Goldsborough creek

After leaving the McDonald’s play land on a dreary Saturday afternoon, I drove myself and my little daughter over to the Goldsborough creek trail. We arrived at the trail head at 1:15.

I was hoping to find tabloid liverworts next to a little stream that joins up with Goldsborough, but did not have any luck. It had been raining off and on all day and the air was quite cold. We saw a bunch of large dicranum cushions growing on live Douglas-fir bases. I think that Dicranum prefers Douglas-fir. A rough looking rytidiadelphus moss was carpeting the ground in many places.

A large volume of Lobaria pulmonaria was on the ground due to the recent ice storm. Several trees had fallen both across the trail and into the river. We also found step moss and the liverwort plants porella and frullania.

I took samples of a stringy moss growing on a maple tree that I think is an isothecium and a sample of a moss with a tiny gametophyte and tons of spores that was growing on a rotten cotton wood log. I also grabbed a tiny Othotrichum moss of the cement wall near the Jr. High Apartments on this trip out.

While looking at moss I spotted what I thought might be a geocache but was probably trash so I ignored it. Then my daughter spotted it too and she insisted that it was a geocache, so we took it out of it's hole under a stump and found out that it was indeed a geocache. We opened up the cache and logged our find on geocaching.com.

What surprised me the most was the number of homeless camps we found. We found three old abandoned camps; one of them had housed children. My child asked me why they left their stuff behind and I did not have an answer for her. Maybe the owners went to jail or were kicked out in the night or maybe they moved on to a warmer climate for the winter. I can tell that times are hard because I can’t walk any of the trails in the city now without stumbling onto abandoned campsites. The only exception is Shelton Creek where there is an active campsite. This is not a nice climate to live outdoors in during February.

We walked past the train tracks.Wewandered along the creek until my little daughter got too cold. I did not realize that she was still small enough to get really cold really fast. We had to rush back to the car because she was so cold. One the way back it started raining but we found an abandoned Dora the Explored umbrella to use. I thought my daughter would be excited about the umbrella but she does not like Dora anymore. “Dora is for babies” she said. OK so she is growing up even if she still gets cold way too fast.

Before we turned around one empty logging train went by us while leaving the air fouled stinking, horrible diesel fumes. The train did not blast its earsplitting horn like it normally does when it crosses the trail.

We did not find anything of interest on the way back to the car due to having to walk so fast. Once we got home I drew a hot bath for my duaghter so she could warm up fast.

Publicado el 11 de febrero de 2012 a las 11:23 PM por mossy