Off The Beaten Path – The Index Eagle January 1992 by Bob Hubbard

This article is from the Index Eagle, January 1992 and authored by Bob Hubbard. He has given us permission to reprint his articles but PLEASE DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. This article may not be reproduced without the express written permission of IndexWa.org and/or Bob Hubbard.
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Off the Beaten Path – Jan 1992

She was few days short of a year in age. This pupa of a certain caddicefly of the family Limnephilfdae, and she was nearly at the end of her life’s cycle. She had lived until now in a series of portable sand-and-silk tubes or cases of her own making, dragging them around the stream bottom as she combed the area for decaying plant or animal matter, algae. and anything else she could scavenge to eat. Two months ago, she stopped eating, glued her case to a river bottom boulder, sealed up the ends of her case and went into a kind of hibernation while her body metamorphosed, changing into its pupal form. Now that changeover was complete and she was chewing away at the silk-and-sand barrier at the front of her case.

She was among the first to attach to her rock, and probably unaware that she had since been joined there by dozens of others of her species. Other rocks nearby, harbored similar concentrations of the squat cylindrical cases that went by the common name of Periwinkles. Inside these cases. other caddice flies were also waking up and starling to chew.

Tonight at dusk, and for the next three dusks, nearly the entire local population of this species of insect – hundreds of thousands. if not millions of individuals – was about to make a big, synchronized dash from river bottom to shore, right through a gauntlet of hungry trout.
The trout knew something was up; a few early emerging caddice flies had already been interrupted In their race for shore. The fat insects made excellent snacks, and throughout the afternoon more and more trout had drifted into the area in anticipation of a good meal. As dusk approached, the trickle of emerges increased to a gush, then a roar. The ‘hatch”, as the fishing people term it, was on.

The particular caddicefly we have introduced finally chewed her way out of the case during the height of the hatch. Her actions were typical of those of her kind. As soon as her body was out of the case it started generating a small amount of gas. This couldn’t escape through her pupal skin, so it started to accumulate under it, forcing it away from another layer of skin under it, her soon-to-be adult skin. The river current plucked her from her grasp on the case and she went tumbling away downstream. All around her the water was filled with other tumbling bodies. The trout swept through this horizontal hailstorm like wolves veering and snapping, enjoying this first course of a fine natural meal.

The caddice tumbled for a bit near the river bottom before the gasses under her skin caused her to rise to the surface. Her legs, short and strong during her larval phase, (the better to drag her heavy case around with), was now longer, and fringed with hairs. She worked those long legs now like mad oars with multiple knees, scrambling her way upward in a tangled blur of motion. The trout continued to dash around stuffing themselves, and several times in her ascent the caddicefly was buffeted by currents caused by the darting fish.

Reaching the surface, the caddicefly heads for the nearest shore. All around her are other caddiceflies with the same goal. Legs rowing, windmilling and thrashing, they head for shore like a miniature D-day fleet. Swirls and explosions of water all around tell the caddices of lost comrades and the narrowing of the gene pool. Rainbow missiles erupt from the water, jaws agape, insect victims centered between hookscarred lips. To the insects, the shore seems a long way away.

Each caddicefly must face ruthless enemies and appalling odds in its sprint to the beach. But because they have evolved a synchronized emergence. the caddiceflies make that dash in a crowd. The trout find themselves literally overwhelmed with food. and enough insects usually get through to assure continuation of their species. Once safely ashore, the caddiceflies crawl into the bushes and moult out of their pupal skin, whose only purpose seems to be to get the insect from its river bottom case to the shore. The now adult caddices must soon run another gauntlet of enemies, as the slim, moth like insects assemble over the river in large swarms to find potential mates. Bats and birds swoop through these swarms like trout of the air, gorging themselves. Thousands more of the insects are lost, but again their natural enemies are overwhelmed with prey, and many more caddices live long enough to find mates in the Single’s Bar atmosphere of the swarm.

The paired caddiceflies leave the swarm and fly to the nearby forest floor to consummate their ‘marriages”, and then the females fun a gauntlet one more time as they fly over to and into the river and swim and struggle their way back to the bottom again. Here they lay their sticky strings of eggs on the rocks and gravels, and finally, their life complete, they release their grip on the bottom and allow the gentle current to deliver them, slowly tumbling to the many mouths of the river.

Bob Hubbard

Off The Beaten Path – The Index Eagle December 1990 by Bob Hubbard

This article is from the Index Eagle, December 1990 and authored by Bob Hubbard. He has given us permission to reprint his articles but PLEASE DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. This article may not be reproduced without the express written permission of IndexWa.org and/or Bob Hubbard.
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The floods this year have done more than just create a lot of environmental havoc and property damage – they have also rekindled many peoples’ interest in forestry as it relates to watershed dynamics and flooding. Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, these floods cannot be blamed exclusively on the loggers and their handiworks, for there are many, many factors which operate together to create a flood. Because of the speed with which the river rose after the storm started. I suspect the influence of a least one of these factors, though – the one I call the Damaged Sponge Effect.

The uncut forest presents three layers of sponge to rainstorms, each of which soaks up rain until it is saturated before it passes the rain along, undiminished to the layer beneath it. Logging can destroy or damage each layer, reducing the water holding capacity of the site and also the amount of rime it takes to saturate the site, which then starts shunting water from the storm into the creeks. This means that more of each storm winds up in the creeks, faster, in the damaged sponge areas, than from undamaged areas. The tree crowns make up the first layer. Old-growth trees, possessing immense quantities of needles, branchlets, lichens and mosses often take a half hour or more to become saturated (as anybody who has ducked beneath a giant tree to get out of a summer squall knows). After leaf-fall, this layer is less effective in hardwood forests, such as our pervasive Alder forests of the Skykomish; and in clear-cuts this layer is completely gone.

The second layer is the litter/duff layer of the forest floor. In old-growth, this layer is especially voluminous, having been accumulated over hundreds of years. Thick moss and well-rotted logs also contribute to the effectiveness of this layer in delaying the arrival of rain to the next layer down. The widespread practice of slash-burning partially or completely destroys this layer, as does the skidding of logs and the building of roads.

The third layer is the soil itself. Under old-growth, this layer is typically deep, with lots of pores, and has tremendous water-holding capacity. Unfortunately, the pore structure is quite fragile, and the thump of a falling tree, or even a few passes of harvesting equipment is sufficient to compact the soil enough to largely destroy its water-holding capacity. Slash burns can destroy the crumbly structure of the soil, giving the same results, and the bared soil is exposed to direct rain splash (rain often falls with sufficient force to blast soil particles a meter into the air). Sediments loosened this way are washed into otherwise undamaged soil pores, plugging them. This layer is very slow to heal, following damage.

As can be seen, there are many ways that logging can damage the sponge function of the forest, thereby hurrying storms into the streams and causing fast rising rivers during rain events. The more a watershed is logged, the more potentially damaging this effect becomes. Although modern harvest techniques are less damaging to the sponge layers than some of the older techniques, the fact remains that significant percentages of our watershed were clear-cut and burnt.

In spite of years of new growth on the soils of these sites, the sponge function remains severely impaired on them, so we’d better get used to rivers which react fast and extreme to every passing storm.

Index Historical Society Vol. 12 – Issue 11 From The Index Eagle 1995

This item is reproduced from the Index Eagle under the Index Historical Society section, November 1995 with permission.

Copyright © Dr. David A. Cameron. Reproduction prohibited without express written permission from the author.
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Yesterday as I walked down the street to the store to pick up my mail I heard a slowly moving automobile coming up behind me, gradually slowing down and then edging along side with a couple of men inside rolling the window down.  They had the advantage, as I was staring into the morning sun low over Heybrook Ridge, and they also obviously were flatlanders, having a new, clean car in Index.

The passenger spoke with a German accent, and I had visions of both a bad imitation of “Casablanca” and the summer spent working on the Department of Natural Resources fire crew out of Sultan. There the locals used to pull that trick and then speed off after depositing a quarter stick of dynamite. Something about out of town guys stealing all the available girls.

These fellows asked me, “Is the tunnel closed?” Not the usual, “Where are the Satan worshippers?” or “What do people do for a living around here?” It took a while before I unraveled that they actually were wondering about the old Cascade Tunnel of the Great Northern Railway or the more recent (1929) one still in use, not the highway tunnel at Money
Creek with its construction area or the Robe Canyon railway tunnels where I recently had been working. But, being a good emissary for the town, I managed to give them relatively straight answers and send them on their way to find out more about the Iron Goat Trail.

Thinking about the incident on the way home, I realized that really we do not build many tunnels anymore. We tend to blast mountain sides apart and create sweeping curves capable of 70 mile an hour speeds instead. Trains and cars and the routes they run really have changed a lot in the last 50 to 70 years. The same is true of other machinery once powered by steam or hand.

All the timber around this town was felled by crosscut saws, yet now they are museum pieces or painted with mountain scenes to hang above fireplaces, replaced by heavy gasoline-powered drag saws such as Wes Smith proudly maintains, and then by later generations of chain saws. This summer 1 had to use a crosscut while working with the Volunteers for Outdoor Washington on the Robe Canyon trail, making a difficult undercut in a log under stress on a steep slope as well as the routine bucking. It was a time warp, half an hour and a lot of sweat when the Stihl could have roared its way through in a couple of minutes. Steam-powered logging donkeys and old tractors still can be seen working through the efforts of President Jerry Senner’s antique tractor club in the Monroe area, but not on today’s farms or logging shows.

A couple of months ago while putting on a program for the Marysville Rotary Club at a motel on the reservation I happened to see a gleaming Model A Ford in their restaurant lobby. For only 30-odd thousand I could drive it home, although the price did not include a gas cap or a minor cosmetic repair to a scratch on the side. Actually I would be
afraid to drive it for fear one of the Alpine gravel trucks might give me a flying ding and cost me a few thousand. Fortunately, given the state of my wallet, that was not going to be a problem.

It does come to mind, though, as I am looking through a 1930 Western Auto Supply Co. illustrated catalogue. Their local outlet was at 2718 Colby in downtown Everett, a store I remember from my youth. The catalogue has a winged radiator cap for a Model T for only forty five cents (same price for Chevies up to 1928), one that looks like the “Mercury” hat on a dime. But next to it is a real classic, an “Aeroplane
Radiator Ornament” with black enameled motor cylinders of a radial engine with a real propeller in chromium plate. The lighted model cost only $2.85. What a deal! A crummy Daisy gas cap model cost only fifteen cents. Wimpy. The Senior Flying Lady (chrome plated) was a buck forty five. Choices.  When is the last time you had a car with a great looking
radiator cap up front to lead you down the highway?

A few other items also seem to be passé. Here is a standard flower vase for smaller, closed cars for ninety five cents. A metal hand signal (yes, a pivoting black enamel painted metal arm with a red painted metal hand) to attach to the side of the cab is only $3.25. A new rubber cloth roof for your roadster is as low as $3.75, $2.65 for a closed car model.  Rumble seats still were in vogue, and an elderly female friend recently exclaimed to me, “Why, people don’t even know what mad money means anymore!” For those of tender years and
limited experience, think of what might happen in a rumble seat and why a good girl might need an extra dollar in her . purse at the close of a date.

Hand grind your own valves, scrape your bearings, shim your spokes, and don’t break your arm on the crank when it backfires. I think I’ll stick with the rumble seat!  Who said history and a good imagination can’t be fun?

Off The Beaten Path – The Index Eagle November 1995 by Bob Hubbard

This article is from the Index Eagle, November 1995 and authored by Bob Hubbard. He has given us permission to reprint his articles but PLEASE DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. This article may not be reproduced without the express written permission of IndexWa.org and/or Bob Hubbard.
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A certain family of Ospreys -which are sometimes called fish hawks or fish eagles-, has lived just southwest of Index for a long time, 17 years at least. During this time they have had several changes of address as tree after tree rotted and weakened under the osprey’s huge nest then broke off in windstorms. Time after time the ospreys rebuilt their nests, sometimes in the same tree, sometimes in another. In last December’s column I wrote a little about the osprey family and sort of wondered aloud about whether they were going to be able to spring back from yet another windstorm home wrecking, the second in a year’s time. Turns out they’re made out of tough stuff; they were building a new nest in a tree a couple hundred feet upstream the next Spring. They’d finished building the nest, had stocked it with 3 eggs, had kept these warm enough to hatch them, and by late Spring their chicks were getting pretty big and noisy as they clamored for food. And then, right across the river, the peaceful forested hillside was turned into an industrial zone.

This was the big project out on hiway 2 a couple hundred feet east of the Index junction, on the downhill side of the hiway; the one which lasted all summer and gave daily employment to at least 3 flaggers handling traffic out on the hiway and half a dozen or more dump truck drivers and power excavator operators down on the job site. Altogether there were many more people involved at some stage or another, but this core group is what most locals saw as they drove by or waited in line out on the hiway. What we saw was a never-ending succession of dump trucks arriving at the site carrying rock, and a similar succession of dump trucks leaving the site loaded with clay. We could see a couple of power shovels or excavators, as they dumped their loads of clay -3 scoops usually do it- into the dump trucks.

What we can now see if we look in just the right place is a view down and across the river, to a small grove of old-growth trees. A broken-topped tree in this grove extends a big side-limb to the right some distance below the top of the trunk, and out on this limb is the new 4 or 5 foot diameter stick nest of the ospreys.

I was worried that the constant noise was going to disturb the ospreys, but they managed to adapt to the construction. As the excavators dug deeper and deeper trenches across the hillside, the ospreys made hundreds of trips upriver and downriver to get the fish to feed their growing chicks. All through the dumping of the rocks into the trenches the ospreys continued to fish and feed their young, and encouraged them to exercise their wings.  Sometime around midway through the project the young ospreys fledged, taking their first awkward flights. The young birds still couldn’t feed themselves, but now they started to follow their parents around, learning how to find and catch fish.  The young ospreys looked comical as they tried to emulate their parents; they flapped enthusiastically from one teetering, jerky landing to another, and they slowly acquired the skill to do it smoothly. One day I looked up and had to laugh; one of the youngsters was practicing his (or her) soaring, and he only had enough confidence to extend his wings about halfway out to full spread.  He was so tense that little updrafts and downdrafts would buffet him and cause him to lose his balance and then he’d have to flap his wings to recover. He was doing more flapping than soaring that day, but in the next few weeks he improved measurably, and by the time the hiway project wrapped up in late October all the osprey youngsters were pretty fair fliers and gliders.

For their part, I thought that the hiway project workers did a pretty good job. They hauled out an awful lot of unstable blue clay and replaced it with heavy, stable rock fill. They rerouted the drainage on the slope into several big plastic drainpipes.  They left a couple of buffer strips of trees, so the site would keep a little of its wild, scenic character. They burned their wood wastes, the stumps and logs and limbs, and every night they put out their waste fire, restarting it each morning instead of just letting it burn all night like the Forest Service and logging firms are wont to do.  (this costs more, but is safer because it eliminates untended fires) And they cleaned up any litter and left a nicely landscaped site behind when they were done. Hopefully, the slope will do its part and cease its slowly-creeping ways so all this attention isn’t wasted on it.

The ospreys must have been thoroughly confused by the hiway project; they watched us cut down a bunch of trees and saw them into pieces and burn them. Then they saw us bring in big power shovels to dig great deep trenches where the trees used to stand. They watched the dump trucks haul the clay up onto hiway 2, then drive it less than a mile down the hiway before turning off on the Mt. Index road and hauling it back upstream until it was almost directly across the valley from where it started out, then dumping it in an abandoned sand pit. They watched other dump trucks return from parts unknown to fill up the great trenches with big, broken rocks.  Then they watched other trucks bring topsoil to cover the rocks with, and when that was spread out, they watched another truck come and spray grass seed, chopped up hay bales and green dye all over the “topsoil”.

I think the workers and flaggers of the hiway project saw the family of ospreys just across the river and realized that this wasn’t just another roadside drainage adjustment job; it was an industrial intrusion into the peaceful world of a great wild bird. There were days when the waste pile fire was left unlit; I wondered whether that had anything to do with keeping the smoke away from the osprey nest, where the nestlings were still unable to fly at the time …  Unfortunately, the project’s perfect record was soiled the other day, when one of the trucks owned by the contractor got too far over on a shoulder of the Mt. Index road and rolled over into a small stream. A couple hundred gallons of diesel spilled into the stream, and even though the hazardous spill folks got out there in a hurry, much of that diesel ended up in a small cattail wetland a few hundred feet downstream from the spill. The effects of that spill on the wetland will be interesting to see, come spring; during the winter most of the plants there look dead anyway, and it would be hard to tell which ones have been affected.

Who knows, maybe come Spring we’ll see another new generation of ospreys raised in this increasingly human-altered wild valley. They’re tough, no doubt about that. If serial home wrecking windstorms aren’t enough to drive them out, and if heavy construction noises don’t drive them out, maybe poisoning their habitat won’t drive them out either. I hope not. Stay tuned, and maybe in another year or two we’ll go back and see how they’re doing.