When the Sky Brings Ash: Reflections from the Farm Table

Wildfire ash scattered along the brick walkway. PNW | 2026

The other day, I worked outside at my long farm table, a space used for endless family meals where we pass bowls, plates, and wine to one another under the ponderosa canopy. I noticed the sky’s ashy dandruff floating around me. Their little particle charges were enough to glom onto the laptop screen and swirl around my shoulders.

I looked at the AirNow app, and the AQI was under 100. It didn’t smell like campfire, so wildfire smoke from Canada to the Pacific Northwest still circulated and fell.

How long will smoke and ash continue, I wondered, and who is studying this? Such questions led me to current peer-reviewed literature on wildfire atmospheric transmission in fire science.

Wildfire ash on the farm table. PNW | 2026.

The local wildfire created pyrocumulus clouds, with intense heat ricocheting in the pyroconvective plume to form a firestorm, complete with its own lightning. The plume's height and the wind’s speed and direction worked together to loft ash and debris high into the atmosphere, allowing them to travel long distances before falling back to the ground. Transport distance can be 5 to 20 km, or roughly 3 to 12.4 miles from its origin.

The ash is chemically encoded. Its composition is a complex mixture. Wildfire ash contains plant nutrients like calcium, potassium, and magnesium. Still, it can also carry toxic metals such as lead, arsenic, and mercury, as well as organic compounds released by burning vegetation.

The Scordo et al (2026) paper stated that “deposition of about 10g/m2 across 1 square kilometer translates into ten tons of ash and pyrogenic material entering soils, surface waters, and vegetation in just over 2 weeks.”  Think of that kind of continuous deposit over the summer weeks at a time while a wildfire rushes through the landscape before containment and lands all over other ecosystems.  

Ash settles on the ground, altering soil chemistry and growth patterns. It washes into bodies of water, where nutrients or toxins harm aquatic life. Airborne, the particulates reduce air quality, making it dangerous for people and animals to breathe, sometimes for days or weeks after the flames die. Whenever wildfire smoke hits an atmospheric inversion, the air hangs low and yellow-to-orange; the birdsong stops, windows close, and people tuck away.

We breathe in the burnt forests and grasses, and swim in its sedimentation. In fire ecology, periodic fires play a crucial role in nutrient cycling and shaping plant communities. Wherever we live, work, or play, ash records our planet’s fire history, marking its shifting balance between destruction and regeneration.

While out with the dogs, I came across a charred needle cluster lying on a patch of my grass. I picked it up. The black-to-golden gradient of the charred needles told me this didn't fall off the tree but was scorched and launched as a firebrand. The dark needles snapped off with a brittle crack. Darker on one side, probably to the heat source, and lighter on the other side does not indicate equal decay, as if it had fallen off a tree above me. I have lived here long enough to recognize this scorched specimen as an anomaly that arrived here by the gusty wind.
Self-portrait with firebrand placed on farm table. PNW | 2026

Peer-reviewed articles I consulted:

Paul MJ, LeDuc SD, Boaggio K, Herrick JD, Kaylor SD, Lassiter MG, Nolte CG, Rice RB. Effects of Air Pollutants from Wildfires on Downwind Ecosystems: Observations, Knowledge Gaps, and Questions for Assessing Risk. Environ Sci Technol. 2023 Oct 10;57(40):14787-14796. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.2c09061

Sanchez-Garcia, C., Santín, C., Neris, J., Sigmund, G., Otero, X.L., Manley, J., Gonzalez-Rodriguez, G., Belcher, C., Cerdá, A., Marcotte, A.L., Murphy, S.F., Rhoades, C., Sheridan, G.J., Strydom, T., Robichaud, P.R., and Doerr, S.H., 2023, Chemical characteristics of wildfire ash across the globe and their environmental and socio-economic implications: Environment International, v. 178, 108065, 16 p., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2023.108065.

Scordo, F., Bavandpour, M., Or, D. et al. Downwind deposition of pyrogenic particles from wildfire plumes. Commun Earth Environ 7, 487 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03660-3

Displaced by Uncertainty

“What are you going to do if your house burns down?” my boss asked. I let out an audible sigh. “Campfire Christmas, I guess.”  I was on a Teams call and unsure what my face said.

Mother texted this photo, while enroute to my house when the wildland fire broke out. July 2026.

I channeled the Buddhist insight of non-attachment. Let.Go.Of.Things. Let go of the outcome.  

The nearby wildland fire started from one of the 14,000 lightning strikes that hit the PNW in mid-July.  

But here’s the thing: we left home before the wildland fire started. We brought only minimal supplies for a long road trip, with the intention of returning home.

There were things left to do before evacuating the property to make it a defensible space for the firefighters—everything else we had done in the spring and summer to make the home firewise.

I texted Dad with the final list: unravel and lay out the hoses around the property, take down the hammocks, leave on lights inside and out, and cross your fingers. Being a first responder in his early life, he called with his matter-of-fact checklist completed in addition to other items he did.  

Being a camper and outdoor enthusiast, I understand what I can live with and what I can live without. The list of needs is short when I look around and see all the gadgets, clothes, and stuff that pulsates people’s need for new, improved, seasonal merchandise. If anything, I am inspired by people who live a minimalist life.  
 
Family and friends sent photos as updates while displaced, living out of our camping tent/gear and with extended family’s gracious offerings, including their splendid Breville coffee espresso maker. I went to the local Target, stocked up on Cocojune yogurt paired with homemade granola bars and a local roaster’s whole coffee beans. I dug into a new book: Rick McIntyre’s The Rise of Wolf 8.

My son texted updates, tracking with precision the aerial assaults from FlightRadar24: the number of helicopters, airplanes, and the CalFire’s DC-10 Air Tanker brought in from Sacramento.

He calculated how many minutes it took for an aerial assault to launch, drop, and reload. He studied the flight patterns overlaid with Watch Duty maps, ArcGIS maps, and Google Maps. He was in his flow.

Over 1,000 men and women from ground crews to aerial assaults hit the wildland fire and demanded that residents get the hell out of the area.

My son texted me the fire lookout camera view. “2 National Guard Blackhawks keep dropping by our house.” “ They drop every five minutes or less.” “Helicopters are dropping on your trails rn, mom.”

Much of July became about seeking higher elevations to avoid heat domes, enjoying an outdoor shower from a spritzing water bottle, and listening for wildlife at camp.  

Now that the wildland fire is contained and we are allowed to return home, I am thankful for what still stands. While driving home from the grocery store, I passed a light green wildland firefighter rig. The driver and I waved at each other.

Homemade signs line the roads, thanking the firefighters, our true heroes who work on non-stop schedules in dangerous conditions and strive to protect the forest and structures..

This afternoon the dogs and I walked to inspect the property. I came across firebrand, debris within a short-range band of the fallout. Thick, corky, spongy ponderosa pine bark plates were skeletonized and scattered. It’s very cool how the plate’s carbon lattice retains the original structural framework of the bark even after all the combustible material is gone. Its texture reminded me of a light-as-air meringue cookie.    

Within the blast radius: I am holding two different ponderosa pine plate’s carbon lattice that retained the original structural framework of the bark. l August 2026

Knowing the fire-adapted evolution of the ponderosa pines, I know they will thrive again into a dense forest in 30 years. What’s a little more waiting to see the trails come back to life? What’s another forest project to show you all how a forest comes back to life? Stay tuned, as I study its death and rebirth.

With climate change, especially the increase in Red Flag Warnings, the wildland fires move fast with gusty winds, low humidity, and drought conditions. | Driving in eastern Washington, south of Spokane. August 2026.

Watch Duty map shows active and inactive wildland fires in the PNW. A snapshot in real-time of the PNW in summer. Wildland firefighters are the heros protecting our forests, grasslands, and structures. l. July 2026

Juniper Woodland Series: Part 2 – Looking Out and Up for Weirdness

Panoramic of the old-growth juniper woodland I observed on a private preserve. Central Oregon. 2026

Looking up is a game-changer in an old-growth woodland. It’s like going from grayscale to full spectrum with a single head tilt.

The land expresses itself through what it grows, what lives there, and what we take from it. Today, my only task was to observe this 40-acre preserve with a few others and a forester from Oregon State University. The woodlands of this juniper old-growth private preserve showed no disturbance history: no visible lightning or wildfire scars, untrammeled native grasses, and no invasive species (i.e., cheatgrass).

I. A Tree Unlike Any Other

The old-growth western juniper is an oddball among us, in the most endearing way. If Oregon’s big city slogan is “Keep Portland Weird,” then the junipers (Juniperus occidentalis) would be “Keep Junipers Wonky.” Unlike most trees, their age isn’t measured by height, but by their gnarly, twisting trunks and asymmetrical canopy shapes—the weirder, the older. Sometimes their branches resemble a Medusa-inspired wig.

 Centuries of ill-advised factors like wind, drought, bark beetle, fires, and lightning wipe out many forests, but junipers lean into the disarray. They’re like, Yasss, we love drought and chaos; this is our home! They are the “get comfortable with discomfort” species in a semiarid ecosystem.

Caption: left to right - old-growth junipers (approximately 700 years old), as evidenced by (1) gnarly, asymmetrical canopy; (2) wolf lichen, and (3) furrowed, twisted, striated reddish bark.

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II. Survival Strategies

Their slow accumulation over centuries isn’t just about survival. They thrive in places where other trees simply can’t make it.

The older juniper’s bark texture is shreddy like brisket before it lands on a bun, and its color ranges from gray to cinnamon. Twisted branches ward off wind damage, and their seal-don’t-heal ability protects living wood from dead sections in the harshest conditions. It’s not uncommon to see deadwood and live wood coexisting on the same trunk—this is a snag-with-a-pulse. These stress responses benefit junipers and the wildlife that make homes in pocket rot.

 Most of the old growth around us was 500-800 years old. For perspective, the USA is just celebrating its 250-year anniversary in 2026—happy birthday! Junipers have the oddities of wolf lichen, an arresting chartreuse shrubby tuft of bright color that’s metabolically alive on a silvery gray branch that is dead. The ability to be alive and dead, based on its internal hydraulic system, is known as juniper cavitation. Basically, the vascular system reroutes water around the dead parts to its thriving parts.

Sadly, junipers are vastly understudied because they haven’t been commercially viable, so few research dollars are invested in them. Their slow-growth accumulation produces dense wood that would probably break an increment borer if someone attempted a dendrological study.

III. A Living Legacy

In any region of the world, human development for humans creates a problem. “We” are not the only ones living here. Thankfully, some humans want to do the right thing and leave some land alone—wild in its own way—for future generations to observe and study. That is why I spent time on this toenail-sized piece of land, a private preserve surrounded by an expansive swath of developed, owned, and controlled parcels. On this private preserve were old-growth junipers, a species highly politicized as an elder or encroacher post-settlement (i.e., white folks seizing the land from Indigenous peoples).

Junipers, native to Oregon, have been around for thousands of years. The oldest is 1,600 years old, east of where I stood. They're an opportunistic species, however, pollinated by the wind and birds; they monopolize resources in an arid, rocky landscape at a certain elevation. They guzzle groundwater and hog drizzle with their canopy, so nothing grows below them. Land managers in cattle ranching disdain them because they use groundwater that native vegetation needs. Wildland firefighters frown upon junipers because their volatile oils burn hot and fiercely, making a wildland fire hotter and angrier. The Firewise neighborhoods encourage homeowners to cut down junipers to help raise groundwater levels.

 They are a nuisance unless deemed old-growth (200-900 years old) or new old-growth (around 200 years old). The question is whether to leave the new old-growth or remove it; the forester said it was hotly contested among natural resources personnel. What we know is that they could be here longer than many more generations of us. They thrive in soil that barely qualifies as such.

BONUS No. 01: A trail run cool finding of mine
While trail running deep in a mixed conifer forest, this USFS Wildlife Tree tag stopped me (see photos below). A forester deliberately decided to retain this juniper during whatever management activity occurred in this area. It adds immense value to the ecosystem, rather than removing it. It’s a giant beauty that’s probably 900 years old.

Caption: The US Forest Service designates certain snags and declining trees with these Wildlife Tree tags rather than removing them, precisely because standing dead and dying juniper provides irreplaceable habitat.

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BONUS NO. 02: Scholarly literature on junipers!
- Echohydrology study - Camp Creek Paired Watershed Study OSU
- Peer reviewed: Management of the Western Junipers

Juniper Woodland Series: Part 1 - Looking Down

I - Lunar-like
There was no crunch underfoot. The ground wasn't right, not in the quicksand kind of way, but a soft, fluffy, beachy way in the high desert. It felt like the earth was giving me a gentle foot-hug with each step. My lug-soled footprints stayed put, which was why eight of us were instructed to spread out on this protected woodland preserve in Central Oregon.

Self-portrait with Owyhee harvester ants and skeleton plant. Old-growth juniper woodlands. Central Oregon. June 2026.

A colony of Owyhee harvester ants was hard at work. (Note: You don’t camp next to them, unless you enjoy pugnacious, aggressive, and venomous little warriors.) They evolved to get shit done and be together. Some colonies thrive for 30 years. One study east of here at Horse Ridge Natural Area found about 40 nests of Owyhee harvester ants. Each colony showed seed predation, enabling a transformation of 46,000 square meters of barren landscape. They re-engineered the landscape into barren zones. Grazing behaviors of sheep, cattle, and ants perform similar functions, just over different time scales.

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“No walking in a single-file line. Don’t follow each other," the Oregon State University forester said. “Any trail you see is from animals, not humans.”  

At home on my parcel, I adore finding animal trails. I think of them as little wildlife highways. Order and sequence permeate all nature, not just humans' “ownership” of the planet to carve roads.

"Remember what you see,” she said, and vanished into the brittlebrush, sagebrush, and old-growth juniper woodlands off to the next rendezvous point by the open meadow.

Separately, we made our way across the preserve and looked down.

Sound came from the distant highway; tires pulsating speed on an overcast Saturday morning. I dressed for the whiplash weather on a summer day in Central Oregon: long underwear, rain-resistant pants, a puffy jacket with a hood, hiking boots, and a backpack. Just three days ago, it was 88 degrees F. I wore a tank top and shorts for trail running. Now the wind made it feel 38 degrees F.

What I also didn’t hear: birds. Didn’t see any either. This broke my heart. I kept my head down and stayed curious.

Caption: left to right are my photographs of the pumice province (i.e., pale, open, coarse, almost no organic layer visible). Old-growth juniper woodlands. Central Oregon. June 2026.
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An older man in a sun hat and a CT scan scheduled for 11 AM, yelled to me, “Whadda ya suppose this scat is from?”   We stood over the clump and bantered about wildlife scats.  

The forester eventually came around and bent down. With bare hands, she broke apart the scat like I had seen her do earlier with a lemon butter cookie. She looked inside. She dropped it and brushed her hands off on her cargo pants, which had muted tribal salmon-silhouette iron-on patches. “Not sure. Gonna think about this one.” And she continued into the preserve.

This forester, with a septum ring and thick silver rings, WAS a former wilderness ranger who spent long stretches in the backcountry observing and analyzing what the land had to say. I hadn’t become her wild, yet, but I was thoroughly impressed with such rugged grace.

Basalt with blackish-gray fuzzy moss on the pumice layer with native grasses sprouting randomly. Old-growth juniper woodlands. Central Oregon. June 2026.
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II - AIRBORNE

What I learned from the ground began 7,700 years ago. When Mount Mazama erupted, it imploded to create Crater Lake (forming the deepest inland lake in North America), and its contents drifted and coated 24 cubic miles and hundreds of miles of the PNW in a pumice layer.

We stood on the Mazama Soil Province: a coarse, pale, almost lunar-like material with textures but no rich loam for vegetable gardens. What was below my feet was an aeolian deposit. The ground literally landed here. The wind brought it and said, " Stay here until I move you again.”

The pumice is the gauntlet, a landscape basically made of volcanic glass, and what grows here tolerates low fertility, rapid drainage, and thermal extremes at the surface. And whatever can survive in such conditions becomes the high desert ecosystem. What made it through was what was around us.

This private property preserve hadn’t been touched by humans since the 1930s. No recreating, no flagging, no government edicts. The only apparent evidence of human interference was a portion of overgrazed land by sheep, and in 1915, the homesteaders dug a channel to capture water. The channel was deep to chest high back in its original state. Over the last almost 100 years, the wind has moved the soil, leaving the channel to appear as a long divot, maybe six inches lower than its surroundings.

“Soil moves,” the forester said. “And another rain will come; the wind will come and cover up our footprints.”  

Caption: (left) Six-point buck skeleton with the skull and ribcage still largely articulated and in rough anatomical position relative to each other. The spine connected them, and ribs were still attached. Bones were not scattered. (Right) Partial skeleton of a woody shrub. Old-growth juniper woodlands. Central Oregon. June 2026.
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BONUS CONTENT! My Theory on the SCAT…
A mountain lion killed the six-point buck. Dragged it to a lower-elevation area on the 40-acre preserve, hid it under a juniper with a wide canopy. Fed on it. The carcass appeared relatively confined to one spot, and the skeleton retained its basic form. A tawny fur patch near the shoulder remained. Mountain lions feed on the hindquarters and thoracic cavity first, which may explain the missing rear legs and pelvis; the head, antlers, and rib cage remain intact. Then a black bear came along to feed on this substantial kill, leaving a large scat pile that doesn’t resemble wolf, mountain lion, coyote, or any smaller creature’s waste. I suspect the black bear fed on forbs and the leftover buck before leaving a little note on the land about his co-existence.

Alive-Dead: The Story of My Meditation Tree

I used a butterknife to peel away the ponderosa pine’s bark plates, revealing bright cambium. I did a soap-bubble test for gurgling at possible boreholes and checked for frass at the base. Was it root rot, bark beetle, sunscald?

A tree contains a biography. The outside tells only part of a story, with its branches, needles, and trunk. Last summer, I noticed my meditation tree—the one I had been looking after for more than a decade—had resin pouring from it, and its needles were browning.

She survived winter but didn't return in spring. Instead, she browned to the crown and down all sides except one small part. An arborist, with a beard to his mid-chest and jolly smile, came and said it was alive but actively dying—"alive-dead," he said. "It’s gotta come down. The longer you wait, the more expensive it gets."
 
He apologized and said that he hated to cut down trees; he fancied himself more of a limber. “In my prime, I loved nothing more than limbing a tree to its full beauty.” But this one was a fire hazard, and we were in fire season. He said he'd put this 85-foot-tall one on the high-priority list if we agreed.

I woke, pulled back the curtains, and took her photo—her last sunrise. A mixture of gratitude and nostalgia entered the haze of remembering the kids and dogs running around her. Three of the dogs were dead now, too.

I know most people don't see nature as co-existing beings, placing me in a hypothetical minority. Her roots still give all they can to the world below. Each tree’s roots stretch as far as its height. Beneath me is a web of symbiosis woven from wood.

My meditation’s tree last sunrise. The small, scattered clouds are a rarity. My evidence? Looking at the sky each morning. June 2026

Three fallers arrived and took her down limb by limb, trunk slice by trunk slice. She’d been a massive shade tree. Her canopy caught rain and snow, keeping the ground below almost untouched.

After they left, I hosed off the sawdust to see her story. Each ring showed she was over a century old: probably germinated around the World Wars, endured the Dust Bowl, slowed growth as she fought for light and water, then grew faster as the canopy opened.

I was born in her rings. You were born in her rings. Her story has stopped, but I leave her stump in the ground and will varnish the top with pine tar and oil, keeping her cross-section alive with history beside mine. Next, I’m trying to decide what to plant nearby her to watch life unfold, again.

Self-portrait in front of my meditation tree. The remaining canopy keeps her in shade. June 2026.

In the Northern Great Basin’s Sagebrush Sea

Panoramic photograph I took while doing fieldwork. It looks like this in 360 degrees! Northern Great Basin, Eastern Oregon. 2026

The Northern Great Basin lies between the Cascade Range and the Steens Mountains in a desolate stretch of eastern Oregon. Sagebrush stretches in every direction.

I was with a fieldwork group, tasked with learning and documenting small landbirds in the sagebrush sea that brushed our hips.

Before we took our positions, a spring squall brought surprises. The sky churned with charcoal grays, indigo blues, and wispy whites. Intermittent, spotty wind gusts produced two dust devils. I squinted and braced my face. Thankfully, I wore long underwear, sweater, and fleece. Beanie pulled down. Wool socks under hiking boots. Gloves on. It was near the end of May. The high desert is known for its spring unpredictability at 5,000 feet, with rain, snow, and heat within a 24-hour period. Wearing layers is a way of life here.

Despite these worsening conditions, the wildlife biologist said, “These aren’t the greatest avian collection conditions. But let’s stick with it; we’re already here.”

As soon as her encouragement landed, the graupel fell—white pellets clung to my black fleece pullover like a starry night. And we laughed at the absurdity. Birds didn’t fly or sing in this inclement weather. So, we stood in silence; the graupel struck the ground with a hollow sizzle, bouncing off dry vegetation and cracked earth that looked like the seams of puzzle pieces. 

Once the weather passed, motivated by her words, we continued. 

Close-up shot of fleece jacket amassing graupel and wind whipping hair parallel to the ground. Northern Great Basin, Eastern Oregon. 2026

The data sheet had five concentric circles, like a bull’s-eye, each ring demarcating distances ranging from 0–40m to 160–200m from my position. On my clipboard, I affixed a rubber band at the bottom that kept the data sheet in place when the wind whipped. 

I took photos from the north, south, east, and west to document the habitat and the position of the data survey. We also used the anemometer, range finder, and GPS. We faced north; each person chose a bird and slowly rotated through a full circle to observe and listen for calls. 

To maintain consistency, we counted only grounded and flushed birds, and no fly-throughs. We set the five-minute timer and went silently with active listening. We recorded every bird seen and heard.

I focused on the Brewer’s Sparrow (BRSP), noted for its distinctive calls. Others listened for meadowlarks, sagebrush sparrows, horned larks, and sage thrashers. First, we listened to call notes, then for the full song. I wrote circles on the data sheet labeled V (visual) or C (calling), plus the direction.

Note from my field notebook. The “Rhythms” section is my own way of “seeing” the calls, as if cryptic sheet music.

Amidst all this, their complicated trills rose from the vegetation, mostly heard but unseen in the steppe. The avian point survey was a snapshot of time. On windy days, hearing beyond 120m was difficult. The cacophony of their calls underscored both the difficulty and the beauty of our scientific choir recording their chorus.  

Custom-built rig by Him for car camping. The drawer system serves as a table for boiling water, cooking, and writing/drawing. Northern Great Basin, Eastern Oregon. 2026

Weather front during fieldwork. Looks like the clouds and earth are separated by a sliver of space. Northern Great Basin, Eastern Oregon. 2026

The Return of Ghost Bird

Dusk turned the forest shapes blue-gray. I read under the duvet by a small yellow light, the window cracked open. The voice returned from the distance: my ghost bird was back. It sounded like ancestral weeping in an attic—haunting and nameless. It rarely visited, never in daylight, belonging only to those transitional times of day.  

The song was a strange, high-pitched, ghostly warble—a whispery cackle, lasting about six seconds.   

Edit of Wilson’s snipe winnowing copy.m4a

This is my poor-quality audio sample; you’re listening for the distant bird. I was too far away with a poor microphone. There is a louder sample at the Cornell Lab, but it’s not quite the beautiful sound I hear from a distance.


I went outside and started the audio identifier. The sound was distant, but it broke through the road noise. Audio identified it as Wilson’s snipe. As if a child were learning a word for the first time, I said it out loud. Repeated it. The birdsong had an identity. Identity means information, and information means creating a narrative in my head. It lived here; I lived here. We were natural neighbors.   

And what I found out was a mechanical engineer’s dream: its song was not a vocalization at all, but rather the sound emanated from its tail feathers during a dive-bombing flight at about 25 to 60 miles per hour. The sound was the flirtiest attempt to woo a mate and show territorial might, called winnowing.  

My sketches of the ghost bird, Wilson’s snipe: whole bird, tail feathers in winnowing dive-bomb, and its prehensile bill.

I have never seen this elusive bird; I have only heard its occasional sound in the spring’s pre-dawn and dusk. Then it goes away or stops its winnowing.    

I did my best to record Wilson’s snipe and convert the audio file into a spectrogram to examine all the environmental sounds at dusk, when diurnal sounds change guard and thermals shift. The Wilson’s snipe sound hid in the spectrogram’s pixelated blue zone among the forest’s ambience. The spectrogram resembled a layered cake: slices of rumbles, winds, and absorptions stacked from ground to sky.   

This is the spectrogram of the audio file showing what dusk “looks” like in sound.

Its winnowing reminded me of how nostalgia arrives sporadically, and in whiffs, when we least expect it. 

 

Down by the Low River Is a Plastic-Sleeved Grove

Standing in the middle of a dry riverbank. John Day River. Eastern Oregon. 2026

Close-up of plastic sleeve, with aerated holes. Eastern Oregon. 2026

Rows of long plastic sleeves were zip-tied to wooden stakes spaced every ten feet across the center of the BLM campground. The sleeves, presumed to protect planted saplings, hinted at a restoration effort. Yet so many sleeves were angled, broken, and discarded across the flat. 

There were no posted signs to explain the experiment. As I walked along the plastic grove, kicking up dust with my trail shoes, the work of Hope Jahren and Suzanne Simard came to mind; Jahren’s studies on plant resilience and Simard’s groundbreaking research into the hidden networks that connect trees beneath the soil seemed especially relevant when I looked at the struggling saplings.   

After exploring, we set up a camp alongside the John Day River. The dogs sniffed and searched for shade while I read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. Abbey’s sharp observations of human intervention in wild places and his defense of untouched lands felt as urgent now as ever, deeply resonating with the scene unfolding around me.  

Later, as the evening settled in, we made dinner in the Jet Boil skillet and shared gummy candy for dessert. We went to bed before people in the city even left for a restaurant.  Overnight, the campground was mostly quiet, except at one point when I heard animals walking on the gravel outside the tent. Peace ended with loud squabbling turkeys and Mallards honking in constant Doppler effect.    

At sunrise, we ate instant blueberry oatmeal and drank black coffee while discussing our plans for the day. We favored the no-plan-as-a-plan approach—either settling on a single destination or letting ourselves wander the dirt roads. In this remote area, printed maps were essential.    

Dawn’s radiation fog skims the tops of the plastic-sleeved grove. John Day River. Eastern Oregon. 2026

Solid, outdoorsy, adventure breakfast of instant blueberry oatmeal and a thermos of black coffee. 2026, John Day River. Eastern Oregon. 2026

Soon after breakfast, a large pickup truck slowed nearby, and two older women got out and walked into the plastic-sleeved grove. "Here’s my chance," I said. "Of course it is," he replied.   
 
I approached the women and went into my roving reporter mode. The woman with deep time and sunshine on her face wore an oversized blue Cabela’s shirt, shorts, and Keen sandals. She had been one of the laborers in the grove. This was her first time back since they planted the trees more than a year ago.  

The BLM bought all the supplies for planting 3,000 cottonwood trees over 20 acres. The cottonwood grove plan was to offer wildlife food and cover. The Oregon Hunters Association planted trees for over two days. The BLM planned to flood the land to soak it. But it appeared that it had never happened. Without that critical step, the dry ground offered no help to the saplings.  

As she spoke about her disappointment, seeing the failed saplings up close, left me too dismayed. I suspected this was the federal budget cuts and a political administration’s efforts to slash an environmental pursuit for preservation and sustainability. Even a modest restoration effort here had its luck dried out under the scathing high desert sun.  

The plastic sleeves were bent and battered by the weather. She said we should be able to hear the river rushing at this time of year; it should be breaking the bank. The river could have been back-up water to the grove, but even a dry winter didn’t give it up. 

"This experiment failed," she said. "Now we need cleanup labor." 

The project's failure lingered with me. Even with the best intentions, things fail, especially when humans try to tend a landscape on their timetable rather than nature’s. Modern landscape is shaped by time, climate, and bureaucracy. Sometimes the land answers in ways we do not choose. My hope, though, is that in another season, a few cottonwoods will take. 

Sunrise illuminated the plastic-sleeved grove. John Day River. Eastern Oregon. 2026.

The Mysterious One-Note in the Forest

Dispersed camping among old wildfire scarred land and thriving forest. | PNW | 2026

I.
Pre-dusk, base camp, remote national forest above a wildfire-scarred ravine.  

We found a dispersed camping spot 20 miles down a forest road. It was after a windy day of hiking, with gusts up to 25 miles per hour whipped off the canyon and along the trail. 

After our campstove dinner, we passed the Fireball flask. The cinnamon heat hit my mouth and stomach as the light faded. Suddenly, our border collie erupted into wild barking. His sharp, protective barks rolled, penetrating the brittle understory and thick canopy. His chest swelled. Breath quickened. Whatever was there, he sensed it.  

We met eyes and praised him. Don’t question a dog. 

II. 
 
Pre-dawn in the windless tent with the dog pack; silence pervaded until a far-off call punctured it. Our newest rescue snapped up, with her ears pricked. A sheriff found her as a stray in eastern Oregon's high desert at winter's edge. She's a zesty, small, hoppy McNab-border collie crossed with a bunny; we swear. Her thin coat suggested nights burrowed tight under sage, bunchgrass, and juniper. Her feral instincts endured, despite domestication and a plush donut bed. She startled first, drifted last, and always listened. 

I unzipped the tent window and pushed my audio recorder into the cold. The soft, metronomic call pulsed every five to seven seconds. After an hour, it faded.  

Gray-green light coated the pointy-tipped pine forest and charred stumps along the ravine and the horizon. Clouds taped off Mount Hood. We made coffee and instant oatmeal, wearing beanies, fleece, and gloves. 

Pygmy Nuthatch, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Williamson’s Sapsucker, Fox Sparrow, and Northern Flicker called. About an hour after sunrise, the one-note sonar resumed. I recorded the audio again, this time near the ridge’s edge, while drinking coffee from a thermos. 

III. 

Once at home, I played back the clip, cycling through bird and animal recordings. The pattern matched neither bird song nor coyote yips—no screeches or whistles—just a calm, soft, relentless note. I considered an owl, a marmot, or a tree frog, but the rhythm and timbre didn't fit.  

I knew mountain lions thrived in the region. While trail running, we often found scattered mule deer bones. I recently overheard paw-tracking stories from campers warming up before yoga. Mountain lions, a keystone species, fascinated me, and I knew they made many vocalizations, including a gentle, bird-like chirp. An ODFW wildlife technician’s audio explanation confirmed my intuition that it was a mountain lion call. 
 
So, my story, then: the night before, our dog did indeed sense a mountain lion on the ridge. We stood between mother and cub; she watched, regardless of distance. In the morning a mountain lion cub called its mother deep in the ravine.

Around here, they say, if you don’t see a mountain lion in the forest, she has already seen you. 

==
Listen for yourself: can you hear the background one-note “chirp”?

Birdsong and Mt Lion call.m4a
Tricia Louvar | Field Audio | 2026 PNW

In the Pursuit of Nothing, Something Happened in the Forest

During forest bathing, I found this wolf lichen with apothecia. PNW | 2026

The dogs stopped before I did, noses in the duff. That is how it works with forest bathing—I follow where the dogs go, so I halted. I try not to go looking for anything, but if something pulls my attention, I ask why. 

As they had their sniff glory, I noticed the chartreuse lichen draped across the topside of a dying juniper branch. I stepped closer. Tucked inside the soft, spiked fronds were what looked like googly dark pupil stickers, the kind found on children’s craft tables. I had never seen these before. Upon further research, they are apothecia on wolf lichen. 

What I learned is this: when lichen fragments vegetatively, the broken piece carries both partners intact—the fungus and the alga together, a complete working unit. It lands on bark, rock, or soil and continues being what it already was. No search required. The partnership travels whole, like a married couple embarking on the Taoist’s Wei wu, path of least resistance. 

The apothecia indicate the opposite. They release spores containing only the fungus half of the organism—no alga, no partner, nothing but potential—into the wind. Each spore drifts until it lands near a compatible alga already living somewhere in the environment. If that meeting happens under the right conditions, something entirely new forms: a partnership between two organisms from different kingdoms of life that have never met before in exactly that combination. Not a copy of the parent but something that couldn't have been predicted. 

I stood in that forest spot longer than the dogs wanted me to. 

I am struck by the natural world mirroring my life as an empty nester. Our kids have floated into the world the way spores do— incomplete in their age but mature enough to move toward partnerships in their new environment. The apothecia do not chase the spore. They let it go and remain, like parents knowing they’ve done their job, seeing their kids go and thrive. And the view from the forest floor is great.

When the Ground Let Go

The forest trail had survived worse. Mountain forest snowstorms are often the last vestiges of snow and ice, clinging until deep July. Frozen land. Thawed land. Animal bones litter these parts. Years of shoes, mountain bike tires, paws, and hooves wear their curves into the land's memory.   

A few days after the winter inversion lifted, I went for a trail run with the dogs. The familiar firmness of winter dirt was not there. Instead, the ground gave way—straight down, no warning, no slide. Just a sharp crunch, and my feet kept dropping into the ground, like a spoon cracking the top of creme Brule. It was as if the earth had exhaled each time my feet hit the trail.   

I adjusted, slowed, and paid attention. The earth could not hold me: crunch, pop, hollow sounds. The ground was lying.  

What unsettled me wasn't the sensation itself but how quickly my body lost trust. Muscles tightened. Balance recalibrated. I began walking the way you do on unfamiliar ice, even though there was no ice to see. The ground had changed its rules without telling me, and my body knew it before my mind could catch up.  

The rocks on the trail finally stopped me. They had fallen straight down into the trail, leaving behind precise outlines of their negative space. Not scattered, not rolled away—just dropped, straight down. The earth held them, then let them go, just as all lives lived.  

Our typical knowledge is   
ground = compresses;   
ice = shatters.  

This was   
ground = shatters.  

Photos from my personal archive of the Cascade Range: (left) long shot of wintry mountain range; close-up of thawing ground; frozen fog on forest road; night skiing lights on mountain ridgeline.

Ice formed in the dark. Water migrated upward. Structure rearranged itself while I went on with my days, unaware. Ice had formed not on the surface but inside the soil itself; thin sheets stacked as a quiet architecture (i.e., ice lenses). When the sun returned, it softened only the top layer, leaving a crust-over emptiness. Welcome to a freeze-thaw segregation of soil physics. 

My point load was ruining the trail; normally, it's spring, when the land managers advise staying off the trails to prevent destroying surface uniformity. But here I totally ruined it in winter.  

I kept thinking about how I trusted the ground when I wasn't next to a slope. How much of my life do I move through it that way, assuming support is inherent rather than conditional? Assuming what holds me up today will hold me tomorrow simply because it always has. 

We often think of collapse as something dramatic. Loud. Sudden. But this wasn't that. This was quite weak. A slow exchange of one state for another. A surface that continued to look like itself long after it had lost the ability to bear weight. 

The trail will recover. The soil will settle. The ice will disappear completely. From the surface, nothing will mark where the ground once gave up. It won’t remember me, but it will stay with me.

The Hold of Frozen Fog

For a week and a half now, frozen fog pressed down, laying rime ice. Every twig, wire, and conifer needle was rimmed in frosty lace. The stillness hummed. 

This winter, so far, has kept itself quiet. Nights run long and clear. Cold air doesn’t rise — it drapes low, sliding downslope and settling into the valleys, folding itself in. The fog doesn’t lift. It stays. And stays. 

Each morning, the world reappears softer. The same forest, the same ridgeline— only now they wear a memory of moisture. Rime ice builds in slow increments, feathered and fine, like time itself is catching on edges. 

This is what an inversion does: holds the world in pause, asks you to notice how silence accumulates.  

finding (the) time

““...The life you lead is your art and the art you make is your life.””
— Art Work: On the Creative Life, Sally Mann

I fondly remember studying Mann’s early work as a budding darkroom photographer who traveled great distances to see Photography ART wherever I landed or lived.

Now she’s 74, passing on her wisdom in Art Work. Life is short, and I’m listening and doing what needs to come next. What will survive, what will linger, what will whisper from time to time among one mind or many?

Down a forest road, walking, looking for the year’s tree. PNW

of truth and trust

“...to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment...”
— "Economy." Henry David Thoreau from Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Hiking in the PNW | 2025

Sequence of Darkness

Astronomy Ampitheater | Nevada

Have you ever met someone so confident and grounded that they don’t talk about themselves? They don’t need to. Either you know who they are, or you don’t—and either way, they couldn’t care less. The sky over Great Basin National Park is like that. It doesn’t need to impress you. It just is. And when the horizon slices out the Snake Range like a quiet blade, you feel the gravity of that presence.

Earth exhales here in basin and range. And the sky? It becomes a slow-moving theater where twilight performs in three deliberate acts—civil, nautical, and astronomical. Each phase unfolds, deepens in hue, then dissolves into the next.

The elevation starts at 6,000 feet and climbs to 13,000 feet if you summit Wheeler Peak. The air is dry, crisp, unbothered. You won’t find crowds—just a couple of roads leading to nowhere in particular. The nearest town, Baker, claims a population of 23. Someone sells ice from their porch if you need it. And instead of a little free library, there’s a take-a-stick-leave-a-stick setup for dogs.

If you come here, come ready—food, water, gear. Self-sufficiency is the unspoken language of the place.

Great Basin is a certified International Dark Sky Park. At night, the Milky Way doesn’t simply appear—it commands. You’ll stare up so long your neck will ache, locked in celestial conversation. The birds disappear. The stars stay.

Welcome, summer. This is what it’s like to hang out with astronomers.

Bookstore Crawl + a bag of chips

We started in the front section of an indie bookstore, then wandered separately but circled the genres.

He found me and handed over a book.
“This one’s for you,” he said. “It’s very you.” Nicholas Triolo - the shapes of his name matched the Enso Zen Circle.

By the end of our bookstore crawl date, we’d gathered eight books between us. He carried them in a brand-new fabric tote, which also held my fresh pair of jeans—and later, a half-eaten, shared bag of sea salt & vinegar avocado oil chips from lunch.

Back home, I made tea. We sorted our finds:


• His stack: military history.


• Mine: writing, photography, nature.

I cracked open “The Way Around” and paused at the prologue: 
“What are we encircling? What is encircling us?”

Out the window, the forest answered in stillness.

The weekend’s gaze held a little longer—read a book, limb some trees.

earth as home

“We must learn to treat the earth as our home, not with authoritarian domination but by responsive cooperation.” 
 
”Reclaiming the American Landscape” 
The Aesthetics of Environment 

Arnold Berleant

Photo from a recent morning when my lungs were filled with mountain air. The little Quaking Aspen leaf had nowhere to go but to be in the sunrise. At that moment, me too.

All content is original and copyrighted by me, Tricia Louvar. No reproduction of contents without written consent from Tricia Louvar.