Wednesday, January 11, 2012


In the dead of winter, the park is bursting with life.  The birds are all around, and often easier to see.  Sun lights up the bright tree trunks and bare branches.  Lichens in the canopy come down to where we can see them when storm winds clean the dead branches out of alders and madrones.  Fungi that have been invisible in the soil all year make their presence known when mushrooms suddenly sprout.  Of course people and dogs walk through the park every day of the year.  

Even the earth comes to life, in a way, when winter rains cause the soil to move.  Sometimes it creeps along, and sometimes it suddenly gives way.  The alders in the picture above probably started growing vertically, and gradually tipped as the earth moved beneath them over the years.  For the last several years, but not yet this year, a small landslide just to the south of the stairs has pushed sandy soil out onto the beach.  A large, deep crack has formed at the beach at the south end of the park, perhaps indicating that a major slide will happen soon.  The four alders pictured above have likely intertwined their roots, helping to lock the soil in place.  Looking back from the beach, you can see the soil has been cut from underneath the west-most alder, leaving its roots in the air.  It is being kept alive and kept standing by its neighbors.  

The staircase was designed to allow slight movements in the soil.  Each section of metal stairs can float around on the concrete pad at each landing.  No section can move more than a foot before things fall apart, but it does allow for some motion.  Each concrete landing is really just a cap.  The actual foundation is a set of steel pipes pounded down into the soil as far as they would go.  Since they are anchored deep in the soil, they will move less, unless the whole hillside gives way.  The natural ecology of the shoreline depends on regular landslides providing new sandy material to the beach.  Because of housing development and bulkheads along the shore, not many areas still allow the luffs to fall into the sea, so places like Eagle Landing Park are more important than ever to healthy ecosystems.  

The concrete landings could also be an excellent substrate for lichens, although none have formed there yet.  Lichens can take decades to grow.  Hopefully, some of the branches that have fallen in recent storms can transfer lichen to that bare stone.  These pictures show some lichens that blew down recently, allowing me to set them before the tripod.

Stone 11 is pictured below with some tiny little mushrooms.  So far, I have not been able to identify this mushroom, but it might be Marasmius candidus.  If you have any idea what it is, please give me a hint.

`The dogs and I walked a couple of miles, for 30 total.

No comments:

Post a Comment