As I’ve mentioned before, I volunteer as an NWS COOP Observer, recording rainfall and temperature data for Celo 2 S, a station that dates back to 1948 – an unusually long period of data for a rural valley in this mountainous region. For its first 50 years, Celo’s records were kept by Elpenor Ohle, the founding physician of the Celo Health Center. This station pairs with Celo’s USGS river gage on the South Toe River (in operation since 1957). Locally, the heat began to build on Wednesday,...

I just returned from a 32-hour solo mountaintop writing and hiking retreat. I left our 3000’ valley as April’s first thunderstorms, and first real rain in 6 weeks, flushed the forest with late-spring green. When I arrived at my 6000’ basecamp, spring was just beginning. On the mountain, I bedded down as the hermit thrush sang his evensong in the dusky mist and woke to his haunting harmony in the misty dawn. The rest of the day was filled with cheerful songs of black-throated greens, Canada...

To a casual observer, the picture above is a simple, perhaps quintessential, representation of Spring: a fresh green plantlet sprouting from bare earth. To me, it represents far more. The plant depicted above is a Dicentra — either squirrel corn or Dutchman’s britches (I’ve yet met a botanist who can distinguish the two species by their foliage alone). Dicentras are rich cove specialists, meaning they grow in pockets of moist forest with neutral or alkaline-trending soils. Appalachian rich...