Northwestern U.S.

July 2 to July 23, 2010:  We began our nearly month-long vacation/professional meeting by going to Maggie’s wedding in Michigan.  Soon, natural history on the road came to the fore.  I saw quite a number of dead foxes (road kill) along Hwy 421 in Indiana on the way to Michigan.  That road goes through some fairly wooded areas – when I was in graduate school we used to come there in the winter to collect Callosamia promethea cocoons which positively dripped from the roadside Sassafras.  We like to travel the smaller highways and on July 4^th weekend that proved to be a wise choice; some of the other wedding guests took over 8 hours to get to Michigan from the Chicago area!

Once at the lodge (near Whitehall) we settled in and chatted with old friends.  Next morning, it was off to a state park just down the road where we had a nice (cold) breakfast – we were the ones that were cold!  Walking along the shore back in the woods, we found a lot of neat stuff:  Indian Pipe (parasitic plant – lacks chlorophyll), vegetative and reproductive shoots of horsetail, several kinds of dragonflies, mushrooms and ant lions.  I dug one out for Peg and Colleen to see – they’re difficult creatures to catch because they burrow in the sand so rapidly.  The adults look like dragonflies with antennae.

Maggie’s wedding and the following reception were wonderful and loads of fun.  Great music and gin and tonic!  The next day, July 4^th, we were off on our way to Washington (the state, not the nation’s capital).  We were pokey – my fault – and drove along the lakeshore.  Traverse City was a madhouse because of a Blue Angels air show, but we managed to find a little peace (and some black squirrels) on the campus of a local college which had some nice sculptures.  We crossed the Mackinaw Bridge, which was amazing.  I had heard it was a spectacular structure, but I had no idea...  We stopped on the other side (the UP) for some photo-ops and I saw quite a few Ring-billed gulls hanging around.  We drove a little ways into the UP and found an isolated motel looking out on a wetland.  There were Tundra Swans swimming around in the wetland, along with Canadian Geese.  We had dinner at a local diner just down the road and heard one of the patrons mention that it was his 68^th wedding anniversary.  He had served on New Guinea during WWII.  The family sitting near him bought him and his wife a bottle of Champagne – very cool.  The diner looked out over Lake Michigan, and the owners had provided each table with binoculars and bird books so patrons could check out all the birds on the lake or visiting the feeders located near the restaurant.  Food wasn’t bad, either!

The next day, we began our trek across the UP, hoping to reach North Dakota (Ha!).  As we drove along U.S. Hwy. 2, we saw many dead porcupines.  Their usual defense doesn’t work so well against autos.  We also saw a large dead black bear – another victim of cars.  I won’t mention all the dead deer...  The UP is BIG – it took us pretty much all day to get to WI.  We pushed on into MN and stopped (finally) at a motel just west of Brainerd.  The next day, we continued our journey west.  A rest stop in western MN yielded a large number of moths, including a Polyphemus moth and many tent caterpillar adults.  We got some nice photos.  The road also yielded our first sighting of Bald Eagles as we neared the North Dakota border.

North Dakota was a pleasant surprise; green rolling hills and lots of potholes with waterfowl.  Among the latter, we saw White Pelicans and my first view of a pair of Western Grebes.  In western North Dakota, we had a brief view of Theodore Roosevelt National Park – enough to convince us that this would be a good place to visit again.  Some nice prairie plants, but I was beginning to feel the butterflies were hiding from me.  We managed to make it to Billings, MT, for the night.  The next morning, we got on the road early and saw some beautiful low clouds in the river valley.  We saw a number of deer (Mule? White-tailed? Black-tailed?) and some spectacular herds of Pronghorns.  Also saw a small herd of Elk.  We stopped in Kellog, ID, for a really nice lunch.  Then it was on through eastern WA – very dry but still quite an interesting area.  Made it to Leavenworth, the site of the annual meeting of the Lepidopterists’ Society (www.lepsoc.org) - our goal for this part of the trip.  I’ll post on that and the rest of our adventures later.