Devil's Club
This approach may work in rocky soil areas but simply will not work in areas with large amounts of top soil.
Notice the man at the left upper quadrant looking into the gully.
One can spend a fortune making things appear to work along the area viewable from the roadside, but, when you have soils like this, you are kidding yourself that you have achieved anything. There will be a one- or two-foot jump a few hundred feet either side of the road, negating such efforts. Then another and then another and ..........................
Here is a scene from five to ten miles west of where Mrs. Cow grew up.
@holy-cow That is indeed sad. Loess doesn??t have the cobbles that armor a stream bed against erosion. Around here a great deal of care goes into using inverted stumps and shot rock to prevent washouts. Ideally fish friendly culverts would mirror the natural stream bed. The older round culverts tend to channel water into a hydraulic dredge at the outflow and when they can??t handle the volume in a storm, the road gets washed out. Lots of them have gone in around here and they are definitely an improvement.
They sound like a good thing, where they will work. We depend a lot on fish eggs coming in on the bodies of birds traveling from water body to water body. Just this afternoon I stopped to look at a little pool next to the county road. There were numerous fish visible in the clear runoff water from the pond on the other side of the road. Last Summer both the little pool and the pond were bone dry for a few weeks. The pond has no stream or pond above it, merely runoff from rain or snow on the hill above it, so no other source of fish.
ugh.... devil's club is really one of the worst. nasty stuff.
Ugh, I remember that stuff well. I'm not as sensitive to it as the guy who wrote this article, but I do remember a few AK survey jobs where I got hit. I was also bad about bushwhacking up drainages while backpacking, that didn't help either. The time savings were negated by the blisters.
I grew up in Texas and was darn near immune to poison ivy, but devil's club always got me within a few hours of contact.
@frozennorth That sounds like some decent devils club armor. Years back I had a 'club' spring back on me like VC booby trap and plant a bunch of thorns in my hand, one of which broke off in a joint in my finger. Couldn't dig it all out and it left the joint swollen and inflamed for months until my body absorbed it I guess. A guy should get combat pay for working in the stuff.
We have it here. Aka ??devil??s walking stick?.
we harvest it, tie it in bundles, and stuff it under the office. Or other dry place. Then, the kids peel them, and make walking sticks. They are very light, very strong, and everybody who has received one, likes them.
as others have said, they aren??t friendly. But, hey, tell Eve not to eat of the ??tree of knowledge of good and evil?.
🙂
Nate
