Beauty From Infertile Ground: Rough and Ready Creek, Josephine County, Oregon
The creek bank runs barren of the usual riparian vegetation -- no willows, no rushes, no cottonwood trees, no snowberry nor elderberry -- just scraggly, stunted pines. A mere 10 miles away, the trees grow tall and lush along another Josephine County creek. What happened at Rough and Ready? Why, despite 60 inches of rain a year, does the soil sustain only a chaparral scrub similar to what grows in the hot hills of California 500 miles to the South? Why is this landscape so different from what it should be? Millennia after millennia, inch by inch, earthquake by earthquake, the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean slammed against the Oregon coast, plunging into the guts of the planet, pushing up ancient rock scoured by pressure and heat and eon after eon of time. Metamorphosed Serpentine the geologists call it, and it is bedrock bereft of minerals that nurture life and replete with those that are toxic. Like a childhood filled with ...
