Trees and distance

It's good to get into an area with new habitats and species. It reminds me how much I don't know. It reminds me how vast the world is (I didn't even get out of the Pacific Northwest and the world seems vast). It makes me dredge up rusty bits of knowledge from college. This area has many meadow areas. Even the forest areas are mostly open forest. It so different from the dense, dark forests filled with Douglas Fir and Western Hemlock that feel like home to me.

Many of the trees around are oak trees. I don't really know my oak trees but since I stumbled on an oak that was distinctly different. It refreshed my memory, most of the oaks we were seeing were black oaks and that one must have been a white oak? It looked silver. The oaks were interesting to me, mostly because I associate them with the endangered Western Gray Squirrel. Once I had a wonderful field trip tromping around oak forest searching for the squirrels and found...nothing..except the good times that adventures in the woods bring.

Along with all the oaks there were the normal pine trees and a few cedar/sequoia mystery trees. It had the coolest bark. Not a tree I'd ever seen before. Several of the trail guides talked about incense cedar. It wasn't in Pojar which is the best guide book for plants in Washington. Although that thwarted my identification efforts it was nifty because it shows just how far out of my home range I had come.

The bark of the Cedar/Sequoia

And there were wonderful madrones. Once again I was forced to ponder on the absolutes we hand out. The books generally say they only grow 50 miles east of the ocean. I'm not motivated enough to figure out how far we were from the ocean. Certainly we were at there extreme eastern edge of the madrone tree, but they are wonderful, healthy species.