Cascade River Cedars

March 16, 2024

As of late I've really been exploring the rivers of the area; my last two posts have focused on the Baptism River and Dragon Creek. This is just the perfect time of year for such adventures, the weather has been warm and sunny, but the ice is mostly thick enough to still comfortably walk on the rivers, although you need to walk along it from time to time where the ice is a little thinner (or completely gone). Today I explored the Cascade River near the Hidden Falls. This was the first time I've ever stopped at this river and it's definitely one of my favorites in the area.

One of the falls I came across

Still plenty of thick ice on the river

Lots of bridges with water flowing underneath

Another bridge

A lot of interesting textures and shapes in the ice

Beaver skull found along the river

I was absolutely taken aback by all the cedar trees. Almost the entire area was dominated by huge cedars, many of which had their roots exposed. I think there were two different ecosystems going on here, a lowland white cedar forest (WFn53a) at the bottom of the ravine along the river that transitioned into a white cedar - yellow birch forest (MHn45b) as you climbed up the hill. Another show-stopper in addition to the cedars was the massive amount of of Canada yew growing in both ecosystems.

Cedar with exposed roots

One of the larger trees, my entire wingspan didn't even make it half way around the trunk

A lot of the cedars leaned significantly downhill

The cedars housed an interesting lichen community. I'd assume there were quite a few things contributing to that. Between the bedrock along the river, the lowland forest, and the upland forest there was quite a bit of variability. The whole area is along a river adding extra moisture and cooling effects (and not too far from the big lake). And of course cedars have some rather textured bark that many lichens find as suitable habitat. I saw many species for the first time today! Elf ear lichen (Normandina pulchella) was one of the favorites that I saw, and what a fitting name. Some other interesting ones are White-rimmed shingle lichen (Fuscopannaria leucosticta) and mealy-rimmed shingle lichen (Pannaria conoplea), both on the MN plant and fungi watchlist. There were also many calicioid lichens all over some of the cedars, at least 3 species that I could identify. Canary whiskers (Chaenotheca chrysocephala) is pretty distinctive with its bright yellowish-green thallus and black stalk with yellow prunia. Another species I saw was Chaenothecopsis viridialba, which was growing lichenicolously on some of the canary whiskers. It's stalk is much wider and white. The other species is frog whiskers (Chaenotheca trichialis), which grows lignicolously. It has a black stalk with greyish-white prunia.