Upper Rio Grande Watershed: Rio de los Pinos to Conejos River

Flanked by the Conejos River and Rio de los Pinos, this watershed includes Pinorealosa and Osier Mountain, along with many excellent creeks (named and unnamed), alpine meadows, and river bottoms. Controlled burns and selective logging seem to be keeping the woodland open and healthy, while fire or beetles have left enough dead and downed timber to create unnavigateable thickets, quite conducive (necessary and sufficient) for unfragmented, Wilderness landscape.

Thin, filamentous, and/or deeply pinnatifid leaves, everything with prickles, spines, or a dense covering of hair (tomentous) -- but not many poisonous. Hairs serve to insulate as well as defend. ... In the wetlands, poisonous and fleshy plants dominate. Elk and bear, fire and grazing, Rorippa, Mimulus, Penstemon, Geum, myriad rodents scurrying away in all directions, fawns hiding breathless in the grass, hellebores and corn lilies, the 'Umbel of God', ululation, mountain thunderstorms...

The coastal fog of California, gentled by a 1,000 miles travel. I heed the thunder, and elevate the advent of rain above dull annoyance. This morning, I climbed the cliffs above our campsite. When I reached the top I felt like crying. Don't know why. Looking out over the watershed I understand the pattern. All water runs downhill. There is a band of trees from a lower line where it is wet enough to grow to an upper line where it is too cold to grow. There is a line in-between those two, above which precipitation exceeds evaporation. All rivers originate above this line, in their Headwaters.

I was always thinking of new, clever, ways of getting ahead of Nature, ahead of myself, beyond lightspeed and Saturation, entropy, Capacity. Rainbows multiplying from the first: Asgaard, Bridge to Heaven. But why does it curve back to Earth? Everyone sees a different shape and distance, depending on their perspective. The kind of rain mosquitoes can still swim through to sting. Lightening and that particular sound of the thunder rolling off of the peculiar and idiosyncratic topography up-valley.

But what if the world refuses to be ordered by the human mind? We know honeybees can be trained to show preference between human faces, but will they ever understand them? Then how too will we ever understand our world? Words are useless if we rely on them to a fault, if natural variation is continuous and nonlinear, yet we expect it to conform by our contingent, evolutionarily-derived logical architectures and cognitive biases.

On the backbone of the continent, the Genesis of the Southwest; a looking-glass world, mountains in every direction, but the brooding presence of the Great Plains felt in the passes opening between. At times we thought we were in Kansas, or safe away in our beds dreaming, but we were in the San Luis Valley, ripening in the sun.

You have driven up and down the mountain valleys, the flanks that lead up from below or down from above, the highways and streams of rivers and clouds. You have stood, still, in the center of the valley, under Blanca, for days. Transfixed interest, blossoms like dollar bills in the breeze. You have climbed high up where there is more air than land, yet still cannot seem to breathe enough and the mountain says enough and the Thunderstorm says Enough and you flee their mutterings and grumblings

Storms billow on surrounding mountains, then range over the landscape. Powerful rain, thunder and lightening on into the night...sigh... San Juan rainstorms. The next day the storms grow but, despite our hurry to avoid them, only blow for early Evening Entertainment, and on into the night. Next day, storms brush by, delivering a soaking with bits of hail mixed in. These storms build on the San Juans, blow low over the valley --but nothing can slow them until the Sangres, where they slide silently up the crest, lick their salty skins, run a tongue along sharpened teeth, and watch the wounds of mankind's world.

Where have all the willows gone? The heart of the landscape dug out, munched, passed, trampled dirt. The magic and will to live that flowed wild, healthy, worshipful. Destruction AND Growth. Unsimplified. Wet, unique.

All land in the West is "wetland"; fear not. Although nothing fits into categories anyway, each consciousness, attuned to an unique understanding, attempting an unbiased account of who-knows-what for someone else. Under the roof of the world, wet with the aspen, the carex, and the rivers; mountain ridges diverge until they peter out, rivers seek their breathren and converge until they become one with the ocean. Flowing water flows together - it lubricates itself; whereas water soaking into sponge, expands -- it flees the mutual weight of multitude.

Oh now gentle rain, Conejos River hopping along...who understands?

Upper Rio Grande Watershed: Rio de los Pinos to Conejos River

http://picasaweb.google.com/conorpro/CumbresAndToltecRioDeLosPinosWatershed

Upper Rio Grande Headwaters: Blanca Wetlands

More photos.

Upper Rio Grande Watershed: The Poso and Los Mogotes

"...driving across these llanos for days, solitary pinon and juniper gnarled and twisted and thickened, like baobobs almost, and the antelope / gazelle bounding away, outdoors dawn to dusk , khaki outfit, pith helmet, driving across the plains for days, looking at the summits; heading toward them but then it starts to rain and the mud becomes too thick: fishtailing across the road, saying 'I'm sorry' to all the plants, the erosion. Eventually, the sound of the engine turning off, the door opening, both feet sinking deep into the mud, the finality of the car door slamming in the sudden, rainy, darkness.

Rock Garden in the Serengetti

Wetlands: those areas that are saturated or inundated with surface or groundwater at a frequency or duration sufficient to support -and under normal circumstances do support- a prevalence of vegetation typically adapted to life in saturated soil conditions.

Upper Rio Grand Watershed: Big Spring Creek

Upper Rio Grand Watershed: Big Spring Creek

Colorado Natural Heritage Program (CNHP)

"For in the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy." Every state in the U.S. has a Natural Heritage Program (NHP) to comprehensively and systematically monitor biological diversity.
Colorado's NHP GIS computer models select points of special interest based on aerial and satellite imagery. We follow GPS maps to the sample point,
lay out plots to focus our attention at different scales from the microscopic to the landscape.,
collect plant specimens and soil samples as well as analyze ecosystem processes and integrity:
Long summer days in the field.

Exploring the Rio Grande Headwaters: San Luis Valley

The Rio Grande drains the Southern Rocky Mountains and meanders more than 2,000 miles through the desert Southwest before reaching the Caribbean. Spanish explorers followed this river to its headwaters more than 400 years ago.
However, the Spanish were notoriously poor scientists, more interested in searching for the Seven Lost Cities of Gold than understanding native ecosystems. Even after the U.S. purchased this area in 1848, and despite more than a hundred years of U.S. exploration and documentation, much of this vast area remains unknown and (relatively) undisturbed by Homo industrialis.

I've set out this summer with Colorado's Natural Heritage Program to explore the Headwaters of the Rio Grande with a top-notch, interdisciplinary team of scientists from across the country.

The Rio Grand's headwaters drain from the San Juan Mountains and the Sangre de Christo Mountains into the vast alluvium of the San Luis Valley. This valley, the center of our research, can be thought of as either the southernmost Rocky Mountain park or the northernmost New Mexican valley.
At 7,500 feet this floodplain is a mix of alpine, wetlands, desert, and farmland. Coming from sea level it is continually astonishing to pause and gasp for breath in the center of an agricultural valley where the nearest mountains are 30 miles away. These high plains support a diverse and unique assemblage of plants and animals, with pronghorn antelope feeding in the alfalfa fields, buffalo competing with cows in the sagebrush rangeland, and elk and bear foraging along the periphery.
Our HQ is marked on these maps, a swanky cabin safely nestled in an out of the way canyon on the western rim of the valley. To get to this alpine oasis you first drive past the endless center-pivot irrigation systems of San Luis Valley, than upwards past La Garita through Sheep pass, where the rounded granite boulders shelter pinon and juniper. You are now entering Carnero Canyon, whose narrowings and widenings sequentially reveal a lush cottonwood bosque, then Ponderosa woodland and finally Aspen groves and mountain meadows.

The "Back 40" (square miles):

*Since the cabin is off the grid this post was beamed up via satellite.

Jaunt up Portillo Mesa with Botany Quotes

Barry Lopez in Arctic Dreams;

"The sound of my footfall changes as I step from damp ground to wet, from wet to dry. Microhabitats. I turn the pages of a mental index to plants and try to remember which are the ones to distinguish these borders: which plants separate at a glance mesic from hydric, hydric from xeric? I do not remember. Such generalities, in any case, would only founder on the particulars at my feet. One is better off with a precise and local knowledge, and a wariness of borders. These small habitats, like the larger landscapes, merge imperceptibly with each other. Another, remembered landscape makes this one seem familiar, and the habits of an animal in one region provoke speculation about behavior among its relatives in another region. But no country, finally, is just like another. The generalities are abstractions. And the lines on our topographic maps reveal not only the scale at which we are discerning, but our tolerance for discrepancies in nature.

Scientists say the pattern of coming and going, of feeding and resting, repeats itslef every twenty-four hours. But a description of it becomes more jagged and complex than the experience, like any parsing of a movement in time. "

Richard Manning, in Grassland from the end of chapter 11, "Seeds"

Pauline says her work is not simply an application of her knowledge as a botanist. It is not a prescribing of the known. Rather, it is exploration of the microscopically complex world we do not know and a realization that some of it is not knowable.
"This is a search for the unknown, and the unknown forms the model from which we work," she says. "We as a species are lessened by the loss of unknown places."

We drove all that day on straight gravel roads set in a grid across each other every mile and finally stopped to lok at one of those. Pauline showed me where a bank had been cut and the roadbed built up, forever altering the soil profile below. The soil manifests itself as plants. The refuge will close these roads and bulldoze them back to something resembling the natural contour, but bulldozers cannot re-create the soil profile, and so for the ages, the plants above these buried roads will be different. The soil below will always contain different minerals in different layers, percolate water differently, and the plants will express all of this. Pauline believes the difference in plants may be visible even from aircraft. Someday one may fly above this refuge and still see the Jeffersonian grid sticking through the grass like the bones off a great buried beast.
In that the plants tell the history of a place, I'm not sure I would have it otherwise. One cannot cheat the land's library of its information.

In some real ways, the effort to re-find the landscape, which is the same as the effort to re-attach our lives to the land, is a religious quest, and it makes sense to consider it that way. Western literate culture, with its respect for authority, needed a creator and pursued one, eventually separate from the creation. This separation excused all manners of destruction.

Yet the creation remains, and some of us creatures need to find it. The creator and creation are the same and the unity is evolution. A place possesses a certain set of circumstances, weather, soil, and community, that lead to a certain manifestation of life in a place. Undeniably, the creation evolved certain parts of life to inhabit certain places, to show the nature of a place. [really, you have to look at lichen to know the primary movers]
Certain cultural traditions took great pains to divine the intentions of the creation. They used shamans, who were not so much magicians or priests or herbalists or storytellers as they were seers, those who would travel beyond the veil to read the verities, to divine the creation's intentions. They saw and heard the mysteries that were just beyond every one else's ken.

...I imagine that must be what it is like sometimes to be a botanist. I have been afield with many of them, and they are different, almost invariably quiet, distant. Undeniably, they see something different from what I see, as if the knowledge of the plants lifts a veil. The whole of it is there in the plants to be read, the full soul of a place, its life and the abuses of its life, the creation's intentions and the manifest violations of those intentions. Botanists are our shamans. "