors of Summer.
Photo by thomasshahan.com
Chances are you took a look at the photo above and either got immediately creeped out but kept looking or were instantly drawn in. Spiders are quite sophisticated yet grossly unrepresented in science due to a lack of funding, and in the Northwest, there are few opportunities for students to study and work under arachnologists (spider scientists).
Rod Crawford, one of the only spider researchers in the state of Washington and curator of arachnids at Seattle’s Burke Museum, recently visited Columbia Land Trust’s Lake Rosannah property (formerly known as Mud Lake), located west of La Center in Clark County. He and field partner Laurel Ramseyer collected more than 40 spider species in total, which were deposited at the Burke Museum for research and identification.
After tapping fallen cones, sifting dead leaves, and sweeping grasses with collection nets, they found a unique species, Washington’s first specimen and extremely rare Gertschanapis shantzi, an orb-weaving spider of the Anapidae family, which is only known from a few sites in California and Oregon.
Crawford has studied spiders for 47 years, and he writes for a website dedicated to spider education that includes an ever-growing list of more than 80 myths.
1. SPIDERS ARE NOT INSECTS
Spiders are arachnids that have two body parts (not three) and four pairs of legs. Identify a spider from other arachnids by its unsegmented abdomen and eight simple eyes.
2. IT’S PROBABLY NOT A SPIDER BITE
A true spider bite is so rare that an average person might be bitten once or never in their lifetime, and it’s more likely you were bitten by an insect or have another skin issue entirely. It’s also nearly impossible to swallow spiders in your sleep and no spider has ever been documented drinking from a sleeper’s mouth or eyes as the legend says.
3. THEY DON’T ONLY SUCK JUICES OF PREY
Many books and even the accounts of spider observers claim that spiders only suck the “juices” or blood of prey and waste the rest like vampires, but spiders actually do eat some digestible solids.
Spiders hatch in the spring and fall and benefit gardens and homes as predators of insects. There are many ways to invite spiders into your garden. First, eliminate invasive plants and replace them with a variety of native sheltering habitat for weather that is too dry, wet, or cold for spiders. Plants such as salal, sword fern, tall grasses, and coniferous trees with dense foliage, plus layers of leaf litter and dead wood, make excellent spider habitat. “If a spider is in your home, it’s likely a house spider that is adapted to survive indoors, and has never been outdoors,” said Crawford. “Attempting to ‘rescue’ or throw a house spider outdoors does more harm than good.”
Read pages upon pages of spider myth and fact on the Burke Museum’s website. Plus, visit Rod Crawford’s Spider Collector’s Journal.
Paleontologists fill in gaps in the Northwest’s fossil record on shorelines conserved by Columbia Land Trust.
It was January 1978 and low tide in the Columbia River Estuary. In the distance, the striking green of the Astoria–Megler Bridge, erected almost two decades prior, pierced the dense fog. Twenty-three-year-old amateur paleontologist, Jim Goedert, and wife, Gail, were exploring the tidal flats in Pacific County, Washington, for the first time. They were packing rock chisels, petite hammers, and old newspaper.
As the tide steadily pulled back soot and sediment, unveiling worlds encased in mudstone and siltstone, the couple spotted one particular, medium-sized rock amidst a shoreline full of similar stones. Jim took note of a fissure on the rock’s surface, and a nodule protruded from its side. With one gentle tap, the rock opened, and a time long ago revealed itself inside the concretion. Jim and Gail had found the skull and teeth of a primitive whale dating back 25 million years, to a geological epoch known as the Oligocene.
“What’s so significant about Southwest Washington is that there’s no representation of the fossil record for many species of the geological time period anywhere else in the region or in the world,” says Jim.
It’s hard to believe that much of the area along the I-5 corridor from Olympia to the Columbia River, known as the Willapa Hills, was underwater 50 to 20 million years ago. Marine creatures of this period lived at an ocean depth between 100 and 900 meters—up to nearly 3,000 feet.
The sea level rose and fell, volcanoes erupted and eroded away, species went extinct while new ones evolved, and pieces of the Earth’s crust, or tectonic plates, continually smashed together pushing each other up to form mountains and great rock faces. Thick layers of rock formed from the steady accumulation of ocean sediments, and marine uplift and faulting in the subduction zone, where tectonic plates meet, shaping much of the Pacific Coast Ranges we know today. Vertebrates and invertebrates were preserved in concretions that have since eroded from landslides into the Columbia River, giving us a glimpse into the life that once existed and teaching us about a time, the climate, and species, some of which have never been seen in the flesh.
Bruce Thiel, who now works with Jim, is also an amateur paleontologist and a member of the North American Research Group. Bruce is an exceptional artist who prepares fossil specimens using small pneumatic chisels and dental tools to meticulously reveal the tiniest of details in ancient crab claws, nautiluses, isopod carapaces, and many other species found at the Pacific County site. Jim and Gail Goederts’ most notable findings from the Land Trust site include more than 100 whale specimens (such as skulls and teeth), sea lion remains, and the oldest published albatross fossil from the North Pacific Basin, Diomedavus knapptonensis—a new genus and species smaller than all existing albatrosses. Another species of albatross from the site came from younger rocks, with a remarkably well-preserved skull and beak.
“Land conservation is sometimes the first step in understanding natural history,” says Columbia Land Trust Stewardship Director Ian Sinks. “The presence of these fossils gives us such rich clarity of the distant past as well as perspective on how to best manage these lands for the future.” Columbia Land Trust conserved 452 acres at this important fossil locality in 2012, including 133 acres of shoreline, to protect intertidal wetland habitat for threatened salmon species, and to protect hillside forests for watershed processes and wildlife habitat. In addition, this conserved site along the Columbia River is now being monitored so discoveries can be preserved for future generations of researchers.
Today, the primitive whale skull Jim and Gail discovered as well as many other finds from the Pacific County site reside at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the Burke Museum at the University of Washington, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, and other museums throughout the world, from Poland to Japan. The Goedert’s generous fossil donations, along with Thiel’s preparations, have made it possible for scientists to fill in pieces of our region’s geological puzzle. When those who come after us look back on our time, the history scribed on paper won’t have the same permanence of stone or the impact of the pioneers working to protect and educate the world around us.
Conserved site Columbia River Estuary
Seal lion skull. Snout to the left. Photo courtesy of Sam A. McLeod of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Primitive whale tooth. Photo courtesy of Sam A. McLeod of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Albatross skull fossil
Bruce Thiel preparing fossils in his in-home lab.
The Klickitat River
Columbia Land Trust’s lengthiest and most dramatic restoration project to date is the Klickitat River Haul Road project north of Klickitat, Washington. Together the Yakama Nation Fisheries Program and the Land Trust set out more than fifteen years ago to free one of Washington’s longest undammed rivers from a failed and washed out logging road. The degraded road disconnected the watershed from its historic floodplain and threatened critical fish habitat.
A Brief History
In 2004, the Land Trust saw an opportunity to conserve an imperiled watershed key to salmon and steelhead survival along the Klickitat River. We began a three-year land acquisition process to conserve 475 acres of wildlife habitat and river frontage, including 12 miles of a degraded logging road that served as the only private access through a 14,000-acre state wildlife area. Finally in 2007, with funding from the Salmon Recovery Funding Board, the property was officially protected from future development and set the stage for large-scale restoration. In the following seven years, scores of contractors worked in five separate phases with funding from the Salmon Recovery Funding Board, Yakama Nation Fisheries Program, LP Brown Foundation, and the Linblad-Expeditions National Geographic Fund. Teams removed over 170,000 tons of road fill and more than eight miles of asphalt. Five miles of rip rap (loose stone) was removed from the shoreline and replaced with more than 40,000 native trees and shrubs, woody log jams were constructed in the floodplain for habitat diversity, side channels and backwater channels were reconnected to the river, and bedrock walls (the natural substructure) were finally revealed. Nature got to work carving out beaches, islands, natural pools, and gravel bars that provided habitat complexity and places for fish to rest, rear, and spawn.
“To the Yakama people, the fish in the Columbia River and its tributaries are of critical importance to culture, diet, health, and economics,” said Habitat Biologist David Lindley from Yakama Nation Fisheries. “The Klickitat River offers one of the few remaining places where tribal members can fish using traditional methods.” Our partners at Yakama Nation Fisheries have wholeheartedly supported this project with countless hours, resources, and more than $900,000 total in matching funds to safeguard this fragile and irreplaceable tributary of the Columbia River.
The River Now
Today the Klickitat River has reclaimed much of its historic 100-year floodplain in the project area. One would hardly believe a road once existed, on what is now a wild and remote wildlife corridor. Salmon and steelhead are once again utilizing these long lost features on the floodplain and species from Lewis’s woodpeckers to black bears to western gray squirrels are enjoying the amplified solitude of a wild river.
Last summer, Columbia Land Trust and Yakama Nation Fisheries began planning the removal of the remaining three miles of road fill. They dug test pits to determine the location of bedrock in the road prism, which indicated how much road fill would need to be removed and ultimately how much of this tedious work would cost. Lindley informed the Land Trust in late 2016 that he had secured additional match of $550,000 from Yakama Nation Fisheries.
Armed with this incredible news, the Land Trust can now freely implement the sixth and final phase of the project, which aims to remove another three miles of road fill by fall 2017. “This final phase of road removal is twice the length we’ve attempted to remove in a single year,” said Cornelius. “With each phase, there are impacts to both the river’s resources and to its users, so our goal is to speed the process up and minimize these effects.”
The Future of the River
The Land Trust welcomes recreationists of all kinds, including rafters, bird watchers, hikers, cyclists, and anglers to visit and observe the changes. We want future generations to look back on this monumental project and know that if enough people care about a landscape, and they are patient enough to see it through, then real and lasting change will follow.
After phase six is complete, both the upstream and downstream access points will remain paved, providing access for families and children to safely reach the project area. Extreme fire risk may necessitate closing the property to public access during some portions of the year. Visitors can check Columbia Land Trust’s website for access status throughout the summer.
“It’s a rare opportunity that someone gets to be involved in a project of this scope,” said Cornelius. “Our partners at Yakama Nation Fisheries trusted us to move forward and to work together on something we both deeply care about. It has been a testimony to their integrity and their devotion to protecting the region that so many species of plants, animals, and local people depend on. I’ll be excited to watch for the rest of my life how the river responds.”
Watch our short film A River Reborn to learn more about the project and stay tuned for updates on the final phase of a long and worthy journey.
