The BackWoods Drifter

Obviously I have been away from the blog for a little while. I’ve been dealing with some personal issues and had to push the blog onto the back burner for a bit. I’m happy to say those issues have been resolved and now I can get back to doing something I really enjoy which is blogging.

That being said, I’m going to ramble a little bit.

I’ve always enjoyed blogging about the outdoors and more specifically about my adventures in the mountains. I talk about my trips because I just simply love to be in the mountains and I like to tell the occasional story and show pictures of places that may have otherwise never been seen. I also like to think my blog can even get educational at times.

I don’t know if I can call myself a true hillbilly although I like to think of myself as a hillbilly. I was born in Kansas, raised in West Virginia and then left WV with the outpouring in the 80’s only to return periodically for the next 20 years. I’ve lost a good portion of my accent but I have never lost my passion for the mountains. The times I did come back it was because of the mountains. I would stay long enough for them to lose their luster with the facts of living in the coalfields causing it to happen. I was use to making good money and living in an economy where multiple job opportunities exist at all times. Although I love the mountains I felt trapped. I couldn’t get a decent paying job unless I worked for the coal industry. But in any case it was hard to pay the bills let alone pack up and move back to an area where I actually had a choice and a chance.

One time, not so long ago, I got so disgusted with the lack of opportunities in WV I went to Dallas Texas with an ‘86 Pontiac Bonneville and $184 to my name. Within a week of arriving in Texas I had a job in a field I chose, within the first 2 months I had purchased a piece of property.

For myself and before I became self sufficient, so to speak, coming to West Virginia was always bitter sweet. I loved being back in the mountains but I knew each and every time the inevitable trap that came with that love for the mountains. But I came back each and every time willingly because the mountains are what I consider home.

I have made the statement a few times about reasons for myself fighting mountaintop removal coal mining. This is another reason and a big one, the mountains are my home and I’m having to watch them get blown to bits so somebody else in another country, in some cases, can turn on their lights. You don’t have to be overly educated to realize the destruction is not a good trade off. The Appalachian Mountains is not someplace we can just so blatantly destroy. People live here and we call it home.

I just wanted to pop in here and let anybody interested know how Samson is doing.

In a word, he is doing great. He is growing like a weed and has this obvious vendetta against my shoe strings. Any doubt about his well being left just a couple of days after bringing him home. One way that I can tell the intelligence of a puppy is how quick they are to learn. I keep Samson in the house and he is already house-trained. Which is a good thing because I’m a little bit of a stickler for a clean house. I won’t know for sure until he gets a little older but I detect some Border Collie in him. Only time will tell. For now I’m just happy I brought him home from the mountains.

During the hiking part of the weekends adventure I came across these strange rocks in an area that had a coal bed sitting on it before. The removal of the coal and a little bit of erosion had uncovered these rock formations.

Just from some basic observations I’m guessing this is a petrified tree root system - millions of years old. There are a few things that make me think this - the first is the obvious texture of the rock. Another aspect is that it is oval shaped and independent of the surrounding rock formations. The oval shape really adds weight to my theory because it would be oval shaped if it had once been round. After millions of years and everything settling on top, it would have compacted the root into this oval shaped rock.

You can tell from the broken pieces all along it’s form that it had had heavy traffic on it recently. I would love to find a long piece intact and had even thought about going back for these that are broken. I did bring two pieces of it home. I’m hoping to find out what it is and how old.

—

Adding - It would appear as if I was correct in my assumption that what is pictured is the remains of a tree root system 286 - 360 million years old. I emailed a professor at WVU and the following is his reply.

It indeed looks like the root system of a Pennsylvanian tree. It is known as sigillaria. The pictures are great! Next time, be sure to place something for scale - a pen, a ruler, a notebook, for example so that the full scope of the find can be determined. You have a sharp eye and you used good common sense to figure out what you must have seen. Well done!

The following from here.

Sigillaria is the generic name assigned to this ancient arborescent lycopod. It had leaves and roots very similar to its contemporaneous cousin, lepidodendron, but it differed in that it exhibited much rarer branching and its tall, columnar trunk lacked the scale-pattern of lepidodendron, instead exhibiting straight, fluted furrows along the trunk midsection. Occassionally the trunks were smooth.

Other differences with lepidodendron were its cones. Lepidodendron cones were attached individually near the tip of it’s branches. Sigillaria cones occurred in clusters attached in certain places along the upper stem.

Another characteristic of sigillaria are the vertically-arranged circular scar pattern found in fossil specimens representing the inner bark. These scars called parichnos occur in specimens assigned the form-genus name of Syringodendron.

Sigillaria was prolific during the Carboniferous Period (360 to 286 million years ago) and, like its cousin lepidodendron, often attained heights of over 130 feet.

Lately it seems as if my blogging has been more just simply going through the motions than really getting into it. I’m not happy with that.

At the moment I have some personal issues going on with my new handicap and for the time being at least, it is dominating my thought process. I really don’t like feeling like I am forcing posts. Like this one for instance. I did feel the need to post this since I may not be around much in the next couple of weeks. It depends entirely on how fast issues get resolved.

I’ve been doing a lot of talking on here about mountaintop removal but lately I have even had trouble concentrating on that devastating issue. I’ll get back into the swing of things, soon I hope.

I wanted to let my readers know of some decisions I have made. The first was to take the Bolt Mountain blog back out, dust it off and put it back in full operation. In making that decision I have also decided to keep the subject of mountaintop removal off the Bolt Mountain blog. I do have a page there with photos but I’m not going to talk about it there. As I said in a post on that blog, I have to have someplace to escape to sanity. I’ve also given the Bolt Mountain blog the tagline of The BackWoods Drifter to tie it together with this blog.

As far as this blog - I believe I have decided to flex my story telling muscles - what few of them there are. I can’t say the stories won’t be related to mountaintop removal as far as heritage and culture is concerned but I can say they will take a more indirect approach. As a resident hillbilly and a neighbor to the coal industry I see a lot missing from our culture today as compared to just 20 years ago. Plus I see all that we stand to lose. I’m going to tell you about it.

On another note - for those into SEO, the BWD Gallery hit a Google pagerank of 3 in it’s first indexing. I’m kind of curious why it ranked so high and being so young. But apparently Google loves photos. If I had to guess it would have something to do with all of the photos having titles, descriptions, and tags. I don’t know what the reason but it is obvious a photo gallery will get you on the good side of Google - in a hurry. So if you go there and like a photo or not - leave a comment. It’s so hard to get good interaction these days.

In the last three days I have installed a blog, a forum and three Wordpress upgrades. Some of that went pretty smooth and some of it made me feel like throwing my computer out into the yard. As soon as the new Stop MTR blog was on-line, Wordpress released an upgrade. Wouldn’t you know it.

I had been threatening to upgrade the Bolt Mountain blog ever since the spam issues. I was a little worried about it because of the process of upgrading - delete this, don’t delete that. Today I used the Bolt Mountain blog as a guinea pig - I upgraded it first. Turns out the upgrade instructions are more complicated than they need to be.

At any rate - I’m done. This Sunday is definitely going to be a day of rest for me. I would say I’m not even going to think about the blogs - but we know that would be a lie.

Have A Great Day!!

If you came here from the old blog then you are pretty much aware of what is going on. If you were redirected here this is a new blog and the posts have been imported from Blogger. So if you read back through them some might not make a whole hell of a lot of sense.

At any rate - From this post forward, this is the new home for the BackWoods Drifter blog. And I’m liking it already.

I don’t know what is going on with Blogger but as regular visitors can tell this blog format has changed again. It wasn’t something I wanted to do and is actually my third attempt tonight at a stable template.

The post title fonts and a few other things went haywire. Two link lists were lost and had to be rebuilt from scratch and there is something wrong with Bloggers add link javascript as well. I had to add each link saving the changes and reopening the window after each link was added. That took forever. I’m one step closer to ditching Blogger. Like the popups the other day this issue came right out of nowhere.

Just thought I’d let folks know the reason for the changes. I’m still clueless as to what happen or if this template will remain stable.

—

Adding - I found the problem to be caused by another piece of javascript code. The problem this time was caused by the Amber Alert code that displayed above my posts. Putting it there like it has been for months suddenly caused my post title to appear as regular font and it played heck with the now non-existent right sidebar.

For some reason Blogger seems to be choking on javascript at the moment. I have no intention of making any more changes. This blog will stay like this until Blogger flounders and rolls over.

The whole time I have been blogging - I have had a problem finding ways to display the photos I take because I take a lot of photos.

My latest trip to Kayford Mountain brought the problem into the light once again. As I stated in a previous post - I took 133 photos the last trip and only a few of those duplicates. Since I can’t realistically write a post for every one, I had to come up with a way to show them without needing a post. These particular photos do absolutely no good sitting in my files unseen and I want to show them all right now.

A few months ago I purchased the domain wvbackwoodsdrifter.com just to have it more or less. I had considered moving to the new domain. I was reluctant to do that because this blog is becoming a familiar face in the community and I didn’t want to start from scratch. To make a long story short - I bought the domain and then parked it.

Today I put the domain online with a PHP photo gallery in a sub directory.

The BackWoods Drifter Photo Gallery

I have already uploaded 29 photos to the site from the Kayford trip. Although all of the photos on the site right now are mountaintop removal or coal related - I will be adding a ton of photos from all of my other adventures as well - past and future. This summer isn’t going to be all about mountaintop removal.

The new site is a work in progress and for a little while, photos will be uploaded regularly from past adventures. I am supposed to be doing an MTR flyover tomorrow and if that happens photos from the trip will be in the albums tomorrow night. That is something I’m finding I like already about the new site - very easy and quick to batch upload photos. It severely cuts down on the procrastination.

In the future - photos I use on this blog or the Stop MTR blog will also be in the gallery.

—

I created the gallery site because I felt rushed - by myself - to show the photos of MTR. I’m trying to brainstorm posts for photos so I can show them. I don’t want to post that way about MTR. When I look at a photo - I will either be inspired or not. In some cases I may not be inspired by a photo now but will be in the future. At any rate, the gallery allows me to show all of my photos and I can pick and choose what I want to write about with a lot less self induced pressure.

What is a mocking cold? It is a cold virus people catch who claim not to be able to catch a cold. Usually caught right after making such a claim. Myself for example - I don’t remember the last time I had a cold. I credit that to a good immune system and to the fact I’m not an overly public guy. In other words I’m not usually in a position to catch the cold bug. But lately I’ve been spending a lot of time at the doctors office and really what better place to catch a virus.

The first sure sign for me that a cold is oncoming is a small un-scratchable itch right between my shoulder blades. Most times if I start fighting the cold when the itch starts I can bypass the major symptoms and kill it before it gets started. But other times it is more persistent than my ex-wife and is determined to make life rough for a little bit.

A few days ago I woke up with the itch and started taking cold medicine right away. Like I said though sometimes I can avoid the full blown cold if I treat the symptoms soon enough - sometimes. This time I’m not going to be so lucky. The rest of the symptoms accompanied the itch yesterday - cough, sinus problems, crappy feeling - the whole nine yards.

Today I have a full blown cold. I’m the guy that doesn’t catch a cold. I’m usually the guy that doesn’t get sick period when a bug is on the prowl. Well - I have caught a mocking cold. A cold that is a slap to the face and tells me in no uncertain terms that I am definitely not immune to the cold virus regardless of how much I like to think I am. But on the other hand - a cold about once every five years or so - I can deal with it.

—

Mocking cold is not some kind of slang found in the mountains. I made it up last night and it began with a couple of letters in mocking different. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.