Pipestone National Monument Week 5

The Water Tower Festival, which celebrates the anniversary of the pouring of the all-concrete watertower in Pipestone, MN, went on this weekend. Events included a medallion hunt (if I had known the clue, I might have found it because I am probably one of the only people who regularly goes to the site!), a concert and street dance, and of course, the event for which we have been striving for these many hours, the parade.

Mike Bender and Nathan King with the Pipestone National Monument Water Tower Festival float.

We had a little confusion trying to find the right line-up spot since we had only vague, oral directions. A few 23 mph. laps around the neighborhood and we finally got directed to our line-up spot, #55!

We were stuck behind a group throwing candy out for kids and in front of a drum line. Between the panic caused by the candy-throwing and the attention-hogging of the drum line, it made us feel pretty insignificant in our silent car.

The wind was blowing out of the northwest (which has now brought us some cool, dry air, thankfully) and when we got the Cushman cranked up to full speed going down the road, we lost one of our foam antenna balls. The rest survived the parade, but by the time we fought the headwind coming back to the park, we were short three antenna balls (out of 4) and two antennas.

It was a good showing for the park, which, I was told, had not participated in the parade in years. I hope that next year, the parade theme would fit my new float design "Electric car, electric guitar, Pipestone ROCKS!" Someone would just ride in the back playing electric guitar. I told the superintendent of my plan. He seemed concerned that the hamster in my head was picking up speed.

We couldn't have pulled off the float without the help of John Lentz and the others in Resource Management and especially Clark Burmeister in Maintenance, who did the construction work. I came up with the design and painted it.

Blue Mounds State Park - Minnesota

I got an early start for my tour of Blue Mounds State Park, located just north of Luverne, Minnesota. The park is basically a big quartzite hill with prairie on top of it, a treed area at the base of the hill, and a small lake. A large portion of the grassland is fenced off and contains a group of bison.

I got started on the trail at 6:30 AM because I knew it was going to be a hot and sweaty day. The high was supposed to be in the low 90s and the humidity was about 100%.

Humidity!

The park touts 13 miles of trails, but three of them are parallel. There's even a few places where I'm sure I could play catch with someone on the other trail. I chose the middle route, the Upper Cliffline Route. The view was nice.

Upper Cliffline Route

The biggest surprise was that I spotted two birds I had never seen before, and one I had seen only once before. Grassland birds are tough to ID because the grass obscures them so well, but the dickcissels were calling regularly. I thought "Dick-ciss-el" was an easy way to remember the call, but it sounds more like "rap-rap-rap." I also saw the grasshopper sparrow, which I identified because I heard a sound I did not recognize. Researchers from the University of Nebraska have been searching daily for grasshopper sparrows within Pipestone National Monument and have only seen two (and caught them both!). I also saw bobolinks, which were great to see, too!

Dickcissel

As I continued down the trail, I came to a cliff face. According to the sign, it used to be a quarry for the quartzite. It was an striking feature that came seemingly out of nowhere. Some optimistic hikers had built a peace sign and a smiley-face out of loose rock at the bottom of the cliff.

The historic quartzite quarry

Upon reaching a point near the end of the trail, I found a sign introducing the "Rock Alignment." The sign said that it was not known whether the line of rocks was historic or an archaeological relic, and stated that parts were built using different techniques, possibly at different times. I wandered down the trail, which got abruptly thinner and brushier - not well-maintained - for quite a while before I found the rocks down in the forest.

The Rock Alignment

As I looked at the rock alignment, I immediately recalled two archaeological sites I have visited in the Northern Rocky Mountains. One was a low-lying wall of green siltite imported from elsewhere in the mountains located about half a mile west of the Many Glacier Hotel at Glacier National Park. The wall, I was told by University of Alberta - Calgary archaeology professor Brian Reeve, was used for driving animals like sheep toward a killing zone. I also thought of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, where bison were driven off a cliff using a variety of land managment practices and a "funneling" landform, though I do not recall whether rock walls were employed there. In either case, this rock wall was located in a funnel shape toward a cliff. There is no reason for a settler to go about building a tiny wall there, as the sign suggested might have been the case. Before it toppled over with the wind and time, the wall would have been just tall enough to crouch behind and attack or drive bison off the steep side of the bluff. I don't want to sound arrogant, but the Rock Alignment's purpose seemed clear.

If all that intuition were not enough, in 2003, on a University of Wisconsin field trip to Wyoming, we bumped into Jim Brandenburg on the way back to Wisconsin. He took us out near his family's farm at the base of the Blue Mound and told us that when he was a kid, they found bison bones and teeth along the base of the cliff. It all fits together.

I walked the whole Bur Oak Loop, on which the Rock Alignment was located, and ended up at a visitor center that used to be someone's house. It would have been an awesome house, but maybe it's better that everyone gets to enjoy it as a visitor center. I took a break since I was absolutely dripping with sweat and watched the nighthawks zooming around overhead. One repeatedly swooped overhead in a high-speed dive, its wings making a distinctive "whoooov!" sound as it zipped by at high speed. Checking my reference book, the males are apparently the only ones that exhibit this behavior, and its purpose is unknown because it is not clear to whom the dive and the noise are being directed. Based on my observations, the nighthawk will fly around beating its wings a few big beats followed by a few quick flutters, calling, slowly ascending until an appropriate height is reached, then it will sweep its wings back, break, and dive straight down, sometimes pulling out close to the terrain, all the while making a noise like an Indy car passing by.

My plant intuition served me well on the return trip down the Mound Trail, which parallels the bison paddock fence. I was glad I chose the route because it was where I got the best look at the shy grasshopper sparrow and I saw a couple of interesting flowers. I saw one and thought it looked like larkspur. I saw another flower and thought it looked like a penstemon. I checked the flower book when I got back and I felt pretty proud of myself - they were a prairie larkspur and a pale beard-tongue (penstemon). Even though the flowers are different, all those laps around the Beaver Pond in Glacier paid off as I seem to know a lot of prairie flowers I didn't know I knew!

Prairie larkspur

The sun was getting higher in the sky, heating up all the moisture. I could see strange-looking, ominous clouds gathering in the west. I headed back to the car, thinking that with the baking sun cooking my skin that it had to be at least 11:00 in the morning. It was just past 9:00. I felt like a big wimp, heat-wise.

The walk was nice, and I got to try out my new uniform backcountry hiking boots, which I really like. I have been hiking boot-less since I left my old pair in Tanzania, hoping someone there would get use out of them.

Work has proceeded swimmingly on Pipestone National Monument's parade float. I spent part of my days this week painting the sign, which we engineered to fit into the bindings for the standard railings for the electric truck. One of the maintenance guys took care of the cutting and the carpentry and he's been phenomenally upbeat about the process. Now we just need a banner for the sides. I'm kind of excited to drive it in the parade on Saturday. Until then, I'm keeping the design a secret.

Pipestone National Monument Week 4

This week, I picked up an extra shift and have therefore stayed in Pipestone over my weekend. This is actually a good thing, since I will use my one day off to explore Blue Mounds State Park (before it gets too hot out) and to work on the park's float for the Pipestone Water Tower Festival. Last Monday, while I was on my weekend, no one volunteered at the staff meeting to help build a float for the parade. Upon my return on Wednesday, I learned that there was a parade we had to build a float for, that I was now part of the project, and that I was also in charge of it! The theme of the festival is "Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes," which I had to combine with themes of NPS values and to somehow trumpet the fact that I'll be driving an all-electric truck through the parade. No easy task. We settled on a design I had made, which I will be building with a little help. I think I've solved all of the engineering problems while working on a shoestring budget of $0.

In the park this week, the snapping turtles have been laying eggs. Why they choose sites right next to the path is not clear, but it might be because the dirt is a little softer there. However, it puts their clutches in danger of being stepped upon, so the resource management team has been trying to build chicken wire and rebar around the nests to protect them.

Snapping turtle. Aggressive!

Wild four o' clock

Gooseberry

As for last week's post, I have some corrections. The purple and white flower was actually a crown vetch, a non-native plant that I had labeled as a wild pea (it is still a pea, but it is more specifically a crown vetch). The plant the bee was feeding on was an indigo bush, not a lead plant, though they look similar but are different sizes. The flower I wasn't sure about was a nightshade, whose berries are poisonous, and whose identity was pointed out to me by my mother and grandmother via phone calls a minute apart.

Pipestone National Monument Week 3

"So... Where's the monument?"

Cultural insensitivity underwent a slight uptick this week as I had to respond to statements including the ignorant "So what's here, anyway?" the somewhat offensive, "Where are the Indians?" and the insensitive, "So, this place is not as important as Mt. Rushmore." The Mt. Rushmore statement, though, highlights a crucial difference in culture: Rushmore is significant because it was made to be; it is self-important. Pipestone was here, the place was treated with respect for uncounted generations, and thus is less obviously significant because it isn't a giant advertisement for cultural domination. It is instead traditionally a place for all cultures to come, to pay respect to the land, and to coexist in peace.

Quarriers have been active this week and I met a returning quarrier who has been here many years. He told me that the oak trees by the cliff were all planted there to make the park more appealing, but they obscure the cliff. That the trees obscure the cliff is true - they do not appear as more than shrubs in Catlin's 1836 painting of the site - but whether they were planted there or have simply persisted in the absence of fire I cannot answer. He also said that many of the other bushes such as the wild plums and raspberries were planted there and used by natives so they would have a food source when they came in the later part of summer to quarry. That much made logical sense to me.

I presented the inaugural evening program on Friday. Pipestone doesn't have its own auditorium or campground, so we are being hosted by the Pipestone RV Campground across the street from the park entrance. They actually do have a building there for gatherings, and a projection screen. I bring the laptop, a power cable, and the projector and set it up there. We are planning to make more flyers for around town and signs to point people into the building at the campground so they know something is going on. My program went OK for the first time. I figured it was about 30 minutes of material and that turned out to be correct. I need to do some tinkering with it, but it will be fine after a couple more runs. The fourteen people who attended gave me some nice (undeserved) compliments and I even got a couple of them to come into the park the following day. The superintendent was also there, mostly to see what I had planned and not to judge or rate my program, and we talked about some points that I wanted to improve. I also discussed with the superintendent ways to get our message out in other outlets, and we might have a couple brown-bag presentations for the Kiwanis Club about other NPS sites, Glacier or Theodore Roosevelt for me, Mesa Verde for Ranger Don.

In the natural world, there have been rapid changes in response to some rain this week. Temperatures have been mild.

The first story is that the robins I posted about previously are now out of the nest, one way or another. They are nowhere to be found. I have since located a bluebird nest. It helps to walk the same little trail frequently because one starts to notice the same critters in the same places, usually a clue that they have a reason to stay there.

Eastern bluebird, grub delivery

These Eastern bluebirds are secondary cavity nesters using a hole bored out by a woodpecker in a dead tree. Because people generally cut down dead trees, bluebirds have had a bad run the last century because they have not had places to build their nests. "Oh, we always see them in boxes," someone said to me while I was pointing out the nest, and I said, "Yeah, well, this is what they really want and the boxes are a substitute." Plus, they've had trouble with birds like European starlings kicking them out of the cavities that do exist. Evil, evil starlings. Long story short, I found that if I waited long enough, the female would make frequent trips to the nest to deliver grubs to the hungry chicks inside.

Feeding time at the Eastern bluebird nest

It was also interesting to watch the bluebirds and how they responded to other birds in the vicinity. They didn't mind me too much if I sat still and quiet, but when the grackles, crows, or hawks flew nearby, they would not stay too near the nest. Instead, they would go somewhere away from, but still in sight of the nest, calling to the chicks to keep their heads down while trying not to reveal the location of the nest. They returned to the nest only after they were sure the threat had passed, and then only slowly and cautiously, moving to an adjacent tree, watching, moving to the nest tree, watching, moving to a lower branch, watching, then finally going to the nest.

Red-tailed hawk

While I spent an hour or so watching the bluebirds, waiting for them to stop at the nest so I could get a few pictures each time, a nighthawk zoomed over my head and then perched in a tree nearby. I was really there for the bluebirds but I went over to see if I couldn't get the nighthawk to cooperate and let me take a picture. Surprisingly, it did. He or she was taking a little nap before starting the evening feeding session. Despite their name, nighthawks don't operate solely at night, nor are they hawks. It's better to think of them as really, really big swallows with less flamboyant plumage.

Common nighthawk

Wildflowers are blooming and it seems that something new appears every day. I do not always know what they are, and I spent quite a bit of time with my nose in several field guides and a photo collection a park employee had put together (and did not always label!).

The above flower is called bittersweet nightshade. It is an exotic from Eurasia, I have learned since the original posting. It exists in a few counties in Minnesota, shown here. Pipestone County is the one above the extreme lower left, which is Rock County.

Not sure what this thing is!

Blooming flowers attract quite a wide variety of insects. A closer look at a blooming leadplant revealed several types of bees, flies, nectar-drinking mosquitoes, ants, and spiders. One spider had stealthily put webbing along the tiny blossoms on one shoot of the leadplant, evidently to score an overzealous nectar collector. I also found a tiny jumping spider, about 1/8" in size, who waved at the camera.

Jumping spider

A bee working on a indigo bush

Related to the pasqueflower of springtime, which I had a photo of back in April, is another anemone called anemone canadensis. I found one in the park, scoured the wildflower book to figure it out and felt dumb when I realized it was an anemone, then later in the evening walked down the Casey Jones State Trail and found it just lined with the same flower.

Anemone canadensis

Then I started to find some familiar flowers, validating Ranger Mary Ellen's prediction before I left TR that, despite only being an expert on Northern Rocky Mountain plants, I knew more than I thought. There are reminders of St. Mary everywhere, including plants like cow parsnip, whose juice, I discovered the hard way, makes my skin blister and scar!

Prairie rose

Crown vetch

Salsify / Goatsbeard

The last story for this week relates to wildlife sightings. While I enjoy talking geology, history, and culture all day, I get really excited for playing Wildlife Detective with visitors. It's amusing to see what people will say about what they think they saw. I've also learned that it's useless to ask how big they think anything was (or to ask about color, appearance, and even location, which makes it a challenge). Here's the story:

On Wednesday, one of the maintenance workers that had been out on the trail collecting the garbage came back and said he saw a critter that was smaller than a raccoon but had a ringed tail. He described the location. I told him that the raccoon was the only thing with a ringed tail, and made sure he wasn't somehow confusing a raccoon with a skunk, a woodchuck or a weasel. "No, no, it wasn't any of those things," he said. We started to form wild theories about pine martens and fishers, but again I asked, "Are you sure it's not a woodchuck?" No, that wasn't it. Fine. I'll keep an eye out for it.

Thursday, a visitor came in and said, "I saw a hedgehog out on the trail!" I said, "A hedgehog? Are you sure it wasn't a woodchuck?" He said, "No, no, it was a hedgehog!" He described the location, and it was the same spot the maintenance worker had seen his strange animal the day before. I asked again if he was absolutely sure it was a hedgehog because if it was an escaped or released pet, then that would be something the park would need to deal with. I called the Chief of Resource Management and told her the situation, that I had gotten these two reports of a weird animal and now this guy was saying it was definitely a hedgehog. I also said that I'd keep an eye out for it and that I still thought it had to be a woodchuck.

Friday and Saturday, I looked and found nothing. Sunday, as I was in the mystery animal sighting location, righting the tipped-over poison ivy sign in the middle of the poison ivy patch - a job hazard! - movement caught my eye. I heard a squeak and saw a flash of fur diving into the rocks next to the trail. I walked over to a big, flat rock large enough for me to lay on, and watched the spot where the animal had disappeared. I held perfectly still and quiet. After a minute or two, a nose poked out, then eyes, a head, and...

A woodchuck emerged!

Not just one woodchuck, but a whole den of woodchucks lived under that rock!

Pipestone National Monument Week 2

I carried on with researching and preparing my programs for the summer this week and I arrived at a solution for my guided walk. It speaks well of the training I got as an SCA intern as to the interpretive process model, a way of organizing a program in a technical manner. While I resisted the model at first, I have grown to depend on it for deciding what things stay, what things go, and how to approach certain topics. Some say, when it comes to interpreting, "Either you have it, or you don't," and, while true, the process model is a good way of assessing whether your "it" is working as well as it should.

I searched for a way to make the traditional elements of the pipe relevant to an audience that would have no idea what a pipe means in a physical and spiritual sense, as well as the quarrying process. While family traditions centered on holidays might be a good approximation, they may not be universal, and as soon as one approaches religion it becomes very dangerous ground. So I thought of baseball. Without giving it away, baseball as an American tradition approaches the sort of significance pipemaking has for its culture, but pipes take on an additional spiritual dimension that baseball cannot.

The birds have been busy. The robin nest next to the waterfall that I showed video of last week has remained successful. The two chicks now are feathery and getting pretty big. One of them sat up in the nest and stretched its wings while I was watching it, causing a scolding from the adult robin in the tree that was watching me.

I only took my camera into the park one day this week, so I regret not having more to show.

I got an unusually close-up look at one of the clay-colored sparrows.

Clay-colored sparrow

A gray catbird sings every morning as I walk out to check the river gauge. They have a complex and interesting song.

A common yellowthroat foraging along the creek. Once I learned the call, I realized they are always there, but difficult to spot unless I stay put long enough for one to emerge. They sound like they're saying "What'choo want? What'choo want? What'choo want?"

Poison ivy

My cell phone only works in select parts of town, but I discovered that the new Casey Jones State Trail on the east side of town was a hotspot. I can walk about half a mile one direction before it cuts out. Another place it works if I don't move around much is at a park on the west side of town, where the baseball fields are. I saw part of a little league baseball game as I was patrolling for the specific spot I could stand where my phone would work. Having played catcher through high school, my impulse to coach was too strong and I had to leave after the ball hit the backstop for the twelfth time.

The final mystery for the week was that people reported seeing a little, brown animal in the park. One of the maintenance guys swore it had a ringed tail, suggesting a raccoon, but he said it was not a raccoon. Another lady came in an hour later and saw something brown she couldn't identify. I work at the desk a lot of the time with the law enforcement ranger who is there permanently and our general assumption was that it was a woodchuck. I went out to look for it, but could not find it. Of course, that was when the stories about "little people," or "chichis" came out. I guess, like gnomes, they steal things and cause general chaos. One of the guys who does craft work in the visitor center used to work maintenance and apparently heard weird noises when he was cleaning alone at night. Just for fun, I thought I'd ask around whether people had heard of the "chichis," and they said, with a straight face, "Oh yeah, they're real!"

In other news, it snowed in Dickinson, ND over the weekend.

Pipestone National Monument

"So what's there to see here?"

I hear that on a daily basis. It's a good question, and the answer is long. Even though it's a small place, that just begs a person to look closer.

I started work at Pipestone National Monument this past week and have been jamming information into my brain all week. I've been cramming info like where the road used to be, exactly where I need to write things down in triplicate and where to put the copies, and the ins and outs of the Treaty of 1848.

This post won't be able to cover everything that's significant about the site, but I hope to add more about certain aspects as time goes on, especially on the topics of culture and tradition.

Pipestone National Monument is approximately 300 acres of tallgrass prairie, oak savannah, and oak woodlands, home to at least 300 plants including the threatened western prairie fringed orchid (I've not seen one yet). Birdwatching is very good, and I've seen several species that are not on the park's list, including a rogue blue-gray gnatcatcher. I had never seen one before, but I knew it was a gnatcatcher at first glance. I guess studying does sometimes pay off.

The natural side of the monument is more of an accident than it is a primary purpose for preserving the site. The real reason for preserving Pipestone National Monument is to preserve the resource - pipestone - and the tradition of quarrying and carving the rock. The site was originally held as an "easement" for the Yankton Sioux, who, in 1848 agreed to move onto a reservation 150 miles to the west of Pipestone, so long as they kept the right to quarry the sacred stone. Without getting into all the details, a combination of conscientious squatters, disputes over land use rights and who owned just what, then a railroad right-of-way issue culminated in the Yanktons being bullied to the point where they chose to sell their rights to the land, taking home approximately $150 per person in the tribe. Immediately, there was pushback to preserve the site some other way, and at the time, the National Park Service seemed to be appropriate.

It is unusual for a national park to preserve an active tradition. Usually, sites like Mesa Verde or Devils Tower that still have cultural significance are not utilized in the same way they were traditionally. However, Pipestone preserves the rock itself, the quarrying tradition, and the tradition of pipemaking. American Indians of any tribe can apply for a permit to quarry in the park, and there are between 30 and 40 quarries that are used within the monument. So far, I've met four quarriers.

The park has a small museum that desperately needs modernizing: the signs are still the old, hand-painted variety. However, in the back section of the museum, there are craftspeople/demonstrators actively making pipes, effigies, and other trinkets out of the pipestone to be sold in the gift shop. This allows people to ask questions and see the tradition as it is actively being carried out within the monument, an initiative undertaken decades ago to make the tradition more a centerpiece of the monument's story rather than having people set up shacks by the quarries or along the park boundary.

The site is a little island of prairie in a sea of agriculture and wind farms. It's really sad to think that so much of the midwest used to look like that, but is gone. It's really strikingly beautiful. At some point, Pipestone Creek was channelized to "improve" the drainage of fields east of the park, draining a lake. Part of that effort was to channelize right down through the waterfall itself, lowering the waterfall by about ten feet and eliminating a natural cascade. It's still an attractive waterfall, but not what it was when George Catlin painted it in 1836. Theodore Roosevelt came to mind: "Leave it as it is...The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it."

Winnewissa Falls

I'll deal more with the cultural aspects of Pipestone National Monument later when I have had more time to study them. I have not asked any of the people who work with the stone to take their picture yet because I don't want to seem weird as we have all just met.

Even though I grew up in the midwest, the plants are still mysterious to me. Sure, I can find you some sumac, strawberries, and violets, but it has been a challenge for me to identify much else. The first two days I was there, the spiderwort was blooming. It blooms for one day. The resource management chief told me that it's also called "snotweed" because if you pluck it, a stringy, gooey mess comes from inside the leaf.

Spiderwort

One of my jobs is to go out and check the river level every morning, then make a subjective rating of 1 to 5 for the clarity of the water. So far, I've always given it a 2 - pretty clear, but not mountain stream clear. It's nice to find the red-eyed vireos, Tennessee warblers, house wrens, grackles, robins, yellow warblers, and orchard orioles chirping away in the morning. I even scared a deer out of the woods one foggy morning.

Pipestone Creek

Among my childhood memories are playing catch with dad in the back yard in Iowa until it started to get too dark, which was about the time the nighthawks come out. So there is a bit of nostalgia when I see nighthawks. Half a dozen have been flying around all day long, making their buzzy "beert" sound, and chasing one another. It must be breeding season.

Common nighthawk. Distinctive white patches under wings and throat, and overall shape make ID easy.

We also discovered a robin nest that's easy to see into. There are currently two chicks in the nest. When mom shows up, she sits on them and is motionless, like a rock, hoping not to be noticed. With visitors, it works more often than not.

Robin on nest, a study on motionlessness. Notice the ants crawling up and down the tree. The sound of rushing water is, indeed, rushing water on the waterfall.

Although I've been doing a lot of reading for work, including the daunting Administrative History of Pipestone National Monument and the Pipestone National Monument General Management Plan, my recreational reading project has been "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan, a look at survivors of the Dust Bowl. Really great reading. I got it on sale at the UW Bookstore when we were in Madison. I also met author Paul Goble in the park. He writes children's books, many of them American Indian tales including "The Legend of the White Buffalo Woman," which relates to Pipestone. I had no idea who he was when I was just chatting with him and his wife on the trail. Later he told me who he was, went into the bookstore and bought his own book, and gave it to me, signed. What a guy.

That's it for this week.