a walk in Fall Creek gorge, part 2
Jun. 25th, 2014 02:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingBeing a tree down in a gorge is an exercise in tradeoffs. On the one hand, you have a constant source of water, which can be very nice in the heart of summer. On the other hand, well, spring floods can get very high. And since the gorge itself is mostly made of bare shale... you get pummeled by a lot of sharp-edged rocks carried along by those floods.
This produces some really neat root structures, not to mention some very oddly bent and twisted trees. And yes, the trees in the later pictures are growing right out of the water. Some of that is a side effect of shifting water levels, but the other thing about floods is they shift the stream bed. Dry land is not stable, as the last tree in this photoset has learned to its regret. It's not quite dead yet, but unless it gets a nice shield of rocks and mud built up over this summer and fall, it may drown before it sees another summer.
This produces some really neat root structures, not to mention some very oddly bent and twisted trees. And yes, the trees in the later pictures are growing right out of the water. Some of that is a side effect of shifting water levels, but the other thing about floods is they shift the stream bed. Dry land is not stable, as the last tree in this photoset has learned to its regret. It's not quite dead yet, but unless it gets a nice shield of rocks and mud built up over this summer and fall, it may drown before it sees another summer.
