Badlands after Snow

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

Is it just me, or does this eroding feature look like a couple bear-headed creatures in gray wool cloaks, conferring? These are “nodules” in the Brule formation, Scenic member.

Badlands: between snows

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

Made this sketch from the , south from Loop Road as dark snow clouds boiled over Interior.

Self-portrait in Badlands

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

Blustery enough to break out the big fur hat! I was toasty immediately. I’m going to keep it by my bed tonight… the power went out once already tonight. My response? Why obviously: poured rice into an old tin can, stuck my emergency candle upright in the rice, voila. Now, where did I stash the matches?

I have been reading about all sorts of things: books on paleosols, the interpretation of coprolite fossils, root-traces, limestones, ash dating, the magnetic properties of shales. One topic leads me to reference the index of another book, drilling down and down into the materials.   Once, I’ve learned, there was a relative of the beaver with a special knack for digging corkscrew-shaped burrows, instead of building lodges.  Palaeocastor – whose fossilized burrows are found today just south of the Badlands, exposed in the Arikareean deposits of Western Nebraska.  What a beautiful image!  Locals, not knowing what these formations were, called them the Devil’s corkscrews.   I am left pondering the words of Walt Whitman, whose poems I loved, but who advised: “You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness – ignorance, credulity – helps your enjoyment of these things.” Is this true, Walt?  Really?   The world fascinates me, in both minutia and grandiosity.  The more I learn, the more beautiful it becomes.  No mundane burrow or scientific description seems unlovely. How could you be right, Walt Whitman?  And yet you were right about so much.

Palaeocastor Burrow

Snowing in the Badlands. Again.

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

Snow and more snow. Snow in the forecast through Thursday. Last night we received an inch of rain — that’s a lot for a region that only receives 20″ in a WET year. This area has been in a drought for the past several years, so I am sure the moisture is welcome by ranchers and wildlife, but the terrain doesn’t absorb rain very well…. the snow covering this small erosional feature is stained yellow and red-brown with sediments that are sloughing off. The Badlands are eroding even as I watch.

Plenty of Reading Materials

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

An indoor, white-on-white sort of day. Rain and snow all night and day, and everything is ice and snow-covered now. A good day for reading and writing and pouring over maps.

I made soup and steamed up the windows. I’m reading a textbook on paleosols at the moment, aka “paleopedology.” Obscure, yes. Amusingly, the author introduces the book by referencing “the opening page of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, where paleopedology is listed as a scientific interest of Humbert’s.” Wow. A guaranteed pot-boiler!

White River, Ice Jam

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

This sketch shows the river locked tight with ice. Just as I finished, the ice started moving — creaking, groaning, banging, cracking, slurping and sloshing, MOVING ON. Incredible event to witness. I was alone for a long time, sketching, but people were stopping on the bridge to check as they drove through; when it actually let loose, I was there all alone. Potential energy turning back into kinetic energy. Powerful!

I went down to the flood-stage White River yesterday morning to sketch the ice jam, which had backed up miles of the river and was making the flooding worse. Here is what it looked like just as the river suddenly started moving again, as I grabbed my camera and ran to the bridge. There was an incredible energy — the gong-boom of ice whamming into the bridge pillars, a frozen landslide of trees (some beaver-felled, some storm-broken) and fence posts and dollops of fresh soil on top of the ice (eroded from undercut riverbanks, I suppose) stirred in with all the broken ice. One minute it was stuck, the next it was UNSTUCK. Like that corked-up feeling you get when you can’t remember someone’s name ——– then *gush* and suddenly everything comes sliding back to you in a rush, every detail and nuance of your last encounter, not just their name but their mother’s name and their neighbors’ names, the course you took together, the hobbies and politics of everyone you ever met through them, all their favorite poems and whether they liked wool sweaters and road trips — everything, all of it, sliding downstream in your brain, in grind-creaking technicolor. I’m saying that river just had a bad case of writer’s block!

PS: I just noticed another video posted by someone else who stopped on the same bridge, two days earlier, just before the river became totally log-jammed with ice. In this image, you can see there is a lot of water and ice, but everything was still moving.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JJYfooxl_E

Badlands Sunset through Rain

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

No filters, gizmos, special settings or Photoshop: the sky really turned this fiery red tonight — through a descending curtain of rain clouds. Raining steadily ever since then. (Note the rain drop on my lens).

White River AFTER

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

Ice is on the move! This “AFTER” view shows how quickly the surrounding floodplain is draining back into the river. The the ice jam broke up, and the whole river started moving in a big (loud) way! I would estimate that the White River dropped over a foot in just about 10 minutes, while I was filming the ice-out event. In this photo, the channel is clearly visible again.