Trail Tool Tech – Page 21 – It's all in the perspective.

Edible Pod (Rat Tail) Radish hyper-productive, tender, mild-flavored, nutritious vegetable

Edible Pod Radish makes an enlarged, succulent, crunchy pod, in the same fashion as green-beans and snap-peas. The tip of the pod tapers to a fine point, giving it a fanciful resemblance to a rat-tail … a name by which it was formerly found in seed-catalogs etc, but is now not often seen.

Seed-pod vegetables are naturally young, and are grown as part of the reproduction cycle, so are a spare-no-expense plant-function. Tradtionally, green-beans became a staple veggie of common rural families. Typically, the act of picking the immature pods actively stimulates to plant to set more flowers, and pods.

Technically a fruit, like tomatoes and cucumbers, they are treated as a vegetable.

Radishes have a natural tendency to Bolt to Seed. This family of garden plants is anxious to flower and set seed. With the familiar radishes grown for the root, this is a problem. With radishes grown for an edible pod, the bolting-habit works in our favor.

JATO units

Jet Assisted Take-Off units became famous on the pages of National Geographic, in the course of their photo-coverage of Antarctic cargo-plane supply-operations.

Are there JATO-units for small aircraft such as the Super Cub? For example to get off a short airstrip with a heavy load?

Cretaceous-Tertiary, Paleogene Confusion

The term Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T), for the boundary or transition between those two geological periods, has been in use for many generations. Then one day it was unilaterally decreed, by an unelected, unaccountable and generally unknown entity or person (a Professor, or group of them), that henceforth everyone should use the term Cretaceous-Paleogene, instead.

This is yet-another case of the Scientific Naming Follies. In this case it is notably unfortunate for science, since the general public has a high level of interest in Dinosaurs, and know that their extinction occured at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary.

Neither Tertiary nor Paleogene are ‘good’ names: one means ‘third’, and the other means ‘old’. That makes them – technically – “dumb” names. Dumb in the literal sense that as names, they say or tell us nothing.

Genealogy & Pedigree for Plants curious relations of photosynthetic organisms

Pedigree of Canadice Grape, bred by NY Cornell U in 1977 Dr. Bruce Reisch

Genealogy for Plants cannot readily be done with the same software that we use for human families (and which can be used for other animals, though perhaps with difficulties), for two reasons.

One, many plants are self-fertile. There are flexible and variable versions of this, such as with apple trees which may require a pollinator-variety, or may bear fruit by themselves. Conversely, other plants like peas, tomatoes and cereal grains, normally fertilize themselves and are not cross-pollinated at all. Continue reading “Genealogy & Pedigree for Plants curious relations of photosynthetic organisms“

Olympic Mountains Trail Guide National Park and National Forest

This is the book that typical and normal hikers & backpackers will want for the Olympic National Park. I bears every sign of having been a labor of love by author Robert Wood, and has been a fixture of local outdoors & tourist book-racks, since the 1980s.

Mount Seattle, Olympic Nat’l Park

Mount Seattle, in Olympic National Park, is on the west side of the Low Divide between the headwaters of the Elwha River to the north, and the North Fork Quinault River to the south. The trails in these two river valleys, joined at the Low Divide pass, forming the primary north-south route through the Park.

Carrie Basin, Bailey Range, Olympic Nat’l Park

Carrie Basin is an informal name for a Shangri La subalpine valley on the main Bailey Range ridge of the Olympic Mountains, and the Olympic National Park in which they’re enclosed. It’s a hanging-valley, jutting out from the ridge, a free-air waterfall launching from cliff-gated slot-canyon mouth, into a 1,000 foot unapproachable cataract-plunge.

There is Fairchild Creek, fed from the Carrie Glacier

Charles Lindburg

Charles Lindburg is known mainly as the aviator who first flew solo across the Atlantic. But Lindburg was also involved in leading-edge scientific research & invention, and he was associated with Amelia Earhart.

Bear candy of Salmonberry A wild-raspberry vegetable with production-potential

Bear candy is the tender spring cane-shoots of a wild relative of the garden-raspberry. In the greater Pacific Northwest of the US, this plant, R. spectabilis, is a ranking – and rank – invasive native weed. Those who work in the brush in this region, in the landscaping trades, or just take care of their own property … know that it easily shows the non-native demon-Rubus, Himalaya Blackberry, how invasion is really done.

is a popular-name applied to a variety of wild food plants, and it will be used for different items in different areas. Rubus, especially Salmonberry, R. spectabilis, is a ranking contender for the name where it occurs because (unlike plenty of supposedly edible plants) it is acceptable to people; even nibbled with some relish by children. Rubus sps. send up a new cane-shoot in the spring, which are a tender, crispy-crunchy vegetable, very similar to the way asparagus spears come up.

Salmonberry makes new shoots that will come up next spring, in the fall. They probably make both cane and runner-shoots, late in the season, which lie dormant until next spring. We uncover & see these white, very tender parts when tearing out unwanted weedy salmonberry-brush. The underground parts are shallow, usually in soft, rich loamy soil. If the ground is not frozen, they could be harvested as “blanched” Bear Candy, all winter. More work than just snapping them off at the surface come spring, though.

For wild-foodies, the flag on this Bear Candy is that in-season it can be harvested in-quantity. Now, it would be prudent & indicated – as always – to experiment with eating it little by little, and stage by stage. Try just a nibble in the morning

Sourdough Mountain, Olympic Nat’l Park comfortable, unofficial, near-in backcountry Olympic Park destination

Sourdough Mtn, Aurora Ridge, Olympic Park

Sourdough Mountain, as the name implies, hosted a mining camp that appears to be a moderately-serious old base-camp or prospect, on a line of recorded claims along a band of mineralization, ca 1930s. It consists of a fairly/partly level little sheltered meadow in the trees, on the ridge-top and tucked in against the west foot of the Sourdough rise; a short water-trail to an intermittent source out on the steep north slope, and a fairly long & impressive local trail up the peak. There used to be a small Adirondack-type shelter, but it slowly collapsed; there were also formerly visible remains of a box-latrine … and other artifacts which likely post-dated the mining-era (perhaps reflecting post-WWII horse-camping practices). It is just off the main Aurora Ridge Trail on its own very short side-trail, and the peak offers good & useful if relatively undramatic views into the North Fork Sol Duc River drainage, and of the north aspects of Mount Appleton and Boulder Peak, which bound the southern headwaters of the North Fork. Continue reading “Sourdough Mountain, Olympic Nat’l Park comfortable, unofficial, near-in backcountry Olympic Park destination“