Reflections in the River

My wandering ranger days continue.  Hired as a naturalist in the Cascades of southern Oregon, I found myself just south of Crater Lake national park walking a trail to the headwaters of Wood River.  Standing on the bank, I found myself totally drawn to the green reflections beneath the waters.  Green.  The symbol of ecology and natural preservation.  My job here was to shape the young minds of tomorrow into understanding the deeper meaning of a greener world.

Leaving my familiar territory of Western and Mountain Hemlock that I was so used to in the Olympics as well as Mt. Rainier, I quickly had to adjust to the tall and spread out Ponderosa forest mixed with Douglas Fir, White Fir and a cedar I wasn't familiar with.  Mixed cones of Ponderosa, sugar and Douglas scattered the trail, and after a winter of inactivity, pine needles scatters obscuring the trail often times losing our way.

We made our way down to the head waters of Wood River where the clear cold spring waters erupted from beneath the earth to create the river.  The spring filtered through rock is clean enough to drink.  Rare in this day and age.  Basalt and pumice, evidence of the eruption of Mt. Manama can still be seen scattered everywhere, the pumice creating a green tint to the river.  The spring is said to come from Crater Lake, many miles away.  I suppose the waters have to go somewhere.

Everything is within a cycle.  We see seasons of warm summers where rivers retreat, animals thrive, and life continues in a lazy way.  In autumn, bears push hard for their last chance calories before hibernation and elk and moose rut hard for the chance of continuing on their genes while the leaves of trees change color ready to fall to the earth to pass on their own nutrients.  In winter, the world rests mostly, although life teams in full concert beneath the snow as mice, picas and other creatures continue on.  Then spring brings renewal.  We humans are mostly desensitized creating environments that match our own luxury rather than adapting to the world outside.  But we too have a cycle.  We live....we die...  Perhaps our own renewal happens on a different place, a spiritual one.

Every forest is unique.  If you take the time to listen, you'll hear something different, or that of nothing at all.  But in it's quiet, depth of solitude unmatched anywhere else.  I'm find I'm happy to have been able to witness but for a day a different place, a different sound, a different solitude.  I'll be back and often throughout the summer shaping young minds into hopefully seeing the reflections I do in nature, and yet obscuring the private reflections within my own life.