Wild Signs and Star Paths: Key #11, The Invisible Handrail

[kylec]

This series is an exploration of the works of Tristan Gooley. I’ll document my efforts to learn to read nature’s signs. If you enjoy reading, I encourage you to support the author by purchasing a copy of Wild Sings and Star Paths (UK) or The Nature Instinct (US). I’m in no way affiliated with the author, nor do I profit from sales of the book.

Last Week’s Work

To notice the way clouds can reveal the things beneath them, from their presence and type to the colors.

New World

Imagine you have a superpower. Where most can see for a few miles, and far less if there are buildings, rocks, and trees in the way, you can see the terrain ahead for of tens of miles beyond. You know if there’s a dense forest in the distance, or an open grassland. You can tell if there’s snow in the next valley over. And you can trace the precise line where the open ocean turns to ice. You spot islands before they appear in the ocean, and distant mountains obscured behind the treeline. Handy skill for a navigator, isn’t it? Luckily it’s a power any of us can acquire if we just turn to the clouds.

The bottoms of clouds act as mirrors, reflecting colors based on what’s beneath them. Clouds change color with composition. White clouds are small water particles scattering light. As they swell in size, the particles absorb light, become grayer, and more likely to fall to the earth as rain. While this affects the main body, the underside can shift based on differences in light reflection at ground level, i.e. color. Open water paints the clouds darker than ice pack, while snow on land might be yellow. There is even a difference in color between pack ice and sea ice. In warmer climes, forests darken the clouds where open lands leaves them lighter. A lagoon may give them a green hue, and an exposed coral reef, slightly pink. The gradations are endless, so observing the colors of the cloud bottoms in an area where you know what lies where is a great way to start honing in on this skill. I utterly failed to do this over the holidays due to both distractions, and clouds that were either too small for the effect, or packed with dark rain.

But there’s even more to the sky map. The clouds themselves appear where heat creates enough water vapor that rises to an altitude where it reaches the dew point—the point at which the air can no longer contain all the vapor—and turns to a cloud. Those low, puffy cumulus clouds aren’t random. They appear over a patch that’s hotter than the surrounding area. Maybe a road, or a parking lot, or a meadow surrounded by forest. Of course they won’t stay anchored long, so it’s better to observe the trend of where they’re coming from. If they do stay in one place while all other clouds move, there’s something unusual there. Pacific navigators use this effect to find islands. An island may only be visible to the naked eye at 12 miles out, for example, but the clouds that form over its highlands and refuse to budge can be visible much, much farther away. In a similar manner, a small cloud shaped like a lens or a UFO can betray a mountain peak on land.

These are just some of the ways that the sky reflects back to us a map of the land hangs over. The habit of observing clouds is good for more than just getting a sense of the impending weather. When this sense is tuned, it gives us a vantage that to the untrained eye must seem superhuman.

Key #11: The Invisible Handrail

A road, river, train tracks, coastline, etc. can act as a handrail for our exploration. If we know our handrail and roughly which direction it lies, we can venture out on the other side even to the point of losing sight of it for a long period of time, provided we can retain a sense of the direction we need to walk to encounter it again. This week, I’ll pay attention to these long, unbroken features that fence me in and notice how they affect my sense of direction and my confidence in where I am.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

This is great. A habitual cloudgazer, the wife and I have been in the habit of watching for rain in distant clouds. But the color aspect entirely eluded me.

Thank you, and Happy New Year.

[kylec]

The rainier it gets, the less useful the color signs are, but those sparkling white clouds work great.

I actually find it easier to see things like hotspots and hidden peaks than the colors, but I'm working on it.