At 10:45 AM Sunday morning, three intrepid urbanites - Susan, Steve (amrikisalaami - he blogs about the Middle East while I blog about the Middle West!), and myself - set out on a miniature road trip out to the Nachusa Grassland in North-Central Illinois, about 20 miles west of Rochelle. This 2800 acre patch of tallgrass prairie and oak savannah has been painstakingly restored by volunteers and professionals of the Nature Conservancy from what few degraded remnants were there twenty years ago.



A thicket of american plums (Prunus americana) blend into the rolling prairie countryside as if they were just one more knobby hill in the series. According to our guides, the shade underneath these thickets of plum shrubs is so dense, and so little grows there, that when a fire passes over the prairie it does little more than singe the edges of the clump, since it can find no fuel underneath them.

( Click here for more breaking news from Illinois. )

Looking forward to returning to Nachusa since 1986,
--mark

So, I spent all of last week in the state of Oregon, both to get a nice long look at the University of Oregon at Eugene and to take a nice little vacation in a land with some awesomely epic forests. As far as the first goal went, my trip was a success, since I now have come to the quite conclusive decision that, next fall, I will be attending the University of Maine at Orono. But I am not sure how successful of a vacation it was, since I was sick for a damnably large chunk of the time I was out there, and since I have been in various sorts of bad moods since my return. But I did get to see some very handsome forests with some very handsome trees, and so it is about them that I will write.

( If you are not masochistic enough to want to look at Mark's vacation slides, turn away now. )

Using your jacket for scale since 1986,
--mark