Red River Gorge Info

A great trip

Kathryn asked for some information on Red River Gorge, so I annotated this map showing most of what I know about it. It seemed like the type of thing that ought to be on the internet. The blue line shows a four day backpacking trip I took with Rolli and Lauren in the spring of 2005, and the blue Xs show approximately where we camped. I've taken the trails that cut across sections of that southern loop, and they aren't as pretty as the rest of the park, but there are some neat views in places. The map underneath is from kywilderness.com. I definitely recommend chewing on some fresh wintergreen if you get the chance.

I'd recommend the pulled cream candy in the gas station outside of the park, but the woman who made them died this past year and her son couldn't keep up the business. It's the end of an era. They still sell Ale 8 however, so if you take a trip there and this map helps you, drink one for me. :)

A Proud Parent

This is what I look like in awe.

Those of you that have seen my living quarters over the last year have probably noticed my recently acquired obsession with plants. Though I'm sure "The Little Shop of Horrors"* is partly to blame, I credit my grandmother with getting me hooked. She gave me a pothos plant during my sophomore year of college and a jade plant the year following. I mothered both obsessively despite them not needing much attention, and the dropped leaves of that jade plant have since, with a little coaxing, spawned plants for pretty much anyone around me who wanted one. I was content with those until this past spring break when Rolli, Lauren, and I visited Hawaii.

The wet parts of Hawaii are naturally hospitable places for plants. If it's not a cactus, it will probably grow there. Every nook and cranny is covered with vegetation, so you can imagine the results when someone actively tries to grow things. The botanical garden north of Hilo, Hawaii is an amazing place, and it inspired me to buy ~$30 worth of bulbs and seeds in the gift shop. As a result, I now have ~20 young guava trees growing on my deck, and that's just the beginning. (If you want one you can probably have one once they are more established. I've got no shortage.) I've gotten to the point that I no longer throw away fruit pits. I start thinking about how the plant that just fed me poured huge amounts of energy into producing this little seed, and that the least I can do is plant it. Even if the fruit goes bad, I've been known to brave the mold and mushy fermenting fruit flesh and plant the pit anyways.

Baby Pictures.

Bringing my plants out to California was difficult as you can probably imagine. To start with, California is picky about what you bring in because of the significance of their fruit and nut industry. One diseased strawberry could financially ruin a whole lot of people. Thankfully, the Ohio department of agriculture has a guy that for $20 will come inspect your plants to certify that they are free of pests and disease. My plants are now papered and have all of the rights and obligations belonging thereto.

Secondly, there's the whole problem of transport. My car (see a few posts back) was pretty well equipped for this, but it was still complicated to keep terra cotta pots from breaking while keeping them accessible enough to water and move around when necessary. I shuttled them between the back seat and my tent whenever we went for an excursion during the day and were taking one car, and set them out in the sunlight whenever I could.

Unfortunately, upon successfully moving into my apartment in Mountain View, I became stupid. I thought, "Hey, my plants have had very little sunlight for the last ten days, I should put them all out on the porch 'cause they could probably use a lot of it." We left for 3 hours to go run some errands. They were all dead when we returned, or at least that's what it looked like. My peperomias were covered in dead leaves and burned at their base, my kahili ginger's leaves were scorched, the stems of my pothos plants were blackened, my other gingers were burned at the base and there were dead leaves all over everything else. This was pretty devastating as you can probably imagine. These plants were the result of months of love and attention, practically pets, and they were all half dead from one bit of stupidity. It had been an exceptionally hot day for Mountain View. The black soil in their pots heated up as it soaked up the sun and killed all of the tissue just above the surface of it. They were effectively nipped off.

I've been coaxing them back to life for the last few weeks, and been pretty successful. My kahili ginger is sprouting new stalks, as are my avocados. My guavas perked right back up, and I'm restarting my peperomias from the branches that I cut from the scorched bases. I'm trying to restart my smaller gingers from their root balls, but I'm not sure if I'll be successful. The worst hit plant was probably my variegated pothos which looked after three hours in the sun like it had spent 3 months in the compost. Every last little bit of stem was black. I cut a few living bits and tried to plant them, but they didn't last long. About a week ago, however, I noticed a tiny little bit of green poking up from a part of my pothos planter. It's currently struggling back from the roots after losing the entire body of the plant. New gardeners? try a pothos. You can kill every bit of living tissue above ground, and it still just might survive.

The most recent addition to my happy plant family are six seedlings of giant sequoias that poked up in the last few days. They started from seeds about the size of the bits of paper that a hole punch produces. The largest, about a centimeter tall, has its first soft pale needles unfolding with its tiny stem. Its a pretty amazing feeling to watch the birth of something that might live longer than Christianity. Some of the trees in Sequoia National Park have been around for 3,000 years.

Speaking of which, Lauren's camera survived the sand and was available to take pictures of the sequoias. She (like all the cool people are doing) has also put her pictures up on PicassaWeb. Check it out.

Here's the list of Common and species names that I prepared for the official from the Ohio Department of Agriculture:

Common Name	Scientific Name
Pink Ginger	Alpinia purpurata
Kahili Ginger	Hedychium gardnerianum
Red Ginger	Alpinia purpurata
Yellow Plumeria	Plumeria rubra
Guava	Psidium guajava
Macadamia	Macadamia integrifolia
Ti Plant	Cordyline terminalis
Christmas Cactus	Schlumbergera ...
Peperomia	Peperomia ...
Pothos	Epipremnum pinnatum
Jade plant	Crassula ovata
African violet	Saintpaulia ...
Avocado	Persea americana
Nightblooming Cereus	Epiphyllum oxypetalum

* "The Little Shop of Horrors" is a musical by Howard Ashman and Alan Menkin, whom you may know as the writers of the music and lyrics for "The Little Mermaid," "Aladdin," and "The Beauty and the Beast." The story follows a poor worker at a plant shop who finds an alien Faustian plant in a local market. The plant offers him fame and fortune in exchange for a steady supply of blood to drink, which he eventually must kill people to obtain. I listened to our vinyl of it on a weekly basis as a toddler, and according to the opening narration, the plant was found in the market on my birthday, "THE TWENTY THIRD DAY OF THE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER, IN AN ERA VERY SIMILAR TO OUR OWN."

Pictures From The Road to California

Trying to narrow my pictures down to a few representatives just wouldn't cut it, so here are the ~100 best in the beta version of Google's PicassaWeb. It was a great trip, and I really don't think there's an ugly state in the union.

Trip out west

Jul 16, 2006 - 97 Photos

You'll notice that there aren't any pictures in there of Giant Sequoia National Park. You'll also notice that some of the last pictures in the album are of giant mountains of pink sand and my camera in the midst of it. I actually did manage to take it all apart and clean the sand out of it, but my souldering skills weren't quite up to the task of getting it working again.

Other peoples pictures will have to suffice.

I'd write a little about the sights on the trip, but its too late at the moment, and all I could really do is bore you with superlatives anyways. Just take a trip sometime and go see Dead Horse Point and Sequoia National Park, and while you're at it drive around southern Utah for a while stopping at scenic points. They've got a place called "Panorama County," and they aren't kidding. Skip the Grand Canyon unless you've got the time to hike down into it. It's cool, but there's cooler.

Hooray for Internet Access!

Behold the glory and the power of the fat pipe. After 3 weeks of waiting for an appointment, 4 hours waiting for a technician that didn't show, and 5 hours waiting for one that finally did, I finally have internet access. I'll post more later. I am now in California and I just finished the second day of my third week at Google. Unfortunately my camera is broken, so pictures of the new place will take a little while. Thankfully it broke late into the road trip so I have pictures from most of that. I'll post some later.