April 2005
Monthly Archive
Teslin
Posted by squirrley on 25 Apr 2005 | Tagged as: home
Right now, 8:30 pm is about perfect: the time when the sun slants just so, sharp and golden, shadows elongating and giving definition and a sliding coolness to what would otherwise be a dry, arid landscape. It is hard at such times not to adopt the strategy of a lizard: simply to lie, in the sun, light glancing bronze and diaphanous off my pearly pale skin.
Thurday evening driving back from Teslin, the light was the same. We were driving into the sun, and as we approached certain shoulders along the road, flocks of birds would scatter ahead. Before we could get a good look–hurtling down the road in our smooth-sailing ship, the enormous, multibenched CPAWS van–the birds would fall off behind us, white bellies and clipped wings buffeted on the wind and in our wake.
It was quite a strange landscape: there were a few massifs of quite hefty mountains, and one dolomite/limestone formation just past the turn-off to Atlin was particularly striking, snow glistening off the peaks and on the flanks, but only between hard gray cliffs and broken ridges. The mountains were often widely separated, interspersed by vast glacial basins now filled with lowlands and lakes and eskers. Jim Pojar, one of the biologists I was with, had led a research project on the eskers: “Eskers and kames: skeins of conductivity”. This study basically showed that eskers–long winding ridges of sand or gravel, deposited by streams flowing under glaciers during the last ice age–are ecologically distinct zones, and ‘carry’ species along their length to different habitats. But what I get caught up on is the name, and the imagery: wool unravelling across a landscape.
Listening to Jim and Don Weir–distinguished biologists with probably a half-century of field seasons between them–it was impossible not to get carried off by their zeal, their total passion and curiosity for every aspect of the land around them. Jim has done research most recently on landslides, how massive slumps of earth and slides of glacial till churn up the landscape: on the wet coast (BC) where forest fires are rare events, landslides are the main change agent shifting the forest, churning the soil profile and throwing up a mosaic of layers and textures of earth, and thus a mosaic of microzones and species: liverworts, mosses, and lichens; wetlands and dry hummocks; in the case of the boreal, fresh earth where willow islands can thrive in hectare upon hectare of spruce forest.
But that day Jim and Don were talking about stone sheep: they began by speculating where the sheep ranges we had seen on a map (we had been at a community consultation of the renewable resource council) actually corresponded to on the land. From this, they went on to conjecture about the geographic niche and historical migration of stone sheep going back to the last glaciation, and compared notes on a couple of scientific papers positing diverging theories on the origins and migration of the sheep thousands of years ago. I was impressed with their incredible knowledge, layer upon layer: a complete understanding of glaciation across thousands of kilometers of landscapes in northern BC, Alberta, and the Yukon; the lifecycles and movements of ungulates; the flora in the hills (Jim is an author of the original Lone Pine guides , and as early as they appear, he follows the alpine spring flowers, chases them from south slope to more shady places as winter recedes. Every weekend and then some, he is out with his wife exploring the hills).
But what is most amazing–what is in fact the source of the incredible minds that they bring to interpreting and discovering any landscape–is their speculation, their curiosity, how they look at a blank hillside of snow and scattered rocks, and ask why? What lives here? What made the land as it is? Could there be wildflowers? How susceptible is this stretch of stone to landslides? Avalanches? Forest fires? Is it part of the winter/spring/summer/fall range of grizzly bears? Moose? Is it along the flyways of migratory birds? Are there any hawks?
I used to be a lot more like that; but that would be a whole other series of reminiscences …