Peepers

In case you don't know, peepers are a type of small frog that come out of hibernation every Spring to begin a new year and to breed and otherwise enjoy their lives. If you live even in suburbia you've likely heard their call when they pop out to announce to us that their long sleep is over. It's something that I have experienced all of my life, except for the years when I've lived in an urban environment.

For the past three years, generally around this time in the midst of winter, we will have a very powerful warm patch (we don't even have a prolonged winter anymore) and the peepers will emerge and begin to call out, letting us all know that they're here. And for the past two winters I have worried--apparently needlessly--that doom will befall them all. My assumption has been that the next cold snap will catch our thin-skinned amphibian pals by surprise and that they'll all freeze to death and the local population of peepers will become extinct.

But I'm not going to worry about the tiny frogs anymore. It's not as if I don't have enough to worry about. I don't need this yearly burden to bear. The way I figure it now is that they've survived two warm winter thaws and refreezes with no diminished ability to crawl up to fresh air and fill our neighborhood with their pleasant songs. Winter of 2018/19 they did it. Winter of 2019/20 they committed the same act. And here it is Winter of 2020/21 and once more they're singing their itty-bitty lungs out and serenading me.

This year I'm not worrying. They did A-OK the past two winters and avoided a mass die-off. I figure they'll do it again and continue to repopulate the local ecology. My little friends are going to be fine. Maybe that's a good tiding for the rest of us, too.

It's 50 degrees out, headed for the mid-60s. The peepers are singing in the back yard. We're good to go.

 

Hey, Mr. Peeper!

Winter?

This is one of those years where human-caused global warming really is especially horrible. We had no autumn weather of cool days and chilly evenings. The trees are all confused, budding and blooming here at the beginning of winter. We're screwed.

I was looking at photos I shot years ago in Maine. One trip I took there was exclusively for the purpose of climbing Katahdin, the highest peak in that state. There's nothing like that peak (in my experience) on the east coast. It has a lot of territory high above treeline and it has been carved in relatively recent history by glaciers. The signs of glaciation are everywhere you look on that summit.

Yesterday I saw this image on a webcam that I check frequently. From this vantage point one should see the mountain covered in deep snow. The lake in the foreground should have been solidly frozen for at least a month. There should be people walking across that lake, or driving snowmobiles on it with no thought at all of falling through the ice.

Yesterday was the first time that lake had even the slightest skim of ice upon its surface, and the summit that should have been solidly cloaked in deep snow for many weeks is barely frosted.

Katahdin. Touched (finally) by light snow. The lakes around it showing (at last) some ice.

No Griz!

Well, we have returned home. Very long trip. Longest ever vacation. So much of it spent driving!

I now no longer have to imagine what it's like to witness a cloud of smoke that covers a huge portion of the North American continent. Between the historically enormous fires in Washington state (over 400 square miles) and the ones in Idaho, and the local fires in Montana we saw smoke clouds that spread over thousands and thousands of miles. Upon leaving, we actually drove for two days over three (enormous) western states trying to escape from the smoke. Only on the very eastern edge of South Dakota did we find ourselves free of most of it.

That said, we did have some days without smoke covering the skies. Three days in South Dakota and Wyoming, and roughly two and a half days in Glacier National Park (Montana). Then the fire smoke rolled in and obliterated the views. Most of the wildlife, also, seemed to fade from the landscape. Hiding? It sure seemed so.

We ended up never seeing a single grizzly bear, not one moose, and only two black bears (one of them a cub).

Details as I download the files and collect my thoughts.

Wyoming's Devil's Tower.

The End is Near!

I hate to sound like one of those old religious fanatics that the media used to parody back in the 50s and 60s. But the end really is near.

Humans have been rending the ecosystems that birthed us for a long time. Our presence here wasn't a problem for Mother Earth until we developed technology. And it wasn't terribly complicated technology that started our rapacious destruction. Something as simple as stone spearheads and fire and organized hunting led to the first mass extinctions at our hands. You can track megafauna destruction across all of the continents (except for Africa) by following the spread of Homo sapiens sapiens as we moved into new territories outside of our native continent (the aforementioned Africa).

The removal of major species is bad enough, but since the 1800s we've been tearing at the actual fabric of the planet and the situation has reached a point where the systems just can't take any more abuse. We're now eating the crust of the planet and vomiting hundreds of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere. If you think we're going to just walk away from this crime with no penalty, you are mistaken.

These days it's not just a situation of us taking down the animal companions with whom we've shared the planet for the past 100,000 or so years. We continued to multiply and spread long after we'd exterminated the Mammoths, the Wooly rhinos, the Glyptodonts, the Megatherium, the saber-toothed cats, Diprotodon, Aepyornis, the Marsupial lion...I could draw up a list that would run into the thousands. The problem now is that we've passed a threshold and it's not just that we're killing everything that is wild and dependent upon untouched ecosystems. We've hit the point where the planet has changed and it's not just ceasing to support the animals--It's going to stop supporting us, too.

I keep reading about pipe dreams idiots have of going to Mars and terraforming it. Hell...we can't even care for the planet for which we evolved to live. What makes anyone think that we can take an already poisonous place completely inimical to life and exist there? The idea is insane, and part of the constant misdirection we have to suffer while Earth is ravaged and depleted for the benefit of such a few at the expense of so many.

I keep repeating this answer when people ask me (and a lot of people do ask me), why I spend so much time hiking and backpacking into wilderness areas. And it's because I want to see these places while they're still relatively intact. I don't mean to imply that I am going to live to see them all collapse around us, but they are going, and they are going quickly. If you haven't seen a truly wild place and the plants and animals that exist in them, then I suggest that you do so. Because they're coming apart at the seams. Everything that men do is destructive and if you wish to see it before it's too late...time is short.

Will your children or your grandchildren live to see a planet with no elephants, no tigers, no wolves, no butterflies, no bees, no redwood trees? Probably. And what then?

Briefly: We were warned. And quite frankly there's nothing to be done about it, now. Of course I've known this for many years, and it's why I will continue to do my best to see what's left before it's all gone.

As for your grandchildren...they're screwed. Remember to thank one of our energy corporations. But what you really need to do is drag those board members and executives out of their homes and hang them from the nearest power line.

The end isn't "near". It's already here.

Last Snow Hike

It has been over a year since I've seen snow here in North Carolina. It has snowed since the last time I was able to experience the stuff, just not when and where I've been present. So the last time I was able to hike in the snow here in North Carolina was January 16, 2012.

Because of the effects of human-caused global warming, it just doesn't snow here in North Carolina all that often. There was a time, of course, when it snowed a lot here in my current state of residence. But not anymore. The companies who make sure that we get so much of our energy needs from oil, coal, and natural gas have seen to it that there are no other options. Things are just going to get worse as far as our climate is concerned.

So, in honor of that last time I was able to hike in snow here in my own state of North Carolina, here are a few photographs from that hike on Tanawha, also known as Grandfather Mountain.

This part of Tanawha/Grandfather Mountain is called "The Boone Bowl" and is thought to be one of the few glacial cirques formed in the southern Appalachians. The scientific jury is still out on whether or not it's a glacial cirque, but having seen plenty of them now in my experience as a hiker and backpacker, it sure does look like one.

Two of my hiking pals, Bob Johnson and Andy Kunkle.

View from one side of the "Boone Bowl".

Fresh, soft, dry snow.

What ya call yer powder. Light, fluffy powder.

Rock Glacier

As glaciers in the lower 48 are headed to extinction, we are left with remnants of them--formations that are known as "rock glaciers". I was vaguely aware of these things until I read a great article about them on Summitpost.

So--keeping with my current writing work-load that is preventing detailed blogging--here is a photo I took of just such a rock glacier at Blue Lakes in the Mount Sneffels Wilderness in Colorado.

Rock Glacier, Blue Lakes.

The field of rubble that shows obvious flow patterns leading down to Blue Lakes. This field of talus and ground-up rock was once the path used by the now-vanished ice glacier that has since vanished.

Buy my latest novel, WITHERING.

Skies of Blue

Today is my birthday. I am 55 years old!


The previous two days we had a cold front move through. The cool air squeezed all of the humidity out of the atmosphere Monday night and I was lulled to sleep by the sound of thunder and the drum of rain against the bedroom windows. And so when I awoke on Tuesday the sky was cobalt blue and the air was cool and dry. I don't think it cracked much over 80 degrees that day. Walking was a wonder.

Blue Sky over Montana, two years ago.

And I was able to look up at that blue sky for two solid days. And that's the point--the sky was blue. And I don't mean clear, but blue. Most people I talk to don't understand that our sky is supposed to be blue. Some of them even think that metallic gray photochemical haze that we live with is "blue". It isn't. For two days we had the kind of sky Mother Nature intended us to have. Before we wrecked the Heavens with smog.

But when I go back to work tomorrow I'll be dealing with triple-digit temperatures, and I can guarantee that the sky will not be blue, no matter the cloud cover. The sky will be a metallic gray, and few will acknowledge that something is terribly amiss.

What passes for "blue sky" here in the eastern USA.

Last February

Man, the weather has surely been different this winter than last one. This winter...well, we haven't even had a winter. The past two weeks I have worn shorts and short-sleeved shirts to work. And the temperatures have been so high that I've had to deal with humidity and sweating. I don't know about the rest of you, but this human-caused global warming sucks ass. Winter is supposed to be cold at this latitude!

Last year, the ski slopes were deep in heavy snow. The ski resorts rarely had to even use the snow-making machines. It pretty much snowed the entire winter. When Carole and I were in West Virginia and Maryland last February, we saw snowdrifts ten-feet deep. We hiked on packed snow three feet deep in Cathedral State Park. It snowed almost continuously during our visit there.

Now we're back to these hellishly abnormal weather patterns caused by the release of carbon that had been sequestered in the Earth's crust for hundreds of millions of years.

The Earth is screwed.

Take a Trip!

If there are parks and wilderness areas that you want to see before it's too late, I'd suggest you do so.

The clock is ticking down and mass extinctions and irreversible environmental damage is in full swing. We're not talking about centuries. Oblivion for many species and many environments are now measured in months and years.

I plan to take at least two trips next year to see some places that I fear will not be around much longer in anything resembling their natural state.

We've really messed things up.

"John Wayne Was a Fag"

You Know...He Did Walk Funny.

Does it come with a load of manure?

Elvis Was Jewish.

Denying Global Warming is Like Denying the Solar System.

"Art Linkletter is a Bastard."

Patriotism Sucks.

Pigeons

When the Passenger pigeons, who used to fill the air in their millions, began to vanish from the skies, ignorant people refused to admit that such an animal could even become extinct. "They've gone to Australia," the deniers would say, staring at skies that once would be darkened by the movement of flocks as vast as frontal clouds.

And still the Holocaust deniers spew their shit in the face of evidence:

Even One Degree Hotter

One of my all-time favorite cartoon quotes is from KING OF THE HILL. Hank's right wing-nut pal, Dale, is pissing and moaning about the "fakery" of global warming. And Hank's reply is classic:

"Dale, we live in Texas where it already gets to 110 degrees in the Summer. If it gets one degree hotter I'm gonna kick your ass!"


As a laborer who works in the elements all year, I can say that slogging away in the heat and humidity is pretty damned miserable. The past few days the temperature has hovered in the high 90s. Tomorrow, it's supposed to hit, and maybe surpass, the century mark. Thank Jove I don't have to work tomorrow.

And if it gets any hotter, I'm going to kick the shit out of the next Nimrod who claims that there's no such thing as global warming.

To the Memory of Southern Snow

When I was a kid living in the mountains of northern Georgia, I'd talk to old-timers who had already begun to notice that it just didn't snow as much as it used to. This is what the corporate bosses like to call "anecdotal" evidence, dismissing it with a sneer.

The entire time I lived in the northern part of Georgia near the NC/TN border, it snowed only once in three years at the elevation where we lived (about 1400 feet). Often we would look up at the higher peaks at 3,000 to 4,000 feet and they would be covered in deep snow and ice which generally descended no lower than about the 2,000-foot elevation.

In those days, Georgia had the southernmost ski resort in the USA. It was called Sky Valley and would get enough snow days to make it worthwhile to open a few runs during the winter. But as the years advanced, it snowed less and less in the southern mountains of Appalachia. In years past, the mountains of Georgia would often be snowed under during the winter months. Now, though, something was happening. The days of looking up at the tops of the Cohutta Mountains and seeing those 4,000-foot peaks frozen in winter storms were becoming more and more rare.

In 2005 the Sky Valley Ski Resort closed its doors for good. As a ski resort. They continued to promote the place as a golf resort and housing development, selling second homes to the moderately wealthy and retirement homes to older folk. The snows have just about fled, and it's rare now to see a good snowfall in Sky Valley, Georgia. Oh, you might see the ground get coated in white from year to year, but it rarely lasts for more than a day before melting off. And there's no way that there is enough snow to supply a ski run; and not even enough cold nights to allow the making of snow with blowers.

So the idle rich have their golf courses as they plow up more and more forest land to build second homes. And they have a place to drive to from Atlanta and Chattanooga so that their big SUVs can belch ever more smog into the air. And the power lines criss cross the mountains, bringing electricity generated by coal-fired plants, spewing vast tons of carbon into the air.

And the madness goes on.

Here's to the fading memory of snow.

Rabun Bald, (seen from Scaly Mountain, NC), second highest peak in Georgia at 4,696 feet on which used to sit the Sky Valley Ski Resort. Alas

Tipping Point (Part II)

Bill Gronroos saw my post about our vanishing winter weather, and sent me the following reply. He grew up in Greensboro, NC, where it rarely snows these days:

"I saw your blog about snow. It really dosen't snow in NC like it did when I was a kid growing up in Greensboro.

Some favorite memories are of sledding down snow covered hills around my house.

The winter of '65-'66 it snowed every Wednesday afternoon for 6 or 7 weeks in a row. I recall great sledding, school being canceled, and the debut of "Batman" on TV during this time period.

We had a lot of days to make up at the end of the school year. Was it worth it ? Yep!"

Another personal response came from Roy Aiken, who mentioned how certain idiots deny the evidence of their own freaking skins.

Alas, I must agree.

The summit of Mount LeConte, elevation 6,593 feet. One of the few places in the South where you can pretty much count on seeing some snow in the winter months. (Photo taken March 5, 2005.)

Tipping point.

When I was growing up and lived in Atlanta GA, I vividly recall that each year between the second grade and the sixth grade, we’d have at least one good snowfall every year. It was no big deal when I’d awaken to find the schoolyard beneath several inches of snow. I owned a sled in those days--we had enough snow so that my parents felt that the investment in a good sled was worth the money. And I certainly put that sled to use. One winter storm that was severe enough for snow to lay in some thickness for several days, I ran the sled until I broke it from repeatedly wrecking at the base of a very steep hill.

Just a few years ago, I was at a local dry goods store near Huntersville NC that was closing its doors after almost 100 years of continual business. It was in a big, old, wooden structure that had served as a general store for ten decades. Just inside the front door I was examining a wooden pillar rising up from the porch. Etched there in pen and lead were various records inked or penciled by various store employees over the years. Every time there was a measurable snowfall, the folk would write it on the wooden pillar. I stood there reading back through the decades, and it was shocking how common heavy snowfall had been in years past, and how utterly rare they were today.

Looking at those crude records, I saw that as late as the early 1970s, the area would commonly be covered in snowstorms. A six-inch snowfall was barely worth noting, but there were dozens and dozens of those. Even storms that dumped nearly a foot seemed to come at least once per year until the late 50s. But after that, the big storms came less and less often, and even moderates snows began to taper off.

And, now, today, it rarely snows in the Charlotte area, at all. We get a dusting during the average winter these days. About once every ten years we’ll see a heavy storm with a foot or so. (I’ve seen two of those since moving here in 1980.) When snow comes to Atlanta, now, it makes the news even on the national level. All for a place that once saw snowfalls every year, that once was a place where kids owned sleds—kids who could look forward to using those sleds each winter.

Scientists keep warning of a “tipping point” when the climate will have irrevocably changed, and when there will be no way to repair the damage we’ve done to our very atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels. From the evidence I’ve seen in my mere fifty years, I can safely say that we probably passed such a tipping point when I was about twelve years old.

Alas.

Our single pathetic snowfall (February 1) of 2007.

Global Warming.

It strikes me that those who deny that global warming has been caused by the effects of Mankind burning fossil fuels are similar to those who claim that the Holocaust never happened. In fact, most of the folk who claim "there's no such thing as global warming" are among the numbers who claim Nazi Germany didn't initiate or engage in the mass murder of Jews and Slavs.