Two Cheers for Conservation

I trekked down Highway FF to see what those earth-movers and heavy-equipment operators spent three weeks doing down by LaBarque Creek during the hotter weather. The conservation department or somebody demanded our landlord provide erosion control at this creek bend. Wait any longer and the LaBarque here, give or take a few flash floods, could undermine the road.

I could tell you why. More paving, especially a parking lot built in 2014 right next to the creek, makes runoff. This encourages the gentle LaBarque to rise and flood. During 2015's heavy rain this was no flash flood: the creek was torrential for a full day, eroding its own sandstone channel, filling its fishing and swimming holes with sand, changing  the creek's floor--it's now all shallow--and its shape, and dumping sand up and over the creek banks for 50 feet on either side, instantly altering the ecology of its entire riparian corridor. Back then I climbed a cliff to take a photo and show you the aftermath. Happened again in 2017. Flash floods now grow ever faster and taller, and when meeting this bend here they hammered a new channel through our other soil: clay.

Was I surprised to see rope for erosion control; 100 yards of woven rope to hold the creek bank all around its bend. Conservation people forced the landlord to uproot invasive cedars nearby and rope them into the creek bank's walls to try to mitigate the pounding this clay side of the creek will still take during flash flooding. Why? Because the other side is sand.

Rope doesn't solve the problem. The only real solution is to dredge or straighten the channel. The LaBarque did have its own very pretty and reasonable channel, but now it's clogged with sand.

Bush Beater

On a glorious day took a walk in Engelmann Woods Natural Area, one of the few tracts of old-growth forest in Missouri:  regal oak, hickory and ash trees. Its lollipop loop trail of two miles is marked, but insufficiently; fallen leaves buried part of the trail, especially the low-lying areas, and huge fallen old-growth trees or their limbs blocked the way a few times, and circumventing one of them I saw no further path. But I did see a bluff I wanted to get to for the view, so leaving my hat on a branch as a marker, up I scrambled.

Got my view. Orienting myself using my hat, I then cautiously picked my way down the leaf-covered, rocky slope and retrieved it. Now to regain the trail and finish the hike--but not knowing where it was I consulted the app called Map My Walk. Using GPS it red-lines your journey on a Google map of the area. (On the map you can see where I went off the trail, around the 1-mile point.) It told me a straight line would get me there. Forward I plunged, calf-deep in thrashing fallen leaves that hid rocks and holes and silt; bare branches of understory whipped my face. Then I saw the trail marker. I finished the trail and went on home, but being lost was the fun part.