Walks with Moss: Breaking through the 600 mile mark for the year

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Breaking through the 600 mile mark for the year

A tiny tarn with no fish, really more of of a peat bog than a tarn
this is probably as high as the water will ever get

I recently broke through the 600 mile mark for the year. That means that I have hiked over 600 miles this year. This breaks my all time record by quite a lot. Here are pictures of things I saw on my hike. It was a off trail hike and I'm not going to reveal the location.

After getting badly burned I'm going to start being even more closed mouthed about special things and places that I find in the woods. When stuff gets put on the internet it gets shut down quick. The Vance Creek Bridge is a good example of this. Locals have always known about it, but when word got out on twitter it was too much and it all got shut down much to the chagrin of the locals. This has also caused hard feelings towards Greed Diamond aka Simpson among the locals.

Polytrichum juniperinium

Probably Pleurozium schreberi

So, if I go to special places I will share pictures here sometimes but not locations. Cushman is the fastest growing area of Mason County, people move there because they like to hike. Don't expect me to share anything at all about that area anymore. Unless I'm on a main and popular trail you won't hear about it here. Sharing my brush crashing adventures ends today. But like I said, I will still post pictures of my adventures, I'm just not going to say where my adventures take me. I also won't be posting mileage and elevation gain. I'm going to keep track of that offline in excel now.

Mount Baker as seen from the Hood Canal

Someone was probably going to come back for this pile
of firewood about 70 years ago, but they never did

Amazing lichen land that I found

Lichen land close up, this was in experiment with focus stacking.
This is three pictures stacked together to help get most of it in focus.

Nice place to brush crash, not much brush!

More lichens from lichen land

I found two new to me mosses on this hike the first one is Andreaea rupestris I've never found a lantern moss before so that was exciting for me. There were no sporophytes and it was so small that I thought it was a liverwort. I don't care what the book says this gametophyte is quite unique with the lack of a costa and the pappilose cells.

Finding this moss tells me that the lichen covered rock in lichen land is probably granite. Granite is not very common in the Olympics. I like that I can tell the rock type by the bryophytes growing on it. At the very least I know that this rock is acidic the presence of Pleurozium schreberi also confirms that this is acidic.