Bagging Silage

 This long white bag that looks sort of like a mutant worm leaving some excrement behind is really not that. Course, you probably already figured that out, being the intelligent blog reader that has chosen to come to this site.

What this bag signifies is that it's harvest time! These are silage bags, and they cost a lot, like several hundred bucks each. Who knew a little plastic could cost so much?

 This machine is called the bagger, and it's being used to put silage (ground up corn) into the bag. The idea is that the bag will create a moist environment, allowing the silage to ferment a bit and increase the protein content. And if the cows get a little tipsy, with fermented food, cheers to them.

 The silage truck backs up to the bagger.

 Then it opens its gate and tips the bed.

 This is what the silage looks like coming out of it. Hard to believe its good food!

 Jose operates the bagger.

 Malcolm puts on a big grin in the silage truck.

 It only takes a few minutes for the silage truck to dump its load in the bagger, then it heads back out to the field to get more.

 The bags are labeled and dated.

It was such a nice afternoon that we decided to head out into the fields to try and find the chopper.

 We found a few errant corn stalks that had evaded the maw of the chopper.

 Seeing the brown corn really made it seem like fall. The snow-covered mountain might have helped with that appearance, too.

 I liked how the road threaded its way through the corn field. We had to take it, of course. The chopper wasn't on the other side.

 We saw that the chopper had been there, though. So we looked for the dust of the silage trucks and continued on.

 Then, off in the distance, we saw the chopper at work, with a backup silage truck ready to take the first one's place as soon as it was full.

Aw, the joys of fall. My husband will breathe a huge sigh of relief once all the corn is chopped. The corn silage is all done now, with quite a bit of corn earlage left. Earlage is when the chopper just pulls the ears off and chops them up. Its higher energy for the cows and is harvested later than the silage.

And now you probably know more than you wanted to about bagging silage. But if you still want to know more, here's a post I wrote about it back in 2008!

Hi

It can be really fun to pose for a shadow photo. Even Henry got in on the action!

It's been a little crazy lately, with some awesome fall weather so we just have had to get out of the house. Plus we restained our house this weekend, which took longer than expected (don't all DIY projects turn out that way?) And the Internet isn't working correctly. So all that means limited computer time. It's kind of nice in a way, but I do have to feed my addiction periodically!

Hey, NaNoWriMo starts November 1. Have you ever wanted to write a novel? November is a great month to do it--the days are short, the evenings are long, and you can fill them up by writing. The idea behind NaNoWriMo is that if you force yourself to write every day, you will finish your novel--or at least a really rough draft. I've participated twice before. The first time I finished a really fun young adult novel, Adventures in the Junkyard. I haven't found a publisher yet, but I have submitted it to a couple contests and received some helpful reviews. The second time I didn't make the 50,000 word goal, but it did help me get through insomnia and make me exercise my writing muscles.

This time I'm ready to go at it again. And for those of you who are non-fiction writers, there's a similar non-fiction challenge for November. I have a friend doing that one, and we're going to be encouraging each other. Who else wants to join the club?

National Fossil Day

It's getting late in the day, but I just learned that today is National Fossil Day! Better get out and celebrate! After all those fossils might not be around for long (but we'll hope so).

For those junior paleontologists out there (like Desert Boy), here's a super fun Junior Paleontologist booklet for free, plus some more activities.

Ricks Spring

After visiting Logan Cave on our NCKMS field trip, he headed farther up Logan Canyon and stopped at Ricks Spring. The spring emerges from a large overhang and has a handicapped-accessible trail that goes up close to the springhead. Except that this isn't any regular springhead. As we watched, we saw a light in the spring, followed by a body. There were divers in the spring!

Even though I won't do cave diving as it's one of the most dangerous sports around, I'm fascinated by it. And it was interesting seeing these divers emerge with all their specialized gear in the 46 degree water. They said it was warm. They dive there all winter, and some of the water comes from the Logan River, so it can be really cold.

I wasn't the only one fascinated--our group watched in awe as the divers surfaced.

It was hard to believe that the passage continues, but in fact it goes back at least 2300 feet in the main passage, and they haven't even started exploring the side passages.

These cave divers have begun mapping the cave.

The cave twists and turns like most caves, and also goes up and down, making it a sporting challenge. These divers have done over 200 dives at Ricks Spring, so they know the tricky spots, like especially tight spots that require side mount tanks. They also know at what water levels they can dive the spring--during snow melt, the water velocity is too high to safely go in. This year all their guidelines were washed out by the super high velocities. They also have to dig out the cave entrance every year.

We listened to a USGS presentation about the geology of the area and what dye traces had shown.

 

Then we listened to the divers, Wendell Nope and Richard Lamb. They made it clear that they are very safety conscious and love what they do a lot. Then they showed a video they shot, which was awesome. If you'd like to see the video and some additional photos of this underwater cave, check out Wendell's website.

Logan Cave

 This last week I went to the National Cave and Karst Management Symposium in Midway, Utah. It was an excellent symposium, with lots of great information shared, old relationships revitalized, new cave people met, and to top it off, it also included an informative field trip.

We headed up Logan Canyon and after stopping at a couple springs and learning how dye tracing had revealed the water sources to them, we met with a state wildlife biologist and learned about the bats in Logan Cave. This is a fairly large cave with a huge cave opening right by the highway. It has both a maternity and hibernating colony of Townsend's big eared bats, so visits in the summer or winter can impact the bats. About 15 years ago, the gate was put on, and since then the population of bats has increased from about 5 to 250.

 Since we were visiting in the fall and the group was made up of cave managers and researchers, we had been able to obtain permission to visit part of the cave. Several members of our group remembered visiting the cave decades ago and were grateful to have a chance to see it again.

 Large walking passages predominated in the part of the cave we visited.

 Of course I couldn't help but look for cave life. I saw several heleomyzid flies.

 We were a little bit of a parade going through the cave, our group, strung out into a single file. It was interesting hearing the little tidbits of geologic, hydrologic, biologic, and historical knowledge people were sharing.

 A bat with white nose syndrome. No! Just kidding. This was a dead bat with lots of white fungus growing on it, but it had been dead a long time. White nose syndrome is a disease caused by the fungus Geomyces destructans, and it causes a white fungus to grow on bats and then those bats usually die. It was first discovered in the U.S. in New York state about five years ago and now has spread to many more states, primarily in the East and Midwest, killing thousands of bats. No one knows how to stop it, and cavers are taking precautions of not wearing gear from infected areas in uninfected areas. In addition, many caves have been closed, which has been controversial, but I won't go into that discussion here right now.

 Logan cave had lots of interesting sand riffles, mud cracks, and other sediment deposits showing how water had recently moved through the cave.

 We continued in the passage until it eventually got too wet. The stream flowed a few inches deep, with pools sometimes a few feet deep.

 With the advance of point-and-shoot cameras, we had plenty of photographers documenting the cave!

 On the way out, I noticed the water lines in the cave. When I saw this photo, I realized that folks had also lined up rocks to avoid getting as wet when water was flowing in the cave.

 We saw lots of chert nodules in the walls.

 More passage with water lines evident.

 A snout-nosed moth (take a good look at that nose!).

 Someone called this a monarch moth, and I'm going with that right now because I forget the Latin genus name.

 Returning to the entrance, we saw that the skies had opened up and that it was raining hard.

 Shawn had found some items to clean up in the cave--a beer can and a super soaker.

 A large packrat midden was right next to the gate, looking like oil oozing out of the wall (and one participant shared a story of a visitor describing a midden just like that and wanting to know why the cave was leaky).

 Right inside the gate was a box with a sign that said "Warning, this area under video surveillance."

I was about to leave when I was notified of a millipede just a short ways back.

 I couldn't resist checking it out. Even though it wasn't a white cave-adapted millipede, it was still really cool and I was glad to see it. Somehow invertebrates are so much more interesting to me when they're found inside a cave!

 Then it really was time to leave, out past the thick chain and padlock. I don't know if I'll ever have a chance to go back in, but hopefully these photos give a glimpse of what's back behind the bars. I hope the bats are able to keep living peacefully in their home. They've lived there a lot longer than us humans have been around, and it's quite sad that humans nearly destroyed them there. (The cave was ultimately closed after some stupid, irresponsible people (yes, I wanted to use much stronger language here, but resisted due to the family nature of this blog) set off firecrackers under the bats. How could they be so stupid?).

We hiked back down to the highway, next to the spring cascading down the leaf-covered rocks.

Next stop: an even larger spring, with a surprise right in the middle of it. Stay tuned...

Camping at Navajo Lake

My husband couldn't go on the previous camping trips, so we decided to go on another one so he could appreciate all the joys of camping. (He doesn't like hard ground, sleeping in the cold, dark evenings, all the noises of camping, but he'll still go along once a year. He's a good guy.)

After shopping all day in Cedar City (it really wasn't supposed to be all day, it just sort of ended up that way, along with a long stop at the Aquatic Center), we got some food for camping (as we really hadn't managed to pack anything) and headed up the canyon. We checked out one campground along the way, but it wasn't too appealing, so we headed up to Navajo Lake. It's late in the season, so they only had part of one campground open, but it had spots available.

So while my husband went off to scavenge wood from the woods, I borrowed a can opener from nearby campers (bean soup was part of our menu--Desert Boy's favorite food). Those campers thought we looked in a pretty sorry state, so they gave us some of their wood, too. We did manage to get our tent up just fine. The campground had been nearly clear cut due to all the beetle kill, so all the campers could see each other quite well. We could also see the lake really well, and I had to keep taking trips down to it to enjoy the changing colors.

For the kids, I think the highlight was the fire. Like how Desert Girl is trying to get into the match box?

Desert Boy can't resist throwing in an extra stick.

Desert Girl was willing to put up with a hat because it helped keep her warm. Navajo Lake is up fairly high (maybe 9000 ft?), and I was concerned that it would get cold that night. Maybe Desert Girl was a little concerned too. She has that eyebrow furrow down perfect.

We had a beautiful sunset.

Then we sat around the fire for awhile and talked and roasted marshmallows. When we decided that no one actually liked the marshmallows, we had fun tossing them into the fire and watching them burn.

The next morning the kids had us up before it was even light. It was really cold, and there was mist coming off the lake. As we made breakfast, we found frost on the picnic table.

So after eating we went for a walk, where we found some folks fishing. We wished we had brought our fishing poles! We saw a lot of fish rising.

On the way home we took a detour by Cedar Breaks, with the beautiful cliffs. The trees weren't as colorful there, so we headed back to the canyon. It was a quick trip, but such a nice getaway, and there were so many gorgeous trees along the route. Welcome, autumn!