September at last 🍂🍁
Mullein leaves. Good lung and cough medicine. Dry leaves to
keep on hand for tea. The yellow flowers on top are sweet.
Mullein is an invasive species. But a good one.
More of a pentagon than hexagon. Hard to find a nice specimen
where the basalt has been chopped through to build roadways.
Big Basalt Boulders
whumped down by catastrophic floods are
found throughout the Arboretum.
J
Harlen Bretz, a highly credentialed field geologist writing
in the
1920s dubbed the Cordilleran Ice Sheet the "Spokane Ice Sheet"
from whence came the "Spokane Flood" upon which these
massive giant basalt boulders traveled.
Below: Taken from Amtrak window en route to Spokane
following the Columbia River. Scablandic looking hillsides
carved along the Gorge.
"Like roads to Rome, all scabland rivers led to Pasco Basin."
J Harlen Bretz
I love the extra large basalt boulders deposited throughout
the park.
"...huge numbers of erratics, giant boulders that didn't
belong naturally in the area" -- assumed to have traveled
here from the flooding of ice sheets, hidden in thickets
like the backs of crouching trolls…
at the Arboretum. She has traveled far to come to rest here
in Mooselvania.
species now extinct like the giant beaver. They seem
prehistoric. Imagine carrying those antlers on your head!
Strong necked moose.
I love living in a protected wildlife area where I can
take a short hike and see moose in the wild.
along Columbia/Paloose basin, check out HUGEfloods.com.
Plenty of black, angular lava rock full of holes all about this
region. Haven't seen so many traces of volcanic activity since I
was on Mauna Kea area of Hawaii.
Granite, Lava Rock and Sandstone all found in same space.
This is a great area for research and study of this history!
I have been wanting to travel west to the Grand Coulee and
Moses Coulee, as they are fairly close by.
The Quillayute tribe and the Cowichan of B.C. Canada have
many tales of catastrophic flooding and gigantic hailstones
'so large many were killed, they beat down the ferns and
camas and berries, ice locked the rivers and no one could fish.'
I noticed when I first arrived to Spokane that much of the
region of the Yakima Valley where my sister once lived had
now gone from orchards into vineyards!
Check out link to learn more about why ice age flooding
of these valleys delivered the silt that makes such award
winning wines.
Old apple orchards still producing now feral fruit at Arboretum.
More mullein! Among the fallen 🍎🍏fruit.
Back home to my own stash of feral fruit…
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