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Past Activity

Nature Ramble with Whitey Lueck

  • Start date: 03/18/2025

  • Start time: 10:00 AM

  • End date: 03/18/2025

  • End time: 12:00 PM

Description:

We'll gather at the Obsidians Lodge where Whitey will introduce what we'll be experiencing during our slow amble with stops along the Ribbon Trail into the Native Plant Garden and Rhododendron Garden of Hendricks Park. Then we'll retrace our steps back to the Lodge, with an optional loop up toward Spring Boulevard and return to the Lodge through a new development.

Photo by: Joanna Alexander

  • Event Leader: Joanna Alexander

  • Event Leader Phone: 541-513-9624

  • Event Leader Email: joalexgypsy@gmail.com

  • Assistant Leader:

  • Event category: Conservation, Science, & Education

  • Area Type: Valley

  • Departure Location: Obsidian Lodge

  • Rating: Easy

  • Roundtrip total drive miles:

  • Season: 2025

  • Permits Required:

  • Event Status: Passed

  • Supplies and Equipment Required: Wear comfortable footwear and dress for the weather.

  • participant prerequisites:

  • Conditions:

  • Total Distance: 2 miles

  • Member Fees: —

  • Elevation Gain: 300 feet

  • Non-Member Fees: $2.00

  • Committee: Conservation, Science, & Education

  • Junior member fees: —

Trip Report

As recently as 7,000 years ago, humans and megafauna- lived side by side in the Upper Willamette Valley.  Wooly mammoths, saber-tooth tigers,  and giant sloths, of which a skeleton can see at the UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History.  And the landscape was not anything like today's hills covered with Douglas-fir forests.  On a few stops as we ambled over the trails in the wild section of Hendricks Park, Whitey Lueck would stop and describe the evolution, through the millenia, of the land where we trod today. He also speculated on how the landscape might look in many decades or in the far distant future.  Dieocious Indian plums were in bloom, their spring green filled the understory in spots,.  Along with yellow wood violets, we saw three types of trillium coming into bloom, spring beauties, buds of fawn lily, Pacific swordferns and their hilt, licorice ferns, and an area lush with tiger lily plants that will be over 3' tall when they come into fiery bloom in June.  And the "sacrificial altar" (Whitey's humorous words for former water source where camping used to happen)  in the spot Whitenycalls the Saddle, as it is a low point between two rises.

In the Rhododendron Garden, Whitey evoked our human need to collect colorful plants native to faraway lands (often Asia)--and pointed out Cornelian Cherry dogwood (Cornus mas), Winter hazel, Viburnum, Edgeworthia, young sprouts of soon-to-be-giantic gunnera leaves, and saucer magnolias about to open.   I learned as well that the persons who started the Rhododendron Garden (in 1951) were North American pioneers in the cultivation of rhododendrons.

Our group enjoyed the slow pace and highly edifying walk along the trails and paths.  Much gratitude to Whitey Lueck for sharing his deep understanding of the out of doors that we all love.

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