Photo-Assault!

Right, so I finally have some pictures to share from Wildcat. They're going to be sort of a lot here, as I've got a couple weeks of catching up to do. (pictures are below the description, cuz I didn't feel like making my beautiful wit and wonderful description a mere caption) Oh, and if they're too small to see, click on them and it'll take you to the ginormous images...

First: The setting. You can't start movie without establishing the setting can you?

It's not the easiest to tell from here, but I'm one terrace down from the "top" of the ridges lining the Miami Valley north of Dayton. (The next terrace up is a bunch of strip malls, so it's hard to see anything). I'll hunt around for a better angle, but you can kind of see the drop off to the valley floor, even though it's obscured by a treeline, but more specifically you can see the other side of the valley rising back up. Why yes, that is an interstate, why do you ask? Isn't it scenic? It's not a huge valley or anything, but hey...that's the topography, I can only describe it as it is...Wildcat isn't on the bottom terrace, it's a ways up (vertically) from the Miami River, although the creek that runs along the treeline parallels the Miami for ~5km before finally joining it.



Alright, skewing our view straight down the hill you'll see "Goose Mountain" as the rise just left of center...and a sporting goods store one terrace down from me (these were at one point natural terraces, but of course now they've been developed and highly modified).



From the edge of the next terrace you can look past the treeline and see a clearing (we'll see in a moment that the term "clearing" is being used generously here). Goose Mountain is off to the left now, and you can see a backdirt pile peeking over the treeline. One of many dirt piles.




Okay, and here we are entering the field proper. This was last plowed in ~2003, and aside from random patches we've mowed in the last 3 years it's been left to overgrow free from interference. Another dirt pile is there to the right (actually I was working just to the other side of it all day). The treeline there is ~200m away (If I can remember how that whole Pythagoras thing works).



What's this? A new image from Mars? A false color image from the moon and the new Lunar orbiter? Nope. Wildcat dirt after ~ an hour of exposure to the sun. Words can not express how absolutely terrible this soil is. Moments after exposure and it turns into concrete (the sand/clay and gravel mix is actually not too terribly different from the mixture in a bag of ready-mix). It can soak up water like a beast (as I mentioned earlier) with little effect...when Wildcat gets tired with that trick the water will turn it into a gooey sticky paste that's totally unscreenable. Apparently the soil is so rocky/horrible that not even 5 years of sludge injections were able to make it fertile (info courtesy of Kat Sterner and her brave foray into land use research). The rule of thumb is: if you can work with the dirt...you're in the wrong place. Unfortunately a preliminary survey shows that this abundant clay isn't even that good for use in ceramics (after some cleaning and lots of water I got it to "barely adequate" for working), which is an interesting result to begin my project.


Hmm, I don't want to go into too much more right now, this post is plenty long. I will however end with a picture of me standing where the subterranean river now flows...down where they've let the forest try to reclaim the field. (This picture is kind of staged, since I'm not really working down there anymore, but I did so at the start of the year. Also shown: The Green Bandanna of Revolution (tm) my awesome hat alternates with the headband). That's not the largest/densest of the growth at the base of the hill, but that's where I took the picture, so sorry for your loss.



I love my job.