Donkey Walking

Last Saturday I took Trooper for a walk. Trooper is a 14.2 hand donkey. I dressed him up in his saddle and the pack, and down the trail we walked. I am walking him so that he gets very used to the people, the bikes, the kids, and the dogs before we go for a ride down the path.

I had PLENTY of time to walk a couple of miles and then come back to the parking lot before 8 p.m., when they LOCK THE GATE! Unfortunately, I failed to factor in standing and thinking when confronted with noises.

We were passing a fence with a family living their every day lives behind it. This involved dogs barking, cows marching out to the field, and kids riding "Hot Wheels" type trikes on concrete. Unfamiliar noises that Mr. donkey can't figure out means standing and thinking and waiting. Standing that takes more than 1/2 hour, as the clock ticks ever closer to the gate-closing hour. Yay.

People came by and said, "Weren't you here when we came by last time?" They were riding bikes up the path and back. Yes, we still were right on the same spot, hadn't moved. Hadn't moved AN INCH!

So the kind strangers chatted with me awhile, and a very nice thing happened. Trooper forgot he was frozen to his spot, and we finally got to go home!

And guess what, yelling and pulling doesn't do squat. Might as well enjoy the scenery and talk to strangers!

Trooper! We have to go! Now! Don't you want to go home? C'mon, boy. Be nice. Trooper! Trooooooooper!!!! Sigh.

Four point buck visits donkeys!

I was quite busy this evening. Abe, our 16.1 hand donkey, had an abscessed hoof, and we are soaking in epsom salts. It is a great thing that our donkey folk wish to do things we ask them to do, even if they don't quite actually want to to them, because if a 16.1 hand donkey decides to NOT put his foot in a bucket, you are NOT going to get his foot in the bucket!

I wouldn't actually want to put my foot in a bucket, either, if I were that big, and I had hooves, because it feels slippery, and I don't know what that thing is for. Everything is a donkey eating thing, unless it is not, and I must be darn sure.

So I was quite busy soaking hoof, squirting medicine into tall boy's mouth, cleaning up, tying out the llamas for their evening salad, and then I finally looked up. A four point buck was inside the donkey yard, which has an approx. six-foot electric wire fence around it, blithely drinking from their water trough!

The donkeys must have seen him before, because they ignored him in favor of dinner. The llamas, however, were quite upset.

I will haul the camera out when I feed these summer evenings. If we are very lucky, I'll get a photo!

Dinner time for me, now! See you!

-Auriel Ragmon

Home

The funny thing is, having lived in the same home for 14 years after a life of "home insecurity," it has taken some time to internalize that this is my home and not just a temporary arrangement that can be ripped away without much warning.

When I was a child, we moved almost yearly, and when I was an adult, my first marriage was to a man who would up and leave his job and move us to another state. Montana, back to California, then to Florida. Then I moved back to my childhood home, then I moved to an apartment, then finally to a rented house, then finally to a purchased home.

Somehow it has taken forever for me to feel as if this is my home, the way a secure child feels about their home. It took me a long time to notice that I felt this way. And then it took me awhile to figure out that I could do some things to feel more secure about home. First I have to accept that it is ok to want to feel secure about home. You may find this odd, but the way to make yourself deal with moving is to convince yourself that it wasn't important to stay.

The animals make it better. Somehow it helps to make a good home for them. The strawberries are very important. A nice little strawberry bed, one that's not too hard to take care of, and all my own, helps. And then there is the room where all my music is. And the woods that I can see every day from the breakfast table. Why can I not believe in this good fortune, as if a wisp of wind will blow it all away?

Tsunami Earthquake of 1700 and the Meadow Landslide

Here we are at the meadow, standing on a hill that is part of the hummocky surface of a landslide. The hill most likely started out as a more angular block, but over time erosion has rounded it into a hill.

Chas says that there is a huge ponderosa pine on the landslide meadow that must be at least 300 years old. That rules out the 1872 quake as causing the landslide, but makes me wonder about the tsunami earthquake of 1700. Geologists made the news when they discovered that trees on the coast of Washington had been destroyed by a tsunami in the distant past, and they were able to correlate age-dating of the trees with a recorded tsunami event in Japan in 1700. That earthquake is estimated at a magnitude of 9+ on the Richter scale.

Since the Richter scale is logarithmic, an earthquake of 9 is 100 times more powerful than an earthquake of 7. The Wikipedia entry for the Richter Scale (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_scale) says that a 9.0 earthquake would be "devastating in areas several thousand miles across." Enough power to cause the meadow landslide, even though it is more than 100 miles away from the Cascadia subduction zone fault where the earthquake was centered. Geologic phenomena can be sudden and huge as well as small and slow.

Landslides and Donkey Walks

Well, I have mentioned before that you are at a non-sequitarian site!

The weekend before last, I had the great pleasure of camping at a friend's cabin in the Cascade Mountains somewhat near the gold town of Liberty, which is between Cle Elum and Wenatchee. We played old time music and other sorts of music that suited us. There were mandolins, banjo, guitars, fiddles, and recorder players. Your host (Auriel Ragmon) plays the clarinet. I am not of Jewish descent, but I adore Klezmer music... However, since my friends play "Old Time" I am trying to learn fiddle music on the clarinet! One difficulty is that the donkey friends take up a lot of my time!

On to donkeys: Sunday, we had our first SOLO walk along the Chehalis Western trail. Abe, who is a 16.1 hand donkey (I kid you not!) is very, very shy, but a great gentleman. Trooper, who is a 14.2 hand donkey, did very, very well today. They are learning that bicycles and dogs don't eat donkeys!

Sometime within the next two weeks, I will have my first solo RIDE along the Chehalis Western trail on Trooper. Abe gets more time to fill out and grow into his huge frame.

Back to the mountains: At the cabin we went for a hike to a meadow. The interesting thing about the meadow is that there are hills and vales and there aren't trees to speak of. The forest resumes along two edges. And there is evidence of a spring within the meadow.

I got to looking and realized that this could be an enormous landslide! The hills and vales are like the hummocky surface that a landslide creates when blocks of the ground slip and tilt. The trees were torn down by the moving slide.

The size of the hills and vales makes me think it was a huge force that caused the slide.

I wonder if this slide happened because of the 1872 magnitude 6.8 earthquake at Lake Chelan? The website http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/states/events/1872_12_15.php says that this earthquake triggered large landslides. One even blocked the Columbia River!

Now to figure out when the landslide happened, you would need to dig up a tree from within the landslide that had been destroyed during the slide and age date it.

Interesting to note that seeing what happened in a past big earthquake gives you an idea what would happen should another come along! Get your emergency plans in gear - water, extra food, that tent and cushy sleeping bags... We hope we never have to use these things, but nice to be prepared. Ok, this is MUCH to preachy for Auriel, time for bed!

The Shell Rock

This is the rock I was talking about in my previous post. Imagine walking along and you see a rock and pick it up. It looks like sandstone, and there are shell impressions on the outside.

Then it falls open in your hand, and you see a shell impression and a shell cast where the rock exactly fits together, but no shell! Where did it go? I think it must have been dissolved by the water that flowed through the sandstone. Maybe the water was acidic, like acid rain is today, and ate away the carbonate shell. Just my speculation.

Can you see the bump and the hollow place? I wish I had put arrows on this picture, but you probably can see it if you look carefully. - Auriel Ragmon

P.S., I added a couple of pictures to the "Little Rock" post, if you would like to see the Mima Mounds and the Tenino Museum Building. AR

Cascade Mountains

I have just returned from a trip to the Cascade Mountains near the town of Liberty. The mountains in this area run between Cle Elum and Wenatchee. On the way home, I drove up a forest road near Liberty at Williams Creek. Many of the outcrops are sandstone. One sandstone outcrop had casts of seashells. The shells themselves were gone, but the shape of the shell was embedded in the sandstone.

The most interesting rock with a shell shape was a rock that had broken in two. On one half of the rock, you could see the shell shaped hole, and on the other half, you could see a bump shaped like the shell. But there was no shell! It was like a shell was buried in the sand and the shell material had somehow dissolved, leaving shell shapes behind.

Seashells in sand mean that these mountains had been seashore once upon a time...

She shall shape shells in the sea sand. (Of course, this doesn't make any sense, but it's fun to say!)

Little Rock

Yesterday we went on a guided tour of Thurston County history and geology. So much fun, so interesting!

Little Rock is literally named for a "little rock" that sits even today in the front yard of the Rutledge family home. It was placed there so folks could mount their horses and get into carriages. Little Rock!

We learned that the coal seams in south Thurston County were at the edge of the sea when they were peat bogs long ago in geologic time.

We saw the mountains of coal piled high at the Transalta steam plant near Centralia. This is near the site of a town called Tono, which is no longer in existence. The name Tono comes from a Railroad conductor who would write "tons of coal" on the manifest on arriving at the town. This abbreviated somehow to "Tono."

Bucoda was the site of the Washington territorial prison. We learned of how the prisoners were abused and the guards were drunk. When this prison was discontinued, the prisoners were transferred to Walla Walla state prison.


The Tenino Museum is made of Tenino sandstone. The origin of the sandstone are sand dunes. You can see the fine upswept patterns in the stone blocks that are indicative of windblown deposits.

We heard about a speculation that Tenino was named after a train (10-9-0), a thought disabused by our esteemed local historian and guide Roger Easton. Mr. Easton said that tenino was a native word meaning junction or meeting place, and that Tenino was on the Cowlitz Trail.


We saw the Mima Mounds and heard the various stories of what caused them. My favorite is Mr. Easton's theory that the mounds formed in permafrost. The landscape formed giant mudcrack patterns, and after melting and draining, the landscape was left with the mounds. Hopefully, I got this right, but don't quote me. I don't exactly have great notes on this, so I am hoping Mr. Easton will write a paper.

The most interesting geological information I learned was that the basalt at Deschutes Park in Tumwater is the Crescent Formation, and that this is the same formation as the basalt crest of the Olympic Mountains. These basalts were extruded on the ocean floor, and now are all the way in Tumwater and the Olympic Mountains! Makes you think!

Sometime I'll get a photo of the great vertical mountainside near Crescent Lake, up on the north side of the Olympics. Spectacular. Even more interesting are the lake side sedimentary deposits. As you stand on the shore of Lake Crescent, look at the stripey looking ground. These are sedimentary deposits that have been turned up 90 degrees! Now how'd that happen!

Explanation: Lake deposits slowly fall down through the lake and make layers that are darker in the sunnier warmer half of the year, when there are more organics around, and lighter in the colder grayer half of the year, when there are less organics. The result are striped beds, if you could see them sideways. When you can see these stripes across the top of the land surface, it means the beds must have been moved by earth forces to tilt up the sides of the beds. Unimagineably great forces at work over unimagineably long periods of time. We are on a moving earth conveyor belt.

-Auriel Ragmon

The Real Life Adventures of Vera Vague

A snippet from attempts to communicate with this Vera Vague person through the written word. Vera is trying to write a book.

The characters in this book are all fictional and bear no especial resemblance to the author. The author is also fictional and bears no resemblance to herself, either. (That is the saddest thing I think I have ever heard!)

Chapter I: In which I wonder what I should write.

Vera was in a particularly fragmented state, so she decided just to write a page or two. She sat under a great oak tree in the June afernoon sun and wrote about Peterson, who spent his life tromping outdoors looking at birds and then writing Field Guides.

There was a picture in Time Magazine of him sitting at his drafting table, a dead stuffed bird in one hand, a paint brush in the other. Vera decided she would rather not hold dead birds in her hand. But drawing and tromping outdoors was nice.

She would have to change her name to write a Field Book. "Vague's Guide to Common Weeds" sounded kind of funny. What about a field guide to people???

Of course, you could probably insult the entire planet by classifying and providing pictorial examples.

Chapter II: In which I write "A Field Guide to People." And change the person point-of-view in mid-air!

I got up excitedly from my resting place under the oak tree and walked over to the library. I needed a plan. I started by cataloging myself. I am one-fourth Irish, one-fourth German, and one-half Norwegian. I wondered if I would ever find a person who was half Norwegian and half Swedish. Poor soul, they would spend half of their time insulting their self and the other half of their time insulting their self!

(Long discussion on grammatical techniques of avoiding using "his" or "her" by using "their" ommitted for brevity.)

Chapter III: In which I discover the true meaning of Cultural Diversity.

(That's all for now. - Auriel Ragmon and friends)

Setting up a site meter!

Auriel Ragmon has no idea whatsoever if anyone, other than two beloved friends, reads this blog, so is setting up a site meter! Ta da! (Except I don't see the thing! Oh well, I'm a bit tired so will try to fix this tomorrow - AR).

Just to entertain you, since I am not writing much today, here is another picture. So now you can't say you have never seen a pirhana! This pirhana lives safely behind glass at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. Funny, it doesn't look dangerous!