What is there, just beyond?
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Click Me for another Malloryville post, “Formed By Water.”
The path beckons
just around the corner
Category: Rivers, Streams, Creeks
Jennings Pond
Buttermilk Falls Source
Tom Knight, “has been delighting children and their grown-ups with his original, interactive, musical puppet show since 1988,” in 2018 Pam, myself and the grandchildren were lucky enough to catch his act at Cornell University Johnson Museum. His CD, “Purple Pumpkin Pie” is in the car and, pre-Covid, I’d play it in the car while riding with the grandchildren.
“Jennings Pond,” a song on that CD, mentions a local town, Danby. Until last week I did not think twice about it. Driving into Ithaca, heading north on Route 13, there’s a compelling view down a valley. I’ve taken exploratory drives down there on the West Danby-Spencer road, seeing what there is to see. A week ago last Sunday, turning left at West Danby, up the hill forming the east valley wall, on Station Road, then Bald Hill Road, passing by the Finger Lakes Trail through Danby State Forest, on the right I spied a compelling open area, a pond, and this sign….
I proceeded onto a footbridge over the pond outlet, the source for Buttermilk Creek,…….
…and continued to a footpath, southeast and away from the pond. Toward the Finger Lakes Trail? I left this adventure for another day.
Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
Salt Road
Summer View with Clouds
Travel to Fillmore Glen from our former home included a climb to an overlook of the Fall Creek valley, seen here on a summer afternoon in four parts.
Three exposures using a 50 mm Canon lens on a Kodak dslr. A tripod allowed me good orientation and, later, to use the Photoshop photoMerge feature to combine exposures into a panorama. At that time, I was limited to the 50 mm lens.
Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
Cow Sheds (waterfall)
A Waterfall with this unusual name.
The gorge takes a turn here to face the west, where I caught the late afternoon sun lowering in these three shots in close sequence.
Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
The Three Laughers of Tiger Glen – repost
The Sound of Laughter Among Friends
In the midst of a pine forest……
Click Me for the complete post….
Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
Kame = Pile
Kettle and Kame Topography
Hard on the defunct gravel pit of the northwest side of the preserve is the deposit of glacial rocks washed to some extent by melting ice the former owners of the pit were turning over for profit with the averted result of destroying the water sources for the ecosystems of the future preserve.
The deposit is called a kame. Kames are the obverse of kettles, formed with an enormous remnant of glacial ice melts in place leaving a substantial depression. A kame is formed when earth gathers in a depression formed by meltwater running over a glacial surface. When the glacier melts (in this area the ice wash a mile high), the washed earth is left as a steeply sided pile we experience as a hill.
Water flowing beneath glaciers forms the long, ridged hills, eskers, we explored in yesterday’s post.
The forested land of this video the kame, upper left, shown in the header, an IPhone7 photograph of GoogleEarth. Also marked is a path for the primary esker, the bog formed by a kettle and another kettle that is now a pond. Click me to view a pdf file saved from GoogleEarth. It provides a clearer view of the header image.
Click me for better experience viewing the following video. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page. Note the replay icon (an arrow circling counter-clockwise.
Click Me for the first post of this series.
Thank You for visiting. Here is a recapitulation of Malloryville Preserve.
Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
Long, Ridged Hill
A Look at an Esker
Well formed, sinuous, graded on both sides, eskers can be mistaken for man-made earthen structures, such as railroad embankments. Here is an example, nine-tenths (0.9) of a mile long substantial enough to direct the flow of Fall Creek. On entering the Malloryville esker bed the stream makes a right angle turn.
Here we are at the foot of the primary esker of Malloryville Preserve (it is marked as such on the information placard of this series first post). The slope to the right is the esker. A swamp lies to the right.
This video provides a better feeling for this esker.
Click me for better experience viewing the following video. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page. Note the replay icon (an arrow circling counter-clockwise.
Click Me for the first post of this series.
Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
Turtle Socks
Flowers from Mars
Two kettles of the preserve represent a pond and, below, a bog. Here is a photograph from the observation platform using the IPhone 7. I brought along the Canon dslr and 100 mm “macro” lens for the stars of this show…..
….purple pitcher plants (scientific name: Sarracenia purpurea). In past years, the central observation deck cut-out, hosted healthy pitchers. Today, invading high bush blueberries from the bog margin, crowded out the pitchers and the only flowering plant were among the grasses 8 to 10 feet away. My goal was photographing the extraordinary flowers.
Each flower rises from the base on a strong stalk. Here are the pitchers, also called “turtle socks”, flooded with sunlight.
A flower unlike any I have experienced, like the carapace of an insect, the reproductive element underneath a hood.
The posterior, there are only bracts.
I have, somewhere, macro images of the pitcher, with the downward facing hairs. Brought the wrong lens to capture this at a distance.
Click Me for the first post of this series.
Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
Flowing water
Water flowing from glacial till
Amazingly swamp, fen, bog, marsh can all be experienced during a thirty minute walk within this preserve. Here we are traversing a swamp …
…buoyed along on planking from recycled plastic.
The founders of this place, from a dairy farming family, strove for years to protect the water sources from encroachment by development, primary a duplicate of a gravel pit found on the other side of the Fall Creek valley.
This former acidic rainwater, percolating through glacial till, is buffered and chemically altered to create these multiform environments.
Water, flowing quietly, almost soundlessly, with powerful effect.
Click me for better experience viewing the following video. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page. Note the replay icon (an arrow circling counter-clockwise.
Click Me for the first post of this series.
Copyright 2020 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
Formed by Water
Overview
Let’s digress from our exploration of Iquique, Chile for this attraction local to the Finger Lakes Region of New York State, an environment diametrically opposed to the Atacama desert. The Preserve at Malloryville opened 1997, eleven years after we moved to our home our home on Fall Creek (see header photograph).
The correct name is the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville. I knew this name from his Finger Lakes geology book obtained from the library and read closely in the early 1990’s. It helped me understand the landscape among which our home was set, in 5 minutes walking distance from the future location of the preserve.
The text from the above information placard at the preserve entrance says it all:“Wetland habitats are shaped by the water that supplies them: the amount, how it moves, and the minerals it carries. Malloryville’s eskers, kames and kettles control the rate of delivery of water to the surface and suffuse it with varied concentrations of minerals. As ground water bubbles to the surface at the base of these hills, distinctive wetland habitats form, each with its own unique community of plants. The preserve’s intense concentration of bog, fen, marsh and swamp habitats is the direct result of ground water moving through this unusually complex array of glacial features.
Before the preserve was opened I was familiar with the landforms described in the above placard. My son and I did his first camping on top of an esker outside our front door. We enjoyed hiking along Fall Creek.
To be continued…..
Michael Stephen Wills Photography 