By Bryce Nielsen, Cisco Sonar
It is interesting to observe things you never had the time to do before. My brother Dale, called me the other day and said that he had found a patch of phragmites about four miles' up South Eden Canyon. Dale lives in River Heights and retired from the Federal Agricultural Research Station at USU. He is ten years younger than me and has a keen interest in a variety of subjects. When he gets on something,he becomes obsessed with it to the very, minute detail. His obsession leads him to research all of his questions. They have been many and varied over the years. He is a true collector and has extensive collections of shot shells, insulators, and train lights, etc. He is an expert on butterflies, frequently raising and crossing individual butterflies to the delight the Lepidoptera society in Utah. He is also a specialist in mushrooms, frequently taking family vacations to hunt for them. Suffice to say, Dale is an interesting person that knows a lot about many different things.
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| South Eden |
He and I have been researching native, phragmites around Bear Lake, in addition to mussels. Extensive efforts have been made to eradicate the "invasive" (?) species along the shoreline. We believe that most of it is native and should be left alone, even if others don't want it.
So back to the story. We headed up South Eden to get samples of the phragmites. Dale had found it near South Eden Reservoir when he was looking for viable seeds from the Utah juniper trees. There are plenty of seeds from the Rocky Mountain juniper, but viable Utah juniper seeds are extremely difficult to find and germinate. Scientists from the west has asked him to collect samples of seeds in the area. Limbs inside junipers were typically cut for fence posts. It was fun to see where the old timers had cut "cedar posts" years ago for many of the barbed wire fences around the area. He was also looking for potential bonsai trees. Apparently there is a market for juniper "bonsai" trees.
Along the north side of the canyon he had located an area where water was flowing out underneath the Nugget Sandstone formation. There were a number of them, like oasis's in the desert. The phragmites was there, along with wetlands, ancient willows and huge hawthorne trees that were slowing slipping down the slope due to land movements below the water source. We collected some specimens and compared them to specimens we collected around the lake. They appeared similar, suggesting native phragmites is in the lake. So how did they get there? This reed cannot reproduce by seeds due to the short length of the growing season here. They expand their "clones" by sending out rhizomes which can create new plants at each joint. Animals could have carried them up the canyon but I prefer to believe that a Shoshoni Indian had made a basket at the Lake out of green reeds and carried it to the site. We will never know but it is fun to speculate.
As I left South Eden Canyon I thought about the hundreds of times I had been there. The phragmites was the reason I went up but I had seen so much more that I had never observed before. Usually I am looking for animals. It is just like Logan Canyon. Every once in awhile I will see something new, even though I have driven it thousands of time. The power of observation is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, we're losing it in our new society.
