The Tufted Hairsnitch

By Tim Homan

        On a warm and partly cloudy morning late in February, 2002, I heard the loud, whickering call of a Pileated Woodpecker in front of our Georgia Piedmont home.  I glanced out the upstairs window; a male pileated — red cap sweeping from near beak base to the back of his crested head, crimson mustache bleeding back from his wood-boring bill — had landed on the trunk of a loblolly pine, recently dead and now uncomfortably close to our porch.  A few moments after I got a good look at him he took off, his slow-flapping, roller-coastering flight trailing his shadow east to west.  The crow-sized bird flew away from the

Close-Call Copperhead

By Tim Homan

        I have stepped or stopped dangerously close to only two poisonous snakes, both copperheads, while walking on or near a Southern Appalachian Trail.  All of the other times I have encountered pit vipers on or beside a footpath, I have been lucky enough to spot them well within the margin of safety, at least 8 or more feet ahead.  A thick timber rattler coiled and buzzing atop warm treadway rock commands sudden stop as good as an armed guard.  But the fortunate thing is, once spotted from a comfortable distance, a venomous snake is no more dangerous than a bullet still in the box.

Possum Dark and Shivering Cold: Close Call on Duncan Ridge

    North of Gainesville, Georgia, the higher folds of the foothills ripple toward the upper Piedmont's meeting with the Appalachian mountains.  North of Dahlonega, the clouds drifted low and unbroken, a solid ceiling of discouraging gray from horizon to horizon.  Past Suches on Highway 60, the weather looked even worse.  The lowering clouds sealed the sky with a sunless smother of uniform gray.
    Two friends and I had met shortly after sunrise to begin our drive from Athens to the North Georgia mountains.  I was on the clock, under pressure to complete a second edition of my trail guide {1}.  Steve and Greg had joined me for a day of ridgeline hiking along the northern border of the Coopers Creek Wildlife Management Area.
    Steve parked his shuttle car on the pull-off shoulder of FS 4 {2} at Mulky Gap.  Then he joined Greg and me for the drive back down the dirt-gravel forest service road to 60, where we continued northwestward on the winding mountain highway to our starting-point trailhead beside Little Skeenah Creek.
    My goal for the day was to hike the first half of Section 2 of the Duncan Ridge National Recreation Trail.  Despite its relatively low elevations, Section 2 was the most strenuous long stretch of trail in Georgia.  Back in 1986, the route roller-coasted along its namesake crest, climbing up and over nearly every peak before dropping to the next gap.  Because of its length and difficulty, I had made the easy decision to split the section into two manageable segments for wheel measuring and note taking.
    The TV forecast-rain accompanied by colder temperatures likely-had seemed more abstract, less bothersome, the night before.  A cold front was closing in on the mountains, but there was a chance it would arrive late enough for us to finish our hike dry, or wet us only for a mile or two at the tag end of our trek.  But now the dark sky was working on our minds and moods.  Our good-humored banter at the early morning rendezvous had turned glum.  Our conversation became intermittent, then sagged into silence.  We were sons of three World War Two fathers; no one wanted to be the first to wimp out.  We held our own counsel and followed our flagging momentum to Little Skeenah Creek.
    It was early April, transition season in Highland Dixie, when winter eddies back into spring's flow: bipolar-weather time with meteorological swings from sunny and warm one day to snow in the high country the next.  But I wasn't particularly worried.  Weather forecasters had cried wolf way too often; time and time again my days in the mountains had turned out better than predicted.  I had begun to view forecasts as worst-case scenarios and started to ignore anything less than an 80 percent chance of an all-day rain.  I had also begun to view myself as a hardy and competent backcountry hiker, one who always carried map, compass, and matches, extra flannel shirt, rain jacket, and poncho.
    Across the bridged creek we began the meandering ascent to the first mountain --the one with the euphonious name of Wallalah-- through red maple, American holly, and towering white pine straight as sunbeams.  Spring's annual rebirth had just begun its first blush down low along Little Skeenah.  Christmas fern crosiers poked up pale green and fuzzy.  Trout lily and Catesby's trillium had punched small leaves up into the vernal light.  The flowering dogwoods seeking the highway's sun gap had yet to whiten the roadside woods.  Their newly born-again leaves were still tiny points of pastel green.
    We ascended a ridgeline with mountain laurel under oaks and a few tall shortleaf pines.  As we climbed into the colder country of Southern Appalachian winter, the three of us were forcefully reminded, once again, that the mountains keep their own calendar.  Back home spring's pulse beat to bud-break and birdsong; the greening forests and fields matched the month's picture of a warm and resurgent season.  But up here, above spring's quickening thrust, we walked through hardwoods still stripped down to their gray-bark skivvies.  The winter-clenched buds of the oaks were still weeks away from opening.
    The temperature felt like low fifties, not bad at all heading uphill with a pack on your back.  We followed the blue blazes past our first good view of the day, a rock outcrop overlook open toward Toonowee Mountain across Highway 60 to the south.  The higher peaks were already shrouded in mist, their summits sheared off and buried in cloud belly.
    The undercoating of the flat-bottomed clouds continued to grow thicker and darker.  They were now as dark as the air-borne water bladders of thunderstorms and looked ready to burst.  The three of us crossed Wallalah's rocky crown and kept walking, descending to Section 2's first prominent saddle.  After a straight-up-the-ridge grunt, we took our first sit-down break at mile 3.2 atop the nearly level summit of Licklog {3} Mountain, at 3,470 feet a modest peak by Mountain South standards.  On Licklog's crown-1,455 feet higher than the trailhead, close to five degrees cooler from elevation gain alone-we could still look out and down from late winter to early spring.
    The cold front's first volley gave a low whistling voice to the tuliptree and oak.  Our climb-sweat chilled in the wind.  As we were standing up to start moving again, Greg, a contemplative botanist and reluctant long-distance hiker, announced that he wanted to turn back.  Steve and I now had cover; neither of us would be the first to pull the plug.  The three of us fidgeted through an awkward silence.  Normally good to go in most any kind of weather, Steve finally said he still felt weak from a bad cold and didn't want to risk a relapse.  Momentum and an unwillingness to lose a day of work made me want to forge ahead.  Sensing my reluctance to turn back, Steve called my bluff and offered to swap car keys and wait for me at the courthouse in Dahlonega.  Greg agreed.  I accepted their gracious, guilt-induced offer, told them I would hike hard, then pushed my measuring wheel away into the late morning and worsening weather.
    The sagging sky wrapped the rising ridgeline in a dim gray shroud.  The final grade to Rhodes Mountain rose through forested mist.  On the backside of Rhodes, the hardwoods shaped themselves again as I followed the downgrade toward the next gap.  The turbulent mix of the colliding air masses-Gulf of Mexico warm, Canadian cold-began to spawn small slanting raindrops as the track began its ascent to a low, unnamed knob.  I stopped and thought about turning back, but a quick calculation of time and distance convinced me that I couldn't catch Steve and Greg before they reached my car.  Now I had no vehicle behind me and five peaks, over 6 miles, deteriorating weather, and a car with a good heater in front of me.
    I slung off the daypack and quickly buttoned up my spare flannel shirt.  I looked inside the double lining of trash compactor bags for my poncho.  I saw only one stuff sack: my rain jacket.  I felt around for the other stuff sack in the bottom of the inner bag.  Nothing.  I pulled the two water-proof liners out of my pack.  Nothing in the bottom of the pack, nothing between bag layers.  Then I remembered.  The week before I had removed the poncho from my daypack to prolong its life with seam sealer.  I had hung the poncho up to dry in the spare bedroom and forgot to pack it last night.
    I put on my rain jacket and stood there, mulling over what no poncho meant.  It meant I was going to get wet below the waist and cold.  Wet was a given, how cold the wild card.  I now had on all there was at hand: ball cap, cotton T-shirt, flannel shirt, wool sweater, rain jacket, lightweight and fast-drying khaki pants.  The night before I had debated whether to wear my polypro longjohn top instead of the cotton T-shirt.  Cotton had won because I could put three layers over it, and between poncho and rain jacket, I knew I wasn't going to get wet anyway.  The night before, in the warm house, the insulating long underwear seemed like hot and sweaty overkill.
    The cloud-dark sky clamped down lower and colder.  I stopped to weigh my options, then with exemplary stubbornness started wheeling at a slightly faster pace.  The cold rain fell harder and settled into the steady rhythm of a shower.  Despite the cooling temperature, I still sweated inside my jacket on the upridge pulls.  Although I was hiking steadily between stops, I wasn't making good time or even average progress.  Writing had become an excruciatingly slow process.  Each time, I took the notebook out of my jacket pocket, hunched over, forced the wet pages open to the place-holder pencil, wrote as fast as I could until the page was too sodden to accept lead, thumbed ahead to drier paper, wrote some more, skipped ahead.
    The temperature continued to dip, down into the forties now for sure.  My breath billowed white smoke when I stopped to take notes on the harder uphills.  The interiors of the monochromatic clouds, formless and flowing, darkened to charcoal gray.  My pants were soaked from jacket bottom to boots.  My wool sweater was becoming increasingly wet from rainwater finding its way down and through my beat-up jacket.  I would have been fine if only I had my poncho like on every other hike except this one.  Yeah, and if frogs had pockets, they could carry pistols to shoot snakes with.  And if your aunt had balls, she'd be your uncle.
    I rolled my measuring wheel east along the well-defined crest of Duncan Ridge, following the lift and fall of named mountains and knobs through the dense gray void of liquid vapor.  The ridge crowned over Gregory Knob at mile 5.8, over Payne Knob at mile 6.3.  Well over halfway now for sure, cold but still OK.  The afternoon was now the deepest shade of gray I had ever hiked through: a dark dusk nearly the color of wet cement.
    As I stood writing notes on the way down from Payne, I held still and stared as a slow-moving mammal crossed straight over the top of the fold, left to right, no more than 30 feet in front of me.  The primitive animal remained unperturbed; it scarcely picked up its pace after spotting me.  It was a possum, its prehensile tail scaly and rat-naked, its fur a lighter gray than the surrounding mist.  A minute before, I would have bet the wet wool sweater off my back and the two twenties in my wallet that such a mid-day sighting of an active possum {4} would have been out of the question, utterly impossible.
    The dim-witted marsupial broke my tunnel-vision concentration.  I stood there, cold and baffled, trying to process the rarity and portent of crossing paths with a possum on a Southern Appalachian ridgeline in early afternoon.  The day had darkened enough to stimulate the nocturnal animal into diurnal activity, that much was certain.
    The appearance of the possum struck me as a reprimand and a warning, nature's own foreshadowing as potent as any image a Hollywood director could have scripted on the same cold-mountain movie set.  The whole scene seemed incongruous.  Neither of us should have been abroad in this weather at this time of day.  I should have been home waiting for a sunny and dry day; the possum should have been denned up waiting for nightfall.  Looking around, I now felt the full foreboding of being all alone and cold in the dark gray rain.  Alone and cold in mist-bound mountains indifferent to human error-or beseeching prayer.
    I walked faster.  My world turned inward to a small, tag-along circle of visibility, increasing cold, and growing worry.  I began to shiver when I stopped to write notes.  Sleet mixed with the rain, then switched to all sleet as I followed the narrow treadway up the northern flank of Parke Knob.  The wind blew in steady from what I guessed was the northwest.  The breeze blew just hard enough to shoot the icy birdshot down at a slant that stung the left side of my face a bit.
    The wind-slung pellets lasted only fifteen to twenty minutes, but the emphatic sound of it ticking off my jacket, then crunching underfoot, drove home the certainty that I should not have pushed ahead without my poncho.  Dumb move.  I chanted a pep talk through chattering teeth: stay positive, keep moving, you'll be OK, keep thinking, keep moving, you'll be all right-my mantra crowding out increasingly uncomfortable thoughts for a few moments.
    By the time I reached Fish Gap at mile 7.9, I had begun shivering violently every time I stopped.  I guessed I had no more than 3 miles {5} to go and, if necessary, I could stop wheeling and quick march for the warmth and security of Steve's car.  I reached the topknot of the penultimate peak, Clements, as the rain lessened to a thick, glasses-fogging mizzle.  But as the rain subsided, the temperature began to drop even more as the cold front wedged through and the ridge-raking wind increased its evaporative cooling.  Upper thirties at best, possibly mid-thirties on the summits according to my bare skin-best guess thermometer.  My convulsive shaking continued for longer distances between stops.
    I quit taking notes.  On my way up the last mountain, Akin, I slipped on a sleet-slick root and fell, thudding to the ground on my right-side hip, ribs, and shoulder.  I lay on the thin layer of pellet ice a few moments, taking a roll call of still-working parts.  Other than the shock of its suddenness and having the breath knocked out of me, I was uninjured and soon scrambled to my feet.  It was the first time I had fallen while holding a hiking stick in one hand and a measuring wheel in the other.
    The fall knocked out more than my breath.  It knocked out the last of my denial too: I was more than just cold and wet-way more.  I was already in the early stages of hypothermia and getting colder fast.  My body and brain were sliding further down the list of increasingly serious symptoms.  My movements were becoming uncoordinated; my thoughts were becoming sluggish and stuttering.  I remembered what I had once read about hypothermia: that by the time you realize you're in trouble, you're really in trouble.
    Fear's first clench grabbed my gut: natural selection's greedy fingers come to say hello.  All right ... buck up ... get with it ... get moving ... keep moving ... keep going ... watch your footing.  Heat ... heat is only ... a mostly downhill ... a mostly downhill mile away.  OK ... yeah ... keep moving ... keep moving.
    On top of Akin at close to mile 10.0, several piles of branches barricaded the continuing trail straight ahead.  I stood there for a few moments, dumbstruck, trying to process what this meant.  Then I got it: this stretch of the tread had been rerouted, or was in the process of being rerouted, for an indeterminate length.  I backtracked and searched for the new blaze and reroute that had to be there.  Nothing.  I traced a couple of concentric circles through the mist-murk atop the mountain's small crown.  Nothing, no luck.
    I stood there, trying to think, my head shaking furiously, my teeth clicking like cartoon dentures, the warm outflow of my breath pulsing in quick white puffs.  My shivering was now a brain-rattling seizure I couldn't stop.  My whole body screamed for relief.  I had reached a tense and teetering edge, one where all control would start to slip away if I dropped any further down the symptom list.
    Time to go, time to get out of here.  Get warm.  That's it.  Get warm.  Get off this mountain.  Car.  Car.  Get to the damn car.  Something.  Anything.  Get moving.  Get going.  Do it.  Do it!  Do it!!
    I unfolded my Chattahoochee National Forest map, but couldn't hold it still enough to make out the details.  I tried to chant my drill sergeant's basic-training marching commands out loud-"rock steady, rock steady"-to calm myself, but all I managed was a series of gasping grunts, loud and panicked.  I wadded the map to the area I needed, sat down, stretched it taut across my trembling knee and located Akin.  I abruptly decided to bail, to jump off the north side of the mountain, then curl to the right and down as I lost what turned out to be 750 feet of elevation to the road.  I was afraid I would strike the road in a place where it wouldn't be obvious which way led to Mulky Gap, so I decided to intersect the road either at the car or to the north of it.  No time for screwing up now.
    I dropped straight off the north side of the mountaintop.  After a minute or two, I ran smack into slash from a clear-cut.  I skirted the cut down and to the right from its upslope edge.  Thrashing through the wet woods generated some heat but drenched my pants even more.  I kept getting the spokes of my measuring wheel hung up in branches.  It shouldn't have been that difficult to hold the big orange wheel so it wouldn't get snagged, but I couldn't manage it.  I bushwhacked through the forest down and down, below the view-obstructing clouds now, my movements increasingly clumsy, my route choices often slow and wrong.  The synapses between the rest of my body and brain had grown gummy; neither focus nor force of will would make my body behave with customary coordination.  I fell in semi-controlled slides, feet first on the wet or sleet-covered leaves.
    I kept slanting downslope and to the right through hardwoods and evergreen heath shrubs.  The road had to be out there somewhere.  I was confused by muddled and conflicting fears for a minute or two.  I stopped to weigh the worrisome thoughts, but the racking shiver-seizures immediately shook me like a terrier shaking a ragdoll.  I started down the sidehill again, moving faster.  But the faster I bushwhacked down the steep slant of the slope, the more likely I was to fall.  And the more I fell, the more likely I was to become hurt or seriously injured.  An injury ... Jesus Christ ... that would be dicey.  But a slower and more careful pace ... that ... that ... that meant continued exposure to the cold ... which might ... could ... freeze my butt beyond mindful function.  The conflict was short lived.  My mind was too numb to fear falling for long.  Both mind and body became fixated on the same objective again: the car ... the white car ... the white car with its savior heater.
    I stumbled down and down in a single-minded rush, a barely controlled panic.  I worked my way to a light gap opened by half a dozen wind-thrown oaks.  Down and to the far left margin of the partial view sat Steve's white Mitsubishi, not where I thought it would be but as welcome as a winning lottery ticket and only a few minutes away.  I had angled too hard to the right; my trajectory would have led me to the road south of the gap and car.  I patted my pocket to quell a "what-if" that had suddenly erupted through my good cheer.  The car keys were still there.
    Changing tack, I slipped and stumbled and slid down the steep slope toward deliverance and Dahlonega.  I tried to grip hiking stick and measuring wheel in my left hand so I could use my right to grab trees to keep from falling on the slush-slick leaves.  I repeatedly dropped wheel or stick as I pin-balled from bole to bole, and fell in slow motion several times as I attempted to pick one of them up.  My legs became even more uncooperative; they frequently failed to accomplish the bidding of my mind's will in a timely manner.  I told my feet to stop, hit the brakes, but they kept right on stepping instead.  I told my feet to coordinate with my hand's quick reach for branch or trunk holdfasts, but I tobogganed on my butt instead.
    My spastic hand clicked the key on surrounding metal before I managed to slide it into the lock slot.  Same with the ignition switch.  I buried the heat lever into the red zone and drove off into the early dusk.  I met no other vehicles on the dirt-gravel road, which was good because I couldn't steer Steve's car in a straight line while my hands trembled against the wheel.  I was drunk from the cold.
    My fits of full-body shakes slowly subsided to intermittent spasms, then gradually abated to quick shuddering gasps as I entered Dahlonega.  The city lights were shining, and it was nearly dark when I made my first circuit around the square.  I cruised slowly around and around, but couldn't locate either my hiking buddies or my old Subaru.  Finally, Steve jumped off the curb and flagged me down.  He told me they had gone into a Laundromat to dry some of their wet clothes.  They had seen me make four passes.  Each of the last three times they had run closer and closer to the road, yelling and waving, sure I would see or hear them.  "You looked right at us several times."
    He told me to call Page before I drove home.  He had called her at least an hour earlier to find out if she had heard from me.  "She's really worried.  I told her what happened; I told her about the rain, but I didn't tell her how cold and dark it got.  We were worried too; we thought you might have gotten lost in the fog or gotten in trouble because of the cold.  Man, it was spooky dark up there; we were in the clouds until we descended way down off Wallalah.  It must have been rough up there for so long.  We waited for fifteen or twenty minutes at the trailhead, but we knew that you knew you couldn't catch us, so we left and came here.  How was it?   I know you were wet and cold."
    I wanted to tell him about the missing poncho, the possum, the sleet, the first fall; about shaking out of my shoes, the blocked path, the bushwhack, and almost missing his car, but I was unable to utter the necessary sentences.  All I could manage was a laconic, "Yeah, it was rough out there.  I don't think I'll do anything that dumb again."
    I drove home with the heater blowing full blast.  After my clothes dried some more, I stopped at a convenience store pay phone and called Page.  I started quaking again before I finished dropping quarters into the slot.  The same thing happened in the driveway at home.  As soon as I opened the back-seat door to grab my gear, I immediately started quivering with the startling intensity of a flu-fevered chill.  After nearly two hours of high heat, the reflex was still ready and waiting to pounce with the slightest provocation from the cold.
    Page had a well-heated home, a mug of hot chocolate, and a bowl of soup waiting for me.  After a quick supper, I stripped out of my still-damp clothes and submerged myself in a tub of warm water.  As my body relaxed, the long muscles running down the front of my thighs cramped repeatedly and painfully from hip to knee.  Another first.
    Later that night, thoroughly thawed and cramp free, I remembered the compass I always carry in my daypack.  I couldn't believe I had forgotten about the compass.  Map and compass, map and compass, I always carried a map and compass in my pack's top pocket, but what good had it done when I was too addled to remember it.  I lifted my hiking guide off the bookshelf and looked up what I had written about hypothermia:
    Wet clothes can lead to heat loss and increase your chances of hypothermia.  Remember, wool retains its insulating qualities when it is wet; cotton does not. ... The first symptom is shivering.  Continued shivering means continued seriousness.  Shivering may be followed by slurred speech, impaired judgment, weakness, and loss of coordination.  The final symptom is unconsciousness.
    The next morning I quickly came to two conclusions concerning the woefully wrong-headed and hypothermic thinking of the afternoon before.  Why hadn't I made the obvious choice, the only rational and logical and no-brainer choice, and followed the blue-blazed path behind the brush piles down to Mulky Gap and the car?  Most reroutes are relatively short and tie right back into the existing treadway.  Even if there were a few deadfalls, the soon-to-be bypassed segment would have been exponentially better than stumbling headlong willy-nilly off the side of the mountain.  So why hadn't I followed the blocked-off path once I couldn't find the reroute?  I had looked at the map and made a blatantly bonehead decision, a decision hopelessly impaired by the loss of judgment and panic of hypothermia.  The hindsight answer was easy: I had butted up against the bottom of the symptom list, the final one where you don't make it home to a hug and hot chocolate.
    And once I had made the helter-skelter decision to plunge off the top of the peak like a crazed mountain goat, I repeatedly worried about striking FS 4 south of Mulky Gap.  That, of course, was an unfounded fret.  If I had swung a little more to the south than I did the day before, I would have run right into the trail and followed it down to the gap.  And if I hadn't come to or crossed a well-defined footpath, that, of course, meant a right turn onto the road would have led to the car.  Duh.
    That morning hypothermia transformed from a CYA passage in my own guidebook-something as alien as a mid-day possum that might happen to someone else, some inexperienced rookie-to a real and relevant danger.  I had learned an important lesson about hypothermia's cold-weather conspirators, collective risk and human error, and its insidious MO.  Hypothermia's early stages are comparable to the beginning symptoms of drunkenness, in that your steadfast belief that you are still in control is the illusion, while the denied reality of impaired function is increasingly the fact.
    Hypothermia can turn you-anyone, everyone-into a stammering, stump-dumb, scatter-brained fool.  It can make you clumsy and incoherent.  Unconscious and dead.  The invisible line between calculated risk and recklessness is perilously thin and slick as a sleet-covered root.  Poor judgment is the most dangerous grizzly in the woods.  Nature bats last and natural selection never sleeps; it doesn't even catnap.  It's always out there-unwavering as gravity, silent as a meditating shadow, indifferent as time.

Notes
1. The Hiking Trails of North Georgia
2. In these stories forest service (FS) is the federal U.S. Forest Service, and these roads, almost always dirt-gravel, run through national forests, in this case Georgia's Chattahoochee National Forest.
3. Licklog is a fairly common Southern Appalachian place name.  The term comes to us from the old days, when farmers ran free range cattle in the lush summer high country of the mountains.  The herdsmen chopped roughly square holes in deadfall logs and dropped salt blocks in the slots.  The cattle licked the blocks until they were gone, then licked the salt-impregnated logs.
4. Today, thirty-four years and thousands of Southern Appalachian miles under my boots, I have not come across a second possum during daylight hours.
5. After my right-side ribs felt better, I hiked that half-section of the DRT again on a mostly sunny and much warmer day.  I carried a new poncho, new rain jacket, and my first pair of rain pants in my day pack.  That stretch of trail measured 10.9 miles.

In his book Natural Acts, David Quammen borrowed a detailed description of hypothermia to add factual data to his chapter A Deathly Chill:

    As that core temperature falls, the symptoms of hypothermia trauma develop in progressive stages.  A physician and mountaineer named Ted Lathrop, in a pamphlet published by the Mazamus Climbing Club, has described those stages in detail.
    Dropping from a normal 98.6° down to 96° at the body core, the victim will show uncontrollable shivering and a distinct onset of clumsiness.  From 95° down to 91° the shivering will continue, and now speech will become slurred, mental acuity will decrease, there may also be amnesia.  During this stage often come those crucial mistakes in judgment that prevent a victim from taking certain obvious steps that could save him from death.

A Rolling Moss Gathers Stones

    I spend my days keeping safe and wandering about the internet. I read the tables of contents of half a dozen or more scientific journals and check out the papers that have catchy titles or seem so off-beat that I wonder what they are about. I'm always drawn to things that are a mystery - unexplained phenomena. This week the award goes to a paper that appeared in the journal Polar Biology: Rolling stones gather moss: movement and longevity of moss balls on an Alaskan glacier.

    Moss balls are ovoid masses of moss, up to 8+ inches in longest dimension. Each moss ball has a center that is either living or dead moss, some gravel, a small rock, or a quantity of sand. They are known by other names: cushions, polsters, or the especially evocative "glacier mice."

Alaskan glacier with "glacier mice" scattered across its surface.(crop of Fig.1C, Hotaling et al., 2020;
Creative Commons 4.0

    Each ball is made of the same kind of moss, but many different moss species can form balls. They are an uncommon phenomenon, confined to temperate and, especially, polar regions of the world. They range from 2 to 8 inches in the longest diameter. They are not common, but have been observed on glaciers in Alaska, the Andes and Iceland. Glacier mouse is especially apt name because they move about the surface of the glacier.

    How the moss balls move is unknown. One explanation suggests that the moss ball protected the surface of the ice beneath it from wind erosion. As wind blows over the glacier it abrades the ice and, over time, the moss ball would be sitting on a pedestal of ice and would eventually slip off. This would suggest that movement of the moss balls would be in the downwind direction,

Moss ball with identification bracelet
(crop of Fig.1D, Hotaling et al., 2020;
Creative Commons 4.0

    Hotaling et al. studied the movement of moss balls on an Alaska glacier over a two month period of time. They marked 30 balls with a "bracelet" of colored beads, each ball receiving a unique combination of colors. The initial location of each ball was carefully determined and the color code made it possible to identify the balls and determine the distance and direction of their movement.  The researchers returned 7 times over two months, gathering data on the direction and distance of moss ball movement.

    The result was mystifying.  The moss balls did not move downhill (the glacier sloped east), nor did they move in the downwind direction (which was southeast). Neither did they move randomly. Instead, by the end of the study they headed, as a group, to the southwest.

    It's nice to know that there are still mysteries in the world.

References:

Hotaling, S., Bartholomaus, T.C., and Gilbert, S.L. (2020). Rolling stones gather moss: movement and longevity of moss balls on an Alaskan glacier. Polar Biol 43, 735-744.

Shacklette, H.T. (1966). Unattached Moss Polsters on Amchitka Island, Alaska. The Bryologist 69, 346-352.

Wheels with Skunk by Tim Homan

   Mid-May, 1986. While wheel measuring Mountaintown Creek Trail (1) down an easy grade close to its namesake stream, I walked around a bend and hit the brakes. Up ahead, only 30 to 35 feet away, a striped skunk held the middle of the tread as it glanced back over its shoulder to see what had come clicking down the path. The sighting was a complete surprise. I had never encountered a Southern Appalachian skunk abroad during mid-day before, and just thirty seconds earlier would have considered the possibility of such a sighting as wasp-waist slim to none. The skunk neither ran nor walked away; it manifested no outward fear whatsoever. The cat-sized mammal remained where it was, giving me ample opportunity to note the white streak between its eyes, and the judicial white wig on the back of its head that forked and flowed into V-pattern stripes below the ridge of its back.
   After a long appraising look, the polecat sauntered ahead. It nonchalantly zigzagged from one side of the track to the other for a sniff, stopped altogether for longer sniffs, then strolled straight ahead with short, small-footed steps. The skunk quickly taught me the appropriate pace and spacing for a new hiking partner. When I crowded to within 20 feet, either by failing to stop promptly or by impatience with the poky tempo, the striped skunk considered my approach a misdemeanor tailgating infraction. After each transgression, the polecat turned its dark and seemingly alert eyes my way and gave me a warning look: The Look, the hold-it-right-there-Buster, big-stick look. The Look reminded me of the quick glance shortstops give to look the baserunner back to third before firing the ball to first. That look says I know you’re there, don’t even think about advancing. And that’s what this mephitid’s stare said: I know you’re there, don’t even think of advancing; in fact, you had better back up a bit, better get back to third, a safe place where you won’t get gunned down and gassed out.
    I always heeded The Look’s advice, a silent admonition about personal space between fellow walkers in the woods. I never tested the tensile strength of the malodorous mammal’s tailgating rule; each time I backed down by backing up two appeasing paces to the rear. After all, I didn’t want to run the little fellow off the trail. Or worse.
    I never pressed closer than 20 feet, and Pepe never raised his bottle-brush tail or stamped his dainty feet, the first steps in a choreographed warning mechanism. A warning sequence that is all bluff and bluster right up until it isn’t. All hat and no cows until the instant stampede of stench blasts from a double-barreled squirt gun.
    The skunk always snuck a quick glance at me whenever it stopped. And whenever I approached too closely, which I often did because I enjoyed the game, the skunk gave me The Look until I backed up a bit. It was my fourth day out alone, so I started talking to the little guy, us being new hiking buddies and all. The first thing I said was something about him being slower than continental drift. Pokecat—that was his new hiker handle—was not much of a talker, but his expressive eyes and demonstrative body language made up for his lack of verbal skills.
    Pokecat continued to communicate his need for a minimum of 7 yards of personal space with brief glances and The Look when necessary. He had a good point. With all the wild land around us and close to five and a half miles of trail, why should one hiker crowd another? Seven or eight yards of walking room was certainly a reasonable expectation.
    I quit crowding the black-and-white stink bomb, stopped moving in for the big-stick stare. He didn’t seem to notice my newfound kindness. He continued down the track as before, moseying intermittently ahead, apparently calm and carefree, his gait humped and unhurried. His dawdling pace reminded me of hiking with some of the botanists I knew. He moved ahead ever so slowly, his legs short and his belly low clearance. He stopped to investigate a scent on the side of the path. I clicked off 13 more feet and stopped to write nature notes. He glanced back, then advanced at daddy longlegs speed. Then I moved, tethered lockstep to the business end of an insouciant skunk.
    I tagged along, remaining out of provocation range of Pokecat’s onboard spray gun. After we had hiked together for 372 feet, the route curled to the right away from the clear-water creek. The skunk ambled straight ahead at the bend, abandoning the footpath and angling down toward the low bank of the mountain stream. Completely assured he could walk softly wherever he pleased, instincts innocent of firearms and fastball rocks, Pokecat never looked back as I clicked around the curve. And so ended the slowest and most memorable short stretch of trail in my Southern Appalachian hiking life.
    The first peculiar detail about this encounter, which occurred close to noon by sun-angle guess on a bright summer day, is that skunks are devoutly nocturnal or nocturnal and crepuscular. Prior to 1986, I had never walked up on a skunk after the sun had risen above the high Southern Appalachian horizon. In fact, outside of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, I had never seen a polecat pussy-footing around in the sunshine before. All five of my previous striped skunk sightings (2) had taken place along the same 2.1-mile stretch of trail in Georgia’s Cohutta Wilderness: the upper-elevation section of the Rough Ridge Trail from its East Cowpen junction to its Sugar Cove connection. But all of these meetings, at the beginning of backpack trips and long dayhikes, had taken place in the gray light of dawn before the sun had crested the Blue Ridge to the east. Each time I had slept in my vehicle at the Three Forks Mountain Trailhead and set an alarm to wake while it was still dark.
    I knew the two highly unusual occurrences in combination—a polecat rambling about in bright diurnal light and willing to share a trail with me—constituted a rarity that had little likelihood of repetition. But still, this prolonged, occasionally eye-to-eye experience gave me hope I might bump into another wild mephitid, if only for a moment or two, along a Mountain South trail at high noon again.
    During the late 70s, I had a close-call encounter with a striped skunk at the Cades Cove Campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This skunk, however, was a campground pest whose circadian clock had been recalibrated by food reward. I spotted the freeloader at my dog’s food bowl at around six on a summer evening. Fortunately, I caught sight of the polecat a moment before my dog did, giving me just enough time to leap to her rope before she tore into that blundering imbecile of a defenseless creature—or so she thought. She knew nothing of the skunk’s warning coloration, a long-remembered black-and-white shield to the initiated, nor had any clue of the olfactory assault her charge would trigger. I reeled her in and tied her off close to the picnic table. Her straining-at-the-leash barks and growls, plus a few chunks of gravel bowled in underhand, drove the intruder from camp. The tenting neighbors to either side, who had fled across the road, expressed their relief.
    Two years after I trailed the Mountaintown Creek skunk, I spotted another one at the far end of the second wildlife opening along Flats Mountain Trail (3). That striped skunk quickly retreated into the woods, its white V wedging the way, as soon as I stopped to raise my binoculars. And that was it. That skunk was not only abruptly gone, but the glimpse also did not qualify as a full-daylight sighting. I had started hiking in the early dawn before sunrise, and the overcast sky was still a misty gray when I reached the nearby opening. So now, thirty-four years and thousands of trail miles later, I still have not come face to face—or face to raised tail—with another walk-about skunk during the bright daylight hours.

Notes

1 The 5.6-mile-long Mountaintown Creek Trail is located just southeast of the Cohutta Wilderness in the North Georgia mountains (Chattahoochee National Forest, Fannin and Gilmer Counties).
 
2 I was reasonably sure, enough to indict but not convict, that my first four sightings were of the same striped skunk.

3 The 6.0-mile-long Flats Mountain Trail skirts the southwestern boundary of the Citico Creek Wilderness, approximately 16,226 acres, for most of its mileage in the eastern Tennessee mountains (Cherokee National Forest, Monroe County).
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   Skunks were classified as members of the Weasel family (Mustelidae) until modern molecular analysis transferred them to their own family (Mephitidae). Five skunk species—striped, hooded, eastern spotted, western spotted, and common or American hog-nosed—live in North America. All five inhabit at least a small portion of the United States, and all five find suitable habitat in Texas. The striped, which occurs in all forty-eight contiguous states, is by far the most common, widespread, and well known skunk in the U.S.
   Members of the Mephitidae family are the only mammals that have slowly turned their scent glands into a weapons-grade defense mechanism: a highly concentrated stew pot of the devil’s own putrescence, nozzled and metered like a long-range nose spray. The acidic ingredients in skunk spray are highly sulfuric compounds known as mercaptans, so at least you’re assured of getting an all natural and organic dose of highly effective deterrent.
   I have since learned that striped skunks can back blast up to 12 feet with disgusting accuracy. Aiming for the eyes, they often squeeze off four to six nauseating rounds in rapid fire through twin nozzles: a double-barreled six-shooter locked and loaded with big-stick stench. The striped skunk’s scientific binomial (Mephitis mephitis) comes from the word mephitis, which my nearly seven-pound New Oxford American Dictionary defines as follows: “N (noun) a noxious gas emanating from something, esp. from the earth. a foul or poisonous stench Origin early 18th cent.: from Latin.” So, as you can see, this mephitid’s scientific name—genus and species—translates to foul stench, foul stench, doubly foul stench—one mephitis for each scent-gland firing tube.
   Striped skunks are reluctant chemical combatants. They do not play their big stick, big stink hold card unless they absolutely must repel a predator. If the threat isn’t serious, or serious yet, polecats frequently squeeze off a small-sample whiff, a slight spritz of Pepe Le Pew stink pot as a friendly warning. They diffuse most threatening encounters by lifting their tails, stamping their front feet, and giving fair warning by hissing and growling. If the would-be predator fails to decode their body language, skunks twist into a U-shape so that both eyes and backsides are staring at the intruder’s face. If that final warning fails, they shoot a stream of noxious yellow liquid right at their antagonist’s eyes. This weapon of mass stench can cause gagging, pain in the sensitive membranes of the nose and mouth, even temporary blindness—all of which make it easy for skunks to stroll away like they are walking the beach with a parasol.
   When retreating from predators they can’t see, striped skunks will release a back-fired cloud of mephitic musk that usually stops pursuing animals dead in their tracks. Skunk kits come into the world armed and ready to reek. They are capable of spraying before their eyes open: boom, adorable little stink grenades born willing and able to pull the pin.
   The reason you see and smell so many dead striped skunks along the roads, in addition to their instinctive over reliance upon their warning coloration and predator repellent, is that they are attracted to carrion as a food source. This habit means they frequently add themselves to the splatter. And once splattered, they inadvertently bait their brethren to the carrion corridor. Scientists would call their self-inflicted carnage along highways a negative feedback loop.
   Mephitis mephitis suffers from a second glaring gap in the efficacy of its biological defense mechanism. Due to evolution’s constant fencing—thrust then counter thrust, safety then terror—the Great Horned Owl is now the skunk’s only systematic predator. This fierce and powerful raptor, known as the tiger of the night, is not bothered by the doubly bad odor, at least not enough to forego a large and slow-footed meal.
   Random mutation and natural selection designed the skunk’s pelage of prominent white V against black as a can’t miss-can’t forget warning coloration. But the owl’s own evolution circumvented the skunk’s predator repellent and turned the white stripes into landing strips. And now when the large, cat-eared owls hunt below a bright moon, the skunk’s warning white turns double-cross traitor, turns into runway lights leading to a lethal landing.