and then in the sunshine I couldn't stop exploring so I ran on

Today I escaped the lab and went for a late morning run, that turned into an adventure as soon as I decided to go down a trail instead of turning around and then ended up in the middle of nowhere on a farm...

But I made it back to the baby Arboretum at Penn State, which I've been meaning to explore for a while.  The botanical gardens are going to be gorgeous in a few months (right now everything is much more brown than my digitally enhanced photos), but I'd give the arboretum, oh, a couple of decades. Right now it is just an empty field with random little saplings planted in the middle of the grass.

I love this weather. But it is destroying my school focus. C'est la vie.

daylight

Is anyone else being completely smashed by this time change??

You wouldn't think that one hour could make much of a difference, but my body and brain don't know how to handle it!!

It is super exciting to see light till 6:30 pm though, and I LOVE hearing the birds chirping in the mornings.

It's been rainy and dark here the past few days, which hasn't helped my post-spring break slump, but it's supposed to clear up this week.   

Green shoots are starting to poke out of the ground; spring is definitely here and I am sooo ready for it now.

Not as ready to dive back into the chaos of my busy weeks...but here we go!

winter has hit

Well after a couple weeks of practically balmy weather in the 30's and 40's and lots of pouring rain, winter has come to central PA.  With wind. 

It's still not as bad as the midwest though...the good thing about growing up in the bipolar climate of the Great Lakes states is that you will be prepared to survive ANYWHERE else.  Blazing humidity and 100+ degrees? check.  Ten below and an inch of ice everywhere? it sucks, but I have seen it happen. 

A very strange thing about living in the mountains is that they don't really have thunderstorms here.  It is so weird. There was one thunderstorm last fall that lasted about 10 minutes and the next day everyone was freaking out. [wimps.]

All this being said, I still can't wait until I can go out and run in the sunshine in the morning.  I'm starting to feel a little cooped up and sun-deprived.

But if it's going to be winter, I would rather have it feel like winter, and not this weird nebulous half-springish stuff that messes with my brain and makes me feel that spring is on the way. 

my backyard mountain

I live very close to the bottom of one of the more popular "mountains" here.

I put mountains in quotation marks because they look more like very large hills, but that's just because the Alleghenies are so old that they have been worn down through time!

I've been DYING to go hiking again ever since the leaves started changing more, and was so sad when the stupid snowstorm ruined what I still believe was the peak weekend for these color explosions :(

It's still gorgeous out though; I am going to blame central PA for my new-found autumn-love because I have NEVER seen such a mindblowing display of leaves, even though I practically grew up in a forest in IL.

I think the mountains make it more extreme. More trees! And also a view from a greater perspective, living in a bowl-shaped valley.

One Illinois or Mississippi River bluff vs. an entire mountain range...yeah. 

I don't know how to describe it, except for an explosion.

(You can get the idea, I've definitely posted enough pictures!)

Here is the view of my mountain I get from the parking lot every afternoon (since I have given up riding my bike in the chilly/nasty weather; such a lazy bikewimp alas.)

GLORIOUS!

Since Sunday was bright and sunny (RARE, believe me) I knew I wouldn't be able to focus until I got some outdoors-time SO off to the mountain I went!

(At first I felt like I was crossing some inviolable safety line; do not hike by yourself, do not go into the woods alone etc. but once I got to the trailhead I realized you will never be hiking by yourself when it is a gorgeous fall day! sooo many annoying couples blecgh.)

I will be hiking/trailrunning more FOR SURE! It was soooo much fun. And gorgeous.  Redgold leaves, in the canopy, blanketing the rocks, glowing in the sunlight mmmm.  Camouflagued with the hair.

I was so excited, haha :)

But honestly, is there anything more perfect than a glowing gold forest on a sunny day???

(Not to THIS Professional Treehugger in training!)

Being by myself let my mind wander and let me appreciate simply existing

Here's the stereotypical overlook of campus:

I liked the mountain/field overlooks better:

(and check it out, Papa and Ben...they have put up these sweet maps at every single station so you actually know where you are haha)

Of course, before I knew of this improvement I had already prepared myself by bringing my OWN official map

that was even better

because it depicted the unmarked do not go there confusing trails that intersect the real trail alot

(AND had topo lines)

lalala, running through the sunny forest :)

I followed the outer blue trail, running (/jogging) the flat non-superrocky parts.

It's evidently 6 miles but it felt like 3??? I was out for a little less than 2 hours but it flew

I was thanking the hip god the entire way for letting me do this without ANY pain or even tiredness!

(Maybe I was too hyped up on coffee and excitement)

I could DEFINITELY become addicted to trailrunning.

(But not the extreme kind where your toenails fall off)

It is fun.

the end

Color Explosion

I feel like this blog has a pretty strong Autumn theme going on...

I just can't help it!

I have fallen in love with this season, for some reason.

I usually cling on to summer and think of fall as the harbinger of doom (aka the dreaded winter)

But this year is different.

I have completely wiped our little winter weekend from my memory.

Today was positively BALMY!

We're talking, high 50's/low 60's, pure sunshine.

I had a hard time getting out of the house this morning, not wanting to face the day of WORK and PAPER WRITING, and I stretched my walk across campus as looooong as possible.

Taking in all of THIS

and some roses survived the snow!

beautiful

During lunch, my labfriend Nancy and I escaped our windowless cave to walk through downtown so she could hit up Jimmy John's and I could stop by the (small but still awesome) Tuesday Farmer's Market.

To get my latest addiction: sweet bell peppers!

because

Organic red bell at grocery store=$4 (!!!!!)

Organic red bell @ farmer's market = $0.75

score!

It was ABSOLUTELY GLORIOUS OUTSIDE

Now I have to try to focus to slap together a paper for Forest Geography due tomorrow
A write-up of one of our mini-research project field trips
It should be no big deal, since it is an undergrad class, this is our first paper, he basically TOLD us exactly what to write, I have written scientific articles gazillions of times before, and not to mention I will be expected to write a freakin thesis in a few months
but...I still get writer's anxiety.
Not writer's block, but an inability to mentally FACE THE WRITING PROCESS!!!
and an easily distracted mind.
grrrr.

Return of Fall

Fall is back YAY!

Just like that, all the snow melted in one day.

Thank goodness.

Ben came up to visit me again :)

I wanted to go on a huge hiking trip to take in all the gorgeous fall colors in the mountains

BUUUT then the winter storm extravaganza crushed my visions.

(They even had to ban tailgating for the homecoming football game...lame!)

It was kind of fun to pretend Christmas was coming

(ONLY because I knew it would warm up again this week)

I baked amazing cookies

We hung out with new friends

Did a lot of cozy nothing

Ate pumpkin pancakes

and made

BENANNA CREAM PIE!

 [aka ghetto-fab homemade graham cracker crust with sliced bananas and REAL whipped cream squirted on top, silly-string-style]

I don't know if I'm ready to face another week! Back to "reality"...sigh.

 

...Merry Christmas?

Guess what...

yup, STILL SNOWING!!!!!!!!!!!!

so I'm just eating my oatmeal and pretending I'm HERE:

instead of HERE:

It's not too hard to pretend!

the Ice Queen has arrived

I somehow missed the memo this morning to wear BOOTS to school...

luckily I did wear my fuzzy alpaca gloves because it was raining and freezing when I left the house

and then it snowed.

all day.

I scraped 2 inches of wet soggy slush off my car to go home.

byebye, raspberry bushes

The funniest thing is, LOOK AT THIS WEATHER MAP!

www.noaa.gov

Notice the pretty pink blob sitting on Central PA...

it stands for "winter storm warning"

Not even ALASKA has even a winter storm "watch" (the purplishblue color)!!!

My soul is crushed. Just a little.

Winterwinter go away

Vegetation Dynamics Lab Tour!

Since I spend so much time in the Veg Lab for my research assistantship, I thought I would share a little bit of what I do with you!

Welcome to the lab...

We work on projects that deal with vegetation change (mainly forests, and mainly out west), such as how forests react to disturbances like fire and human activity.  Then the research results are used to develop management and restoration programs to return forest structures to their natural state.  Lots of research is also done to figure out what this elusive "natural state" really is, since humans have really screwed things up in the last 150 years!!

Some of the "evidence" we use to figure out this disturbance-restoration cycle are tree rings and fire scars.

Here is an example of a fire-scarred tree trunk:

It's a cross-section; the outside of the trunk is across the top and right side.

All the little bumps and vertical lines across the top dark part are fire scars.

This tree survived multiple fires and we can tell what years the fires occurred by dating the tree's rings!

This is a close up of a tree core that is used to analyze and date rings:

Each ring represents one year of growth. Some rings are bigger and some are smaller, based on how much rain fell in that year or how many other trees and bushes the tree was competing with to grow.

If we know that a particular year had a drought or lots of snow and rain, we can match those years with small and big rings on the core to date the rings and tell how old the tree is!

On the other hand, if a tree has lots of small rings followed by lots of bigger rings, it probably means the tree was stuck under bushes and bigger trees for a few years until it finally broke through to join the canopy and get more light.

We can analyze a set of tree cores to make a historical timeline and tell a story about what happened in the forest hundreds of years back!

Thousands of trees are cored at different sites for each project and the cores are stored in drinking straws:

These are the increment bores that are screwed into the tree trunk to carve out a core (it doesn't hurt the tree because it will just grow around the bore hole and heal itself like it does after a fire):

The orange one is for HUGE TREES and the unopened blue one is for small trees.

Just because a tree is big doesn't mean it is the oldest tree in the forest! They all grow at different rates, which is why the only way to tell the age of the forest stand is to sample and count tree rings. Mmmm lots and lots of work...

Back in the lab, we look at the cores under microscopes and use tools like calipers and rulers to measure growth and assign dates to the rings...

(see the weird marks on the slab of wood under the tree core mount? those are maple syrup tap scars!!)

As you can tell, it is a HUGELY LABOR INTENSIVE field of study!!

Luckily I like trees, so I think it is pretty interesting

I will post a geography lesson on the impacts of fire and Smokey the Bear later :)