Another World at Black Mesa: Oklahoma Academy of Science field meeting, part three.

After lunch at the fall 2014 field meeting of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences at Black Mesa State Park in the distant panhandle of Oklahoma (see previous essays), a few of us took headed northwest on dirt roads.

First, at an unmarked spot, we saw a few sauropod dinosaur tracks, almost hidden by mud. Ecologist Chad King demonstrates that the sauropod that made the tracks must have been about the same size as he.

Then we went to see Three Corners, a place where humans have arbitrarily drawn lines on a map, with the result that Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico meet at this spot. Some of us were able to jog through three states in less than ten seconds. In this photo,  OAS executive director David Bass and his assistant Kinsey Tedford look off into the distant and uncertain future of three states.

Then we started on the trail to the top of Black Mesa itself. Before we had gotten very far, Chad demonstrated how to get a tree core out of a juniper, by which we could see that it was far older than you would expect a little tree to be. But, out in the high plains, the way for a tree to survive is to grow very, very slowly.

The trail went on and on and on for two miles parallel to the mesa before making an abrupt turn and climbing up. Most of the rock layers formed from Jurassic sediments, and some of them were quite visibly green. But the top of the mesa is a cap of volcanic rock only about five million years old. Near the top we found some mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus), but we did not find the wafer ash Ptelea that I am quite certain I saw somewhere around here about a decade ago. I stopped at the top of the plateau and admired the view of the juniper-studded hills and the Polanisia flowers, while the others went to the end of the trail, to the highest point. I did not, because I figured that if I was riding the back of the elephant, there was no need to mount the head.

As I returned to the van, I was frequently alone. There was no wind. I could literally hear nothing except the ringing in my ears. This is something most of us can probably not experience anywhere that we live, where we are always near road noise or, at my house in Tulsa, a constant flow of old propeller planes.

For the Saturday evening presentation, Leland Bement of the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey illustrated his research in the Black Mesa area, which has had continuous human occupation at least back to the days of the Clovis culture, when Native Americans made “stone” tools out of dinosaur bones. Since the Santa Fe Trail ran through this area, the caves have not only Native American art but white pioneer inscriptions as well.

What was perhaps most amazing of all to me was the stars. Tired from long hikes, I chose not to go to the star party (regarding which I hope others will write), but I did look at the sky from behind my distant cabin. There is very little light pollution—Black Mesa is almost as isolated from civilization as is Death Valley—and the Milky Way was clearly visible, something I cannot see even from the “small town” of Durant. If you haven’t seen the Milky Way, you have not seen the sky. You are looking into the flat disc of stars that make up our galaxy. There are so many that it looks like a band of milk. (The word “galaxy” comes from the Greek for milk.) Billions of stars! The black splotches are not the absence of stars, but the presence of dark nebular clouds hiding yet more stars. In other directions you can see the relatively few (but absolutely many) stars that surround us in our distant arm of the galaxy. Even the minor stars were bright, so that I was unable to recognize the constellations that I thought I knew. I was totally disoriented. And that, my friends, is the right way to feel when beholding the universe.

I was at first skeptical of driving nine hours each way to go to this meeting, but I was richly rewarded.

Another World at Black Mesa: Oklahoma Academy of Science field meeting, part two.

Here is the second of three essays about the Oklahoma Academy of Science field meeting this fall

On Saturday morning, we gathered for our respective field trips at Black Mesa State Park way out in the panhandle of Oklahoma. Many students were required to take some of these field trips. One of them started at the crack of dawn, or even before: Bill Caire of UCO led an excursion to collect mammals from traps. Not to scare any of you campers, but you might as well know. Bill and students found a bear track in the mud in the camp. Black Mesa, way out in the shortgrass prairie, is not where you might expect to find this.

But the rest of us started our trips at 8:00 or 8:30. I went on a local botany hike led by Gloria Caddell of UCO. The bluffs had a lot of shortgrass prairie species, plus a few scrubby trees, mostly netleaf hackberry (Celtis reticulata), soapberries (Sapindus drummondii), one-seed juniper (Juniperus monosperma), and fragrant sumac (Rhus aromatica). We had left most of Oklahoma, with its ubiquitous red cedars (Juniperus virginiana), behind. We also got help from Northeastern State botanist Suneeti Jog.

At least we thought it was going to be a botany hike. But we had not even gotten up onto the bluff before we found a snake failing to hide itself in a cholla cactus. That is, we saw more herps on this trip than did the people on the herpetology trip.

Some of us got into the trip with all of our senses. Of course, we could see the beautiful flowers. We learned that you have to look closely. To see, you have to do more than glance. Gloria identified for us no less than eight species of composites that had yellow ray or disc flowers. But we also got to feel the biota. For example, Grindelia gumweeds actually exude enough gum to make them look like goblets of cream. Of course, it felt gummy. But some of us got to feel three different kinds of pain. First, a tiny plant called Tragia has almost invisible and very nasty stinging hairs. And the beavertail cacti have big thorns—which poked some of us—and the even nastier little hairs, which got in my hand when I ate a cactus fruit, and which got in the lips and tongue of a less fortunate person. And I definitely felt the spiny tip of the yucca leaf that I accidentally and barely touched—it was like getting poked by a sword.

But we also used our senses of taste and smell. The cactus fruits tasted fresh and slightly sweet. And the buffalo gourd’s scientific name is Cucurbita foetidisssima, which means “the most foul,” which some people discovered to be truly the case. And next came a perfect example of how terminology can bias perception. Gloria wanted to know what we thought the fragrant sumac smelled like. Nobody had any really clear idea. But when she told us that one of the plant’s names was skunkbush sumac, of course we all started imagining that, yes, indeed, it smelled like a skunk.

Finally, we could hear the wind in the grass and the tree branches. There you have it—all five senses. Gloria showed us almost as many plants before we got on the nature trail as after; I wonder how many casual visitors think that nature exists only on the other side of the Nature Trail sign!