couldn't make it this year...

I missed the Wilderness Volunteers trip to Escalante this year, and I'm sad about that. A really, really beautiful place, and while it's a "work" trip to kill the invasive Russian Olive, it's work that has good results, so that's fun. It's really the results that are so striking, how the river is profoundly changed from it's choked, invaded, on-the-way-to-ruin state, back to its native riparian biomix, the way it was 50 years ago before the Russian Olive easily escaped from where people planted backyard shrubberies. Check it out:

Upstream view before and after.












Overhead view from the canyon rim before and after.






















Gotta say - knowing what that damn plant is like up close, the choked before shot makes me twitchy and claustrophobic. The after is a big "ahhhh" sigh of the river in it's natural state before the damnable olive got a foot in the ecological door 50 years ago.