Confluence

The annual meeting of the Illinois State Academy of Sciences was held yesterday and today at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. I'm in the second year of my 3 year term as chair of the chemistry division, so played host to that part of the meeting. I was also interested in going because I had applied for a position there 11 years ago and wanted to see what the place was like. I was somewhat like the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, with a big circle drive and a rural location, but it had some roughly three times the population. Their science building is in pretty rough shape. The meeting itself went OK with only a few logistical challenges.

I visited some interesting places in the area. A show on PBS has mentioned the Camp Dubois visitor site, which commemorates the camp where Lewis and Clark and company spent the winter before leaving on their trip to the Pacific. I have a bit of interest in that historic trip and the site is only several miles from the SIUE campus, so I arrived early enough to make a short stop there. There was a reconstruction of the fort complete with a couple reenactors and a museum with a reconstruction of the big boat that the expedition used to haul supplies up the Missouri River. The boat is what I really wanted to see; it was taller and skinnier than I expected. From that location it was a short drive to the current confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers (which is close but not quite where it was 200 years ago). In the picture, the Missouri flows from upper right to left and the mouth of the Missouri is straight ahead (I think it is the Wood River on the near right). I had heard that the confluence was somewhat turbulent, but that is not what I observed. A friendly fisherman there tipped me off to another interesting location that I checked out on Friday evening after the day's meetings. There is an island in the Mississippi river that can be accessed by a car bridge, but on the other end of the island there is a bridge that used to be a toll bridge for Route 66. Instead of carrying cars now it is only open to foot and bike traffic. The mile-long span crosses the wider channel of the Mississippi River, so I walked from Illinois to Missouri and back for the fun of it - and the view. As I understand it, this Chain of Rocks Bridge gets its name for a formation nearby that used to be a significant navaigation obstacle on the river. Now there is some sort of dam there and at the high water level the only thing that was really visible were areas of turbulence - I saw whirlpools 2-3 feet wide sometimes. I could see St. Louis (including the arch) on the horizon and two century-old water intake structures that looked like castles on ships. I get the impression that the whole area has lots of bike trails. After I finally got to the hotel in Troy, I found a Jack in the Box - I think the St. Louis area is the farthest east they get.

Today we had more meetings, I ate at a Red Robin, and drove back to Peoria. This evening Kris and I checked out a puddle in the woods where we found tadpoles last May. We found them there again, they are so little that at first I thought they were large mosquito wrigglers. So now we have a tank o'tadpoles again. No morels were observed - I heard people were looking for them in Edwardsville, but spring is 1-2 weeks ahead down there.