Sunshine on the Bluffs

A family outing to the Cannon River Wilderness Area (west unit), what my daughter and wife refer to as the "up-and-down park" because of the upper hiking trail along bluffs cut by a series of ravines. Windy, temperature in the mid 30s, the roads muddy, the trails icy, and the off-trail snow nothing but slush.

Thoreau, in his journal entry for this day in 1854, says that "gray rocks or cliffs with a southwest exposure attract us now, where there is warmth and dryness." With this in mind, we climbed up one of the bluffs at the park to bask in the day's warmth.

Out of the wind and catching the late afternoon sun, the bluffs were warm indeed. At the base of one of the limestone and sandstone outcroppings I spotted the year's first spider and first fly. Liverwort covered one area of the bluff face.

Continuing my mid-winter antics of bark lifting, I explored a rotten log and uncovered a firefly larva. "Good things come to those who peek under bark," I quipped to my wife as I showed her what I'd found. These larvae are very strange creatures, outrageously armored as if the insect were modeled upon just the tail of an alligator with its embedded bony plates, a kind of crazy block-fault mountain range in miniature, or a series of living wedges. Oh yeah, and they're pink and black and possibly glow in the dark.

Posted on February 13, 2017 04:37 AM by