{"id":83453,"date":"2012-03-06T00:04:11","date_gmt":"2012-03-06T05:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/83453\/feel-undulating-grassland\/"},"modified":"2012-03-06T00:04:11","modified_gmt":"2012-03-06T05:04:11","slug":"feel-undulating-grassland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/83453\/feel-undulating-grassland\/","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes You Feel Like an Undulating Grassland, Sometimes You Don’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went to go visit these famous geographical features of Central Western Washington yesterday\u2026<\/font><\/p>\n

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No\u2026 Not that! <\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

The other one!<\/p>\n

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Ah yes. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\"\"The Mounds.\u00a0 The Mina Mounds<\/strong>.\u00a0 These aren\u2019t the only mysterious prairie mounds found in the world.\u00a0 Examples can be found in several, but not many parts of the world.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never seen anything like them before in my life.\u00a0 Totally bizarre.\u00a0 Acre upon acre of undulating mounds under a lichen and scrub covered grassland.\u00a0 \u201cPrairie Mounds\u201d may be as yet to be definitively explained by geographers, but given that they\u2019re all located right on the fringes of the furthest expanses of glaciers in the last Ice Age, yeah, glaciation must have something to do with why these mound fields exits.
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Whatever the “Giant Prairie Dog” theorists might otherwise believe. <\/font><\/p>\n

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Now, one may not think of Western Washington as a likely place for there to be prairies at all. We\u2019re all covered in trees, right?\u00a0\u00a0 Just as there a few forests in Nebraska, a few flatlands in Montana and a few Democrats in Mississippi, the Evergreen State is home to patches of prairies.<\/p>\n

Many of these prairies were artificially maintained and would have been swallowed up by the forests if not for the hand of man.\u00a0\"\" The Native peoples recognized the value and medicinal use of several plants that would only grow on prairies, and burned away the encroaching forests, something that land management bureaucrats do to this day (along with building nice, civilized asphault walking paths).<\/p>\n

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Bury these 9-foot-tall mounds under a canopy of 80 foot tall Douglas Firs for a few thousand years, and yeah, they wouldn\u2019t be very noticeable. <\/font><\/p>\n

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Along with a lot of neat geographical and historical stuff I learned on my voyage to West-Central Washington this weekend, I learned that they really love to shoot guns at hillsides!\u00a0 Damn!! I heard more live ammunition being fired in one day than I had in my whole previous life!\u00a0 Between the nearby gun club, the folks flying multiple model airplanes in the adjacent property and the overall landscape, it felt like I had landed a battlefield of World War One! \u00a0 Later in the day, a dozen miles away, I even somewhat accidentally wandered into one of their firing ranges while looking for a place to hike!\u00a0 (the last scene in the video)…\u00a0 It’s a weird experience to try and calmly walk away from a bad scene while dozens of men discharge firearms behind your back… <\/font><\/p>\n

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Video trivia question!\u00a0 What are the two TV shows represented in this theme music??
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I went to go visit these famous geographical features of Central Western Washington yesterday\u2026 No\u2026 Not that! The other one! Ah yes. The Mounds.\u00a0 The Mina Mounds.\u00a0 These aren\u2019t the only mysterious prairie mounds found in the world.\u00a0 Examples can be found in several, but not many parts of the world.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never seen anything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,837,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-nature-2","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}