I'm eleven months through my project of recording night and dawn in
Muir Woods every month. I also wanted to add the sound of a storm in
the forest to the collection. Last winter, when storms blew in at
night I had trouble finding the motivation to drive in the storm for
an hour and then go out in it.
Day before yesterday a big storm was predicted to hit Friday morning.
That was perfect for me; my ambition burns brighter in the morning.
Getting there proved to be a challenge. The Highway 1 exit from 101
was closed due to flooding. The route through Mill Valley was mostly
clear but I was stopped by a tree across the road a couple of miles
before the park. I went back. Approaching Tam Junction from the north
I was able to get onto Highway 1 and get over the ridge.
Going down Muir Woods Road I had to stop twice to drag branches off
the road. I was starting to think that my heroic plan was perhaps a
bit foolish. There were no other cars on the road and I had a good
chance of being stranded for a while.
The park (Muir Woods National Monument) <http://www.nps.gov/muwo/>
was closed. I parked in the maintenance yard and rigged up with my
shoulder mics. I had the bad luck of arriving at the parking lot gate
just as a park policeman pulled up to make his rounds checking the
gates, parking lots, visitor center, and cafe. He told me the park
was closed. I asked him if Mia (the boss) was in her office. He said
OK, I could go see her, but I should get out as fast as I could
because it was a very dangerous place.
I had to pick my way through the shattered remains of a grand old oak
on my way through the parking lot. The boardwalk was carpeted with
litter and branches. The director's office was locked up. I made a
five-minute recording before going further, so in case the policeman
came to check on me I would at least have something. My Sharp
MD-MS722 recorder stopped responding to its buttons. This was what
happened to one of the same model when I was recording in the rain on
my first nature recording expedition, in New Zealand in 2001. I
unplugged the mics and put the recorder away, hoping it would run to
the end of the disc and shut itself down. Time for MD recorder No. 2.
I got to Cathedral Grove, my recording spot in tall old growth
redwoods. I recorded for half an hour. Being in a steep-sided canyon
there wasn't much wind at ground level. The rain was being processed
by the redwoods into large drops that made loud impacts after falling
a hundred feet. Each wind gust was crowned by a spatter of drops. The
drops were pretty noisy on the brim of my cowboy hat, so I switched
to a knit cap for another half an hour. That was quieter, but of
course more drops hit the windscreens on my shoulders. With the
raging storm I didn't have to worry about body noises. I was hoping
to catch a tree falling, but the best I could do was a branch
cracking and falling (hear below).
Despite the storm I heard calls of winter wrens and ravens, two
ubiquitous resident species.
As I was soaked and cold, I stopped at one hour. Tried to stop,
actually, because my second Sharp's buttons had frozen up, too. I had
brought an extra plastic bag to put the recorders in, but by the time
I started recording I was pretty exhausted from the circuitous drive
in the storm and picking my way through the debris, and I thought
holding it close to my chest would be shelter enough. It wasn't. Two
down.
I let that machine run to the end while I walked back, and when it
ran out I plugged the mics into my Nagra ARES-M. I stopped in a few
places to catch the raging of the creek in flood. Back at the
entrance a tree had fallen across in front of the visitor center
while I was out. There was high wind at ground level there, and I had
to turn my gain way down to keep from overloading. I would have
switched on the high-pass filter, but on the Nagra M it's in a menu.
Later I remembered that I had made a preset with the filter in, only
two menu levels down, but again my tired brain failed to connect
under chaotic conditions.
Back at the lab I put all three recorders in a food dryer for a few
hours. They recorded their TOCs after many determined presses of the
stop buttons. A couple of days later they seemed fine.
Sorry this story has gotten so long. I edited together four of the
best gusts from Cathedral Grove:
<http://www.dandugan.com/downloads/Muir%20Woods%20Storm.mp3>
I tried to upload it to the group cache, but it was too long (2-1/2
minutes, 192K b/s).
-Dan Dugan
"While a picture is worth a thousand words, a
sound is worth a thousand pictures." R. Murray Schafer via Bernie Krause
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