Uncategorized – Page 14 – State of Wilderness

Hill Country Highways: Burnet, Durn it! Episode 1

Over the weekend, we headed out to Burnet, Texas for a weekend getaway. This was a trip that ended in adventure, education, and eventual disappointment.

First off, I will admit that originally I was mispronouncing the name of this town. I was telling my “sisters” about the trip I had planned there, and Stevie Muree corrected my mistake. She told me a funny story about being interviewed on the radio, in which she told a story about being recognized as the rock star that she is, in Burnet, of all places…only she also said the name wrong. The DJs went quiet, shook their heads, and set her straight, and she vowed to never make that mistake again, even to the point of putting a bumper sticker on her guitar case to remind her that it’s “Burnet, Durn it!” (can’t you learn it? is the rest of the expression).

We came to Burnet with a single purpose, which I will eventually explain. However, we had a whole day to kill. We decided to spend it geocaching at Inks Lake State Park, checking out the caves at Longhorn Caverns State Park, and tasting some Texas wines at Perissos vineyards. We also soaked up the sun dipping our sweaty bodies in Lake Buchanan after a long day of being out in the hot Texas sun.

I had never been to Inks Lake SP myself, actually, but had intended to go there on an ill-fated trip back during the Spring Break of 2007. That is a story for another day, but suffice to say, I never made it there, since my vehicle was totaled in Luling and our trip had been cut short. J had been there once for a Texas Challenge years ago but hadn’t explored the park hardly at all.

We were a little mystified at first at how to access the trails we wanted to hike on, but we figured it out after burning some time driving through the park. You could get a start on the trail from the camping area, but it would be a much longer hike than parking at the trail head outside the park proper.

We had a great time hiking around the Pecan Flats area, grabbing the TPWD 2013 Geocaching Challenge cache and another cache called Pecan Flat. There were some cactus hazards, though. During the hunt for the first cache, there were these small tubular cacti that kept getting caught on my legs, leaving little spines that I continued to rub across for the next twenty four hours. The second cache involved crossing a whole field of prickly pear. I tried to avoid them by going a different way than J to the cache, only to end up brushing against stinging nettles and then whining about it until I got some cream on those spots. Nothing turns me into a bigger baby than stinging nettles! Scenes from this hike:
After this, we went across the road to the trail on the other side, grabbing TSP 4 – Gniess Oak and Rocky Top. At this point, we had been out there for about two and a half hours, and were both starting to get overheated. We got in the A/C, drank another entire bottle of water (each had a water bottle along the way), and stopped at the Hoover Valley Cafe for lunch. It was delicious. They use a special bun for their sandwiches that is sweet and fluffy (I read online later that they obtain them from Sweet Mesquite in Houston – will have to check that source out). I would recommend this as a great place for lunch if you are in the area. Here is a down-home youtube commercial if you are interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KC4zYBZ45M

We were still pretty hot, even after the lemonade and A/C, so when I suggested going to the winery across the street, J balked at first. He had this idea that a winery visit would involve walking through the fields looking at the grapes, maybe a grape-stomping; outdoor activities that he wanted nothing to do with at this moment. When I convinced him there was indoor shady seating just to taste the wine to pick out a bottle to take home, he went along with the plan. I liked one of their reds the best, but was too cheap to spend almost $50 for the bottle, so I got a 2010 Sweet Lucy white wine for about half that price.

After this, J really wanted to go swim in the lake, but it just didn’t make sense to drive back to the Willow Point Resort where we were staying, only to turn around and come back down this way to check out the Longhorn Caverns. Plus, the caverns are only open from 10 to 4, so it just made sense to stop by there first. It was fifteen ’til two when we walked in there, and so we caught the two o’clock tour.

There is a lot I could say about the Caverns, so I think I will continue the story on Episode 2. We are currently addicted to watching Breaking Bad on Netflix, and it has been slowing our stroll, but I hope to pick up the story within a day or two.

Lake Livingston State Park

On the Fourth, we headed about an hour and forty five minutes northeast of us to a state park that I particularly like, Lake Livingston. Lake Livingston itself is the second largest lake in Texas, being 39 miles long and 7 miles across at its widest. It covers 93,000 acres, 635.5 of which belong to the state park. It is notable for its white bass fishery, but also holds catfish (mostly blue), largemouth bass, striped bass, and crappie.

We were going up there to chill for the day and go hiking. Once there, we met up with my friends Diane and Misti, and were joined at various points by a geocacher named Linda (it was technically a geocaching event, but very low-key) and some members of Diane’s family. We all sat around in chairs in the shade by a picnic table in the swimming area of the park for a couple of hours. People had brought various treats to eat, such as chips, guacamole, salsa, orzo salad, couscous, and pound cake. We grilled some veggie burgers, hamburgers, and hot dogs and had a group lunch. After this, Misti, J and I went for a little hike. We ended up walking almost all the trails in this little park in about two hours. It was a little warm outside but it was bearable.

Initially, we took the Livingston Trail from the swimming area. We did the entire loop. At the beginning of the loop, you cross over a bridge that takes you over very inviting looking water. I wanted to swim in the lake today, but J didn’t think it was a good idea given my complications with my leg injury. We are fairly certain that last time we were here, this bridge was out, and also this part of the lake was dry – it was probably a drought year when we were in this section of the park last, so that doesn’t surprise me.

We found one of the few geocaches left in the park that we hadn’t already found while we were over this way. After this loop, we walked past the swimming area again on this same trail – which, in its entirety, is 2.73 miles long – and then skipped off of it just before it ended and took the Pineywoods Nature Walk trail, which is about 0.95 miles. This is a boardwalk path that leads you through a butterfly garden and bird blind observation area. I liked the educational signs inside the bird blind building.

We noticed as we were walking that some of the trees in the park had been completely taken over by poison ivy. This picture below is actually of a pine tree, but it has been enveloped nearly completely in the poisonous vine.

All in all I think it was about 3.5 miles that we hiked.

This state park has a lot to offer, but apparently can get crowded with both people and poisonous plants. There were a lot of people here on this holiday afternoon. The parking lot to the swimming area was so full that the TPWD state park police were parked at the front of the lot, blocking access to it and directing traffic. In this area, there is a swimming pool that is about $2-3 entrance fee, and it was completely packed with people. I really did not check out the lake access swimming area, but I imagine it was crowded, too. We found some occasional trash along our walk to pick up at first. At some point we just kind of gave up on that – especially after two incidents where I picked up 1) something nasty and 2) something that had ants all inside of it that bit my fingers pretty good. The park volunteers or rangers were going by on golf carts to pick up trash, but towards the end as we got closer to the swimming area, I noticed quite a bit of trash piled up near one family’s little claimed spot, and a collection of soda or beer bottle tops piled up near a little bridge. It is a little disheartening to see, and it made me consider the idea of hosting CITOs at state parks after holidays like this.

This park also offers horseback rides through their stables only (public is not allowed to bring their horses) for about $30 an hour cash, and you can also boat, paddle and fish here. There is a nice fish cleaning station at the marina. Diane was camping for the weekend, and said she was not too thrilled with the camping areas – they were very close to each other, she said. It is not her favorite park, but it is nice that it is close enough to Houston for a weekend getaway.

I heard a rumor that the state park was looking to kick this park out of their system, but that might not be substantiated. It looked like a very popular park, and I think it has a lot to offer in terms of recreational activities. TPWD is hosting a Birding 101 walk there July 13 and August 10, which could be interesting – unfortunately, I have conflicting events going on those days. I wouldn’t mind going back to this park again – at least to grab that one last geocache we have left to find in the park. It was also a nice excuse to see Misti again- hopefully it won’t be so long in between our next outdoors outing together!

Environmental Issues: Burials and Cremations

In the beginning of the book “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, the main character, a nine year old boy, muses on the increasing world population in terms of where there will be room to bury all the dead. He throws out the idea that there are more people alive right now than have died in all the preceeding generations (snopes.com dispels this myth, but it is based on estimations), and envisions a world where we will have to have multi-story burial facilities to be able to handle all the dead bodies.

I don’t think it will come to that, but I did laugh when I read that, and contemplated other solutions. My concern is that we will indeed run out of space for burial of human remains. Also, I would hope that we as a society move away from burial practices using embalming fluids and heavy-duty non-biodegradable caskets. Humans emerged as a species five million years ago, and formaldehyde was developed in 1867, so in the grand scheme of human history, it has not been long we have been using this method of preservation of tissue. There is potential for embalming chemicals, which are carcinogens, to leak into groundwater sources that lay below grave sites, and this is part of my concern for continuing this practice. Also, the land used for burials might eventually run out, or there may be need to turn that land into food production to feed this growing population of people. Cremation uses up a large amount of energy, and so for that reason, is also not believed to be an eco-friendly way to transform remains.

There is a small, growing number of cemeteries that offer green burial, in which the body is buried without the chemical embalming beforehand, and in by which process the body can return to the earth. As this takes up a large amount of space as well, this is not though to be the sustainable solution for our future. Eco-coffins made out of materials that readily break down in the environment are gaining momentum. There is a company called Eternal Reefs, which will take a person’s remains and mix it with reef material to add to the ocean to help restore fragile reef systems. Some other new ideas that have come out recently are techniques such as alkaline hydrolysis, which turns the body into nutrients for the earth, or eco-friendly urns for cremated remains, like the Bios-Urn, which contains a tree seed and can be planted afterwards. You can choose to be any tree you like. I think there are probably other ideas I haven’t read about yet that are or will soon be out there to bring sustainable burial practices to today’s population.

Gryes of the World, and Great Pacific Garbage Patch

I have been obsessing about the “garbage patches” in the gyres of the world since reading some information about them I hadn’t previously heard. In the book “The World Without Us”, by Alan Weisman, he tells the story about Captain Charles Moore, who in 1997 inadvertently steered himself into the largest collection of garbage in the ocean, a spot in the North Pacific Gyre that scientists termed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This patch, like others in the ocean, is formed by a combination of factors: rotating patterns of hot wind, resulting in circular currents in the ocean swirling into a vortex, and then the accumulation of trash from our rivers that empty into the ocean, as well as trash that is dumped directly from ocean-going vessels being sucked into the circulating vortex, like a big giant toilet that won’t flush.
The current size of this patch is estimated to be about twice the size of Texas, although it is hard to measure precisely. In 2005, Captain Moore began making references to it encompassing 10 million square miles – nearly the size of Africa. By this time, Moore had formed the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to study this patch and try to find a way to remedy it. Moore’s original estimate of the amount of trash in this pacific gyre was initially 3 million tons of plastic; an estimate corroborated by the Navy. Later, he went back with a trawling device and realized it was much more than that, and that the ocean in this spot carried six times more plastic by weight than plankton. It is suspected that 80% of the trash inside this patch, and the other large patch like it on the other side of the earth, originates from the land: flying away from landfills, dumped into our rivers, plastic bags on a runaway mission to join this collection and entangle marine mammals. The remaining 20% comes from ocean vessels, which contribute a shocking amount: a typical 3,000 passenger cruise ship produces over eight tons of solid waste weekly, a portion of which ends up in the patch. As early as 1975, it was estimated that ocean going vessels were dumping an average of 8 million pounds of plastic annually. More recent research quoted in Weisman’s book suggests the merchant fleet is dumping about 639,000 plastic containers every day.
The sad fact is that the ocean life is being affected in alarming ways from this. “Ghost” fishing lines and nets can entrap ocean animals. Animals get the plastic caught up on them and suffer as a result. Also, the plastic bits in the trash are ending up in all parts of the food chain. Some of the plastic slowly breaks down by the process of photosynthesis and ends up in small particles at the surface of the ocean, where it is consumed by filter feeders. Small nurdles of plastic (nurdles are the tiny pieces of pre-production plastic resin) are consumed by krill, which then die prematurely. These nurdles make up a good portion of the garbage patches, and act like sponges for toxins such as PCB and DDE, which then intensify as they attach to the nurdles, becoming 100 million times higher in levels than surrounding seawater. Puffins have been found with this alarmingly high amounts of PCBs and DDE as a result of consuming these nurdles. Seabirds are found dead with stomaches full of plastic.Since at least 2008, concerned scientific groups have been trying to come up with a solution on how to clean up these areas. Some of the ideas are really promising, like an idea presented at TEDxDelft2012 by a Dutch Aerospace Engineer named Boyan Slat that proposed using surface currents to let the debris drift to specially designed arms and collection platforms. Running costs would be virtually zero, and the operation be so efficient that it may even be profitable. According to Boyan Slat’s calculations, a gyre could realistically be cleaned up in five years’ time, collecting at least 7.25 million tons of plastic combining all gyres.

Without a radical change to our plastics practices, though, it might be a futile attempt. We need ways to package food to keep it fresh and free of bacteria that is truly biodegradable and will not contaminate our oceans and our earth as it decomposes. We need to figure out ways to keep our trash in our landfills and not in our oceans.

For more information, see:
http://5gyres.org/what_is_the_issue/the_solution/