Worms

Mt Hood, from somewhere on the north side. No, I don't know where: if you must know, we were lost. We had followed a familiar road toward a familiar trailhead, but suddenly found that we weren't on familiar ground anymore. Suddenly we were seeing forks in the road which we both swore we hadn't seen before, and then not so suddenly we realized that we were nowhere near where we thought we should be. It's all so improbable- roads don't just pop up overnight, or even in the course of a year (with the forest service budget the way it is, we're lucky to have roads at all, and these "new" roads sure didn't look new to us), but there it is: we followed the same old trail, to find that it did not lead to the same place.

Of course you don't believe me. I wouldn't either. You try navigating up there, though, and get back to me (if you make it back). If you're really eager, we were trying to find the Vista Ridge trailhead. We've hiked that trail four times in two years- you'd think we'd be able to find it again....

Anyway, I liked this picture because I framed Mt Hood between two Cascadian icons: the Western Hemlock's droopy tip on the left, and the Douglas Fir's spiky top on the right. Other trees (some cedars and cypresses I guess) also have slightly-droopy tips, but you can tell this is a Hemlock because of it's fuzzy character. The other droopy-tipped trees all have needles that lay smooth like cedars.

On this day in 1984, a street in Fort Worth, Texas, developed a 20ft long, two-foot-wide bulge. It moved from side to side like a giant worm before disappearing after about an hour. 'It seemed almost alive,' said fireman Charlie McCafferty. 'What spooked me was that there wasn't even a crack in the road.' Street crews used jackhammers to break through two inches of asphalt and four inches of concrete, underlying silt layers intact, and no evidence of a gas build-up that might have caused the bulge.
Shortly after this a similar mound was seen on Calvin Lang's homestead at the outskirts of Ft. Worth, and after prodding it with a rake it disappeared. Reportedly it had left some buildings torn apart, fences torn down, and shrubs and trees uprooted. Later Jeremy Boiter spotted what appeared to be a giant tentacle erupting from the ground in a shower of gravel and dirt about 2 miles away. It seized a cat and her kittens, devouring them in seconds as well as two growling dogs which it swallowed in its "slick dripping mouth". His friend Phil Dewar also found scraps of birds, rabbits and other while animals among the rubble of a destroyed hut. source: THE GAZETTE, Schenectady, N.Y., 16 July 1984; NATIONAL EXAMINER, 12 Feb. 1985