On Saturday, we took our dogs on a hike at Gunpowder Falls State Park (Jerusalem Road) where we explored the trails there for a few hours. Little Gunpowder Falls river is a very pretty river, meandering across a large rock bed. Despite the name, we never came across any significant falls, however. Along the trail, one of our dogs discovered a toad in an unfortunate position; its back-end was fully engulfed by the unhinged mouth of a snake (see picture below). Elsewhere, the trail opened off to a large grove of poplar trees, which provided an impressive area of shade to everything beneath them. We also found a few fallen trees with basketball-sized fungus growing on them. All in all, it was a nice hike with the dogs at a location we had never explored before.

Little Gunpowder Falls (Click thumbnails for larger view)

Below are a number of waterfall pictures that I took while in Juneau, Alaska. Comments welcome!

Click on photo for gallery

On our trip to Juneau, we had the good fortune to see several glaciers for the very first time. The most famous glacier in Juneau is the Mendenhall Glacier, which the Forest Service maintains several trails to, as well as, a visitor center.

We hiked the trail to the glacier, passing a tremendous waterfall, Nugget Falls, and were able to get within 50 yards of the ice block. We were told that the Mendenhall Glacier has been receding for many years, where several decades ago we would have been able to touch it from where we were standing.

Huge blocks of ice drifted slowly through the water away from the glacier, gradually melting away into the channel. The range of color from bright white to dark blue was amazing, with the darkest colors being where the most recent chunk of ice separated from the larger mass.

Later in the week we got to see the same glacier in the distance over a field of purple fire-weed. Fire-weed flowers from the bottom up, and the locals told us that they know summer is almost over once the top of the plant is flowering.

On a short boat excursion we passed by Herbert Glacier (below), which was quite impressive. This glacier is part of the same Juneau Icefield as the Mendenhall Glacer, with the Mendenhall on the west side of the icefield, and Herbert north of that.

Someday I would love to revisit the Juneau Icefield, and actually hike up to and onto the glacier to explore the various ice caves and habitat. Comments welcome!

Yesterday, we were fortunate enough to have a friend take us out on their boat to do some whale watching. We left Auke Bay in the afternoon, and headed out looking for whales coming up for air.

The best way to spot them is to look for their spouts when they clear their blow-holes so that they can breath.

We only saw a small portion of the humongous mammals, but even their humped backs (hence the name, humpback whale) were large enough to appreciate their size.

During every surfacing, we always hoped that they would bring up their tail and splash it down in the water. We never got any huge splashes, but we did see several tails rise up out of the water.

In addition to the tails, we saw one whale who was rolling in the water a little bit, stretching and waving one of its flippers up out of the water.

The highlight of the trip for me was probably when we saw a mother cow with her calf. We watched the pair swim together for a few moments before they vanished from sight under the water.

In total, we probably spotted 5-6 whales during our two hour trip, but combined with the excitement of the sightings and the beauty of the mountainous surroundings, it was a wonderful excursion.

I was looking in my emersed setups the other day and noticed that a couple of the Polygonum species I had in there were flowering. The flowers on both of these species are in clusters on the end of a stalk. The flowers themselves are quite small, only a few millimeters across.

This particular species is a North American native called Polygonum hydropiperoides. It’s a pretty nice plant that can get red underwater, with nice white flowers when blooming.

Despite being rather small, these flowers are pretty attractive. I especially like the yellow centers. P. hydropiperoides is quite easy to grow and flower in captivity, and I would recommend giving it a try!

The second plant that was flowering is Polygonum praetermissum, but is often sold in the hobby as Polygonum sp. ‘kawagoeanum’. This one can also get red under high light, and is a very nice highlight plant for aquascapes.

The leaf shape is very distinctive, looking similar both submerged and emersed. Emersed, roots can sprout at every node, going into the soil as it creeps along somewhat horizontally.

The P. praetermissum flowers are slightly pink with the flower stalks themselves being a bit more pubescent than the P. hydropiperoides.

The flowers weren’t quite open yet when I took these pictures, but you can see that they’re still fairly nice looking.

Both of these plants would make wonderful outdoor pond plants, that would have the potential to reseed themselves and come back after winter. Comments welcome!