Kleiner's Blog

A few pictures!

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When the long ice of winter fades and warmer winds signal the beginning of the vernal change, one of the first ecological signs of spring is the rise of Spring ephemerals.  According to the Pennsylvania DCNR, our “Native spring ephemerals include bloodroot, common and cut-leaved toothwort, Dutchman’s breeches, harbinger-of-spring, squirrel-corn, trout lily, Virginia bluebells, and many others.” Keep an eye out along paths in parks, trails and hikes in the mountains, and even in your own backyard for these guys right now. 

Remember, just last week – this is what the world looked like.  (Well, sometimes considering our steamy Winter)  The frozen pond in the following pictures is the same pond where two warmer days later those singing frogs in the video above started going crazy.

That first summer, most of my friends and family thought I had lost my mind.  (They probably still do)  I had written a list of parks in Allentown that I used as a checklist.  It stayed in my back pocket until it was rendered unreadable from use and travel.  Every single day was an adventure.  Honestly, I don’t think I ever had more unadulterated fun than I did on those hot days during that first summer.

That first summer, I changed completely as a person.  (What else are you supposed to do when you’re laid off and directionless?)  I became curious about the natural world around me and my studies have not stopped since.  My direction came by sauntering aimlessly wherever I could find wildness to do so within.  If you have been reading since the beginning you know where the story goes from here.

I offer this bit of dewy-eyed nostalgia today because I received a comment about the video that leads this post off.  That slideshow is a literal greatest hits of that first summer.  It’s odd looking back at those pictures and remembering the enthusiasm and wonder that each one of them conveys, even now.  Odder still because I feel more connected to that directionless person right now than I have since I was him.  I’m still waiting for a letter to tell me what my future is going to entail.  It’s rough waiting after so many years working to get to this moment.  I still have my fingers crossed…

That first summer, I could never have imagined that a project designed to help me spend the free time I found myself with following my lay off would lead me here.  In April, I will be presenting my Ecotoxicology research at a major conference in Virginia.  I am (briefly) employed at the moment as a field biologist.  That first summer, I had never – not once – considered a life as a scientist.

Maybe it’s more than the video.  Maybe I am thinking about the upcoming summer. (probably because it feels as if it has arrived already!) I’m nervous these days readers.  That video shows me why I always have something to come back to – to rely in.  It shows me the strength I had at one of the greatest times of adversity I had ever encountered.  It shows me that the opportunity to demonstrate that strength was given because of Parks.

That first summer, I learned forever why Parks are so important.

I hope that you can make it out to Muhlenberg College on March 28^th at 7PM to learn more about the ecosystems in our parks. I will be giving a presentation and following it up with a question and answer session.  Click here to visit the Facebook event page.  Share, spread the word and make it out!!

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I am really happy to announce a new event! This time, I will be giving a talk on local Ecosystem restoration in parks, and the issues/concerns surrounding it.  Following my presentation, I will be doing a question and answer session.

The event will take place on Wednesday March 28^th at 7PM at Muhlenberg College. I will be posting further event reminders as the date nears.

Here is a link to the Facebook event page – click that you are going and please, Invite People!!

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If you have the chance, please go vote for Kleiner’s Blog  in the Personal Category on the Morning Call’s online – Best of Blogs contest.

Here is the Link.

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Lastly, please forgive the slow rate of new posts.  I have just begun a research job and coupled with the volunteer environmental work I do, it is really hard to keep up with everything at the moment.  I have some awesome stuff on the way though, I promise! I am hoping to take the blog in some different scientific directions and I still have more Park Logs 2012 to come!!

At the last event I organized, while I was being interviewed by The Morning Call, the reporter asked me why I was doing this and why I have been doing it for three years.  I paused before answering but ultimately told him something along the lines of the following: “By cleaning up the trash here, we not only help preserve wildlife habitat here, but we prevent ecosystem degradation all the way from Cedar Creek to the Atlantic Ocean”.

That’s true, but in hindsight, I considered more personal reasons – that is, not just scientific ones.  The personal reasons I began thinking about ran behind my eyes like some odd greatest hits commercial or, worse yet, some sentimental montage from a late 80’s Rom-Com.  I imagine that most folks who grew up in Allentown can easily access a similar rewind upon recollection.  Last week I was out having a beer with friends when someone asked about another event to come at “The Park”.  I asked him which one and he laughed.  He said “Cedar Beach” but since he grew up there, he always had just referred to it as “The Park”.

That nostalgic slip of the tongue reveals to me exactly why I do all these events and why a lot of you come out to help, learn, or be part of a developing sense of community spirit.  I am going to refrain from slipping into altruistic platitudes here today though because the greatest reasons to care may in fact be 100% personal reasons.

I genuinely value, even treasure, a great memory.  As a person who is sick alarmingly often or for whatever reason ensnared in poor circumstances, I rely heavily on the great and beautiful memories I have to get me through. Life can really and truly suck sometimes.  At its worst, the machinations of being in the throes of daily existence are tempered by the times worth remembering.  For me, some of my best memories exist because of the Parks I spent time growing up in as a child and finding a direction in life through as an adult.

I’ll remember the car rides my dad took me on as a kid through the Lehigh Parkway or the times we spent in the creek searching for crayfish and other assorted creatures to freak out my mother.  I am relatively sure that if I am ever a parent, one of the greatest lessons I have learned from my parents and one I intend to use frequently as a father is the idea of summer evenings spent in parks and locally owned ice cream shops.

The worthwhile memories were not stopped from creation in my adult life.  Last summer, I spent an evening at my research site with an amazing person catching bumblebees.  The hot and humid late afternoon was passing and we stood among stands of towering Jewelweed with test tubes, nets, and (for me) the hope of avoiding a sting.  It was late summer and many plants had begun to go to seed.  The yellow evening was full of white wisps, bird song, and bee buzz.  My friend and I stumbled around, found success and just as we were readying to leave… I discovered I had lost my keys somewhere in the vegetation.  My friend, well, my friend laughed.  Night fell.  Thankfully, I eventually found those damn keys. That was probably my best night last year and maybe for more than a few years.

A night like that, that’s the kind of night that makes this whole bloody life thing worth endeavoring through.  I suppose I couldn’t really explain that to the Morning Call reporter, especially when I am fighting for a message to get out there.  That’s why the blog exists.  I can share my stories with you. I don’t get comments often on here anymore but I would really like to create a series of posts with your park stories.  Don’t limit it to Allentown either – National Parks, forests, wild worlds – share them. It would be nice to create some patchwork quilt of the sorts of memories that make living worth living through.  Do it!

(This is the tenth park log of 2012 – get caught up with the links at the bottom)

There is no easy way to say what I am about to say to lifelong Allentonians.  I’m just going to say t without disclaimer or preparatory comment. Muhlenberg Lake has got to go.  It is unlikely to go this year or even in the coming years but I assure you, the consequences of its continued existence will worsen over the next decade and Muhlenberg Lake will have to go. 

In the early 1900’s there existed no standing body of water where the “Lake” is today.  A Depression Era project saw Cedar Creek dammed and the now existing Lake created.  It is more than highly unlikely that a Field Biologist or Environmental Scientist was on hand to guide this construction and, even if they were – it would likely not have mattered.  Science has come a long way since then and I can tell you, scientifically, that lake should not exist.

Cedar Creek is a shallow, fast moving body of water.  The particular ecosystem that such a creek creates for itself a unique and variable equilibrium in combination with the organisms that inhabit it, the riffles, runs and pools that characterize it, the plants that live on its streambanks, the organisms that find their niche in those plants, and the entirety of the creek’s surroundings for miles.  In other words, left undisturbed the entire ecosystem is governed by a negative feedback loop; meaning, that whatever enters the ecosystem is equal to that which leaves it.  What goes in – goes out, everything is maintained and no loss or gain occurs.

Now, consider what would happen to that delicate balance if a lake was created somewhere along the course of the stream.  The balance is lost.  In nature, lakes and still bodies of water (stream-fed or otherwise) are part of natural processes that, as they happen, maintain the feedback equilibrium that I described above.  A man-made lake with almost zero circulation? There is no natural process that could account for that degree of disturbance.

One of the pro-lake arguments that you may hear around Allentown calls for a remodeling of Muhlenberg Lake that would see a proper circulation introduced.  Folks, such a stop-gap measure might reduce the accumulation of stream sediment and the growth of algae but it would not help the health of Cedar Creek as it heads on to meet the Little Lehigh.  Even if the infamous land bridge would be removed, the circulation would not change greatly.  You cannot stretch a six foot wide creek to the width of a lake and maintain the same rate of speed.  That’s what is important here, the loss of speed.

There are many reasons why such a new system of circulation would not help but perhaps the most significant involves temperature.  As water from the creek enters the Lake and its speed is greatly reduced, the water is longer exposed to sunlight.  When the water warms, the organisms that inhabit it from invertebrates to fish are affected so detrimentally that some of them – perhaps many of them, will die.

Think about what happens to the water then.  It is warmer, full of nitrogen, ammonia, and methane from all the decomposing organic matter.  The Lake becomes a smorgasboard for algae – so much so, that the City of Allentown has to hire individuals each year to free the waters from algae.  As algae blooms, the water loses its dissolved oxygen and contributes to further loss of aquatic life.  Here, begins a positive feedback loop that ends in eutrophication.

Consider also the sediment from the Creek that builds up in the Lake as the speed drops significantly.  Muhlenberg Lake has had to be dredged many times in its past and as you can see from the standing Geese below, the sediment has become very high again.

That hypoxic junk water leaves the lake and meets the Little Lehigh near MLK Boulevard.  What do you think happens to the Little Lehigh when that sickly stew comes pouring in?  The Little Lehigh is a source of drinking water for the City of Allentown.  The dirtier that water is, the more money is required to clean it.  Whatever water doesn’t head in for treatment continues on to the Lehigh River.  Everything in Nature is connected folks.

Despite drawing the ire of residents of the City of Allentown, I must suggest and must continue to suggest that this Lake meets an overdue end as soon as possible.  A proper ecological restoration should occur to return the stream to its natural boundaries and a wetland should be created in the space around it where the Lake was.  The other valid option would be to reroute the stream around the Lake and make sure that the water in the Lake never reaches the stream.  Thing is, this is a very flood prone floodplain.  I do not think this solution is an ecologically viable one.

Many similar projects across the country have been undertaken because of man-made lake like ours.  This is not a foreign concept or a new one.  It is the logical course of action and the action that needs to be taken.

Park Logs 2012:
1. Cedar Creek Parkway 1. : The LCA destroyed everything.
2. Cedar Creek Parkway 2. : Well, They never paved the Rose Gardens…
3. Lehigh Parkway 1: Erosion, Erosion, Erosion )
4.  Lehigh Parkway 2: The Proof is on the Stream Banks
5.  Parkway 3:  This is Bad. Very Bad.
6. Jordan Park: What I was surprised to find
7. Winter Woods and Rain at The East Side Reservoir
8. A Smack in The Face at Canal Park
9. Thanks Harry, at Trexler Park

Yesterday, between snow squalls, in the windy and bitter cold, a group of people came together and cleaned a vital “Grow Zone” across a large swath of Cedar Creek Parkway.  I arrived early and as the snow seemed to slam in to the ground with the force of a winter wind that had been mostly absent this year; I was genuinely worried that no one was going to show up.  Thankfully, my worry proved to be unfounded.

I was joined by Muhlenberg College’s EnACT club, the fraternity ATO, Scout Troop 74, local environmentalists and neighbors of the park.  In thick coats and large, black, plastic garbage bags, we marched through the buffer removing plastic, Styrofoam, cell phones, and whatever other miscellany of human waste that accumulated there over the last year of flooding and use.

The pictures from the event are loaded as a slideshow below, take a look through.  I want to thank everyone for helping out! It was really incredible to see so many people come out and quite literally brave the elements to make a difference in a place that they care about.  I also want to thank the Morning Call for coming and covering the event. (If a story or pics are posted, I will link to them as soon as I see them.)

That was an awesome time.  Come out for the next one!

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Big day tomorrow everyone!  I hope to see you there!

(This is a continuation of my new Park Logs, the others are linked at the bottom. Don’t forget about our event at Cedar Beach this Saturday at Noon!) 

Trexler Park has to remain the symbolic heart of the Allentown Park System even 80 or so years after the Estate of Harry Trexler became a Park following The General’s death.  Today, Trexler Park may show us how a solution can occur to bridge the recreational and environmental uses of our City Parks.  There are extensive riparian buffers here, as well as deep and thick developing wetlands.  Despite all the environmental development, Trexler Park remains one of the most frequently used and easily accessed parks in Allentown.  Also of note, that despite all this growth there are no criminals or drug dealers hiding in the grass.

Yes, there is compromise at Trexler Park.  That does not exempt Trexler from the ecologic issues plaguing its nearest verdant neighbors, Cedar Creek Parkway and the Lehigh Parkway.  There are ruts from the use of heavy machinery in developing wetlands, as you can see below.

There are large and expanding swatches of invasive plants across the park and they need to be dealt with as Cedar Creek first enters the park system here and any seeds from these plants that are loosed to the wind will find new homes downriver and in turn, spread colonization.  Despite that though, there must exist an inherent appeal to Trexler Park.  I have never visited the park, even in bad weather, to find it empty.  This is something that has always been curious to me.

My inner cynic wants to think that people come here because it’s natural but not too natural.  That given its location, it is a seemingly and stereotypically safe place rather than a downtown location like Canal Park or Jordan Park.  Maybe my inner cynic is correct, maybe not.  Perhaps, a visceral remnant of the mythical spirit of Harry Trexler can actually be felt there.  It could be that ecologic/recreational compromise that draws them in droves.  I think it to be a combination of all the things that I have listed above.

The true validity in my wild speculation is that people are going – regardless of the reason.  Trexler succeeded.  He got urban dwellers into green spaces and here at Trexler Park, park users are fulfilling his wishes on his former property.  It is my hope that in the near future, the vision of Trexler will be acknowledged again and we will restore the ecology in our parks in the manner that is necessary to ensure that they survive for future generations.  For now, I wander on. Lots more to see…

Thanks Harry.

Park Logs 2012:
1. Cedar Creek Parkway 1. : The LCA destroyed everything.
2. Cedar Creek Parkway 2. : Well, They never paved the Rose Gardens…
3. Lehigh Parkway 1: Erosion, Erosion, Erosion )
4.  Lehigh Parkway 2: The Proof is on the Stream Banks
5.  Parkway 3:  This is Bad. Very Bad.
6. Jordan Park: What I was surprised to find
7. Winter Woods and Rain at The East Side Reservoir
8. A Smack in The Face at Canal Park

(This is a continuance of my new Park Logs, the others are linked at the bottom. Don’t forget about our litter pick up on February 25th!)


The thing about Canal Park, like East Side Reservoir, is the surprise the place offers.  There aren’t many surprises left in the world.  Mostly, I think we find ourselves surprised at how things in the world seem to worsen more than we could have imagined.  Sure, that sounds pessimistic but any time spent on a news site will confirm my assessment in seconds.  This is why these parks matter so much folks.  Now, there are plenty of other good and/or great things out there in the maddening chaos – I will never deny it.  This blog is mostly about parks though and today it’s about Canal Park.

It’s a smack in the face.  It’s a glass of ice-water dumped over your head on the hottest day of July after hiking Mount Tammany.  It’s stepping from your car and making your way down to the boat launch to be greeted with this sight – in the middle of downtown Allentown:

Driving through the broken macadam and pothole riddled parking lot convinces me that that view, that surprise – is just not that important to be tended to.  With the East Side Reservoir and Keck Park in Allentown and Walking Purchase Park and the Lehigh Mountain Preserve across the river in Salisbury Township, we are privileged to have some of the best preserved sections of forest, river, and mountain in any urban corridor in Eastern Pennsylvania.  That parking lot would seem to suggest that such a fact has been deemed insignificant or was simply just forgotten.  I dare you to go and look straight into the face of the waters of the Lehigh River and tell me that a place like this should ever be forgotten.

Park after park in Allentown, all I see is promise.  In the face of ecologic destruction or human abandonment, I see the possibility of projects – of clean ups, of ecological restoration, of science, of community of the very stuff that is the antithesis of the worsening world that makes both the existence and subsequent ruin of these precious places such a surprise. 

The meandering D+L trail that finds itself arriving at Canal Park over the hill from the river is such hope manifest.  You can see it behind the green building that used to rent boats to park goers years ago.

If I were to be awarded one million dollars under the condition that I could spend that money in only one Allentown park for the purposes of restoration, I think that I would spend that money here.  Getting out of the city and venturing into places like Cedar Creek Parkway and the Lehigh Parkway is incredibly important for folks living in the urban density of a City.  Having said that, perhaps it is more important to visit a place like Canal Park, just to get slapped upside the head with a taste of the grandeur of Nature. It might make decisions easier when it comes to the needed restoration in those other places.


For now, Canal Park sits in true beauty as half a ruin.  It’s a shame.  As I was driving out of Canal Park, a group of neighborhood kids rode/walked over the train tracks to come into the park.  It was just after three and they must have come down to hang out after school.  Loudly laughing and playfully chasing each other, the kids were doing exactly what kids should be doing with a park as their backyard.  The oldest kid, on a bike waved at me as I drove me and said “Hello Mister!” 
His friends waved as I passed and headed home.  

Park Logs 2012:
1. Cedar Creek Parkway 1. : The LCA destroyed everything.
2. Cedar Creek Parkway 2. : Well, They never paved the Rose Gardens…
3. Lehigh Parkway 1: Erosion, Erosion, Erosion )
4.  Lehigh Parkway 2: The Proof is on the Stream Banks
5.  Parkway 3:  This is Bad. Very Bad.
6. Jordan Park: What I was surprised to find
7. Winter Woods and Rain at The East Side Reservoir