The Bridges of Madison County

Yeah, we did the cliche trip while in Iowa last weekend. We visited the bridges of Madison County.

Fall Colors

We hoped to be enjoying the fall colors in the Ozarks 3 weeks ago, but fall was pretty late this year.

The oaks on the way up to Des Moines were the prettiest colors I saw so far this year.

Pumpkin Mania

This local church has the biggest pumpkin spread in town.

However, they also have a lot of pumpkins left over the day before Halloween.

Don't try this at home

This may look casual, but the drop off behind my fearless brother was about 50' straight down a rocky cliff.

It may make a good Match.com picture, but it doesn't do you any good if you fall and turn into a mangled heap in the process. Chicks don't date hamburger.

Where the Spring meets the Current

Here's the view of where the Big Spring outflow goes into the Current River.

Spring water is just so amazingly clear.

Cave Man

He may look primative, but this speciman obviously uses modern clothing and has a grasp of modern technology.

Although he looks like he is at home, the typical Cave Man of this species only spends about 6 minutes of their lives in a cave. And that's no bat guano.

Alley Springs overflow

This is the little stream that goes out the overflow of the Alley Spring pool. There is a little rock in the middle that kicks up a spray of water in the rapids.

Alley Spring

The Alley Spring has a huge and beautiful pool that it come out of. The color of the water was really blue. I like the reflection of the mill on the water, as well as the limb in the water.

Alley Springs Mill

We had to visit the Alley Spring Mill.

They use pictures of this mill on most of the travel brochures for Missouri and it's not hard to see why.

409 Cabin

Here's the cabin we stayed in at Big Spring. # 409, like the cleaner.

It was built in the 30's by the CCC and had a fireplace that smoked up the whole cabin unless you pushed all the wood to the back of the hearth. It was really cool, and I would highly recommend the experience to anyone interested in a little local Missouri flavor in their weekend getaways.

Commuter Spider Chronicles

The commuter spider that I wrote about some time back has finally disappeared on me. He would make a web on my rear view mirror each night, and each morning I would see the new web, then mess it up when I drove to work. He went on a few trips with me. He went to Junction City, Hillsboro Kansas, up to the airport for a long weekend while I was in Cincinnati, and to Big Springs Missouri for an Ozark trip with me. After the airport, I actually saw him fall into the car and he took 3 days to find his way back out to the rear view mirror. I'm not sure what happened, but he finally stopped remaking his web the week after the Big Springs trip. He was my constant companion for about 2 months this summer, and I always enjoyed seeing the evidence that he was still with me each morning. I only actually saw him 4 times. He was pretty shy and hid behind the mirror most of the time. I hope he left in search of spider love and was able to father a new batch of commuter spiders for next year!

River's Edge

This little resort in Eminence Missouri on the Current River was very cool. Looks like they had all kinds of verandas and benches and gazebos for the comfort and enjoyment of the guests. We'd like to go next spring and float the river and stay there.

River Gage

This River Gage was next to the bridge over the Current River in Eminence Missouri. I'm not sure whether the station transmits information back to the center in Rolla Missouri, or whether it stores the information in the little box at the station. It looks very old fashioned, but they have been keeping constant records of the rivers for years, and I can't help but think that they do it with more modern equipment now.

Trail Riding in the Ozarks

These people had some trail horses saddled up waiting for them outside of the kitchy tourist place in Eminence Missouri. I think they have trails along the Current River where you can ride for miles. Looks like something out of the Old West, doesn't it?

Wildlife Photographer

My brother Steve at Big Spring in the Missouri Ozarks.

Stalking the elusive sky blue spring water shot.

Big Spring Moss

Here's another pic from Big Spring south of Van Buren Missouri in the Mark Twain National Forest in the Ozark Region of southern Missouri

There is some beautiful moss on the rocks next to the outlet. The pretty blue color of the water is due to the minerals in the water.

Even though all the water that falls into the "recharge area" of a spring goes underground and is filtered by solid rock (mostly dolomite), minerals and some surface chemicals persist in the water, giving it the pretty blue color.

It makes for some pretty views.

Big Spring Snails

The water coming out of Big Spring south of Van Buren Missouri in the Mark Twain National Forest in the Ozark Region of southern Missouri is 56°F year round. That's pretty cold. Try wading into one of these springs some day if you don't believe me.

But in the winter, that's pretty warm. You wonder what could live in such cold water, and the answer is, strangely, snails. When you look in the water, you see a carpet of black snails.

I did not want to jump in and cuddle up to them.

Fake Snake

We were in the bottoms near the Current River and passed over an old channel. The mucky river bottom was intriguing and we stopped to look it over.

We thought there was a snake slithering over the a rock, see the yellow stripe on the dark rock? We were convinced until we looked at it with the binoculars. It's a root.

Firesong

10/13/2007 6:59 AM

As I write this, I’m sitting in a cabin in the woods near Big Spring Missouri in the early morning hours, next to the fire I woke up and stoked up this morning. The cabin is unheated except for the fireplace, and although it is not midwinter or horribly cold outside, the fire does make the cabin much more hospitable.

As I woke up cold and decided to rekindle the fire, I knew I had to be quiet to allow my wife and brother to continue to sleep. So it was one of those early morning experiences where the silence magnifies every sound that does occur.

Through careful feeding of small sticks and nursing the reluctant coals back to life, I was able to get the fire going again. By the time I was feeding the big pieces in, I was ready for the warmth the fire would bring.

Then I noticed something. This was at a time when I had moved away from the fire and could not see it. There was a sound just like a geyser erupting. If it had not been for the recent trip to Yellowstone that my wife and I took this summer, I probably would not have made the association, but the sound of a branch violently offgassing was very similar to Old Faithful erupting. More on that later.

I moved closer to the fire and could hear more sounds coming out of it. Little high pitched notes, that I had trouble identifying at first. Morning twilight was starting, and the sun was starting to bring a tinge of light to the curtains. This is usually the time of morningsong, when the birds are waking up and start to sing joyously about how beautiful the new day is - at least that’s what I imagine. Maybe they are sharing sports scores or gossiping about the escapades of the night before. In this case, the fire was making those noises. I had never heard (or maybe just never noticed) such an uncanny duplication of the noise from a fire before. In the next 10 minutes, I noticed that the fire made a noise just like a steady strong wind, then it made a sound like a sail or cloth flexing in the wind. It also makes those really loud snaps, which are distinctly a sound from fire. Something about the early morning silence had focused my hearing and concentrated my imagination.

The geyser noises probably aren’t such a mystery, when you stop to consider them. I learned in Yellowstone, from reading the storyboards at various sights, how geysers work. If you think of the groundwater as a lake that has a surface under the ground, that’s a fair start. Rather than a clear surface of a lake you can see, the surface underground is bounded by rock and earth, so it is not as free to move as the skin of your favorite fishing lake. For a geyser to happen, you have to have the intense heat of the earth’s magma. I imagine a red hot arc of material that looks like a loop of your intestine, but I’m not sure how far away or what shape the magma takes. What is important is that it heats up the rocks below the ground, hotter than boiling water. At the beginning of an eruption cycle, this hot spot is underwater. The rock has some cracks, crevices, or holes that go all the way up to the surface, but the are filled with water. Just like your ears are under intense pressure at the bottom of a swimming pool, the water in contact with the hot spot is under pressure from all the water above it. Water under more pressure takes more heat to boil, so you can have superheated water in this region. At some point, the water gets so hot that it finally boils, and something starts the column of water moving upward. Once it starts to move upward, all the weight of the water above comes off the water below. Under pressure, this water was liquid, but without the pressure, the boiling point is quickly reached and the water turns to steam. Steam takes up much more volume that the water it came from, so it expands. This forces the column of water above, already in motion to shoot out of the mouth of the geyser with explosive force.

The sound is distinct, a prolonged rushing whooshing sound. If you’ve ever watched a fire, you’ve seen logs send out jets and streamers of flame. Something inside the log is suddenly trying to escape explosively. Wood is nothing more than a series of tubes, bundled together in a trunk, log, branch, or twig. In the living wood, the tubes carried water and nutrients from the ground to the leaves and back. The core of the tree is old conduits from earlier years, like a tree skeleton. The surface just below the bark is the active living part of the tree where the sap still flows. You cut a tree down and slice it up and stack it in a pile and all the sap that was in the tree doesn’t just pour out of the cut ends. In pine trees, there is some seepage of evaporated sap, or resin, on the ends, but most wood just magically dries up without leaking all the sap out. What happens? Probably two things. The water in the sap makes its way to the cut end and evaporates. In addition, some of it is probably converted into compounds in the resin. The resin eventually renders itself into a hard substance, like amber. That resin is distributed throughout the wood, and it is flammable. It is trapped in the inside of the wood, but under heat, it liquefies. When it finds an open channel to the surface, it boils from the release of pressure and it jets out of the opening, just like a geyser. Same process.

Discovering the mechanism behind the phenomena does nothing to diminish the lovely sound of the geysering wood.