Arachnids

My brother came to visit me over Labor day weekend. He is a tarantula enthusiast and so we went hiking around various places in Missouri looking for them (they aren't found in northern Illinois where he lives). I like to think of our trip as the tale of three arachnids

1. Aphonopelma Hentzi, the Texas Brown Tarantula. This is what we were looking for. They appear in glades in southern Missouri under rocks. At least that's what we heard. We failed to uncover any even after flipping many rocks.

The first place we looked was fairly close to home. The Valley View Glades Natural Area in Jefferson county was rumored to have tarantulas. It's a small glade complex but it did offer us with a view of the second arachnid.

2. Centruroides vittatus, the Striped Scorpion or Plains Scorpion. This is apparently Missouri's only scorpion. They were quite plentiful under the rocks in the glades. However I think we only saw young scorpions because they were sort of a yellow color rather than the dark brown color that the adults are supposed to have. We also saw several skinks and several small snakes which I think are Western Worm Snakes. They are really small and hide under rocks.

After spending several hours we decided to head to southern Missouri to the Hercules Glade complex. Here is a picture of the glade top trail which I stoke from the forest service web site.

We camped in an area called the Tidwell area which is very nice. During the night it rained really hard. So much so that we had to abandon our tarp and retreat to the car. Wind blown rain was getting in. We were trying to share an 8x10 tarp with me in a hammock and my brother on the ground. The tarp didn't provide enough coverage for two.

Although the Hercules Glades are nice looking we thought we might have better luck a little further east at Caney Mountain Conservation Area. We enjoyed hiking in this area but failed to find any tarantulas. We saw a few more snakes but I'm not sure which species they were. However the patches of grasslands provided an enounter with the third arachnid.

3. Trombicula alfreddugesi, Chiggers! I don't normally encounter many chiggers when I hike. But that's because I tend to stay in woodlands. Chiggers infest grassy areas. You never see them (they are tiny) or even feel them bite. You just begin to itch after a few hours. This scratching dislodges the chigger but that is just the beginning. Chiggers do not burrow into your skin or suck blood. They pierce the skin and inject a saliva that dissolves skin cells. It also causes the nearby cells to harden into a tube that the chigger can drink through. It is this tube that causes the discomfort later on. Your body will eventually break down this tube but until then you have an itchy welt. At the moment I have something like 100 on my feet, ankles, and the backs of my knees. Oh well.

Katy Trail: Portland to Marthasville

I have now completed a second overnight trip on the Katy Trail. This time I biked the area just west of where I had gone last time. On my last trip I went from St Charles to Marthasville, a distance of about 40 miles. This time I put my bike in the car and drove to the little town of Portland, MO and then biked east to Marthasville (once again about 40 miles), camped and biked back the next morning.

Portland is a very small town. It's main feature seems to be the Katy Trail trailhead near a boat launch on the Missouri river.

This section of trail is just as beautiful as the previous section with limestone bluffs and forest all around.  Occasionally the trail comes out of the forest and passes through farmland as in this part where the trail crosses over a bridge on a creek.  That's my bike in the background and my pack in the foreground.

The bluffs are actually even more impressive in this section then in the section closer to St Charles.  In fact one of the little towns I passed through was called Blufton, apparently named after the nearby bluffs, which are really high and very impressive.  However it's really hard to get a picture which does them justice.

What really sets this section apart is the views of the Missouri river.  It's quite close in other places too but here you ride so close that often it's just a few feet away, with no trees to block the view.

The downside of being so close to the river is that near the river there are always plenty of mosquitos.  But when you are on a bike you don't even notice them.  They can't keep up and so I wasn't even aware of them until I stopped to take a picture.  Then they swarmed around me and I got back on the bike quick.  Biking is definitely the best way to see the Katy Trail.  A walker would get eaten alive.

Once again I camped in Marthasville,  in fact I slept in exactly the same spot as I did last time.   Here is the view from where I slept (the picture was taken in the morning).  It's right next to the town baseball field.  The great thing about this spot is that it's covered and so there's no need to string a tarp or otherwise protect from rain.  A little rain was forecast but never materialized.

Once again there was a game going on when I arrived.  The town seems to be really big into baseball and they all come out to cheer on their team.  This time it was the 16 to 18 year old boys.

The people in town are really nice. The lady at the concession stand recognized me right away. I had dinner and watched the game before showering and going to sleep. The concession stand is a typical midwestern affair, the prevailing attitude being that anything can be deep fried. I had a burger, fries, and the jalepeno bites you can see on the menu. A jalepeno bit is just sliced jalepeno, dipped in batter, and deep fried. Great for an old New Mexico boy like me.

I slept pretty well on my Big Agnes pad. I wrapped myself up in a Neat Sheet (with the corner weights cut out) for a quilt. It worked fine. I didn't sleep quite as well as last time because the wind kept waking me up. But it wasn't bad. I woke up at 5:18 which was perfect because I had to get back for a meeting at work at noon. So I got some hostess snacks at the convenience store and biked the 40 miles back to my car and then drove home, changed and got to my meeting just in time.

All in all a great trip.

Pictures from the Katy Trail

In my last post I bemoaned the lack of photographs I had taken. So I drove back and took a few just to give an idea of what the trail looks like between St Charles and Marthasville.




As you can see the trail is well packed and wide with trees arching overhead. It's a veritable tunnel of green. I didn't get any shots of the wetlands on the south side of the trail but on the north side in many places you are riding next to limestone bluffs that are quite beautiful.


I'm heading out in a few minutes for another ride, a bit farther west. Next post I'll have info about that part of the trail.

Bike camping

The past few weeks the weather has been scorching. This week was so nice that I decided to take a bike trip along the Katy Trail. It wasn't a long trip. About 40 miles each direction. And rather than backcountry camping I ended up in a city park in the cute little town of Marthasville.

View Katy trail to Marthasville in a larger map

The Katy trail is a real gem. I've used it for long runs when I was training for a marathon. It used to be a railroad line and I believe it is part of the Rails-to-Trails project. The trail is flat and for many miles it runs next to the Missouri river. Often there are limestone bluffs on one side, the river or wetlands on the other, and trees overhanging the trail itself. Nothing short of gorgeous.

Biking the Katy trail is popular enough that there are trail towns that cater to the biking community. I stopped in one of them, Defiance, and had pizza at a little tavern before continuing on. (That's one benefit of bike camping: no need to bring food since you are never far from civilization.) Some town allow camping in the city parks and Marthasville is one of these. It's one of the cutest towns you will ever see. Really tiny. There are like 4 streets in town and the trail cuts right through it. When I showed up at the park there was a little league game and a men's softball game going on. I swear the whole town turned out to watch the games. It's so quaint it's like the town that time forgot.

The city park also has showers for bikers and they ask for a $5 donation to help fund the facilities. It was nice to be able to shower before bedtime and then to sleep under a park shelter so there was no need for a tarp or anything.

I ran into 5 other bikers and we all camped together. They are college students who are part of a cross-country trip called Trek to Re-Energize America. Several teams are biking to Washington D.C. to advocate for action on climate change. In particular they seem to focus on biking as a viable alternative for commuting. The particular group I ran into blogs about their ride here (although when I last checked the site was down). They stared in Peublo, Colorado. Great kids. We had a nice time together. They wanted to hear me lecture about economics and the environment. And of course professors love to talk so we got along great.

I wish I had more pictures of the trip. I tried using my cell phone as a camera but I can't get the pictures off. But if you go to the Katy Trail website there are maps and lots of info and pictures from better photographers than I.

Mapping the Damage at Marble Creek

This past week my daughter went to a girl's camp our church sponsors every year which was held down at the S-F scout camp (on the Swift explorer base). I was asked to go pick up the girls from our congregation on Saturday morning. So I looked for a place nearby to do a hike on Friday with the idea of camping Friday night and picking the girls up in the morning on my way back home.

I looked at the Ozark trail page and saw that the recovery work was well underway on many sections. I felt a twinge of guilt that I hadn't volunteered to join any of these work parties. Then I saw that the post-storm status of one little section of the trail not far from the girl's camp was "unknown" and they were looking for someone to go scout out the damage and report back. I decided to volunteer so I could contribute in a small way to the trail I've come to love so much.



The section is called the Marble Creek section. It's not very long and currently doesn't connect to the rest of the trail at either end (although eventually it will). Perhaps for that reason it isn't as popular as some sections. It's quite nice though. It begins at Marble creek (pictured below).

After that the trail winds with only gentle ups and downs through the forest and then ends in a loop around Crane Lake.

Crane Lake, like every lake in Missouri, is man-made. A dam was constructed in a narrow valley. The southern loop of the trail brings you right next to this dam. The northern loop brings you around quite a ways above the dam with a nice view. I took a picture of the view but it was getting dark and so the picture didn't turn out so you'll have to be satisfied with the picture below, taken from the edge of the dam on the southern edge of the lake.

Mapping the damage to the trail involved stopping at every point where a tree had fallen across the trail and creating a waypoint on my GPS unit. Later I would share those waypoints with the sawyers so they could plan a cleanup. This turned out to be pretty exhausting. No only does it slow you down to stop and enter a waypoint but afterward you have to clamber over the tree or bushwhack through the surrounding forest and then try to find the trail on the other side. The trail itself has seen better days. Lack of use has caused it to become overgrown in places and occasionally I got lost. I had several GPS track files to go by but one was just an approximation and the other two were incomplete. At one point, near the lake, I became totally lost. Then I happened to catch sight of an old trail marker. The trail itself had completely disappeared in undergrowth but I was able to follow the trail markers up through some glades and along the side of a hill, which I later saw was one side of a steep valley where the dam was built.

Some people feel that the hiking season in the Ozarks starts October 1st and ends sometime in April or May. It's certainly true that those are great months to hike the Ozarks. But I have learned a few tricks about hiking in the summer.

1. Treat your pants and socks with permethrin ahead of time. Ticks climbing on clothes treated with permethrin quickly die. One can easily pick up dozens of ticks in just one day of hiking in the summer in the Ozarks. I only saw one on me this time and it was on my forearm from where I had brushed a nearby bush. My legs and feet were completely clear.
2. Take a bath in the hot part of the day. Find a stream or a lake, pull out the Dr Bronner's soap and restore your humanity with cleanliness. Just swimming is fine too because it cools you down. But a bath is nicer. This time I swam in the lake and then went on the rocks below the dam to take a bath in the rushing water.
3. Hike quickly and don't stop until after dark. Mosquitoes can't fly very fast. If you walk at a reasonably brisk pace they can't keep up. You don't even think they are there until you stop and suddenly they swarm you. But mosquitoes also stop flying once it is truly dark. This time I took a hammock with no bug net and found I didn't really miss the bug net because by the time I went to sleep there were no mosquitoes around.

Hike and Bike

On my first trip on the Ozark trail, last summer, I hiked the first 7 and a half miles of the northern-most section of the trail, the Courtois section. I had planned to finish it at spring break but I got sick. So I set out to do it this past weekend.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the storms that had knocked down so many trees in the Paddy Creek wilderness. I turns out that that storm caused widespread damage in south-central Missouri. Many sections of the Ozark trail have had to be closed (many of which I have hiked in the past year) until sawyers can come and clear the dead trees. Fortunately the Courtois section was largely spared, at least the northern portion. So I decided to start about 12 miles into the section (from the southern end) and hike up to the point I had reached last year.

One of the challenges faced by backpackers is transportation. Most trails are "point-to-point" and so you end up a long way from where you parked your car. Rather than using a shuttle service this time I hit on the idea of using my bike. The Courtois section, as you can see below, makes a wide bend and touches (or nearly touches) highway 8 in two places. So I put my bike in the trunk of my car and hid it in the woods near the northern end of the trail and then drove to my starting point. The idea was to hike to the bike (following the blue path on the map below) and then bike to the car (the red path, which follows highway 8). It worked out reasonably well (except for a rainstorm during the biking part of my trip).

View Middle Courtois Section Hike in a larger map

As near as I can figure the total distance on the trail was 23.7 miles and the biking distance was 8 miles.

Even after having done quite a few backpacking trips over the past year or two I am still a very imperfect backpacker. The one thing I do well is hike. Once I start hiking I become quite taken with the beauty of the forest and it just seems wrong to stop hiking (until it gets too dark to find my way). So I end up doing quite a few miles in a day. This time I started at 1pm or so and did about 19 miles before I stopped to camp. I ended up hiking all the way to my bike on the first day. Part of that is because I hike alone. Hiking alone is really great. But sitting around in camp alone is not much fun. So I tend not to do it much.

Every time I go hiking I think "This one, THIS is the most beautiful section I've ever hiked". It can't really be the case that every trail is more beautiful than the last so I think my memory just fades quickly. But I was very taken with the beauty of this section. Unfortunately most of my pictures didn't turn out (something on the lens I think) but here is a taste of what it was like.


I made a few mistakes, like I do every time. I brought a stove and a hot meal to cook as well as dried snacks to eat along the way. But I never ended up using the stove or the hot meal. It all goes back to preferring to hike rather than sit in camp. And the right kind of snacks can be tasty as well as nutritious. I really like crunchies freeze dried mixed fruit. No sugar, additives, or preservatives and it's light as a feather and tastes great. I've bought similar stuff from Just Tomatoes. Their freeze dried mixed veggies is awesome trail food. I also eat a lot of jerky along the trail so I get a pretty balanced diet. And for pure calories (it takes a surprising amount of calories to hike) peanut M&Ms are hard to beat.

My biggest weakness as a backpacker is sleeping. Often I don't sleep at all. Other times I sleep fitfully. If I hike until I'm exhausted I have better luck but still my body needs to have familiar surroundings. So this time I left the hammock at home and tried the air mattress and bug bivy. It's heavier in the summer than a hammock but it feels more like a bed. My mistake was to look up at the clear night sky and decide that no rain protection was necessary. In the middle of the night I felt drops on my face and quickly threw the poncho/tarp over the bivy. That kept me dry but because it wasn't staked out or supported with trees or poles there was little circulation so I felt pretty clammy when I woke up. Oh well, live and learn.

Next morning I hiked a bit farther up the trail to meet the point I had got to last year and then I went back to camp, got on the bike and headed to my car. That's when the rain really came down. So by the time I arrived at the highway 8 trailhead I was drenched. Then the rain promptly stopped. I hid the bike in the trees, hiked about a mile and half up to my car and drove back to get the bike and go home.

All in all it was a great hike.

Paddy Creek After a Storm

Well the finals are all graded and the grades submitted so I took the opportunity to get away for some hiking. I was originally planning to go Thursday night and come back Friday but something came up and I had to reschedule. It turns out to be fortunate that I did because a very severe storm hit on Thursday night. More on that later.


View Paddy Creek Wilderness (short loop) in a larger map

The map above shows the loop I took. I wanted to do a longer loop but somehow I got on a shortcut trail that makes a shorter loop. I'm going to start a support group for knuckleheads like me who own GPS units and don't have the brains to use them. I had forgotten to load this section of Topo map onto my unit and didn't realize it until it was too late. Hence the mistake.

The Paddy Creek Wilderness is located in Central Missouri, essentially directly southwest of my house. It's farther West than I have gone before. The area differs from the parts of the Ozarks I have explored before in that the rock formations appear to be limestone and not igneous rocks. The Paddy Creek Wilderness is near the Big Piney river which runs through central Missouri and empties into the Gasconade (which in turn empties into the Missouri). The Paddy Creek Wilderness area is the area surrounding the little Paddy Creek (which joins the big Paddy Creek before it empties into the Big Piney). The area is quite beautiful with many limestone cliffs overlooking the creek.




Since it's late spring there's beginning to be more wildlife around although the mosquitoes aren't yet as bad as they will be. This is the first time I've got a decent picture of one of these guys.

He thought I didn't see him and so stayed real still for the photo. I'm not exactly sure but I think this is a Five-lined Skink, also called a "Blue-tailed skink" (note the blue tail). This is Missouri's most common skink.

Being from the desert I'm used to lizards. But I thought that was the only slice of desert I'd find in Missouri. Imagine my surprise when I almost stepped on this right next to the trail! Am I right that this is a prickly pear cactus? Weird.


I arrived in the late afternoon on Friday and it had rained all night. The trail was soaked and all the little tributaries that dump into the little Paddy were full. Here the trail crosses one of these tributaries. It made a nice picture I thought.


But the main story of this trip was the storm damage. It was truly unbelievable. Hundreds of huge trees had been ripped up by the roots. I think I spent half my time off the trail, bushwhacking, trying to find a way around fallen trees. I genuinely think that if I had gone on Thursday I might not be alive today. My hammock could have been tied to one of those trees. Or worse, one could have fallen on me in my sleep (if anyone could have slept during that storm).

Most of the fallen trees were oaks. But many tall pines fell as well and this surprised me. I would have thought that those straight, tall pines provide less of a target for the wind and so wouldn't be as prone to fall over in a storm. But as you can see that wasn't the case.

In the picture above it's a bit hard to get the scale. I'm standing on the trunk and taking the picture. The trunk is larger around than my body and looked to me to be at least 40 feet tall, maybe 50.

This next picture is a bit hard to understand unless you were there. A row of three huge pines fell like dominoes. Note how you can see the rootball of the second tree under the trunk of the first. The third is farther along.


I went super-ultralight on this trip. My lightest hammock, just my poncho for a tarp and raingear, and no stove (just ate cold food). Worked out fine. I'll push this even farther when the weather warms up even more so I can do some serious miles.