Quicksand Fans

BM Adventure #1: My First Sink Of The Season, in QuickClay/Silt!

Please feel free to use the pictures for backgrounds!

After a very long wait through a long La Niña winter and early spring, it has been weakening, and the weather has been beginning to return to normal! I had eyed Sunday, May 1'st for the first bikeride, but wasn't certain about the privacy at my Harris Creek slide area on a weekend, with all the atv'ers and motorbikers likely tearing up the trails. I also didn't believe that it would be as nice as they forecasted (sunny with a high of 19˚C or 66˚F), given the cloudy, showery day Saturday. I was also feeling a bit tired Saturday, so I decided to wait until Wednesday, May 4'th, which was also supposed to be just as warm, although with some clouds mixed in, in the afternoon.

This was going to be my first bikeride to the Harris Creek area since 2009! I never went once during 2010, because a tendon repair operation on my baby finger on my right hand forced me to refrain from biking until late April, and then the beginning of La Niña kicked in, keeping things so cool and unsettled, that by the time things warmed up, it was the second week of July, allowing me to skip right past the Harris Creek sinks, and instead make my first plunge into my Crescent Road pond quagmire, as seen in the first posting in this thread. This year, with La Niña weakening, spring went from being unseasonably cool in March/April, to finally turning back to normal in May!

I got up early, and my dad drove me up as far as a little way up Harris Creek Road, but not as far as he had dropped me off in the past, due to time constraints. I was on my way around 8:30 am, biking at very low gears to make my legs last the day, since it was my first full day of biking, hiking, and hopefully, sinking. I stopped briefly at a spot where I saw garbage dumped down an embankment. I frown down upon that type of activity, but sometimes find useful stuff. At this time, I was looking for some sort of bucket to allow me to carry water from the creek to my cleanup basin, since it was likely to be empty, or filled with silt. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything except for a heavy metal pot/basin and a plastic drawer that appeared to be cracked on one side, as well as some more items that were too heavy, so I continued on.

I had no idea what I would find at my Harris Creek slide area, since I hadn't been there at all last year. For all I knew, another slide could have happened, burying all my stuff I had there, including my weights, and my sinking areas. Or, a new slide could open up new sinking areas. Or, the entire area could have lost all its water, becoming totally dry, with no more sinking spots! Anyways, I was going to find out soon!

It was some time between 10 and 11 am when I approached the area, spotting a 4 litre milk jug on the side of the road, filled with water! It was exactly what I was looking for!!!! I emptied it, and continued onward to the entrance, where I saw fresh tire tracks leading to the area of the clifftop overlooking the more easterly part of the slide. I figured that they must have been made during the weekend, making me happy to have chosen the middle of the week, although I did see/hear the odd atv and truck with atv while heading up the road, which made me a bit concerned. But, with so many trails all over the place leading away from this area, I hoped that my one secret place would remain private, although sometimes just one atv is one too many, with it turning up in the most remote locations when you least expect it!

I walked my bike into the bushes, near the clifftop further to the west, where my sinking area was down below, not that easily visible from the vantage point that was easily accessible from the road. When I looked down at the sinking area, I noticed silt washed down over the flat ground around my staging area, with a tongue of sand/silt covering my original cleanup basin. But, I had two, and hoped that the other would be okay.

I took off my jeans, since I wore shorts underneath. I brought along junk jeans I had saved for making a new makeshift backpack, since the old ones must have been rotten by now, after sitting outside for two years, exposed to the elements all that time. I also brought some fresh string (orange plastic bale twine) to use in case the other stuff was getting rotten. I also had my gorillapod inside a margarine container (actually two containers fitted one inside the other), my camera, and my junk shorts, since I was hoping for my first video of the season. I also brought along a doubled black garbage bag and a garden hand shovel so that I could bring back a couple of skunk cabbage plants for my bog/pond garden at home.

With my supplies in hand, I headed down the hillside and the silty embankment, to the flat area, that was once sinkable years ago, but was now solid, with the soft spots now located further to the west. This flat area what I had been using for my staging area. I hung my new junk jeans on a dead tree branch to dry it out, since it was wet from sitting in an unused metal garbage can for a year. But, at least it wasn't rotting. I walked around the place, checking the status of everything, and took some pictures:




Just to the west, my second cleanup basin was still intact, but empty, although some silt had accumulated in it. There was water oozing from the hillside in the area, meaning that the area could still be sinkable.


Heading further westward, down the slope, I found that my sinking area there had slipped down a little the past year or so, with more water oozing from the top of the slip, below the dropoff, meaning that it was all nice and sinkable, just what I was looking for!

Now that I had checked out my sinking area, my first priority was to get the cleanup basin prepared and filled with water, since the sooner the water was in it, the sooner it could get warmed up by the sun. I was glad I had brought along the garden hand shovel, since it allowed me to easily dig out that cleanup basin faster, easier and with less mess, allowing me to do it with my regular clothes still on. I never bothered with my original buried cleanup basin, since I only needed one, and my second one wasn't filled in completely. Once I had the hole redug to my satisfaction, with the stuff I dug out lining some of the sides, especially the south side, I noticed that some water was seeping into it from the softer uphill side (it was likely sinkable ground adjacent to the cleanup basin), but slowly.

With the cleanup basin all dug down deep enough, I headed down to the bottom of the valley with the plastic milk jug and looked around for a good place for water, noticing all the skunk cabbage plants sprouting their showy yellow spathes. I found the creek in that part not so easily accessible, so after a bit of wandering around, I opted for a side stream, at a spot where the pool was sufficiently deep. I then found that each trip between the water and the cleanup basin took 10 minutes, so when I started transporting the water at 12 noon, I had made 6 trips by 1 pm, at which point I decided to stop. There was sufficient water for some decent cleanup, or so I had hoped, and didn't want to lose too much time for sinking, since I still had other things to do.

I decided that it was time to head up the steep hill back to my bike for lunch, but stopped when I realized that it would be easier on me if I didn't have to carry everything back up to my bike all at once when leaving at the end of the day. So, I decided to get myself a couple of skunk cabbage plants first, and carry them up to my bike when I went for lunch. Unfortunately, because of all the silt that spilled over the valley bottom when the slide was younger and more active, the skunk cabbages had been buried, and therefore had to grow up through the layer of silt, resulting in the roots being very deep down. After probing the mud with my hands, I found a couple of small plants with roots not so deep, and collected them. I headed back up the hill to my bike above the cliffs with my jacket, garden shovel, and the black double garbage bag containing my two small specimens wrapped up in moss.

It must have been some time around 2 pm when I finally had my lunch, and then headed back down to the slide area, where it was time for my next phase, which was dismantling the old rotten makeshift jean backpack, and assembling the new one with the weights (one lead ball and one heavy transformer) inside. While sitting on a log in my staging area, putting together the new backpack, I found that I was getting some strange leg pain that felt like cramps in my knees or lower legs, something that sitting down didn't help, and standing up and walking around didn't seem to provide relief, either. I hoped that it wasn't going to interfere with my sink. But fortunately, the pain subsided, and I finished the backpack. I felt that same pain recently before, while crouching, pruning raspberries at my brother's farm. Now, with the end of the legs tied together with string, they made great shoulder straps, and so I was now ready to pick out a place to sink, although I had already chosen the spot on the side close to the hillside, since it had more clay mixed in.

I was concerned about some high thin cloud that the sun was starting to get filtered by, but it was more like just a band of cloud, and hoped that it would move away to bring the sun back to its full strength.

I changed into my junk shorts and I carried the backpack down to a higher spot above the sinking area, and set it down. I filled one margarine container with water for cleaning my hands after the sink for turning off the camera recording, and set it aside. I took a picture of the area I was going to sink in at 2:59 pm, ground which looked and felt normal, but given some pounding, was going to turn very wicked very fast!


I removed some rocks from the area, and had a stick stuck/sunk into a crack in the ground nearby (you can just barely see part of the crack in the bottom of the above picture), where I then mounted the camera with the gorillapod attached to it. I framed the area perfectly, planing to sink roughly between two small white rocks (one closest to the centre of the right edge, and one just slightly to the lower left of the centre of the picture). With my sweater and shirt on a dead branch of a nearby dead horizontal tree, I was almost ready to begin, starting with a video of me doing my quicksand activation dance there, before I put on the backpack and started the main movie recording.

But then, the wind suddenly came up, which made me a bit concerned about the audio of the recording, since the wind blasting past the mic had really ruined the audio the previous year at times. So, I waited and waited, only to find that there were small cumulus clouds starting to cover the sun. I waited for the sun to come out from behind it, but it seemed as though the second the cloud started to move away from the sun, a new one would materialize there, and cover the sun all over again, with the previous one dissipating! To make matters worse, as soon as the sun went behind the cloud(s), all the heat was lost, and things started to feel too cool for a deep sink! The south-facing slope had created such a wonderful microclimate, making it warmer there than in the surrounding area, but when the wind came up, it blew away the warm air that had accumulated there, and the clouds prevented the sun from making things warm again. In fact, when the sun did come out, it still wasn't enough to warm things up enough. It was getting late in the afternoon, and with the sun getting lower, that is, when the sun wasn't behind the small clouds, it no longer felt warm enough to sink to my chest or deeper with the weights. Disappointed, I had to make a judgement call, and put the camera away. I would save the sink for next time, when the weather would be warmer. I would have never been able to properly clean my upper body when it turned that cool, anyways.

Instead, I decided to go for a more limited, but stimulating, waist-deep sink into some thicker stuff, off camera. Just to the west, on the downhill side of my chosen sinking area, things looked nice and saturated as well, but thicker. So, I stripped off my junk shorts to be naked, and proceeded to do my quicksand activation dance over an area roughly 2 feet wide, and 3 feet long. At first, only the top surface felt slightly doughy. But, as I kept on pounding the ground with my feet, I could feel the stiff surface begin to shift, and then quake! I pounded the rubbery ground a bit more, until I felt it was ready to suck me in!

Facing roughly westward, I stood in place on the front (west) part of that activated spot, since the back (uphill) side was starting to have a little water oozing on it from a crack in the silt behind me. I then pumped my legs, with the rubbery ground sagging beneath my feet, and then wrapping around them. I could feel its muscular grip on my feet and legs, as it slowly sucked them down deeper. However, because it is a slide area, there was debris under the surface, such as small rocks and sticks/roots, which my feet had to brush past, which at times hurt a little bit. But, once my feet got deeper, there was less debris. I loved how the mire that was creeping up my legs kept on making farting sounds as I struggled. I pretended to be trying to pull one leg up, while the other sunk deeper. It was softer below, but still fairly thick. It was a really thick mush, and pumping my legs helped to liquify it further. The voracious thick ooze rose to the top of my legs, and slowly, my crotch area began to settle into the quaking rubbery surface as well. I just kept on struggling, trying not to stress my legs too much, since I didn't want to get painful leg cramps. As it was, I started to get leg cramps on several occasions earlier on before the sink.

The mire was so thick that it took a lot of struggling and pumping of my legs to sink deeper, although I found that swaying my waist front and back allowed the mire to rise higher more easily up my waist, since that helped loosen the thicker surface ooze, which had been slowing me down. With all the struggling, eventually the sucking muck finally engulfed a certain body appendage into its rubbery clutches! But, I wasn't certain if I could sink too much deeper due to its density, so I was content to leave it around belly button deep, with no discernible bottom, and continue to imagine that there were no buoyancy issues.

I struggled, looking down the western edge of the debris field to the valley bottom below, thinking how that must be how deep this stuff was, and if I didn't get out in time, I would keep on sinking to the bottom! It was so thick that rather than working my hands/arms into it, which would have taken a while, I instead slipped them down along my sides, until they were also "stuck" in its thick, doughy, rubbery clutches, which had a fair amount of clay mixed in with the silt, which made it feel nicer! Imagining that there was no way out of the deadly quicksand, feeling its firm grip on my lower body, imagining that I would soon be sucked completely under, thinking how could something so thick could suck me down so deep, I struggled vigorously until I was hit with convulsions of ecstasy!

I wanted to linger there for a while and enjoy the feel of my first sink of the season, but knew that it was getting late, and I had to wrap things up and head back home before dark. So, I began to gently work myself back up, which was a slow process. This is the type of stuff where a helicopter rescue would tear you in half! I pumped my legs while pushing down on the firmer ground to the sides, slowly rising up higher and higher. Even while my crotch was still below the surface, I began to also work one leg up at a time, which seemed to be a bit more efficient.

I lifted one leg up until the mire locked tight, then lowered it slightly until the muck loosened, and then lifted it again, with my leg getting higher each time before the sucking quicksilt locked up again. Once I worked one leg up to the point where I was losing my leverage, I then switched to the other leg and repeated the process, going back to the other leg once that leg had lost its leverage, etc. I sometimes also pumped both legs while pushing down on the sides again, but once my crotch was above the surface, I was primarily doing it one leg, then the other leg, and back again, each time I lost leverage.

All the while, I was taking care not to overstress my legs, so as to avoid leg cramps. But, as I worked myself higher, I had to work my feet through the debris layer again, sometimes having to work my feet through the ooze to turn them around to go around the debris. I felt my left foot slide past a stick or root, which was hurting a bit as it ground past my toes, but I got that foot above that.

As my calves rose back through the thicker, stiffer layer on top (it was mushier below the top rubbery layer), that layer was pressing hard against them, resulting in calf cramps developing, especially in my left calf. I was almost all the way out, so to minimize the duration of those cramps, I managed to work my right leg/foot the rest of the way out quickly, leaving a deep hole in the quicksilt, after which, I managed to work my left leg/foot out, my legs covered in thick, pasty clay/silt mixture. When I stood up, I was almost stumbling, because of the cramps in my left calf which forced my left foot to be stiffly pointing downward. But, when I turned around to face uphill, the slope under my feet forced that foot flat, which made the cramps vanish, which was a relief!

I agitated the mud to close up the holes, and then went to clean off my hands briefly before returning, making a slight impression in the mire, and taking a couple of pictures of it at 4:30 pm, the time I had originally planned on leaving for home.



I headed to the cleanup basin, and cleaned myself from the waist down. When I looked at my clay-caked feet in the water, some blood was showing through the mud on one of my toes on my right foot, indicating that I indeed scraped some skin off at least one of the knuckles. Upon cleaning, I noticed that one knuckle on my left foot had a slightly more noticeable scrape on it as well.

Once I was clean and dried, I got dressed, and decided to take some pictures of the patches of skunk cabbages in the valley bottom before I left. But first, I had decided that I would make one short video of me agitating the patch of mire that had swallowed me to my waist, with no discernible bottom. So, wearing my shoes, I shot a 31 second video of me tapping the surface, making that 2' x 3' patch of quickclay/silt quake and pulsate at 4:29 pm.


I then headed down to the valley bottom and took pictures of the skunk cabbages, using my regular card for the skunk cabbage pix. Here are a couple that might make interesting backgrounds:



I then started packing everything up, at my staging area and worked on hiding my makeshift backpack under a young tree, covered with slabs of bark, not only to hide it from sight, but also to try sheltering it from rain so it wouldn't rot so quickly. I also worked on hiding the plastic 4 litre milk jug from sight, covering the white jug with a green shopping bag to make it less conspicuous before putting more slabs of bark on it. I figured that I should have put that milk jug in the valley bottom, near the pool of water that I had used for the cleanup basin. I would do that next time.

While I was finishing covering things up, I heard a strange sound, and looked up, to see a man standing on the top of the cliff, off to the east! I couldn't believe it!!!! I had passed up a Sunday bikeride (which was actually a nicer day) for one on a Wednesday (which had more clouds in the afternoon and cooled off earlier), hoping that things would be quiet, allowing more privacy, only to have someone peering over the entire slide area from the top of the cliffs!!!!! I wasn't certain if he saw me, but I waited and he just stood there looking out, although I didn't think he looked in my direction. I think he may have had a camera, and was perhaps taking pictures of the Harris Creek valley from that vantage point, since it offered a nice view. I finally decided to leave and as I started up the hillside, I noticed that the man was gone. when I got above the cliffs, I heard a truck take off, heading westward, and could make it out through the trees, passing by, with an atv in the back.

I packed my things on my bike, and was on my way at 5 pm. I passed other trucks with atv's (didn't know if any of them were the one that was at the clifftop), and figured that people must have been arriving there after work. Perhaps I should make certain to leave the slide area around 4:30 pm, since things seem to be a bit more unpredictable after that.

I had to put on more jackets, because the high clouds had thickened and hid the sun, making things feel cooler. I snacked on a couple of Pizza Pops and some chocolate chip cookies on the way home. I got home at 9:15 pm, just as it was getting dark.

I was happy to finally be able to go on my first bikeride of the season, around 3 to 4 weeks later than normal (due to La Niña), but still 2 months earlier than last year (due to La Niña). And, it was the first time to Harris Creek since 2009 (once again thanks to La Niña). I spent much of the day getting things set up, and retrieving a couple of skunk cabbages (they are nicely potted and sitting in buckets of water in the shade of cedars, and starting to grow new leaves). If I had been ready for the sink even an hour earlier, then I might have been able to do my video, but now, all I have to do next time is fill up the cleanup basin the rest of the way, hopefully using more than one milk jug, if I can smuggle more up. I think that I should have shot that mud agitation video at the same time I had taken those two "after shots, since I had bare feet at the time which could have gotten "stuck" in it during filming!

I let Tuesday, May 10'th get by, which would have been a perfect day for sinking (sunny and around 22˚C or 72˚F), but since I only went once so far this year, and my parents are away on a tour for a few days, I wasn't certain if my knees would hold up to a round trip just yet. It is so much easier when my dad gives me a lift into the mountains, which saves me time and wear and tear of my knees, not to mention energy. But, they return Thursday, and the forecast for Friday the 13'th at the time of this typing is for sunshine and 21˚C (70˚F) according to Environment Canada, while the Weather Network forecasts a high of 20˚C (68˚F) with 30% chance of isolated showers. I just hope Environment Canada's forecast is the right one and doesn't change for the worst, and I can enjoy a deeper quickclay/silt sink on camera that day! Now, what can possibly go wrong on my hike through a slide area on Friday the 13'th

The short clip of me agitating the thick quickclaysilt is now linked to in this thread.