S o there we were, drinking beer in a stinky little white car at 11:30 on a Sunday morning, thinking about kayaking 15.8 miles down Ten Mile Creek into the South Fork Eel River. The rain pounded. We were in downtown Garberville waiting on our friend Ed, who was trying to get gas. The power […]
Life + Outdoors
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The Cane Mutiny
Difficult, thorny, seemingly impossible pruning jobs don’t happen by accident. You have to really be dedicated to neglecting your garden in order for it to get so overgrown that you’re afraid to even approach it. I have been just this dedicated to my raspberry and blackberry bushes, and now I have the scars to prove […]
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Watts in Coffee, Pot and Brakes?
I am reading a full page ad in our local newspaper: "… miracle idea … heating bills hit rock bottom … miracle heater is a work of engineering genius … so advanced, you simply plug it into any wall outlet. It uses less energy than it takes to run a coffee maker. Yet it produces […]
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‘Fish and chips’
After two years of sometimes tense discussion, the 26 disparate stakeholders participating in the Klamath Basin settlement talks released a proposed agreement Tuesday that they say provides for the diverse needs of irrigators, fishermen and Indian tribes. Craig Tucker of the Karuk Tribe is calling the Proposed Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement a "fish and chips […]
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Ferndale Redeemed
Ferndale therapist Stuart Altschuler got exactly what he wanted for his birthday: On Monday night the Ferndale City Council voted 4-1 to approve a home occupation permit for his psychotherapy office. That permit has been at the center of a four-month debacle involving Altschuler, his neighbor Shannon Leonardo and Shannon’s uncle Rich Leonardo, who questioned […]
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A Professional Birdwatcher
Last summer, I went out with my friend Elias Elias to count marbled murrelets, the small, endangered water bird that nests on old-growth tree limbs. We tented the night before in the Prairie Creek campground and got up at 4 a.m. to count the birds as they left the forest for their salty breakfast at […]
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What is Our Bedrock?
Our bedrock consists of an exceptional diversity of rocks spanning over 100 million years of history. The diversity is due to our location at the convergent boundary between continental and oceanic plates. To enjoy this diversity you should visit Trinidad Beach, where the "Franciscan" subduction complex consists of a mix of rocks from both plates. […]
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The Shady Lives of Ferns
A human female is diploid, having paired maternal and paternal chromosomes. She is born with over a million haploid eggs with unpaired chromosomes. Each egg has the potential of being fertilized by a haploid sperm. A fern’s life cycle is more complex. It alternates generations between a large diploid “sporophyte” plant that produces haploid spores and a small haploid “gametophyte” plant, grown […]
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The Humboldt Answer
I’ve lived in Humboldt County for seven years, and it’s taken me all this time to adopt the standard Lost Coast response to the question, “What do you do?” Where I come from — and this basically applies to anywhere south of Garberville, north of Orick or east of Willow Creek — everybody has an […]
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A Yurok Mushroom Hunter
Winters are horrible back East and I used to dread them. Here in Humboldt, though, the first rains of fall bring out the mushrooms, and the rest of the season is an Easter egg hunt. I love to disappear into the damp green woods while the rest of the nation freezes. It’s a thrill to […]
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Basic Birds & Bees
I had intended to write about ferns and their shady lives, but realized that I should first review the fundamentals of reproduction. The diagram shows the basic concepts, under the assumption that each parent provided one chromosome to form a diploid cell with a pair of chromosomes. (Further simplification is my equating cells with nuclei.) […]
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A Counting Problem
This Holiday season deserves a fun project: Count the seeds in one cattail. I estimated the number to be half a million, but every scientific claim should be verified before acceptance. I suggest you share the fun and check my result. A source of cattails is just east of Bigfoot Gas in McKinleyville. The cluster […]