WC recently spent a few delightful days birding in Summer Lake Wildlife Refuge, in southcentral Oregon. Because it all starts with geology, WC will start there, too. Multiple geology theses, a few books and hundreds of geology papers have been written on Summer Lake and its ancestor, Chewaucan (chee-WAU-can) Lake. WC is necessarily going to…
Imagine running one of the great American marathons. Or, if you are in the kind of shape I am in, imagine jogging, then walking, and in the end possibly crawling to the finish line of an American marathon. Whatever your condition, by the time you reach the finish line you’d be in dire need of…
During the Pleistocene, as recently as 12,000 years ago, central Oregon had a number of large lakes. One of them, Fossil Lake, located in south-central Oregon, in northern Lek County, was, at peak, about 30 miles wide and perhaps 250 feet deep. It’s vanished now. The last two ponds evaporated about 1877. But during the…
7,700 years go, give or take 1.5%, the 12,000 foot high stratovolcano Mt. Mazama catastrophically erupted, blasting so much ash and molten rock from its magma chamber that the whole edifice collapsed, creating an oblong caldera six miles long on the longer axis, four and a half on the shorter one, and nearly a mile…
It’s just a little over-hyped. Rome, Oregon – a country store in southeastern Oregon – is probably best known as a launch point for raft trips down the main stem of the Owyhee River. The place was named by William F. Stine for the nearby hoodoo formations that suggested to him the ruins of Rome, Italy. It’s a…
Strictly speaking, these photos aren’t from the Oregon Coast, but rather on the drive back from Crescent City, California to Boise, Idaho, WC’s adopted hometown. The drive back involved several birding stops: an overnight stop at Upper Klamath Lake National Wildlife Refuge, and a series of stops for May 8’s Global Birding Big Day across…
WC wants to make a moment to praise the joys of tide pooling. At low tide, peering into the rocky pools along the Pacific Coast is about as much fun as any would-be naturalist can have without getting into trouble with law enforcement. The sheer density of life in the hyper-oxygenated pools and rocks never…
Did you know there is a species of Asian babbler – the only babbler species in the New World – found solely on the western edge of North America? Neither did WC. Wrentits are a member of the family of birds called Sylviidae. The family includes the Old World sylviid warblers, parrotbills and their allied…
The Coastal Redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, are the biggest trees on the planet, nearly the oldest and, at least for WC, the most awe-inspiring. There also nearly impossible to properly photograph, at least with the equipment WC carries. You can try standing at the base of the tree, with your widest angle lens, and photograph up…
The Southern Oregon Coast geology is a distinctly different beast than its more northerly neighbor. The southern coast is dominated by the Franciscan Melange. It’s the detritus scraped off the top of the subducting Juan de Fuca and Pacific Plates. Geologists call it an accretionary wedge or prism. It’s not a good place to be…
A few bird photos from May 2, 2021. The photos are from two areas just south of Coos Bay: Sunset Bay State Park and South Slough Marine Estuary. None of these photos are going to win any prizes, but WC promises you that they were immense fun to take. Processing them on WC’s somewhat aged…
Several readers took WC to task for his Lincoln City Syndrome post. The Oregon Coast, they said, is still beautiful, is still relatively undisturbed, is still a wonderful place to visit. WC, they said, is a cranky old man. Yes, but. The sea wrack is laced with plastic fragments. This is not healthy, normal or…
Most readers will have heard of the Oregon Flood Basalts, the series of volcanic events between 17 and 11 million years ago that covered much of Oregon and Washington, and a chunk of Idaho, under immense lava flows. What they may not know is that two of the lava flows actually ran all the way…
It’s a bit implausible: an English formal garden in the middle of a remote stretch of the Oregon coast, sandwiched between two state parks. But there it is, a meticulously restored and maintained formal garden, perched on top of a cliff over the North Pacific. The Gardens were part of the estate of Louis J.…
As David James Duncan observed in his classic The River Why, all those Oregon coastal rivers that come rushing and hurrying down out of the Coast Range slow to a crawl in meanders and bends when they get near the ocean. James claimed that viewed from the right angle, from the right hilltop, one river…
Wickersham's Conscience 