Tag: Landscape

A Ride to Reavis Ranch

Some history and exploration

MichaelStephenWills16 Comments

….continued from the chapter “Desert Luxuries”

After hitching the saddled buckskin, named “Nugget,” and lightly packed pinto to trees beside the trail, The Searcher climbed up to my camp for a visit. I started water for tea and soon we were chatting. Right from the start The Searcher asked for privacy. Devoted to searching the Superstitions for the gold of the “Lost Dutchman Mine,” he organized his expeditions from a staging point near Phoenix and spent nearly sixty days each year in the wilderness. Part of his preparation was a desert survival course provided by the Reavis Mountain School, conducted by Peter Bigfoot.

An Invitation from The Searcher

The Searcher described a place near Pine Creek, he called it “Circlestone,” a large, almost perfect circle of precisely fitted stone walls, on the slopes of Mound Mountain above the headwaters of Pine Creek. My sister, Diane, and I found Circlestone on backpack expeditions March and November 2006. WThe site exceeded our expectations, the walls appeared less built than patiently persuaded from the mountain itself.

Here is a panorama from March 2006, southwest from the forests of juniper and pinion on the slopes of Mound Mountain.. The southern tip of Reavis Valley is to the right, from there Arizona Trail lead to White Mountain in the distance. It was taken on a later trip, in November of 2006 when my sister, Diane, and I visited Circlestone.

Click any photograph for a larger image.

The Searcher also told of Elisha Marcus Reavis, who settled the Valley west of Pine Creek in 1874. At one point, a band of Apaches planned to kill Reavis, but were respectful of his reputation as a rifle shot. They were waiting him out across from the his dugout, when Reavis stripped naked and, with wild hair and a flaming red beard, charged their camp, knives in both hands. The Apaches rode off, wary of his insane behavior, and never bothered him again.

We talked about my prospects and plans when The Searcher offered to take me to the Reavis Valley the next day, on horseback. There is a large apple orchard there and, this being April, we’d be treated to masses of apple blossoms. The day after Reavis Ranch, I could pack out with him down the Arizona Trail, past the Reavis Mountain School, over Campaign Creek and drive back to the Lost Dutchman Park. I readily agreed.

To Reavis Ranch on Horseback

The following morning rose slowly from colorless darkness, accompanied by thin birdsong and the whitening glow of high clouds. When the Searcher arrived around 8 am he was leading the pinto, introduced as Colorado, equipped with a western saddle instead of a pack. As an absolute novice trail rider, I rode while The Searcher held Colorado’s lead rope. The reins were wrapped around the saddle horn, leaving me to hang on and enjoy the view and the swishing tail of Nugget, the buckskin.

The 2.5 mile trail to Reavis from Pine Creek is typical of the eastern Superstitions, minimally improved, dramatically uneven, littered with boulders polished smooth by decades of hooves, floodwater, and erosion. From Pine Creek there’s a climb of a 631 feet to a 5,278 foot elevation, where the trail meanders beneath a dramatic red cliff with a view of the pinyon/juniper forests on the slopes of Mound Mountain. As he picked our way, The Searcher pointed out the sights. “Circlestone is somewhere over there, a ring of stones overgrown with Alligator Juniper.” I could do little more than observe; photography was entirely out of the question. The trail twisted around the mountain like a dry stream remembering water.

A cliff along the trail to Reavis Ranch offered the ledges and shadowed cover preferred by cougars. In daylight it posed little danger to mounted riders, and attacks against horses were rare. In all our years in Arizona, neither of us had seen more than the tip of a tail slipping behind brush.

This had been a lush April after a wet winter, and small game was plentiful. Only a sick cat would have been desperate enough to stalk horses. The darker possibility—a cougar infected with rabies after encountering a diseased animal at a water source—was a thought neither of us lingered on for long.

Eventually, the path descended steeply to Reavis Creek, the valley floor and intersected with the Reavis Ranch trail. Heading south the Reavis Ranch trail passes the site of a long abandoned ranch. What remained of the adobe and stone ranch house stood on a level bench overlooking what had once been the corral and a broad open meadow.

Open field at near the juncture of the trail from Pine Creek with the Reavis Ranch trail.

Apple trees in bloom sween from the former site of the ranch house. There used to be a pond near this spot. With a little imagination, the trail from Pine Creek can be seen on the far ridge.

Reavis Ranch Trail, foreground, traverses the valley length north to south. The Arizona Trail from Pine Creek following below the red rock cliffs in the distance.

The US Forest Service razed the building after it “burned to the ground” Thanksgiving 1991. I would not call what is left “a foundation,” it is a platform where the house stood. In the photograph, the surviving tiles still suggest the modest warmth of a lived-in home. I’ve seen old photographs of the structure with a large pond to the left of this view, a door and simple porch face east and the pond used to hold irrigation water. The leveled ruin possessed the melancholy geometry of abandoned human hope.

Turning from the ruin, another structure came into view. Built into the western slope above the valley floor was a hexagonal adobe foundation overlooking the remains of the ranch house across the trail.

My interpretation rests partly on the surrounding terrain. South of the structure runs the shallow trace of an excavated canal, suggesting that water from upper Reavis Creek—or one of its tributaries—was diverted into a catchment basin before being stored or directed toward irrigation.

Whatever its exact purpose, the site commands sweeping views of the central valley and is a beautiful place to watch evening settle over the orchard.

Turning from the ruin, another structure came into view. Built into the western slope above the valley floor was a hexagonal adobe foundation overlooking the remains of the ranch house across the trail.

The Searcher led me to a place a few hundred yards south, in a narrowing of the valley, where he let Colorado and Nugget roam free. The horses appreciated the level, open spaces and I enjoyed the Ponderosa pines on the west valley slope. We sat on the smooth trunks of fallen trees, 4 feet in diameter, near Reavis Creek.

Colorado took this opportunity to bolt, headed south. We took off after him into and through a thicket of locust trees where The Searcher cornered Colorado to regain control. “He was abused by a previous owner and can be difficult at times” was how The Searcher put it.

We were close to the end of Reavis Valley where Reavis Creek originates from the drainage of White Mountain, to the west.

We headed north here, back to the ranch house site, to the lush new grass of the apple orchard.

Nugget in Horse Heaven

Nugget grazed, tethered with plenty of slack, with the calm assurance of an animal that knew it had arrived in horse heaven. This photograph of the pair shows their personalities, Colorado edgy, Nugget content to feast while the grass is available. The orchard grass rolled in waves around their legs like green water beneath anchored boats.

Colorado on the alert while Nugget grazes, typical of their personalities.

Click me for the next post for photographs and more history of this Apple Orchard in the Superstition Wilderness.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Where Winter Yields: Skunk Cabbage, Pitcher Plants, and Milky Ice at Malloryville Preserve

A late winter walk through Malloryville Preserve reveals milky ice, emerging skunk cabbage, and hidden wetland life—seen through the curious eyes of grandchildren.

MichaelStephenWills9 Comments

The morning began in that quiet register peculiar to late winter in the Finger Lakes—when the calendar insists on spring, yet the land, still half-claimed by frost, speaks in a more cautious dialect. At the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, the woods held both seasons in tension. Snow lingered in shaded hollows, while the exposed ground, damp and rust-colored, breathed with thaw.

Sam and Rory—boots muddied almost immediately—climbed atop a great, weathered stump, its cut face fanned with the geometry of years. There is something about a stump that invites children upward, as though it were not a remnant but a stage. From their perch they surveyed a kingdom of bare trunks and quiet trails, their laughter momentarily lifting the stillness. Behind them, the forest rose in gray-brown columns, and beneath them, the history of a tree—rings like a clock no one can wind backward.

We moved downslope toward the seepage-fed lowlands that give this preserve its particular character. Here, the ground softens, water gathers, and winter lingers longer in pockets of ice that seem reluctant to relinquish their hold. The ice itself told a story—not clear and crystalline, but cloudy, milky, almost opalescent. This opacity is the signature of trapped air, minute bubbles frozen in suspension as water repeatedly melts and refreezes. Each cycle interrupts the orderly lattice of ice, scattering light and transforming transparency into a pale, diffused glow. It is ice that remembers its instability.

Threading through this ice were narrow rivulets of meltwater, tracing paths around moss-covered hummocks. These islands—bright green even in winter—rose like miniature continents in a frozen sea. On one such hummock, we found this skunk cabbage. Its mottled spathe, deep maroon flecked with yellow, pushed upward through the cold, its form both alien and ancient. I pointed out to the boys that this plant generates its own heat—a metabolic furnace capable of melting the surrounding snow. It is one of the earliest heralds of spring, though it announces itself not with color alone, but with scent—a pungency that walked with us that day.

Nearby, nestled in the sphagnum, were the pitcher plants—Sarracenia purpurea—their tubular leaves tinged with winter’s reds and greens. Even in dormancy, they held their form, each pitcher a small reservoir. I explained how these plants supplement the nutrient-poor conditions of the bog by capturing insects, their modified leaves forming a subtle trap. The boys leaned in, curious, perhaps imagining the unseen dramas that would unfold here in warmer months.

The North American genus Sarracenia are the trumpet pitchers, which have a more complex trap than Heliamphora, with an operculum, which prevents excess accumulation of rainwater in most of the species.

The wetland was a place of plants and textures. The ice thinned near the edges, revealing water beneath that reflected the vertical lines of trees above. Droplets fell intermittently from branches, punctuating the quiet with soft, irregular taps. It was a landscape in transition, each element negotiating its passage from one state to another.

Along a tangle of shrubs, I noticed an unusual growth—a dense, broom-like cluster of twigs protruding from what appeared to be a highbush blueberry. This “witches’ broom” is often the result of fungal infection or other physiological stress, causing the plant to produce a profusion of shoots from a single point. To a child’s eye, it might seem like a bird’s nest or some deliberate construction, but it is, in fact, the plant’s own altered architecture—a distortion that nonetheless becomes part of the ecosystem, offering shelter to small creatures.

Further along, a fallen log bore the layered forms of shelf fungi, each bracket extending outward like a series of pages half-opened. Their colors—muted tans and browns—blended with the wood, yet their structure was unmistakable. These polypores are the quiet recyclers of the forest, breaking down lignin and cellulose, returning the substance of the tree to the soil. I ran my fingers lightly along their surface, feeling the fine texture, while the boys, less cautious, tapped them as though testing their solidity.

On the bark of a nearby tree, we encountered a patch of what looked like pale, fuzzy insulation—the egg mass of the spongy moth. I explained that each of these masses could contain hundreds of eggs, waiting for the warmth of spring to hatch. It was a reminder that even in this subdued season, the next wave of life was already prepared, concealed in plain sight.

As we made our way back, the boys’ boots squelched in the soft ground, their earlier perch on the stump now a distant memory. Yet the morning had offered them—and me—something more enduring than a climb. It had revealed a landscape in flux, where ice is not merely frozen water but a record of change, where plants defy cold through chemistry, and where even decay participates in renewal.

Late winter, in a place like Malloryville, is not an absence of life but a study in persistence. It asks for attention, for patience, and for a willingness to see beauty in transition. Walking with Sam and Rory, I was reminded that discovery does not wait for spring. It is already here, written in ice, moss, and the quiet industry of the forest.

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The Science and Poetry of Melting Ice: Cayuga Lake During a Winter Thaw

Under a blue February sky, Cayuga Lake keeps its icy grip, revealing how light, time, and physics conspire to make winter’s farewell a slow, luminous negotiation.

MichaelStephenWills8 Comments

These photographs, made along the frozen margin of Cayuga Lake at Cass Park in mid-February 2026, carry a quiet paradox. The sky is a lucid blue, the light has that late-winter clarity that hints at spring, and yet the lake remains locked under a pale, glassy skin. A few geese stitch the air. A bench waits. Red and white beacons stand where water should be moving. The moment is fixed: late afternoon light in February, Finger Lakes winter—but the deeper story is written in physics, not pixels: why does lake ice linger so stubbornly during a thaw?

The short answer is that water is a hoarder of heat and ice is a keeper of promises. The long answer is the reason these scenes feel suspended between seasons.

Start with the cost of melting itself. Ice does not simply warm into water; it must first be converted, and that conversion demands a large, fixed payment of energy known as the latent heat of fusion. To melt just one kilogram of ice takes about 334,000 joules—and that energy raises the temperature not at all. It is spent entirely on changing solid to liquid.

Scale that up to a lake surface and the numbers become sobering. Even a modest sheet of ice—say ten centimeters thick—contains roughly ninety kilograms of ice per square meter. Melting that much requires on the order of thirty million joules per square meter. To put this in a human context, in 1 kcal there are 4,184 joules. Melting a square meter of ice requres 7,170 kilocalories (kcals) or 3.6 days for a person expending 2,000 kcals per day. Spread across square kilometers of lake, the energy bill climbs into the tens of terajoules. That is the hidden arithmetic behind the familiar disappointment of a February thaw: a few warm days feel dramatic to us, but to a lake they are only a small down payment.

This leads to the second, more subtle constraint: melting ice keeps itself cold. As long as ice is present, the surface of the lake is pinned near 0 °C (32 °F). Incoming heat does not make the surface warmer; it simply converts more ice into water at the same temperature. The thin layer of meltwater that forms on top is also near freezing, so the entire interface remains locked at winter’s threshold. There is no “warming momentum” here—no quick rise in temperature to accelerate the process. The system quietly consumes energy without changing its outward thermal expression.

That is why the lake in these images can look bright and almost springlike while remaining physically winterbound. Sunlight is being spent on erasure, not on warming.

A third rule of water deepens the delay. Freshwater is densest not at freezing, but at about 4 °C (39 °F). In early spring conditions, the coldest water—near 0 °C—floats. The slightly warmer, denser water below tends to stay below. This creates a stable stratification: a cold, near-freezing surface layer sitting like a lid on the lake.

The consequence is crucial. The lake cannot easily mix warmer subsurface water upward to attack the ice from below. The thaw must work mainly from the top and the edges—where sunlight, mild air, rain, and shoreline heat can do their work—rather than through a coordinated, whole-lake turnover. In practical terms, the ice is dismantled by margins and seams, not by a sudden, uniform collapse.

Add to this the reflective nature of ice and snow. The pale surface in these photographs is not merely beautiful; it is also defensive. Bright ice and snow reflect a significant fraction of incoming sunlight back into the sky. Dark, open water would absorb that energy eagerly and warm quickly. As long as the lake remains light-toned, it is actively rejecting some of the very energy that could hasten its release.

Thickness and structure matter too. Winter does not lay down a single, simple sheet. It builds layers: clear black ice, milky refrozen crusts, snow-ice composites, trapped bubbles—each a page in winter’s ledger. A brief thaw may soften the surface, open a lead near shore, or trace fine cracks across the sheet, but the bulk remains. In the closer views—the lighthouse and the red beacon standing in frozen sheen—you can see subtle tonal shifts and faint stress lines, the calligraphy of slow change. These are signs of negotiation, not surrender.

Scale, finally, is destiny. Cayuga is long and deep; it behaves more like a small inland sea than a pond. Small waters can change their minds quickly. Large waters are conservative. They remember. The heat they lost in autumn must be repaid, carefully and in full, before winter loosens its hold. This is why harbors and shallows darken first, why the margins in these scenes show hints of movement while the center keeps its pale composure.

Put together, these rules explain the peculiar patience of February ice. The thaw is not a switch but an accounting. Enormous quantities of energy must be delivered just to accomplish the phase change. While that work is underway, the surface temperature barely moves. The cold meltwater stays on top, limiting mixing. The bright surface reflects sunlight. The lake, in effect, resists haste through the ordinary, unromantic laws of physics.

There is an austere beauty in this. Ice is a temporary architecture built by the loss of heat, and its demolition requires an equally disciplined repayment. The quiet in these images is the quiet of bookkeeping—joules being transferred, layers being undone, thresholds being approached but not yet crossed. When the change finally comes, it often feels sudden: a windy day that breaks the sheet into plates, a warm rain that darkens the surface, a week when the margins retreat visibly. But that drama is only the visible last act of a long, invisible exchange.

So the lake lingers. Not out of stubbornness, but out of fidelity to the rules that govern it. Under a sky that already looks like April, Cayuga is still paying winter’s invoice. The ice remains until the account is settled—and when it finally goes, the benches will no longer face a mirror of light, but a moving field of dark water, ready once again to begin the long work of storing heat for another year.

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Stones That Traveled: Glacial Erratics, Deep Time, and the Stories They Leave Behind

Glacial erratics are immigrant stones—carried south by ice, dropped without explanation, and left behind to challenge our sense of permanence, place, and deep time.

MichaelStephenWills22 Comments

There are rocks that merely sit where gravity has placed them, and then there are rocks that arrive with stories already embedded—foreign syllables carried south on ice, dropped without explanation, and left for us to puzzle over. Glacial erratics belong to the second category. They are migrants with no passports, refugees of deep time, whose presence quietly contradicts the landscape that hosts them.

Long before anyone reached for a hand lens or an ice-flow diagram, people answered such contradictions with imagination. In Ireland, a boulder perched just so on a mountain side is not a geologic problem but a resting place. Leprechauns, we are told, favor such stones—high enough to observe human intrusion, solid enough to outlast it. Skepticism, as folklore reminds us, is not always a stable position. Kevin Woods—better known as McCoillte—found that out the hard way when doubt collided with experience on the slopes of Slieve Foye. What followed was not merely a conversion story, but an act of modern mythmaking: folklore translated into bureaucracy, imagination petitioning regulation, and “The Last Leprechauns” entering the unlikely language of conservation. Stone, story, and belief hardened together into something oddly durable.

Rocks such as this are a favorite perch for leprechauns to rest and contemplate the works of man who have invaded their world. Inhabitants of Carlingford who wander Slieve Foye have come upon them often enough, their stories and certitude in the existence of the Little People are resistant to manifold doubters with their reasons and arguments. Kevin Woods, aka McCoillte, was a doubter until worked on a stone wall on property he owned on Ghan Road, Carlingford. His belief did not arise on the discovery of the leather purse, covered with ages of dust and lime, nor with the gold coins inside. McCoillte pocketed the coins for luck. As luck would have it, McCoillte loved to walk on Slieve Foye. It was on one such walk he and his dog encountered Little People who paralyzed them to escape. His unexplained absence led to troubles with the wife. This experience brought McCoillte around to enough of a belief that he, with lots of help, succeeded in petitioning the E.U. European Habitats directive to recognize leprechauns a protected species. A reserve was establish on Slieve Foye to protect the “Last Leprechauns” and you can google this phrase to learn more about McCoillte’s stories.

Back in the Finger Lakes, we tend to use a different grammar when confronted by an out-of-place rock. We name it, classify it, and trace its lineage northward. Erratics scattered across Tompkins County are geological sentences that begin somewhere else entirely. The bedrock beneath Ithaca—Devonian shale and sandstone—cannot account for crystalline intruders left behind like forgotten punctuation marks. These stones speak of ice sheets thick enough to erase valleys and decisive enough to transport mountains in fragments.

Some of those fragments have been domesticated. Cornell, for example, has never been shy about rearranging its stones. An unremarked erratic along the Allen Trail may once have been shrugged off as inconvenient rubble, while another—dragged from the Sixmile Creek valley—was carved into a seat and made eloquent. The Tarr memorial boulder, resting near McGraw Hall, transforms erratic stone into deliberate monument. It invites rest, contemplation, and perhaps gratitude for those who taught us how to read landscapes written by glaciers.

We find boulders of crystalline rock, commonly derived from Adirondack sources, left behind on the surface of ablation moraine, in the Finger Lakes Region. Cornell finds some and move them, maybe the case for this unremarked erratic found along the Allen Trail of FR Newman Arboretum. Another enormous erratic, brought in from the Sixmile Creek valley, was carved into a seat as a memorial to Professor R.S. Tarr who deciphered much of the glacial history of the Finger Lakes Region. Find it at the southwest corner of McCraw Hall on the Cornell University Campus. Reference: “The Finger Lakes Region: Its Origin and Nature,” O.D. von Engeln, Cornell University Press, 1961 page 106

Glacial Erratic, Fillmore Glen

Elsewhere, erratics remain defiantly themselves. In winter, one along Fall Creek alternates between anonymity and revelation, depending on whether snow smooths its surface or retreats to expose lichen constellations. Bridges pass overhead, traffic flows, semesters turn over, yet the rock remains unimpressed. It has already endured pressure sufficient to rearrange its crystals; a passing academic calendar is not likely to trouble it.

Glacial erratic with and without a snow covver and spotted by lichen along Fall Creek in a winter afternoon as seen from Cornell Botanic Gardens. That is the bridge over Fall Creek on Forest Home Drive. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

Closeup of the same boulder

This boulder, a glacial erratic, was found near Fall Creek and the Cornell Botanic Gardens Horticulture Building. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

This rock, a glacial erratic, was found near Fall Creek and the Cornell Botanic Gardens Horticulture Building. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

Then there are the stones that confront us most directly—those we stumble upon in fields, pulled from soil by plow or frost, demanding explanation. A white, iron-stained marble boulder in a Tompkins County field is not subtle about its foreignness. It does not belong to the local vocabulary of shale and sandstone. Its pale surface, crystalline texture, and mineral scars point insistently north, toward the Grenville terrane of the Adirondack Lowlands. The Balmat–Edwards–Gouverneur marble belt offers the most persuasive origin story: metamorphosed carbonate rock carried south by Laurentide ice, released when climate and physics finally lost patience with one another.

I found this white marble erratic in a Tompkins County field. The highest-probability source is Grenville marble from the NW Adirondack Lowlands / St. Lawrence County (Gouverneur/Balmat–Edwards marble belt), delivered by southward-flowing Laurentide ice. I say the most probable source is metamorphosed carbonate (marble) from the Grenville terrane to the north—especially the northwest Adirondack Lowlands / St. Lawrence County marble belt (the “Gouverneur Marble” and related Grenville marbles), transported south by the last Laurentide ice sheet. Why that’s the best bet: Ice-flow geometry favors a northern source. In the Finger Lakes, glacial ice advanced with a flow direction that was very close to due south, guided by the north–south bedrock valleys. Tompkins County erratics are “exotic” imports. Local bedrock around Ithaca/Tompkins is Devonian shale/sandstone, but the region contains many nonlocal (“exotic”) glacial erratics carried in from much farther north (including southern Canada and beyond). Marble isn’t local to the Ithaca area, but it is abundant in the NW Adirondack Lowlands. The Balmat–Edwards/Gouverneur area in St. Lawrence County is a classic Grenville Lowlands district with marble belts (the same province that yields cream/white building marble around Gouverneur).

What makes this particular erratic compelling is not just its provenance, but the improbability of its journey. Ice moved with purpose here, flowing south along bedrock valleys like Fall Creek and Cayuga troughs, turning the Finger Lakes region into a conveyor belt for distant geology. When the ice melted, it left behind evidence that refuses to blend in. Erratics are geological truth-tellers. They announce that this place was once unrecognizable, that what seems permanent is merely provisional.

Perhaps that is why folklore clings so naturally to stone. Whether leprechauns or Laurentide ice are credited, erratics insist on a larger frame of reference. They ask us to imagine landscapes in motion and beliefs under revision. A boulder can be a seat, a marker, a perch, or a puzzle—but never merely background. It waits, quietly confident, for us to catch up to its story.

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Glacial Kettle Bog Wonders: Photographing Pitcher Plants at the O.D. Engeln Preserve in Freeville

Step onto Freeville’s O.D. Engeln Preserve boardwalk and meet purple pitcher plants in a glacial kettle bog—carnivorous beauty, hidden blooms, and macro-photo magic.

MichaelStephenWills3 Comments

Seen from 1000 feet above in Google Earth, the O.D. (Von) Engeln Preserve at Malloryville Road lays itself out in two glacial “kettles,” pond and bog; a simple diagram drawn by ice and time, then complicated by everything that has happened since. In my photograph, taken from the bog observation platform on a July morning, the sky is rinsed blue, clouds billow, conifers stitch along the rim around open space. Step closer, or lower your lens, and the openness resolves into a crowded, intimate architecture of sedges and moss, twigs and standing water, sunlight and shadow.

I came here for a plant that does not announce itself the way wildflowers often do. The purple pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea, is a quiet scandal: a green vessel in a place where green should be satisfied simply to survive. I arrived equipped for attentiveness—an iPhone for the broad scene, and a Canon DSLR with the F2.8 100 mm macro lens for the stars of this bog. The macro lens is an instrument of humility. It forces you to admit that the important drama is often no bigger than your palm.

In earlier years, the pitchers could be found right where a visitor naturally looks—within the central cut-out of the observation deck, close enough to lean over and study. But the bog is not a museum display; it is a living negotiation. This season, highbush blueberries pressing in from the margin had crowded the pitchers out, pushing the flowering plants into the grasses eight to ten feet away. The shift is small in human terms, the kind of distance you cross without thinking. In bog terms, it is displacement—an erasure of a familiar scene, a reminder that rarity is not only about numbers but also about space.

The pitchers themselves—those “turtle socks,” as they’ve been nicknamed—sit at ground level in a rosette, their mouths open to weather. Sunlight floods the cups and turns them into something both domestic and uncanny: a set of green, veined slippers left out to air, or a cluster of small amphorae awaiting an offering. In the bog’s thin soil, nourishment is hard-won. The pitcher plant answers that poverty with invention. Instead of arguing with the chemistry of peat, it borrows from the animal world—luring and taking what the air can spare. The cup is a trap, yes, but also a reservoir: rainwater gathered and held, a miniature wetland that mirrors the preserve’s larger one.

There is a tension here that never quite resolves: the plant’s beauty, and the plant’s appetite. We admire the cup’s red veining, the glossy rim, the way the opening flares like a lip; then we remember what the lip is for. We admire the flower’s elegant sheltering forms; then we realize the shelter is also a funnel, a choreography. This is not cruelty—no more than winter is cruelty. It is adaptation made visible, a lesson in how form follows need, and how need can produce something unexpectedly lovely.

And yet the real marvel—the reason I came that day—rises above the traps on a strong stalk, lifted clear of the dangerous mouths below. The flower is not purple in the obvious way its common name promises. It is subtler and stranger: a suspended structure with the poise of a lantern and the protective logic of armor. It struck me as a flower unlike any I have experienced, resembling an insect carapace, with the reproductive element underneath a hood. That hooded design feels less like ornament than strategy—an architecture that guides a pollinator’s route, controlling entrances and exits the way the pitcher controls the fall of an insect.

Even the flower’s back side refuses to perform for the camera. From the posterior angle, “there are only bracts”—plain supporting structures, the botanical equivalent of scaffolding left in place once the facade is finished. The bog, too, shows its scaffolding everywhere: dead stems, old wood, peat-dark water, last year’s leaves. A preserve is never only what is blooming. It is what persists.

I found myself thinking about the details I wanted but could not quite capture that day: the downward facing hairs inside the pitcher—those one-way bristles that make retreat difficult once a victim has slipped in. I or my lens was not up to this challange. The shortcoming was minor, but instructive. The bog offers glimpses, not guarantees. It invites return visits, different light, different seasons, a different kind of patience.

Standing on the platform I felt the preserve’s central truth: these are landscapes shaped by constraint—by ice, by water, by nutrient scarcity, by the slow encroachment of shrubs—and yet they keep producing improbable forms. The purple pitcher plant is one of those forms: a green cup that drinks rain, a flower that wears a hood, a turtle sock that turns hunger into design. In a place where the ground itself seems to refuse abundance, the plant answers with a different kind of richness—an elegance that is also a solution.

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Exploring Malloryville Preserve: A Hidden Glacial Wetland Gem in New York’s Finger Lakes

Explore the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, a hidden Finger Lakes wetland where glacial eskers, kettles, and springs reveal the deep story of ice and water.

MichaelStephenWills20 Comments

In the heart of upstate New York, the Finger Lakes region stretches out like a handprint left by the last great ice sheets—long, narrow lakes aligned north to south, their steep-sided valleys feeding into a lattice of creeks, waterfalls, and wetlands. It is a landscape defined by water and time: glaciers grinding south, then melting back north some 12,000 years ago, carving deep troughs, piling up ridges of gravel and sand, and leaving behind a terrain that is anything but simple.

The O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, near the small village of Freeville, is one of the quiet places where that story is written most clearly on the land. It doesn’t shout like Taughannock Falls or Ithaca’s famous gorges. Instead, it whispers—through the curves of its hills, the softness of its ground, the unexpected appearance of a spring at the base of a gravel ridge. Here, in a relatively compact area, you can see how ice and water worked together to shape the Finger Lakes region we know today.

Overflow from a Kettle Pond threads through a meadow before feeding Fall Creek. The O.D.von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville.

By the time the preserve officially opened in 1997, the name O.D. von Engeln was already familiar to anyone curious about local geology. His classic book on the Finger Lakes helped generations of readers understand that the scenery around them was not random, but the result of powerful, understandable processes. Reading von Engeln, the rolling hills and quiet valleys near Freeville become more than background—they become evidence: of buried ice, rushing meltwater, and the slow settling of sediments into the forms we walk on now.

Malloryville is an outdoor classroom for that lesson. The preserve is built around a cluster of glacial landforms—eskers, kames, and kettles—that create a three-dimensional mosaic of ridges and hollows. Eskers, those long, winding gravel ridges left by rivers that once flowed inside the glacier, snake through the forest like frozen currents of stone. Kames—steep, irregular hills of sand and gravel—rise suddenly from the surrounding lowlands. Kettles, the depressions left behind when buried ice blocks melted away, now cradle wetlands and pools.

Beneath and between these features, groundwater is constantly on the move. It seeps through layers of sand and gravel, emerges as cold springs at the foot of slopes, and spreads out into swamps, fens, and marshes. In the Finger Lakes, water is always telling a story; at Malloryville, it’s simply easier to hear. Follow the trail and you move through a succession of wet worlds: a seep-fed fen with delicate mosses and sedges, a shrub swamp where skunk cabbage thrusts up in early spring, a cattail marsh that hums with birds and insects in summer.

For my family, the story of Malloryville began even before the preserve had a name. We lived nearby along Fall Creek, itself a thread in the larger fabric of the Cayuga Lake watershed. My son and I camped for the first time on top of an esker just beyond our front door, our tent perched on what I would later learn was the remnant of a stream that once tunneled through the base of a glacier. At the time, it was simply a magical narrow ridge in the woods. Only later, with von Engeln’s guidance and the preserve’s interpretive signs, did that ridge become a sentence in a much older, longer narrative.

That is one of the great gifts of the Finger Lakes: the chance to move from simple admiration—“this is beautiful”—to understanding—“this is how it came to be.” The steep slopes along Cayuga, Seneca, or Skaneateles; the drumlin fields near the north ends of the lakes; the hanging valleys and waterfalls; and the quiet wetlands of places like Malloryville are all chapters in the same glacial chronicle. Once you learn to read one place, you begin to read them all.

Walking into the O.D. von Engeln Preserve, you enter that story at a small, intimate scale. The parking area and trailhead give way quickly to a world where the ground feels different—sometimes firm and gravelly, sometimes soft and yielding underfoot. Wooden walkways and narrow paths thread through shady forest and open wetland. Each bend offers a subtle shift: a new plant community, a change in water clarity or flow, a small sign explaining what lies beneath your feet.

Fall Creek meanders through the esker fields of the Malloryville Preserve. Here is the view from an abandoned railroad bridge. The preserve is near Freeville in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State.

This is not grand scenery in the postcard sense; it is something quieter and deeper. Malloryville invites you to slow down and notice. To ask why a particular ridge is so narrow, why water emerges here but not there, why one hollow is filled with shrubs and another with moss and sedge. In learning those answers, you gain not only an appreciation for this modest preserve but also a richer understanding of the entire Finger Lakes region.

The Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) is named for the mottled brown leaves resembling marking on trout.

In the end, the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville is a lens—a way of seeing. Through it, the familiar landscapes of central New York—valleys, hills, streams, and lakes—come into sharper focus as the lasting work of ice and water. Stand on an esker, look across a kettle wetland, listen to the quiet trickle of a spring, and you are standing inside the very processes that shaped the Finger Lakes.

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Climbing Piestewa Peak: Multicultural Pilgrimage to a Phoenix Desert Dawn

In the cool predawn, strangers from every background climb a stone stairway above Phoenix, trading city lights for desert silence as sunrise spills gold across Piestewa Peak.

MichaelStephenWills9 Comments

Arriving at 5 am there is a line of trucks and cars and Piestewa Peak parking almost full when I grab a spot in the predawn darkness. The desert air has that deep, merciful coolness it offers before sunrise, edged with the long-remembered scent of creosote. Car doors close with soft thuds, headlamps blink on, and a loose procession of strangers begins to funnel toward the trailhead like pilgrims, even now white and red headlamps sprinkle the upper slopes.

At first the climb exists only in a narrow cone of light, my lamp illuminates the scant gravel, uneven steps, and each scuff of boot or shoe sounds loud in the hush. Somewhere below, the city hums, but here the conversation is mostly breath and the occasional murmur of greeting as we fall into the rhythm of the climb.

My beam catches a young couple just ahead, their hands knotted together. They speak Spanish, laughing quietly as they miss a step and bump shoulders. Behind me an older man in a Veterans cap leans heavily on trekking poles, his companion—maybe daughter, maybe friend—matching her shorter stride to his with patient care. A group of women in bright leggings and braided hair moves past us in a burst of energy, their languages overlapping—English, maybe Vietnamese, something I cannot place—like the weaving of a rug. A man passes me, a drum on his back. Piestewa draws them all, before dawn, to this rib of stone in the center of the Phoenix basin.

As I stop to rest myself and turn off my headlamp, ahead the trail tilts steeper the steps fade to rock, irregular and unforgiving: a stairway carved from ancient volcanic bones. With my dark adaptation, surfaces reflect star and city light, leading the eye down the ridge toward the dark quilt of neighborhoods below. Later, captured in the photograph, those steps will twist away like a stone dragon’s spine, the city waking beyond in soft pastels. Now they are simply work for legs and lungs.

The desert plants materialize around us as shapes before they acquire color. Saguaros stand like sentinels along the slopes; their arms lifted in silhouette. Ocotillo rise as witchy bundles of sticks, each spine leafed out from October rains the leaves catching a little light. On a small plateau a family has paused; the father adjusts a tiny headlamp on his son, no more than six, who is insisting, with fierce determination, that he can carry his own water. “Almost there, campeón,” his father says, and the child straightens like a soldier.

The dark begins to soften at the edges. Over the eastern horizon a thin band of orange appears, a delicate seam between night and day. In one direction, the city stretches out in a glittering net of streetlights, the squares of parking lots and subdivisions catching the last of the darkness. In the other, the mountains are still black cutouts, their profiles sharp as paper against a gradually brightening sky. One of my images will hold that moment: the jagged ridge of Piestewa in shadow, the valley below already spangled with light, a single towering saguaro rooted at the cliff’s edge like a punctuation mark.

November 2025 while visiting Pam’s family in Phoenix

Higher up, the trail narrows and the rock turns rougher. We fall into single file, strangers linked by a line of effort. A runner comes flying down, feet barely touching stone, breath steady and controlled. “On your left,” he calls, and we part for him like water. A woman with a hijab tucked neatly under her ball cap leans against the retaining wall, stretching a calf muscle, her friend counting in accented English: “Ten more seconds, you can do it.” Near one bend a hiker pauses to press a hand against the rock face, whispering a quiet prayer in a language I do not recognize. It is a small, intimate moment, gone almost before I register it.

The last push to the saddle is steep, the steps uneven, the sky now a cascade of colors—copper, rose, faint lavender melting into a high dome of blue. The silhouettes of distant ranges sharpen: the Estrellas?, the Superstitions?, low ridges whose names I do not know. On the horizon, the first thin line of sun breaks free, setting fire to the edges of clouds. In another photograph, framed by dark rock and desert trees, that sunrise becomes a golden portal at the end of a shadowed corridor of stone.

We reach a broad ledge just shy of the summit as the light finally spills over us. People are already gathered there: a trio of college students taking selfies, a pair of retirees sharing thermos coffee, a solitary man sitting cross-legged with eyes closed, face open to the warmth. The city below is suddenly transformed. The carpet of lights dims, replaced by the clear geometry of streets and rooftops, golf courses and parking lots, all laid out like a model at our feet. The mountains that hem the basin—once anonymous shapes—now reveal their ridges and ravines in sharp relief.

For a few minutes conversation dies away. Everyone seems to feel the same thing: that fragile instant when the sun clears the horizon and the desert shifts from silver-blue to gold. The rocks around us, sharp and broken in the photographs, glow honey-colored. Saguaros catch light on their spines, each thorn a tiny ember. Even the dusty air seems to shimmer.

Down below, a new wave of hikers starts up the trail, latecomers walking into full daylight. We, the predawn climbers, share a small, quiet complicity. We have seen the city from the backside of night, watched the day arrive from a perch of jagged stone. Piestewa Peak has turned us, for an hour or two, into a single, breathing organism: many hearts, one climb, all of us stitched together by the steep path and the slow unveiling of the sun.

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Cayuga Lake Bench View

Distant Sapphire III

From a modest bench above Taughannock Gorge, Cayuga Lake shifts from distant glimmer to presence—a quiet invitation to pause, breathe, and follow the water down.

MichaelStephenWills9 Comments

From the south rim of Taughannock Gorge, Cayuga Lake appears like a distant strip of sapphire, framed today by a soft veil of hemlock and oak. The overlook here is modest—a fence, a bit of open sky—but someone wisely added a comfortable bench, an invitation to pause between gorge and lake, rock and water.

I stood in front of that bench, resting the camera body on the fence, fingers braced against the wood to steady the shot. This is not the grand, sweeping vista of a postcard. Instead, it is a quieter, more human vantage point, the way a person actually encounters the lake after walking the rim: emerging from the trees, breath easing, eyes adjusting to the light on water.

From here, the trail descends toward Cayuga’s shore, each turn bringing you lower and closer, trading the lofty perspective for the intimate sounds of waves and stone. In Distant Sapphire I and II, the lake was a glimpse—caught between branches, distant beyond the gorge. Now, in this “Bench View,” the water feels nearer, almost within reach, as though the landscape itself is drawing you gently down.

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Cayuga Lake Bench View
Cayuga Lake Bench View

I’ve gathered the three photographs—Glimpse of Cayuga Lake, Gorge View with Oak Leaves, and this Cayuga Lake Bench View—into a small gallery, a progression of approach. Each frame is a step closer: from suggestion, to invitation, to the quiet promise of the bench, waiting for whoever needs to sit and look a little longer.

A gallery of the three Cayuga Lake photographs for comparison.

Glimpse of Cayuga Lake
Glimpse of Cayuga Lake
Gorge View with Oak Leaves
Gorge View with Oak Leaves
Cayuga Lake Bench View
Cayuga Lake Bench View

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Gorge View with Oak Leaves

Distant Sapphire II

Cayuga waters reflect a blue November sky.

MichaelStephenWills7 Comments

Cayuga Lake from the south rim of Taughannock Gorge, seen through a veil of hemlock with a carpet of fallen oak leaves, foreground. This is a companion to the previous post, both were handheld. For this the foreground was included to increase interest. For added stability, I rested the camera body on the fence bracketed with my fingers.

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Gorge View with Oak Leaves
Gorge View with Oak Leaves

A gallery of the two photographs for comparison.

Glimpse of Cayuga Lake
Glimpse of Cayuga Lake
Gorge View with Oak Leaves
Gorge View with Oak Leaves

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Glimpse of Cayuga Lake

Distant Sapphire I

Cayuga waters reflect a blue November sky.

MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

Cayuga waters reflect a blue November sky.

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Glimpse of Cayuga Lake
Glimpse of Cayuga Lake
Oak Leaves, forest floor
Oak Leaves, forest floor. Taughannock Falls New York State Park, South Rim Trail, November 6, 2019

Photographs in Gallery

Glimpse of Cayuga Lake
Glimpse of Cayuga Lake
Oak Leaves, forest floor

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