Field Trip To Snowbowl

On Sunday evening Taisyn (my pup) and I knew the sunset would be beautiful and we put our heads together to kill two birds with one stone; find a place that we could find some great examples of succession and watch the sunset. It was decided that our local ski resort, Snowbowl, would be the perfect place to accomplish our mission.

We've arrived at our destination at 7:14pm

 

 

A layout of Snowbowl

Succession is when nature is disturbed by either
something man made or a natural disaster and nature begins to rebuild itself in the aftermath.  I chose the
ski resort because it's a perfect example of how man
disrupts the land, not only once, but for long periods of time once a year. There isn't much time for vegitation to restablish before it is disrupted again. I wanted to see:

A. Does any vegitation have time to grow back before the season starts again.

B. How much had grown in in the last month or so.

The Ski Run I chose

First vegetation spotted

This is where they removed plant life to construct a parking lot and the vegetation is growing back

 

Here an Aspen is actually growing out from underneath the building.

 If someone were to argue with me about our natural systems not being effected by our actions I would start with asking a few questions. What do we do when we run out of room to build? What happens when the ability for nature to reproduce becomes slim to none with nowhere to grow? These are the things that we are faced with when earth's population continues to grow and demand for places to live etc. increases. It only takes one person to think that our activities won't have an effect on nature's ability to restore because when everyone is in that state of mind it's only a matter of time before it catches up to us and it's too late for mankind.