Is This Pollution?

Knock me over with a feather, this little pool way back in the woods turns out to have all-natural soap suds. As you know, soap is made from plants. Running enough water over decaying leaves and logs releases "surfactants" like the those in your Joy and Suave bottles that lift and dissolve oils. The woodland surfactants form a near-invisible film on top of water, most of the time. But pool the rushing water and churn it in a cove or a tiny pool like this one, and do it for a while, and suds appear naturally.

Most times in unpolluted conditions these natural suds are 99 percent water and air and 1 percent surfactant, so foam appears only under exacting conditions, and cannot be used as soap. It's just for looking at. This foam is white, but it can be off-white or tan. So relax. Unpolluted spots on earth still exist!

The Most Remote Waterfall

November when the trees are naked is a great time to view the property's waterfalls, especially after rain has them rushing, and this one, #7, is the most remote and difficult to access of the eight waterfalls, with banks on each side so steep and choked up with rocks and impassable fallen trees I've never gotten close enough to capture its mostly unseen majesty. But yesterday, because it was there and because if I didn't do it now I might never, I was determined to climb, splash, crawl, and balance-beam to inch as close as possible, and got closer than ever before so I could show you. Still photos are nice but they don't give you a sense of scale or capture the whole experience with sound. I took a video. Now you can see and hear Waterfall #7 at full flood for real (40 seconds). Its brook ultimately flows about a quarter mile through the woods, and then over another waterfall, #5, into a pool, and then beneath bluffs into a swirling LaBarque Creek.

The Eighth Waterfall

No day is truly rich and full unless you've fallen into a creek that day. In February, especially along the LaBarque, the tangle of underbrush and poison ivy is leafless (although not thorn-less), and I bushwhacked my way into territory unseen, possibly because the creekbed is always changing thanks to floods, weather, beavers, and fallen trees, and discovered on the property's southwestern edge this Waterfall #8. Shortly after taking this photo I crossed the brightly running creek by sitting on a spongy-wet fallen log and inching sideways to the creek's shallowest point, about six inches deep, where the water glittered golden and cold, and dropped myself feet first into the water, trusting my hiking boots and wool socks to keep me warm and mobile until I got back home. Which I did one way or another. Welcome to Waterfall #8. I love waterfalls.

Light Like Christmas Cookies

How perfect: a sunny Christmas Day, 50 degrees, and eight off-trail hikers who met through Meetup.com, for various reasons all of us free on Christmas afternoon to explore LaBarque Creek Conservation Area and Natural Area, 639 acres, almost all forested, including seasonal waterfalls on LaBarque Creek tributaries. This was our second annual Christmas Day hike; last year's was snowy, cloudy, and icy. This year's had the pale yellow light of Christmas cookies. Recent rains allowed us to see running streamlets with green-and-gold pools up to three feet deep. We found that the Conservation Department has been sawing down red cedar trees, an invasive, non-native species, so that natural Missouri dolomite and sandstone glades can restore themselves. The downed trees made our going rough at times. But we were out for adventure. Above you see our leader, Kim.

I am always at the end of the line of hikers, about 45 seconds behind the rest despite my best efforts. This is called "being the sweep," and it is a job: The "sweep" makes sure the number of hikers leaving the woods is the same number that came in. One of us slipped on wet rock and fell, but it wasn't me; unfortunately he landed on, and broke the screen of, his cellphone.

(Excuse me--I have to go--the kitchen mousetrap just went "snap"!)

High Water

My Weather Radar app forwards National Weather Service warnings by making the smartphone shriek and vibrate. It's been issuing flood warnings for this area since Sunday's heavy rain. This was taken where LaBarque Creek empties into the Meramec River -- the flood's peak, if it doesn't rain again today. A foot or two higher and the water'd crawl up over Highway FF as it did in '08, when all my three possible routes home, including the Interstate, flooded and the National Guard turned us back and I couldn't get home for four days. When the water gets up about this high I try not to leave home (which I'm grateful is on high ground). Flooding is a growing problem as more land is developed and paved. Jeff County Highway W is under water -- don't plan on going there.

Why We Should Protect Missouri Streams

Taken at the "beachfront" of a LaBarque Creek tributary with no official name, sometimes called "Sandy Creek" or "Robinson Creek." Deeper and wider than the LaBarque, people at the party were floating on it, boating on it, jumping off the dock into the water (squealing with joy all the while), sunning themselves, playing with their kids and grandkids, swimming in it pretending to be water dragons, and sitting beneath umbrellas on shore drinking a beer, all without fear of polluted water or the deadly currents that sometimes take people who are swimming in the Meramec, the temperamental river that the gentle LaBarque Creek empties into. I was so happy I was at the picnic, about a mile from my house. This is the sort of land being saved for posterity by the Friends of LaBarque Creek organization.

The Labarque Creek, as it runs through the Divine property, has no stretch as deep and swimmable as this one. Because it changes its shape after big rains, once in a while there's a swimmin' hole.

The Many Moods of LaBarque Creek

A one-lane bridge crosses a one-lane LaBarque Creek up the road just a bit, and I sat on the railing and looked at the dreamlike water, usually crystal-clear but chocolate-gelato-colored because an inch of rain fell the day before, and watched it sparkle in a setting of ultra-rain-soaked greenery, and I sighed because I am so in love with it and it is all I have ever wanted, and because it looked almost like a Japanese painting. I wanted to capture that and show you. Here's also a photo of the little bridge's warning. I sometimes crawl down the bank and when it's passable go hunchback beneath the bridge seeking fossils and crayfish, which survive only in very healthy streams. And I did once scoop up a glassy little crayfish hoping to show it to a friend. With its little toothpick arms it defended itself, pinching the palm of my hand (ow!), making me drop it back into the water.

You can't imagine how as a kid of about eight or nine I pined to sit by streams, to study their creatures, to watch the light on them, to listen to them. Instead I visited a vacant lot and after rains watched a rill that ran into a culvert, and listened to its trickling, and hoped that someday I could have what I have now.

The Secret Glade

LaBarque Creek Conservation Area off Doc Sargent Road now has a well-marked, three-mile "primitive" "moderate to difficult" loop trail. That's putting it mildly. Be prepared for lots of uphill, carry a hiking staff, and bring water because the loop will take two solid hours. But halfway along the trail, high up, is this marvelous secret glade, and being there was worth all the slogging and sweat.

What's a glade? It's a rocky clearing or "outcropping" you'll find up in hills or mountains, home to spring wildflowers and water features like this basin. Because there's mostly rock and little soil, few trees grow in glades, so it's open to sunlight, and I even found a few prickly-pear cacti. A lake up in the mountains always seemed impossible to me, but this little one in the conservation area is a scale model of how it's done. The water runs from here into a pretty little LaBarque Creek tributary, arched over with trees, that forms one border of the conservation area.

High and Mighty

Flooding is the new normal. It's been raining hard six days out of seven, and was tornadic near here (close call). Can hardly recognize this usually gentle tributary of the LaBarque that runs through the LaBarque Conservation Area, and now rushes about three quarters of a mile along the road you see up top, Doc Sargent Road. Photo was taken this morning before it began raining again. And then again! Downstate the water is higher. A rough April weatherwise, I think, for everyone. If it really really floods, I will take and post lots of dramatic disaster photos.

Seven Divine Waterfalls: Video Tour

The Divine property of 100 acres has seven dramatic waterfalls especially active in spring and visible to the world only in this 4-minute video I made, wanting to share them. They're on private land so here's your chance to see and hear them. They are all different and numbered in order of discovery. Narration by Divine Bunbun, who hung from trees and got all drenched and muddy enjoying every moment of filming.