September 21, 2025

To and From Chicago

September 21, 2025/ Gwen Morrison

My husband and I signed up for an Urban Birding Festival in Chicago earlier this month. I’ll be doing a series of posts about it over the next week. This post is about our drive to and from the city; as usual my husband did all the driving.

We made frequent rest stops along the way. At our first one I realized that the route from Springfield MO to Chicago via Route 66 was depicted on floor! The Interstate route of today is likely a bit straighter that the old route…and the speed we traveled was probably higher too.

I took pictures as we drove – road cuts in Missouri, the arch in St. Louis just before we crossed the Mississippi River, and sunflowers in Illinois.

At the end of our trip, I took a few pictures as we left the city…and of sunflowers along the roadside. I like that Illinois encourages sunflowers in the medians by only mowing the edges (and not mowing too frequently even at the edge). The farmland appeared to be mostly planted in soybeans and corn.

At the last rest stop in Illinois, I recognized a hackberry – it was full of galls produced by insects as most hackberries are.

And then I photographed the arch and bridges as we crossed the Mississippi River into St. Louis.

There was a little fall color in the forests west of St. Louis…and the bluffs always make for added interest.

We got home easily; our three cats were a great welcoming committee.

March 30, 2025

Zooming – March 2023

March 30, 2025/ Gwen Morrison

I selected 22 images for this month’s zooming post. 7 were taken during our road trip to Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge (going through Kansas City), 5 during the road trip to the Orchid Show (St. Louis), 5 at home, 3 during a hike at Cedar Gap Conservation Area, and 2 in Dallas. March was a good month to be out and about…typical for early spring!

February 23, 2025

Learning about Missouri Geology – February 2025

February 23, 2025/ Gwen Morrison

The geology class/lecture I am taking at Missouri State University is providing good background in general geology…but I am most interested in the geology of Missouri…trying to be more aware of the geologic features around me.

My copy of Roadside Geology to Missouri has been a good reference. On the drive from Nixa to Branson, MO, my husband’s navigation system took a scenic route (to avoid a construction area); the two-lane road was predominately downhill and followed Woods Fork over to US 65.

The road cuts are spectacular along US 65 with one of the tallest marking the margin of the Springfield Plateau…and then the Salem Plateau as we continued south. There are layers of limestone, dolomite, and shale. There were frozen ‘waterfalls’ from some of the cuts. The day was sunny, so it was easy to get pictures of the cuts as we moved past.

We stopped at the Branson Scenic Overlook downstream from the dam that created Table Rock Lake. The overlook area was the first proposed location for Table Rock Dam. There were evidently too many cracks and faults in the rocks to build it at this location. The dam was built in the 1950s and spans the White River creating the deepest lake in Missouri.

The view for the overlook shows Branson and the lake in the distance but I was more interested in the river immediately below…the bare trees and remnants of snow…ripples in the cold water.

Our field trip to the prairies near Lockwood MO (from Springfield) took us from the Springfield Plateau to the Osage Plains. It was a very cloudy day, so I took few pictures - I did notice the flattening out as we drove around farmland with parcels being maintained as prairie. There were low rolling hills. There was a significant windfarm….indicating that the wind there is reliable enough to make it worthwhile.