Yesterday I was out looking to see what I could see. One of the speakers at the Tree Symposium I attended a couple of weeks ago said we should be walking our property every couple of weeks looking for insect damage.

Easier said than done, I wonder how many acres he's got. Things look pretty good, but we are supposed to be thinning out the skinnier trees to give the bigger trees room to grow. It's for forest fire management so the fire doesn't climb up the skinny trees into the high canopy of the bigger trees.

Here is an aspen tree that was felled by heavy snow. Look at all the rocks in dirt under it. This is what we deal with whenever we try to dig.



This is the side stream to our side stream. It has a lot of snow runoff water in it for once.



See that kind of foam off to the side? There are these big soapy looking bubbles in the streams, and my first thought was pollution, but I don't know where it'd come from since there is no civilization upstream. I looked it up on the Internet, and this is what I found:

"Before the ecology movement in the 70's, factories and sewage plants were usually the main suspects when people saw foam in streams. Today that problem has mostly been solved. There is still plenty of foam in streams, however. This foam is natural and belongs there. It is caused by diatoms, tiny one-celled algae that live in crystalline houses and creep across the rocks at the bottom of the stream. Rapids further upstream sometimes pound these diatoms to bits. The froth you see consists of fragments of their little houses, or frustules."

This is the mountain side behind our house. I'm always showing you pictures of the river, so here's a change.