Ocean In View

Nobody. Else. There.

2012-01-29T08:09:00.000-08:00

Friday morning. Rialto Beach. There was nobody else there, and mostly nothing else either: no birds, no kelp, no trash, no break in the slope, no... Just the ocean, the beach face, and then the trees.

Rialto Beach, January 27, 2012. Morning. (Click for larger image.)

During the high surf days the waves had swept clear across parts of Rialto Jetty, either carrying the drift away or pushing it over and down the back side of the slope, where it seems it must be going to stay forever or until some unimaginable 1000-year flood on the river picks it up and carries it back out into the ocean. Further to the north, on the Ellen Creek beach segment, the waves had smoothed away the summer berm and flattened the slope of the beach face, shoving all the sand or pebbles up and into the forest edge. It was ever so clear why a scrim of salt-killed ghosts edges the beach. (McKay and Terrich, Gravel Barrier Morphology: Olympic National Park, 1992: "It is evident that frequent overwashing occurs along this part of the barrier and the entire barrier is retreating into the forested area... trees are being killed by saltwater intrusion and eventually are toppled by high waves and drift logs.")

Swept. (Click for larger image.)
From behind the screen of ghost trees, Rialto Beach, January 27, 2012 (Click for larger image.)
A raccoon (??) had passed by (Click for larger image.)

Even for a winter weekday morning, such solitude was unusual. This is after all a premier drive-to beach on the Outer Coast of a well-used National Park. After a couple of hours, a pair of people walked by, and shortly afterwards a through-hiker with a backpack. O noes, I had to share the ocean!! With three other people.

Later I drove around to the La Push side of the river; sat out on the point reading, sleepy. Every last stick of drift had been carried away from beneath the point, and a sharp bank cut. A crow pair was hopping around; skittering sideways towards each other, hunching their necks and clacking their beaks; keeping close to each other. A fishing boat came through the channel into the Quileute River mouth, heading for the harbor. The tide kept coming in.

... (Click for larger image.)First Beach, With Crows (Click for larger image.)

Ready, Set...

2012-01-26T08:21:00.000-08:00

The storm has cleared, finally, and they've moved the barge out of the way. I think Barnard Construction is about to blast that eastern corner of the dam face. Keep your eye on the dam cams today.

Glines Canyon Dam from the Dam Cam, early January 26, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Salmon, get ready. Soon it will be time to come home.

Well, ok, not all that soon. They're blasting the corner because gnawing at all that concrete with the crane and hammer is going really, really slow...

Elwha Love

2012-01-23T08:31:00.000-08:00

The Dam Cams have been behaving a little funny, yesterday for a while the 'current' view was no more recent than January 10. But they are working this morning, and keep your eye on Glines Canyon Dam. According to the Peninsula Daily News, Barnard Construction is going to blast on the east side of the dam face, it should be really obvious when it changes shape, even if the cam updates bracket the actual explosion. Evidently the guys in the cage dangling from the sky hook (see previous post) were setting the charges...

There's a nice article about measuring sediment in the lower river.

PDN also says I missed a high-tide-and-heavy-surf event at La Push yesterday (see 3rd image in article). This is especially ridiculous since I spent most of the day on the couch reading Chris Dixon's Ghost Wave: the Discovery of Cortes Bank and the Biggest Wave on Earth, and watching big surf videos from around the globe on YouTube, over and over. Watch the trailer, it's cool. But I shoulda gone out to Rialto Beach in the rainshowers, well maybe not, maybe even the road would have been closed; but maybe I should go today, high tide at midday...

Water level at La Push yesterday was 2 feet higher than predicted... (Click for larger image.)

#weatherslugs

2012-01-20T09:01:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday it did this:

Snowy Morning on the Deck, January 17, 2012. (Click for larger image.)

We just looked at the world through web cams, and stayed put.

First Beach Webcam, January 17, 2012 (Click for larger image.)
Glines Canyon Dam Cam, January 17, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

That was four inches, maybe. Wet stuff. Wednesday maybe another four inches sifted down. Dry stuff. Driveway was shoveled Tuesday late, but then people drove up and down on the Wednesday whitestuff, turning it snowpacked-and-icy and not shovel-able. It's a messy icy heap down there at the bottom. We'll need chains to drive the first 30 feet, no matter how fast it warms up today. (Well, because we're timid old ladies. NOBODY barreling along the cross street on the packed snow is wearing chains.)

My houseguest hates and fears the Evil White. She has spent days staring out the window, making sure it is not Coming To Get Her. We had books to read, and internet connectivity, and food. But slowly we got cabin fever. Twitch twitch.

Entertainment on the DamCam, Two Guys Hanging from a Swear-to-God Sky Hook. January 19, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

The main bulk of the storm hit south of Puget Sound and into Oregon. We will have to wait until the Snotel maps are updated to see if it did any good where it is desperately needed, the bone dry Sierra Nevada... Now it looks like there's a pretty good swell edging towards the California coast. Will they call the Mavericks surf contest? Are the 24 official bigwave surfers heading to their airports around the globe??

Ocean Prediction Center, January 20, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

The cam on Hurricane Ridge is covered with ice. There are pix in my own camera of the street yesterday, but I'm too much of a slug to download them. Good thing this happens only about once every other year.

Beach Day (With Elk)

2012-01-15T09:53:00.001-08:00

On Friday we went to the ocean. Might actually have preferred to do nothing on Friday and outer coast on Saturday or Sunday, but a snowstorm was coming, so off we went.

There were elk, both on Beaver Prairie and in a field of stumps and grasses and scotch broom.

Elk on Beaver Prairie, off Dancing Elk Road :-) January 13, 2012 (Click for larger image.)Boss elk on Beaver Prairie, January 13, 2012 (Click for larger image.)Elk among the stumps, January 13, 2012 (Click for larger image.)The elk in the scotch broom were at the pin by Sappho. Beaver Prairie is the other pin. (Click for larger image.)

It was kind of a murky day. Tide too close to high to get out on the beach, really. We stood up in the drift and watched the moderate swell come in and in. Sometimes the sun tried to break through. Blue patches grew in the sky, but never any direct sunlight.

... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)Looking back: Quileute River, Rialto Jetty, James Island and Pacific Ocean beyond. (Click for larger image.)

Four Nights, Five Days

2012-01-14T10:57:00.000-08:00

Right, we were in Seattle for a long time. I no longer feel like Seattle is a mystery land halfway to Kansas, and don't have quite the same fear of Driving in the Big City. If you make wrong turns, you just drive in circles until you get headed in the right direction, and meanwhile may see stuff. Like some sweet little park somewhere that we deadended at (Kobe Terrace Park, apparently), and Suzanne Tidwell's yarn-bombing in Pioneer Square. Trees with sweaters, oh my...

January 8, Seattle. Trees with sweaters. (Click for larger image.)

Once we were settled, GF picked us up and took us here and there, including a sweep along wherever (the ship canal?) to Chittenden Locks.

Working docks along the ship canal. Fishing boats in from Alaska, January 8, 2012 (Click for larger image.)
January 8, goldeneyes at Chittenden Locks. (Click for larger image.)The railroad brdige downstream of the locks (Click for larger image.)

The next three days were all about medical business. The only workout the camera got was those entrancing sunrises from our room. Thursday morning we saw my Big City Doctor at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, then drove off down the hill and onto the ferry and home.

January 12. Lake Union from the waiting room, 4th floor, SCCA (Click for larger image.)

According to the GPS data which the camera creates, we were exactly here,

Location map from the exif data... (Click for larger image.)

when I took this image of leaving the Emerald City.

Seattle from the ferry, January 12, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

PS. Continuing to mostly put the images up as is, using auto settings on the camera and mostly no after-processing. Will inch further along the learning curve later on.

Four Sunrises...

2012-01-13T08:45:00.000-08:00

...from a window in the big city. We country mice found our window endlessly thrilling.

Sunrise, looking toward downtown Seattle, Monday, January 9 (Click for larger image.)Rainy sunrise, looking toward downtown Seattle, Tuesday, January 10 (Click for larger image.)Sunrise, looking toward downtown Seattle, Wednesday, January 11 (Click for larger image.)Last sunrise, looking toward downtown Seattle, Thursday, January 12 (Click for larger image.)

Then we went home. More about being in Seattle, and some health news, in next posts. Right now we need to go to the ocean...

New Year's Eve Ocean

2012-01-06T18:19:00.000-08:00

Stopped by the OCNMS volunteer office today to check if my NOAA login is working again (yes) and talked to JL, the new camera's godmother, about my struggles. She said this one was an ok picture,

New Year's Eve, Rialto Beach. (Click for larger image.)

and explained some of the camera's baffling behaviors. So though I don't usually post things out of order, here are some other images from Saturday last. Various settings, no after-processing:

Dahdayla Island, December 31, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Looking North, December 31, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Pebbles (Click for larger image.)

(Why the camera's GPS gave the elevation as anywhere from 26 feet above whatever it thought sea level was (no) to 255 feet BELOW sea level (definitely not) remains mysterious.)

Horizon

2012-01-05T09:12:00.001-08:00

It's the time of year when minutes count. We examine the condition of the light obsessively, morning and evening. Is there more light yet? Is there? Is there? Here, finally, this very morning, sunrise is earlier than it was yesterday. 8:03 AM (It's not symmetrical, you will recall, neither against the clock nor up and down the latitudes. Check yours...). And we've gained 15 minutes at the sunset end since our earliest sunset at 4:20 on December 14.

OK then, at sunrise on January 2, Mount Baker showed off his silhouette briefly in the endless run of cloudy mornings. Mount Baker, over behind Bellingham, about 90 miles away as the eye sees it (or maybe a 4-hour car trip including a ferry but not including climbing the mountain when you get there)(does anyone climb Mount Baker? I dunno.)

Mount Baker on my horizon, January 2, 2011, over roof and under wires. (Click for larger image.)

This business of 'as the eye sees it'. Just walking around the apartment, and anywhere I am around town or on the road, my attention zooms right past the foreground to water, always. Or to the horizon. My famous water view is an extremely small slice of the world but it's what I see first. In reality, it's just a tiny bit of what's out there, you can barely pick it out on a real photo.

Moment of sunshine without zoom, morning, January 5, 2011. (Click for larger image.)

Mt. Baker if it had been visible yesterday morning would be just to the right of the telephone pole. Under other cloud conditions you would see tiny bits of San Juan Island (US) and Victoria (CA) on the other side of the Strait. Here is a full-size strip from the same image. On a blue day my eyes automatically pick out every tiny bit of water between the houses and through the leafless tree branches.

Horizon of that moment (Click for larger image, then scroll for the water bits.)

GOES and Other Tech Toys

2012-01-03T07:32:00.000-08:00

Oooh, lookit this. GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites) weather data overlaid on a MODIS imagery base from the Terra and Aqua satellites. GOES West and GOES East. We're not actually seeing anything available to the eye, it's digital magic; on offer 24/7, day and night and winter and summer, and clear as clear can be. Thanks to MSNBC for the explanation, shoutout to @stevesilberman for the find. I love it madly.

GOES/MODIS imagery mashup. See GOES West and GOES East for current, and be sure to click to full size when you do... (Click for larger image.)

Sure enough the dam cams are offering entertainment. A full portrait of the barge at Glines Canyon Dam flitted by yesterday evening as it changed position.

... (Click for larger image.)

The First Beach Cam was down all weekend, but boy is it ever back. According to the Ocean Prediction Center this is only a 12-foot swell, but such a lively one. Why am I here and not there?

... (Click for larger image.)

My new camera, by the way, is a Canon Powershot S100. JL took me all the way to a camera store in N. Seattle so I could try out cameras in the hand before choosing. It should be absolutely idiot-proof, but doesn't seem to be. Even in AUTO mode strange things happen on the little screen. I am not learning very fast, because not trying very hard. I meant it to be easy.

Water Views

2012-01-02T08:50:00.000-08:00

There have been visitor days with many events in them, and a shopping day (new camera), an outer coast day, lying-around-reading days, procrastination days. Time flies.

One of the Evergreen container ships crosses the bottom of the street, December 30th, 2011. (Click for larger image.)

Sunrises have been gorgeous, even with a shortage of clear-weather days.

Sunrise to the NNE, sunrise to the SSE, December 31, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

The 'fish window' ended, and the dam removal contractor is able to work in the riverbed again. Holidays and winter storms have interfered a bit, but woo hoo, dam cam entertainment once again on the agenda.

Some work between storms at the upper dam. Glines Canyon Dam Cam, December 28, 2011 (Click for larger image.)RF & I watched the action at Elwha Dam from the overlook, December 23, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

With RF & MS, ran all over the local landscape, but in their style. Tiny walks, shopping, meals in, meals out, questing for lavender salad dressing, sidetrip to the most supremely weird Roadside America location you never heard of (Troll Haven in Gardiner, overlooking Discovery Bay); twice to Salt Creek (once with RF, once the three of us), a walk in the forest at Barnes Creek, waiting for logships, and all. Oh, and a rock and roll dancing party, thankyou youtube.

Barnes Creek, trail to Marymere Falls, December 24, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

The tides are never right at this time of year. Every time I bring a visitor to Salt Creek, the tidepools are under the waves.

Tongue Point, invisible, December 23, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

...and the little island is indubitably an island, and we can't walk on the sand out to it.

Salt Creek County Park, December 25, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

It's almost all about water, innit? Except when it's about people.

RF and MS at the gates of Troll Haven, dusk, December 23, 2011

I Found One

2011-12-24T07:53:00.000-08:00

Tsunami debris? Tsunami debris. Here. Now.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the flotsam guy, was here in Port Angeles earlier in the month. He and James Ingraham gave a presentation at the college about the science of flotsam, their computer model, and the likelihoods— including that the earliest arriving tsunami debris, driven by wind as well as the known movements of water in the North Pacific Gyre, could show up at the 8-month point, like now, rather than at the two-year point as NOAA's water-driven models predict. They showed a lot of debris collected east of Neah Bay, including a big float that they were persuaded is surely from the tsunami coast. December 15 story from Peninsula Daily News).

December 16 followup story reported that similar buoys had been found up on Vancouver Island, and at La Push on Rialto Beach (eeeep, that's my beach, said I), and December 18 a story passing on a news story from Japan that "it looks like those used in oyster cultivation in the Miyagi area, The Mainichi Daily News said... Miyagi prefecture is in northeastern Japan and includes the hard-hit city of Sendai."

So on Sunday the 18th, KF and AM and I were ambling along at Rialto Beach. We crossed Ellen Creek, and there far back in the drift was, yes, a buoy, looking just like the one found at Neah Bay that they had on the stage at the presentation. But English markings.

... (Click for larger image.)

I emailed Dr. Ebbesmeyer. English markings, said I, so I assume not tsunami debris. Oh yes, he said, the same as the others and tentatively identified by Japanese officials. Eeeep, said I. Who manufactured it, what do the markings tell us, [doesn't seem very confirmed to me, I really meant], said I. Still doing research, said he.

But really it seems most likely. Why else are these things suddenly up and down the west coast here, exactly as predicted by the computer models for high-floating objects, unless truly they were carried away from the tsunami coast in the spring and now they are here? As will eventually be boats and houses and all the rest of what is now still out in the ocean... Dr. Ebbesmeyer says people in Japan hide mementos in their house walls, and we will need to be cautiously and even reverently attentive to the debris as it arrives, to preserve what traces we find for their families' sake. Oh my.

Two Days, Four Places, Three (Then Four) Old Friends

2011-12-21T06:34:00.000-08:00

On Monday we did at least three things. First thing, we heading up to Hurricane Ridge. It was overcast in town, and layers of cloud and fog as we drove up,

Dungeness Spit from the Road Up. Not All That Clear, But I Stubbornly Showed It To Them Anyway (Click for larger image.)

...and on top, OMG, there was glory. The Bailey Range was on full display, with Mount Olympus behind.

... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

We walked a tiny bit here, a tiny bit there, without ever in fact leaving the plowed-out parking lot area. Carloads of people arrived to snowbunny, donned masses of gear, and snowshoed off. A snowshoeing class for small children spent forever getting started, the ranger patiently refastening the tiny plastic shoeshoes over and over, calling the kids (who were more interestied in sliding around and falling down) to gather round and pay attention over and over.

Part 2. On the way back into town we picked up sandwiches and went down to the harbor to watch IVS Kwaito load. KF took so many photos and little movies that the workmen got paranoid. She explained she was assembling a presentation for her two-year-old grandson, who Loves Trucks.

December 19, 2011. (Click for larger image.)

Hey, I'm not a two-year-old boy, and I too love the kind of Trucks And Things that work the harbor. While KF was zeroed in on Kwaito, suddenly behind the waiting log trucks one of the big yacht lifts appeared, rolling away from Platypus Marine and out onto a pair of tracks; and lowered the boat into the water. Oh. Aha. That's how it's done.

... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

Part 3. There was not so much daylight left, but we headed off to walk in the woods a little, along Barnes Creek on the trail to Marymere Falls. It's not the rainforest, but we weren't getting to the rainforest on this visit. And there are some fairly big dudes in there.

... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

And on Tuesday, sea voyage to another country: the three of us went to Victoria to visit with WC. One of the rewards of being sort of Old is there can be Really Old Friends. We had a good time. Went inside the Empress, and the Parliament Building; spent a whole lot of time photographing ducks and swans at Esquimalt Lagoon, had a nice lunch in Metchosin and then back to the Lagoon. Then back onto the ferry, sea voyage home again.

The Empress Rules Victoria's Inner Harbor. As seen from the ferry... (Click for larger image.)Me and WC and AM on the lawn of the Parliament Building (Click for larger image.)

Later The Same Day

2011-12-21T05:54:00.000-08:00

It's still Sunday afternoon. We're in La Push, overlooking First Beach. The tide has turned, and steelhead are coming up the river. Steller's sea lions are working the river mouth, diving around, barking. (We know it's steelhead because one of the other watchers on the point is a fisherman.)

The sun came out, transforming the world.

Looking Towards Quileute Needles. First Beach, December 18, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Toothiness: a sea lion pops up (Click for larger image.)In the Sun, Suddenly Two Eagles Stand Out, La Push harbor, 12/18/11 (Click for larger image.)The Quileute school in La Push (Click for larger image.)Long Soft View Across First Beach. This Time of Year the Gray Whales Are Far Out To Sea, and Southbound, So We Are Not Seeing Them, But They'd Have Hidden Anyway If They Were There... (Click for larger image.)

The One Beach

2011-12-19T07:11:00.000-08:00

Off we went to the outer coast. The promised sunshine eluded us for some hours. On Rialto Beach we had wild water, the usual entrancement of visitors by the huge drift logs, a buoy up in the drift with English markings (apparently therefore NOT tsunami debris),

...eagles, oystercatchers, a little tidepooling—anemones, ochre stars,ribbed limpets and a seaweed called spongy cushion that first we looked in the book under tunicates and then under sponges before we found it—and, as Robinson Jeffers said of another place, "unbridled and unbelieveable beauty."

I still feel fine, you know. Well capable of hustling my visitors two miles along the sand to the most beautiful beach in the world, and back again.

(These images a mix of KF's and mine. You can tell mine 'cause my camera makes a grey world blue. (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

Then we whipped around the corner to La Push, to the point overlooking First Beach, where I'd see whales in April if I saw any which-last-year-I-did-not,-not-once (see next post).

Ships for the Watcher

2011-12-18T06:50:00.000-08:00

A tanker at Terminal 1, a log ship at Terminal 3 ('the T-pier')— action on offer for this week's visitors. The window of the office I work in at NOAA when I'm doing data entry for their Electronic Library looks along the harbor, across the ferry terminal loading lanes towards where the working ships hang out. There's Alaskan Explorer, and behind her IVS Kwaito.

Window with a view. Explorer and Kwaito, and no cars yet for the ferry. (Click for larger image.)

So when I leave the NOAA office it's sunset, but I whip around to the docks. They're loading.

Ships, Friday evening (Click for larger image.)Kwaito and Explorer tail to tail. (Click for larger image.)

Saturday noonish I go to check on the action, and find that it's lunch hour for the log truck drivers. About a dozen trucks sitting ready, and Nothing Moving. Alaskan Explorer has left, Terminal 1 is empty. The man in the guard shack and I agree we think that Kwaito must be bound for China, because the logs are peeled. Then I hustle off to the airport to pick up AD and KF.

Vair vair quiet at the T-Pier, December 17 noon. (Click for larger image.)
Lunch Hour for the Log Truck Drivers, December 17

It's one of those days when I stubbornly see sun breaks in the forecast. About to round up KF and AD, and haul us out to the Outer Coast.

Dams and Ships and Things

2011-12-15T15:09:00.000-08:00

Ooooh, look. They found something entertaining to do at Elwha Dam that is outside the riverbed and not causing silt during this 'fish window'. Since the middle of last month they have taken out the old powerhouse buildings. (I had other things on my mind and missed it entirely.) And now: thank you, Peninsula Daily News, for a film of the old powerhouse tower at Elwha Dam coming down this morning. It looks like they've put a telescope there at the viewpoint, too. Yum. It's still pretty boring on the upper dam webcam, because nothing visible is happening. I can't wait until they start lowering the dam face again, presumably in January when the 'fish window' closes.

That Was Then. From the webcam's slideshow, Nov. 16 is when they started on the powerhouse buildings. (Click for larger image.)This Is Now. Today the tower came down, boom. (Click for larger image.)

Thanks to the local paper also for harbor columnist David Sellars. On Sunday he gave an update on the log trade. Three log ships are due to load this month, 'despite a softening demand for logs within the Asian market during the past few months' as Mr. Sellars describes. The first of the three, IVS Kwaito, just came in off the Strait this morning. There will be photos.

And lastly, my friend IJ found this story about the reintroduction of fishers to an area in the Sierra Nevada in California. The story mentions that they have been reintroduced also near Crater Lake (Oregon) and here in Olympic National Park. Ours certainly didn't need to be encouraged to leave their cages. I don't think I've seen stories about them for a couple of years. I hope the reintroduction took.

What Else Is Going On

2011-12-15T14:52:00.000-08:00

A short version, from an email to a friend. Most of you already know, and I might not write about it here again: "I have carcinoid tumors, much metastasized. It is a slow-growing neuroendocrine cancer, and usually—as with me— found by accident and after it has spread beyond removal. We are still gathering information, further scanning scheduled in Seattle for 2nd week of January. Treatment of choice already begun, injections of a hormonal drug which if it works will slow growth still further, and suppress symptoms (which in fact I have not yet got).

"If it doesn't work, yeah well, other things to try and the clock ticking louder; no way to know how it will go for me, where I will be on the survival curve (whose median is definitely scary); and isn't that really life. Not knowing.

"I was shocked and frightened clear out of my wits for about six weeks; better now. Am going to my tiny part-time job at the college library, doing volunteer time working on the 'electronic library documents' database for the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, and generally behaving as if for now I can stay here and be embedded in the life I chose in Port Angeles four years and a bit ago.

"Which as I get sicker will not work. But I am not going to uproot myself until I do get sicker. Whenever that is.

"Sorry for all the detail. Talking about it helps me not drift off into denial. Thanks for asking."

Frosty Ocean

2011-12-15T08:11:00.000-08:00

On Monday tagged along for the monthly beached-bird survey at Hobuck Beach. Four of us from Port Angeles, including my bird mentors MSB and JL, and SP who lives out there at Neah Bay. (map) It was cold, cold cold; heavy frost here in town and all along the highway. Lots of birds visible from the highway as we drove along the Strait, ducks and cormorants. Half a dozen or so bald eagles scattered along, including one in a tree by the harbor at Neah Bay who didn't seem to have moved at all when we came back five or so hours later. A pair of swans near the Wa'atch bridge.

Hobuck Beach, December 12, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

The wrack and everything else still frosty when we came down onto the beach. The first (dead) birds we found were frozen, and the beach itself frozen hard under our knees as we worked to identify them.

The first bird—and several of the others—was a common murre, a tidy little intact juvenile high up in the drift. We also had a couple of rhinoceros auklets, a Pacific loon, a Brandt's cormorant; maybe 12 bird (corpses) total to identify and report to COASST. We divided into two teams and hopscotched each other along the beach, me and SP and MSB doing the even-numbered birds, whose ID photos ended up in my camera... (example)

Working birds, Hobuck Beach, December 12, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Shorebirds, wrack, lots of sand dollars. I picked up several limpet shells, whitecap and keyhole. Am way into limpets these days.

Stopped for a snack at the turnaround. There was a loon showing off in the mouth of the Wa'atch River, we stalked him with JL's camera; the sun was warm, we were all very mellow.

Lots of sponge in the wrack, and lots of sanddollars (Click for larger image.)

Kept right on finding (dead) birds on the return leg. We picked up a whole lot of trash as we returned, and left one big heavy trashbag with a surfer whose vehicle was parked right behind the beach, so we didn't have to carry it all the way back to the car. It was very satisfying to pick up trash all the way, and not just the 1/4 mile that we were filling out the Marine Debris tracking form...

On the way home, two pairs of swans, and a field full of elk by the highway just west of the Ozette turnoff.

Elk along Highway 112. We were talking cameras when they appeared, as in what shall I buy if I want to reach out for elk who may otherwise be faraway fuzzy specks... (Click for larger image.)

Garnet Sand

2011-12-05T08:59:00.000-08:00

Went to the ocean on Saturday. My houseguest of the moment, my old friend LB, stayed in the car or wandered about and did just what she pleased; so I did too; please myself, I mean. It was dark-cloudy, then brighter, with subtle light effects my poor little camera is not up to. Golden. The light in the picture below should be golden on the water. Ambled north solo along the beach as far as where Ellen Creek flows into the ocean. Then ambled back. Stopped and read for a while. That's the best, really. I be there, I get lost in a story, I wake out of the story and I am still there.

Rialto Beach, December 3, 2011, at a brighter moment (Click for larger image.)

When it works it is deeply soothing, I smile all the way home. (This is different from ecstasy moments, which are rare and I can't remember the last time I had any, a couple of years at least. Don't need 'em either, as long as I get to entirely stop for a while in the sound of the waves.)

Rialto Beach at Ellen Creek, December 3, 2011 (soundscape for Cee)Rialto Beach, more or less from where I sat reading (soundscape for Cee)

The place along the beach where the garnet sand sometimes appears put on its subtle show. A gull posed. And on our way west, the elk were out on Beaver Prairie.

... (Click for larger image.)
... (Click for larger image.)Elk on Beaver Prairie. Resolved: No more waiting. I must shop for a new camera, no matter what else is going on: one which will reach out to the elk, ... (Click for larger image.)

PS I did want to mention as I have before that whenever I am there at Ellen Creek, I think of it as the Raymond Carver point—"Where water comes together with other water"— though he made that phrase for the place where Morse Creek flows into the Strait of Juan de Fuca; and that I always look at the modest creek flow and think of Ivan Doig's story in This House of Sky of getting swept into the ocean, right there, by a winter storm tide. (Hope the link works. You're welcome.)

Processes

2011-11-29T08:30:00.000-08:00

Monday. Over a couple of hours, the weather cleared, the tide crested, the swell subsided. It wasn't nearly as wild as I'd hoped, and the surf never washed over the top of the berm. I was watching one particular log to see if it would move at the height of the tide. Move yes, wash-away not.

Rialto Beach, about 2 hours before high tide, November 29, 20111 (Click for larger image.)Later (Click for larger image.)Soundscape for CeeMore soundscapes

Later we went around to the La Push side of the river and sat for a while on the point, looking sometimes towards First Beach, sometimes back north (the river, the boat harbor, Rialto Beach beyond), sometimes straight out west.

Jayden Bay coming out of La Push harbor, September 29, 2011 (Click for larger image.)
Same image, closer up; notice Hole-in-the-Wall at the far end of Rialto Beach in the distance... (Click for larger image.)
Jayden Bay heading out towards the Quileute River mouth, James Island behind her (Click for larger image.)

King Tides

2011-11-28T08:24:00.000-08:00

Presently contemplating the weather report and the tide table. Going to the ocean today, yes for sure, but can't probably get down on the beach because of very high tide at the wrong time of day. Will be limited to watching and listening to the power of the incoming swell. Eee too bad, the ocean will not bend to my convenience; when I want surf to experience sometimes I get boring beach. Today I want boring beach and will get surf to watch. :-)

First Beach WebCam at the moment, November 28, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Sunny Day for Two

2011-11-21T06:32:00.000-08:00

Saturday had the best weather forecast all week, so we planned it for our beach day despite snow on the deck and a snow shower over the Strait at dawn. It began to lighten up, forecast remained steadfast in its certainty that we would have some sun at the ocean. PH and I started assembling lunches and gear, and headed west.

November 19, 2011, morning. Storm has passed by... (Click for larger image.)

Lake Crescent was showing off.

November 19, 2011. Lake Crescent, mid-morning (Click for larger images.)

No elk on Beaver Prairie. But yes, sunshine at the beach. (We have no idea what the day may have been doing back here in town. We were out there.) We devoted ourselves to sitting on a log, reading our books and eating our lunch and taking pictures now and again. The tide finished going out, then began coming back in again.

Rialto Beach (Click for larger images.)

We stopped at the overlook by the river to look for seals, ducks, or eagles. Out of consideration for PH's un-electronic sensibilities, I did not take advantage of the good signal there to fire up the iPad, check email and twitter. PH spotted an eagle sitting down in the river, its white head moving about. It shifted to a branch sticking up out of the water, then flew stately across our field of view and disappeared into the trees on the other side of the river. I wanted credit for having manifested the eagle as well as the sunny day; PH thought she got the credit for having manifested the eagle, since she spotted it.

Then we drove around to La Push and parked out on the point for a while.

From La Push, looking south along First Beach, the view where I didn't see whale #1 all last season, and not for lack of trying (Click for larger image.)From La Push, looking west (Click for larger image.)From La Push, looking north. Little James Island, Quileute River. That's Rialto Beach over there beyond the jetty (Click for larger image.)

No elk on Beaver Prairie on the return journey either. As we got closer to town it looked like there may have been fresh snow showers.

Staying Local, in Eight Stops

2011-11-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

Continuing the pursuit of distractions. GF came over from Seattle on November 12, (now a week ago). The weather was not ideal— and anyway he wanted to see what could be seen of the dam removals— so we stayed hereabouts, in the rainshadow. I contrived never to set wheel on US 101. US 101 being almost all he knew of this area, it was every-mile-new for him.

We took a look at the airport terminal, because he was charmed by how close the airport is to my house. ('If it were me I'd walk there wheeling my suitcase at least once, just because,' he said.) Then we went to the overlook for the Elwha Dam. No work seemed to be happening, well it was a Saturday and we are in the 'fish window' where no work can go on which might add to the silt settling over the redds, the salmon nests, in the first five miles of the river. I waved my arms around a lot explaining about the temporary channel where the river now flows, and the plan to return the river ultimately to the old channel on the other side. The dam cams, by the way, don't show much action because of the fish window, but yaay the slide shows are now offered in both java and html5 so you can watch 'em on an iPad, w00t! The upper dam, the Glines Canyon Dam, being out of reach until the Whiskey Bend Road reopens, we moved on.

Elwha Dam, November 12, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Since we were already on WA 112, the next stop was westward along the highway, to Salt Creek County Park. First we went to the parking area down by Crescent Beach at the east side of Salt Creek where the land belongs to the County Park. It was high tide, the swell off the Strait was rolling right up the creek almost to our feet, and the parking area was full of surfers drinking coffee from thermoses. Why are you surfing here, we asked. Because the swell on the outer coast is too dangerous. But I was at Rialto yesterday and the swell was very mild, I said. It built during the night from the big storm off Alaska, said the surfer. For some reason it pleased me greatly to rub shoulders with this other school of ocean-watching, people who are tracking the build of the swell in the dark of night, turn up for high tide along the Strait...

Bad pic of waves rolling right up the creek and into the marsh at our feet, Salt Creek County Park, November 12, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Then on to the picnic area at the back of the campground in the Park itself, which overlooks Tongue Point. Except Tongue Point was almost completely under the waves. We went to the bottom of the stairs. Waves were splashing up to them. There were harlequin ducks, and black oystercatchers, bufflehead. Not a whole lot else in the way of seabirds, or anyway the water too wild to see them. Before leaving the park we took the trail along the bluff edge and up to the bunker (this being in fact an old WWII coastal defense installation). Along the trail, a perfectly spectacular mystery fungus growing from a stump.

Tongue Point under the waves (Click for larger image.)Little island at Salt Creek, surrounded by waves (Click for larger image.)Mystery fungus. Identifications cheerfully accepted. (Click for larger image.)

(Tongue Point not under the waves, June 2009). (Little island not surrounded by waves, February, 2011.)

OK then, back on the Elwha River exploration track. We went to the cobble beach at the river mouth. Surfers, but the tide was falling and the breakers not too impressive. We walked on the pedestrian-and-bike deck of the new high bridge, where I got to wave my arms around again pointing to the water plant and detailing all the industrial infrastructure investment which had to be in place before the first bite was taken out of either dam. We went down to the end of Lower Elwha Road on the rez and looked at the river from just inside the mouth.

Cobble Beach at the mouth of the Elwha River (Click for larger image.)Looking toward the Strait and the river mouth from the end of Lower Elwha Road (Click for larger image.)

The light was fading. We hustled on out to Ediz Hook, saw ducks, watched the pilot boat go out to meet a ship (whose name I have lost), rendezvous, return to its berth. The weather was breaking up. Blue patches and peekaboo mountains.

... (Click for larger image.)

Then GF headed back to Seattle in the dark.

The Elk Were Out

2011-11-12T07:27:00.000-08:00

Friday we pretended we didn't care about the weather forecast, and IJ and I went out to the ocean to see the places I write about. We did very well as to weather, waves, and wildlife. There was pouring rain along the highway as we headed west, but it lightened up once we were on the outer coast. It was high tide when we got out there, so we couldn't get down on the beach at Rialto, but perched in the drift watching the waves and the ever-changing light between the rainshowers.

Rialto Beach, with James Island, November 11, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Soundscape for Cee (with IJ's Rainsuit)

A strong rainshower chased us back to the car, and we drove around to the south side of the mouth of the river. We parked out on the point in La Push overlooking First Beach, where we'd see whale blows in March or April if we had better luck than I usually do. It was extremely windy, we stayed mostly in the car. There were tiny sunbreaks. There was an eagle over the channel, who went behind James Island before IJ could spot him.

Looking west from La Push, November 11, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Here is the best part. IJ very much wanted to have me point out Beaver Prairie, where I sometimes see the elk in winter. They hadn't been around yet, I said, so she had no expectations. But there they were. She counted at least fifty. It was raining, the rain was coming in the car window, the camera jumped; but here by golly are some of our blurry elk.

Elk on Beaver Prairie, November 11, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Swans, Anemones, and So On

2011-11-08T07:10:00.001-08:00

Sunday we went out to Neah Bay. That way we were seeing new territory for PG, and it's all the same ocean as long as it's the outer coast. :-) Stopped to duck-watch near the harbor in Neah Bay, and then on out to Hobuck Beach. (Sam Beebe's glorious aerial photo shows everything: Hobuck Beach in the foreground, Wa'atch River, Neah Bay on the near side of the Strait, then the Strait with Vancouver Island behind.) The tide was going out.

Sunny Mid-Day, Neah Bay, November 6, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

It's really quiet out there, compared to the wild high-energy feeling of Rialto Beach, for all that it is the same ocean. PG asked me, "What's straight out there?" pointing perpendicular to where we stood, compass bearing west in intention if not in fact. We had to wait until we got home for the answer, looking on the big globe. Straight west is Sakhalin Island, not Japan as it is in everyone's imagination.

(Click for larger image.)Barely a Soundscape, for Cee

The tide was going out all afternoon. We wandered. We didn't have the bird survey pack with us, but found three beached birds and looked at one very carefully, trying to retain enough information without ID book, measuring tools, etc to identify it when we got home. (Maybe pigeon guillemot, we think, just like the living mystery bird we had the day before at Ediz Hook.)(Later: sent the dead-bird photos to JL, my beached-bird mentor; she says the one we looked closely at was a common murre.) There were fish skeletons, mounds of kelp, lots of limpets and sand dollars. Hobuck is an accumulation beach, what arrives there stays there. I found a chiton plate, the first I have found on my own without a beach companion spotting it and giving it to me, since I'm known to be mad for chitons.

When we returned to our starting point, the tide was well out, and we could look for tidepool critters.

Where the anemones were (Click for larger image.)Only a couple of sea stars (Click for larger image.)Lots of anemones and barnacles (Click for larger image.)

It was the day of the time change. We kept track of our time, so we could make the two hour return part of our driving loop in daylight and PG could see more new territory. Along the Wa'atch River just behind the beach, the swans were there. They must winter there, you can often hope to see them. OMG they are so beautiful. We watched them for quite a while. I didn't try for a photo, it wouldn't have come out.

Birthday Portrait; I am holding an enormous sand dollar that PG hoped to get home intact in her tiny overstuffed carryon luggage. (Click for larger image.)

Not-a-Duck

2011-11-05T20:36:00.001-07:00

Accumulating distraction reports: On Wednesday took PG out to Salt Creek County Park. The tide was coming in, she couldn't really see how Tongue Point emerges from the Strait covered all over with kelp and tidepools. There were lots of harlequin ducks, and some black oystercatchers (lo-o-o-o-ve oystercatchers). Also merganser, an eagle, a grebe, some cormorants.

Then we went on out to Ediz Hook. There were great blue herons, a loon, buffleheads, sanderlings, dunlin, lots of wigeons, a red knot (unusual; we had trouble believing we had it but we did). Also lots of harbor seals hauled out on a log raft.

Tongue Point going under the waves, November 2, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Island in green water, Salt Creek County Park (Click for larger image.)Great Blue Heron on the boom by the pilot station. Port Angeles beyond. (Click for larger image.)

Friday we went to the ocean. The forecast was for clouds but instead we had a day like this:

Rialto Beach, November 4, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Stupid blogger changed the interface, I have to reload these, but for now...

Soundscape for CeeAt Ellen Creek (Click for larger image.)" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="360" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true">The 360

Saturday evening, back out on the Hook, lots of ducks and a not-a-duck. Some experienced birders also couldn't figure it out. This morning PG thinks maybe it was a pigeon guillemot. Also we had scoters, wigeons, buffleheads, mergansers, harlequins, and not a single eagle.

November 5. American wigeons in Port Angeles Harbor (Click for larger image.)November 5. Klahane Ridge and Mount Angeles emerge above Port Angeles (Click for larger image.)

Looking at the Work

2011-10-31T06:34:00.000-07:00

On Thursday went with W. to the second overlook for the Elwha Dam removal. We spent a long time there, watching red and yellow backhoes chew up the old stepped spillway which occupies the river's original channel, and move dirt around. Trucks moved out load after load of rubble and dirt, bringing it to a staging area right by where you park to get on the trail. From there a different fleet of trucks is carrying the rubble off to elsewhere.

Watching the work on the dam, October 27, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Go to the dam webcams and click on webcam slideshow, then tell it to go forward instead of back. Forward takes you to the beginning of the sequence, before the removal began...

What It Looked Like on the Webcam Before Deconstruction Started, August 24, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

They are repairing the Whiskey Bend road, and even hikers can't go up there. No way to get near the upper dam, Glines Canyon, probably until spring, as snow will close the road before repairs are completed; and we won't be able to approach from the other side until the project is completed.

The Vine Maples on the West End

2011-10-25T20:34:00.001-07:00

On Sunday along US 101 west of the lake, the vine maples were at the height of their color. The sun came and went. In the sunshine, in some places, they absolutely flamed.

October 23, 2011. Maybe near E. Snider Road. (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

The sun came and went. A rainshower passed by.

Rialto Beach, James Island, October 23, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Ocean in the Sun, October 23, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

I read for a while.

Soundscape for Cee, Retreating Tide

No pelicans. On the way home, out over the river, two bald eagles were hunting hunting, talons hanging down and head bent to eyeball the water. They'd stoop. Didn't seem to carry off anything. They were very vocal.

The Blue Garage

2011-10-25T19:24:00.000-07:00

The blue garage in the alley has red leaves in its garden patch. In the spring, forsythia. In the summer, sunflowers.

October 24th, 2011, in the alley. (Click for larger image.)

Going To See the Elephant

2011-10-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

The news is everywhere, science blogs and NYT and the sort of science journalists who find something hot to write about in each week's Science Magazine. And the local papers, including the weekly Sequim Gazette, are going wild.

Did I know we had a mastodon? No. Did I know Sequim has a museum with a natural history exhibit? No. But boy I sure now know that we are in the forefront of paleontological news, with a confirmed pre-Clovis hunting site. Boy howdy.

Beastie was excavated in the 70s, from the Manis farm in the Happy Valley area of Sequim. But the paleontological establishment told the researcher who did the work that it couldn't have been as early as he said. And science filed his findings in limbo, though the Manis Mastodon remained in the museum and on the mental maps of local people who have been around a long time.

The news is that it has been retested and firmly dated to 13,800 years ago; and the truly lovely part of the story is that the guy with way-modern dating technology worked with the original researcher, Dr. Carl Gustafson, lo these 35 years later, and he appears as one of the authors of the new paper. Take that, Clovis-first true believers.

The root story, in Science: (1). Lots of other stories: (2)(3)(4). The critter is not nearly as large as I imagined. Lovely size chart at New York State Museum's web site.

Keeping the museum's hours in mind, to plan a visit to the elephant ancestor's bones.

Fifteen Feet Down, 195 Feet to Go

2011-10-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

Barnard Construction is going to take the Glines Canyon Dam down another four feet before the end of the month, then shift activities out of the river flow for the first 'fish window' (to protect the salmon in the lower five miles of the river). An article in the Peninsula Daily News pointed out yesterday that this means some 15 feet of the 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam will have been removed as of November 1.

9:55 AM, October 21, on the DamCam (Click for larger image.)

PDN is doing a great job of keeping us up-to-date. I wish they would ask Barnard Construction how many feet down they can go with the present notching procedure, i.e. when the working barge will ground on the rubble-filled silt upstream of the dam face. It's all just getting dropped in, for now...

Up on the Sol Duc

2011-10-18T07:36:00.000-07:00

Went looking for leaping salmon, on the theory that the ocean will still be there after my trip to Santa Fe and Crestone, but the returning coho salmon run will have ended before I have another chance to look. River flow at the Cascade pretty low, and I only saw one jumper. I think that they were there, but can just swim invisibly up the flow at this volume.

Sol Duc River at Salmon Cascades, River Mile 59, October 16, 2011. (Click for larger image.)The Forest at the Cascade (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

The light is golden all day long in the winter forest.

(Click for larger image.)

Occupy Report

2011-10-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

There were people from AFL-CIO, Veterans for Peace, Green Party, MoveOn, can't remember who else. One person with an anti-GMO food sign. One person with a sign against the Federal Reserve Bank. One of the un-speakers pointed out there was nobody from the county Democratic Party.

The un-organizers brought a lot of old movie posters to write signs on the back of, but at first had no markers. Someone came running with a handful of markers. Eventually I was able to make myself a sign that said "99% we are the people" on a folded-over poster. Later I decided my base message was the one I saw on several handmade signs: "Remove corporate influence from politics", so I wrote that on the other folded half, and switched back and forth.

Occupy Port Angeles, October 15, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

An eccentric dude in yellow trousers took the microphone twice. The second time he was singing John Lennon's 'Imagine'. People sang along. The mad-as-the-devil woman read a statement she had written out beforehand. A couple about my age asked me how long I had been demonstrating. I checked my watch. "About 48 minutes," I said. "That makes you senior to us, we got here half an hour ago" they said, and told me that they had never been to a demonstration before.

After standing by the park for an hour, waving signs at the traffic on Lincoln Street (which is US 101 at that point) we started marching and circled around downtown in about 30 minutes (it's a small town), visiting various bank branches, politely stopping for red lights so we interfered with no traffic. Saw a couple of police cars, but their occupants not visible. They didn't need to remind us, we were good about staying on the sidewalk. The front of the line chanted "We. Are. The 99 percent." The back of the line with much louder voices was chanting "YOU. Are. The 99 percent."

"This is my first demonstration," said one young person to another as we were walking. "Same for me," the other replied.

Occupy Port Angeles, October 15, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Not Ready For This

2011-10-15T16:50:00.001-07:00

The sun now rises behind the lot with the trees, where it will continue to rise for the next four or so months. And there was frost this morning. Actually I think there may have been frost yesterday morning also, but I didn't look until it had melted.

Kind of wintry. October 15, 2011 (Click for larger image.)
Ornamental color, and blue Strait. Late afternoon, October 15, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Addicted to the DamCams

2011-10-11T08:43:00.001-07:00

The height of the dam face is now below the level of the spillgates, and they continue to deepen the notches which are drawing down the level of the lake. (The DamCams also ofter timelapse slideshows. Extremely rewarding...)

Saturday Morning. October 8, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Handwork (!!) on Monday afternoon. Sure would love to know what that was about...

Man in a safety cage doing Something. October 10, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Ocean Again

2011-10-11T07:43:00.000-07:00

The Ocean Prediction Center forecast something like 12-foot swell. Barely noticable on the beach, right? Wrong. Hello, winter surf, you've been almost forgotten, so glad to see you again.

October 9, 2011, about 2 hours past high tide (Click for larger image.)

This was a COASST survey day. Needed actual beach to survey. Even at 90 minutes past the high tide, no beach to speak of. I set out anyway, immediately caught by water washing into the drift and up above the knee (thank heavens for rainpants and waterproof boots), retreated to a log and just watched and listened for another half-hour or so.

No dead birds, though on the Rialto Jetty beach segment there could have been any number hiding under the accumulated drying foam. Which is always painful to see since Akashiwo caused all those dead birds two years ago (1), (2), (3), but apparently not causing harm under present circumstances. Pelicans, crows, gulls. Misty, sometimes very misty, but essentially sunny and warm.

Pelicans in the mist (Click for larger image.)Piles of foam always spooky, but not actually harmful... (Click for larger image.)

The tide did eventually recede, the sea surface less wild. Last weekend's fresh wrack lines along the Ellen Creek beach segment had been swept away, the beach clean and bare.

At Ellen Creek, October 9, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Later afternoon (Click for larger image.)

The Watchers by the River

2011-10-04T07:46:00.000-07:00

Driving west, there had seemed to be very darn little water in the Sol Duc River, and no fisher persons at the usual pull outs. So it seemed unlikely there would be salmon jumping at Salmon Cascades. But I had to go look, on my way home from the beach. Up the Sol Duc Road I went, through the beautiful forest, grey and dark; and yes, you could see watchers down by the river as you drove around the last curve, and the little parking area was full. Fish. We have fish.

Watchers at Salmon Cascades, October 2, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

These are the Sol Duc summer coho. They spawn a couple of river miles upstream. Sometimes a really big one would jump, and all the watchers would murmur or go "oooh". Sometimes one would jump a little to the right of the main flow, where you could see it wriggle and scramble up the thin water flowing down the rock instead of vanishing into the cascade; and the people would say "Go! Go! Go!", and clap their hands, and make pushing gestures in the air, adding their own intention to the fierce determined fishes.

No new photos of salmon in flight. If I concentrate on trying to get photos, I'm not watching any more, and once I have a good picture I think I am done and go home, instead of just being there. Here is where they were jumping:

Salmon Cascades, October 2, 2011 (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

Two years ago I spent a long long time on several occasions trying to get pictures of the coho at Salmon Cascades. Though it violates the one rule of this blog, that all the pictures should be new, here are a movie and my best jumping salmon photo, both from 2009.

October 18, 2009. Perfect Flow, a Salmon MovieA Coho Salmon on October 18, 2009 (Click for larger image.)

The Quietest of Beach Days

2011-10-04T06:52:00.000-07:00

The forecast was for rain, but it didn't rain, which was a good thing because the whole purpose of the day was to sit on the beach and read. No dead-bird surveys, no wading in the surf, no glorious photos, no ecstasy. Just read.

The light was gray and flat, and there was no swell to speak of, no surf, little wave sound. There must have been some recent wave action, because the beach was netted with lines of fresh wrack. There was a strong smell of salt and (?)iodine.

Rialto Beach, October 2, 2011. Fresh wrack. (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

Some pelicans. Gulls and crows working the wrack lines and flying off with things in their beaks (which was interesting, you never see gulls doing anything but standing around...) Away to the south, a fishing boat moved through the channel beyond the jetty. All you could see of it was a tall slender mast, with a light at the top. Later the air got brighter, though the sky didn't actually clear.

October 2, 2011. Rialto Beach. Looking North. (Click for larger image.)

I sat against a handy log and read every inch of a very lovely novel for middle-schoolers, Hilary McKay's Saffy's Angel. J fiction, as we used to call it where I used to work, has the very great virtue of offering classical unity, the whole arc of the story can be experienced in one sitting. Most satisfying, if it's a good book, which this was.

Quiet Beach Movie, October 2, 2011.

This post is for Roshi, who once complained that I send him pictures of the same beach every time. This from a man who has done the same thing every morning for the last fifty years.

Chewing Right Along

2011-09-30T13:27:00.000-07:00

Both dam removal teams are making great & visible progress. It's still hard to imagine what will happen when the work at Glines Canyon Dam gets down to spillway level. The lake is surely too deep there to move the flow out of the way with cofferdams, as they did down at Elwha Dam, and they somehow have to be cutting notches in the dam face to lower the water level. Or something.

Glines Canyon Dam, September 30, via the DamCams (Click for larger image.)
Elwha Dam (Click for larger image.)

Ships and Ships

2011-09-30T06:47:00.000-07:00

From the window of the OCNMS office where I am picking away at the database project, things look pretty quiet. There are two Polar tankers in port, and both the submarine support vessels, HOS Eagleview and Arrowhead.

Quiet in the harbor, September 29, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Polar Discovery (Click for larger image.)

Of course Global Standard was not going to Europe. Scratch shipspotting.com, a great source of photos, as a source of tracking information. David Sellars, who writes about the harbor for Peninsula Daily News, says she went to Lanshan, China. Mr Sellars had the great good fortune to watch the lashing down of Global Standard from on-board, and wrote a most informative article. Global Standard was followed at the T-pier by Cook Strait. She was fully loaded but still at the dock when I flew in over the harbor on Monday evening, but then sailed. The log yard is empty at the moment.

Yesterday there was a mystery ship which I was too stupid to put the binoculars on, or to look it up last night, and the photo is useless, and it's gone now. Rats. Who is this and where was she going, or coming from.

Mystery Ship (Click for larger image.)Ocean Cape has been at the city pier for weeks (Click for larger image.)

You Can See the Strait (But Not Canada)

2011-09-28T08:37:00.000-07:00

It's an absolutely beautiful morning. I'm so glad to be home.

A bit misty over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. No islands out there. (Click for larger image.)Fall morning in the alley, September 28, 2011... (Click for larger image.)

This post is for @heidigoseek.

Harbor Full of Ships

2011-09-19T19:31:00.000-07:00

The harbor is full of ships. Earlier today there was even a container ship, which we don't usually see in our harbor. According to the tracker sites, NYK Artemis came in off the ocean having sailed from Oakland, not carrying much, spent a night anchored out in the harbor, and then sailed for Busan, Korea. We'll never know why.

NYK Artemis with Polar Adventure, looking ghostly, 09/19/11 (Click for larger image.)

At the T-pier there's a log ship, but it too is mysterious. It's not one of the Pacific Basin line ships, which all the others have been. It looks entirely different. Global Standard came through the Panama Canal on August 30, and when it leaves here it is headed back through the canal en route to Brussels. Huh? Logs to Europe? At midday there were a dozen or so fully loaded log trucks lined up and waiting, no logs in the cradles, and the cranes were not working. I'm leaving in the dark hours for a family visit, and will not get to see what happens next: whether they load it to the tops of the stanchions, or whether like Artemis she'll set forth mostly empty; nor will ever know why her itinerary brought her here.

Global Standard, looking idle, 09/19/11 (Click for larger image.)The harbor, evening, 09/19/11. I bet they all have a story... (Click for larger image.)

Humble Handmaiden of the Muse of Science

2011-09-19T09:56:00.000-07:00

I've begun working on a 'library' project for Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary. I say library in quotes because they call it their library but it's entirely intangible: a database of articles and reports in PDF form, which is in a neglected state and has hundreds of papers (i.e., PDF files in several different directories on the network) that need to be entered. NOAA in Washington had to set me up with a NOAA email address (OMG I have a noaa email address!) so I could take an online computer-security course that everyone has to do once a year. Now I have my own login, a PC set up for me and a spot to work in an unoccupied office (hey they must REALLY want me to make progress on this!); until a visiting scientist bumps me, I get to sit up on the 3rd floor of the Landing building with a view over the harbor, being a humble handmaiden of the muse of science. Whee. (There doesn't seem to be such a muse, exactly, but I know who I am.)

It first came up when I was out on the Tatoosh for the pelagic bird survey at the end of July. Liam, the OCNMS scientist who was running the survey, overheard me telling someone I was a librarian. Oh, says Liam, we need help with our library. Hooked, just like that. Helping anybody with their library is what I was born to do, you know... Besides, I am piling up the volunteer hours and earning a spot on one of the boat trips next summer. Besides besides, messing around with a digital library is new librarianly turf for me, and interesting. In a boring way.

The only problem is, I go back to work at the college on the 27th. College, tribe, OCNMS office. I now have THREE places I'm supposed to be! Well, I'll just work out a pattern of life during the quarter that includes a couple of two-hour sessions in the database every week, or most weeks, or something. At that rate I'll be working on this project for the rest of my life, but in truth my brain goes out of gear at about the two hour point anyway...

It does call into question exactly what retirement means. I have a microscopic paying job, and two volunteer gigs, and much of the time I imagine I'd really rather be lying on the couch reading.

This post cribbed almost intact from an email to a friend. It's hard to write something twice and have the second one be at all fresh...

Cars lining up for the ferry, Sealth Arrow preparing to pull out, etc.: view from the OCNMS offices. (Click for larger image.)

The First Bite

2011-09-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

The dam cams are up. And OMG, yes, they took the first bite out of Glines Canyon Dam yesterday.

End of First Day's Work on Glines Canyon Dam, September 15, 2011. (#6 webcam) (Click for larger image.)

Peninsula Daily News has a good little video. Olympic National Park has begun a dam removal blog. It's really happening.

Actually, You Can... (Dambusting, II)

2011-09-07T07:17:00.000-07:00

The Park has moved the entrance station on Olympic Hot Springs Road out of the middle of the road and onto a little loop off to the side. This is to facilitate big pieces of equipment moving by; the biggest piece, the crane as tall as Glines Canyon Dam itself, has already moved up there. You can't drive up to the dam anymore on the main road, and the Whiskey Bend Road is still closed to cars since a landslide last winter. (The Park shows no particular inclination to repair the road, I mean, they say they will but the season is almost over. Probably they're just as happy to not have people back in there on either side.) But you can walk up the Whiskey Bend side, and in about half an hour be right there on the east buttress of Glines Canyon Dam. Love those late-1920s light poles. Hope someone is going to preserve a few of them... The date on the USGS benchmark on the concrete stairs there is 1929.

The crane, as viewed from the East Buttress, Glines Canyon Dam, September 3, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Benchmark, 1929. (Click for larger image.)

From there you can hear but not see the water coming through the gates of the spillway. You can't see any of the dam face, or put your nose and camera through a chainlink fence and look down down down to the river 210 feet below.

West buttress and spillway, Glines Canyon Dam, September 1, 2010 (Click for larger image.)Lake Mills, September 1, 2010 (Click for larger image.)

This is not romance, but industrial-scale work, and the ugliness too will be industrial scale. I won't live to see it healed, nor see the salmon find their way upriver and make new redds. But the only way to get there is to begin.

Lake Mills is being drawn down, September 3, 2011 (Click for larger image.)... (Click for larger image.)

Dambusting

2011-09-03T10:15:00.000-07:00

It's been a year since I last took a houseguest to visit the dams which are leaving, freeing the Elwha. The run-up has been ongoing and slow—whether you count the decades of political struggle, or the several recent years of major prep: water works, greenhouses raising native plants in vast numbers to plant out in the naked former lakebeds, new hatchery on the rez, new diking on the rez (as they are at risk of flooding when all the sediment now behind the dams raises the river bed several feet), road work, experiments in drawing down the lakes, baseline science along the river and in the nearshore part of the Strait, and all.

Salmon, come home.

This is a huge big deal, the largest dam removal/ river restoration project ever. Now we are having a long tedious run-up to the official dambusting ceremonies being staged by the Park and many local and national stakeholders later this month. It's hard to care about gala dinners and rock concerts and invitation-only bigwig ceremonials at the lower dam because in fact NO ACTUAL WORK WILL BE BEING DONE to mark the moment, not even symbolically. Meanwhile you can no longer get anywhere near either dam, and I simply didn't notice when the long-term road closures meant I'd missed a last chance to take a set of 'before' photos, not that I don't have plenty...

Glines Canyon Dam and Lake Mills, June 30, 2009 (Click for larger image.)

Then on Sunday the newspaper said, "A 200-foot crane, the largest piece of machinery planned for the removal of the two Elwha River dams, was being installed last week at Glines Canyon Dam. The 4100 Crane will be used in tearing down the 210-foot structure beginning Sept. 15." Aha. The real work will have already begun on the upper dam a few days before the bigwigs foregather at the lower dam. OK, then.

The other thing the paper said was that a new public viewpoint had been established overlooking Elwha Dam, the lower dam. So I went and looked. Not a whole lot to see unless they take down some trees (which why would they, this is a restoration project, not a further-depredation project). But there it is,

From the New Viewpoint for Elwha Dam, September 2, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

and three years of careful work from now it will be gone, and the river running free.

Salmon, come home. This is all for you. Salmon, come home.

Sailed for Shanghai

2011-09-01T09:28:00.001-07:00

Monday afternoon Pacific Logger was still loading. It sure looked full to me, but none of the load was lashed down. I asked a couple of truckdrivers who were in waiting position, shooting the breeze together, when she would sail. 'Tomorrow,' said one. 'Supposed to be at 5 PM today,' the other said, 'but it's not lashed down yet, and they sure won't bring on another gang this evening...' Sure looks full to me, I said. 'The wood is very dry, no weight. They can pack a lot more on,' the second driver answered.

August 29, afternoon, loading Pacific Logger (Click for larger image.)

(Saturday morning, got a nice video of the logloader at work, the machine that SA calls 'Biter'.)

August 27, morning, loading

Tuesday afternoon sometime, she sailed for Shanghai. You can't find out where she's going until she sails and one of the tracking sites shows the destination.

Image from siitech.com (Click for larger image)

The First Real Weekend of Summer

2011-08-29T06:53:00.000-07:00

It was kite weather, and not. Inland just a little it remained sunny; on the beach, the marine layer drifted in, rarely so thick you couldn't see the blue behind the veil, or sunshine-over-there. There were enormous numbers of people on the beach: 78 people and 7 dogs on the clicker for the Ellen Creek Beach segment, though by that time the fog had slipped in. All over NW Washington, people must have looked at the forecast, declared this the first real summer weekend of a cold season (as well as perhaps the last one), and bolted for the Outer Coast.

August 27, 2011. Soundscape for C. Note the fogbank in the west.

This was a COASST survey day. No dead birds to report, unless I was just too spacey to notice. One notable bundle of feathers, but no measurable parts = it can't be identified and doesn't count. A bit of wrack. On one stretch the beach was substantially reshaped, though there have been of course no winter storms. A handful of pelicans flying past and a few cormorants in the air, down along the Rialto Jetty segment.

Rialto Jetty Beach Segment, August 27, 2011 (Click for larger image.)The Other Aspect: Kite Weather (Click for larger image.)

Another henge-builder with an interesting mind had been at work in the drift.

Climbing Cairns (Click for larger image.)No Measurable Parts (Click for larger image.)

As usual, stopped at the pullout over the river to get online, this time the excuse was to check on my North Carolina friends just then having a hurricane. There were about three dozen mergansers in the river, flitting back and forth from shore to shore like they were playing some kind of water-soccer. Two eagles, moving more lazily from one side of the river to the other.

I need to ask Tim McNulty about these signs. How is the Wild Olympics Campaign progressing, and why is the only evidence that it is happening at all these (completely delusional) anti- signs on the West End? Maps and whatnot on the Wild Olympics Campaign website.

... (Click for larger image.)

Pacific Logger

2011-08-27T08:39:00.000-07:00

They made lot of progress yesterday. If they're working today, Pacific Logger may be filled up and ready to sail before I get back from the ocean this evening. I'll go down and try to get a working photo or two before I head west.

August 26, just after 5 PM (Click for larger image.)

Heading west soon...

Logship at the T-pier

2011-08-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

Arrived: Pacific Logger, looking overdue for some maintenance. But she's here to load logs.

Might try to get some pictures of the peeler yard in action...

August 25, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Right now am reading a book about the invention of the shipping container (The box : how the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger). Wouldn't mind seeing a fully loaded container ship this close up; also wouldn't mind reading a book about the log trade.

Travel Days

2011-08-25T05:21:00.000-07:00

August 19-21. The ferry eastbound was chaotic, traffic heavy on Whidbey Island; and it was hot in the Fraser Delta. C and me mostly hung around inside, near fans, and let the world proceed without us.

Tagged along with J on his Sunday morning routine. Went for a bit of a walk with his walking group; we were on a boardwalk trail in the coniferous area of Burns Bog, squoze between the highway and the railroad tracks. The boggier areas are a Preserve not open for hiking.

August 21. From the Boardwalk in Burns Bog, Delta, BC (Click for larger image.)

On the paved path, before you reach the boardwalk loop, there were vast numbers of a mystery flower. It was elaborate and delicate enough to look like a runaway garden flower, and certainly must be invasive rather than native. But—after hours of online research, and much paging through plant books, by all three of us— it remains a mystery.

What is it? (Click for larger image.)

Sunday morning, part 2: off to the White Rock Farmer's Market. Wonderful produce from the Fraser Valley, gorgeous fruit and berries from the Okanagan. Music, cool breeze off the water, just perfect wandering weather.

Whale Wall at the White Rock Farmer's Market (Click for larger image.)From the Okanagan (Click for larger image.)

Having drawn a false conclusion about summer weekend conditions from the trip north, I left early and allowed hours and hours of extra time for the border crossing, traffic, and mischance. Arrived on Whidbey with lots of time to spare, and detoured down into Deception Pass State Park, to see the bridge from below. Unexpectedly encountered people swarming the shore and the Pass to catch pink salmon (humpies, everyone called them, not pinks) (1)(2). It was slack tide, which I don't understand but I could see with my eyes: no visible current and the boats were just bobbin' around out there close enough to talk to the folks casting from the shore. They were catching fish.

Deception Pass, August 21, 2011. (Click for larger image.)Fishing at Deception Pass (Click for larger image.)

About the currents: Thanks to JL for finding me the Currents at Deception Pass. If I stare at this long enough I almost get it. The animation at deepzoom.com was no help at all.

Those fish had a job to do, to get on through the Pass and up the Skagit River to spawn. They fought against the lines. They flapped and wriggled determinedly trying to get themselves back down the shore into the water again. I'm not sure I want to eat salmon anymore.

Places To Go, People To See

2011-08-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

Long weekend in another country. Arriving mostly by land, well, except for the ferry ride from Port Townsend, and the bridge over Deception Pass...

...

Um, yeah, you've seen this map before. If it seems like I'm getting around a lot, it's true. I don't work at the college during summer quarter, and this year am managing not to waste it. Time to get ready to get moving.

There Were Librarians

2011-08-19T07:46:00.000-07:00

Washington State Tribal Librarians meeting. This year we met at the Port Gamble S'Klallam reservation. Fourteen librarians came. Well, maybe 11, three of the people were from the State Library. The library itself is a wonderful and busy place, stuffed full of local art and vast amounts of materials. It's a branch of the Kitsap Regional Library system. County provides materials, computers, employees. The tribe owns and maintains the building; it is embedded in their increasingly well-devloped campus of buildings. Their resident rez population is about the size of Elwha's, but the library serves also a wider population off the rez.

We had an agenda, but the main purpose was connection. Everyone brought something to share—lavender from a neighbor's garden, dreamcatchers that a bunch of schoolkids made but they were really messed up so she remade them into objects of beauty (thankyou LR!); a gorgeous calendar with native foods recipes, joint product of the Colville Tribe and WSU; a booklet describing the results of Jamestown S'Klallam's digitization projects; and so on. We got a tote bag (librarian conferences always get tote bags), lunch at the Port Gamble casino, wonderful baked goodies for our snacks, a tour of the library and of the Port Gamble tribal center complex.

In the Longhouse, Port Gamble, August 18 (Click for larger image.)
In the library, Port Gamble, August 18 (Click for larger image.)

It all worked as intended. A week after the meeting emails are still flying back and forth with followup questions, thankyous, lists. ("What was that book people were talking about at the end of the table during lunch?") Let's do it again soon.

Addendum:

2011-08-18T20:45:00.000-07:00

"Protocol: Traveling ; 70.0 mile(s)." Before we left the Tatoosh on July 25th, Ryan Merrill took a copy of the pelagic bird survey data from the Seebird program on Liam's laptop, and entered it into ebird.org as checklist #S8599880 , http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S8599880. He includes not just how many were reported to Liam or me or Chris at the keyboard, but others seen outside the survey quadrant. Like, "4750 Pink-footed Shearwater; 2633 in survey area, a few large rafts and many smaller rafts outside survey area."

Other highlights:

3850 Sooty Shearwater ; 1932 on survey
1050 Fork-tailed Storm-Petrel ; 761 on survey
2 Leach's Storm-Petrel ; both on survey, crossed close to boat and seen well
300 Black-footed Albatross; 169 on survey, most associated with the hake trawler/processor and in the wake trailing behind them for miles
Go to the ebird entry to see them all.

I don't see how to get to his comments from the link above. But he emailed them to Liam, and gave permission to use them here: "Comments: OCNMS NOAA survey from La Push - Forecast was 7 foot swell at ten with 10-20 knot winds but reality was more like 5-6 foot swell with max 10 knot winds, overcast at first clearing to mostly sunny, dodged some dense rain showers. Mammals included 6 Humpbacks, 15 Dall's Porpoise (bow riding), 15 Pacific White-sided Dolphins (bow riding), 50 Steller's Sea Lions (all but three at Sea Lion Rock south of Carroll Island), 2 Fur Seals, 1 Gray Whale (south of Carroll), and 4 Harbor Seals. Big highlight was encountering a hake trawler and processor with thousands of tubenoses (mainly fulmars) behind it, most of which were in the survey area! only a couple hundred of the PFSH were here - Good numbers of birds seen throughout the survey highlighted by tremendous numbers of Pink-footed Shearwaters (4750)! Several rafts of 50 or more Fork-tailed Storm-Petrels seen sitting on the water were fun to see as well. 26 species (+1 other taxa)."

I sure didn't see a fraction of all that, you know. But we did. I'll add this Addendum also to the original post.

Fading Light

2011-08-18T06:02:00.000-07:00

The sun set quite suddenly at 8:24 PM yesterday. The light faded, instantly; I looked at the clock. "The days are getting shorter," I said to my friend.

Daylight is already about two hours shorter than it was at the solstice. Now it's changing very fast, and will be two hours shorter still by the equinox. As of this moment, it can't be ignored. There will be darkness.

O noes.

Sun and Moon Data for One Day

The following information is provided for Port Angeles, Clallam County, Washington (longitude W123.4, latitude N48.1):
Wednesday
17 August 2011 Pacific Daylight Time

SUN
Begin civil twilight 5:37 a.m.
Sunrise 6:11 a.m.
Sun transit 1:18 p.m.
Sunset 8:24 p.m.
End civil twilight 8:58 p.m.

Dead Bird Survey at Hobuck Beach

2011-08-17T06:53:00.000-07:00

We carpool from the north side of the Safeway parking lot; what a beautiful day. There's a certain amount of organizing day packs, nipping into the market for supplies, double-checking. Then we set forth. Along highway 112 it is foggy, sunny, foggy, sunny again.

This kind of day in Port Angeles (at the start), August 16, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

This is the monthly COASST survey for Hobuck Beach (map). GD and I have joined the expedition for practice, since there are usually more dead birds at Hobuck even in seasons when everyone else's beaches have nothing. This day in fact there are only two. The first might be a sooty shearwater,

Found Something. We stop wandering the wrack lines and gather to identify it. (Click for larger image.)

but it doesn't have a head so we have to use more subtle signs. By the measurements and foot characteristics it is of a size with a northern fulmar. Is it dark grey or more brownish? Is the tarsus round or flat? We all pinch it. We are not of one mind. Me and SP think it's a NOFU, but JL is the most experienced and she says SOSH. (We pine for MS, our scientist mentor, who always knows at a glance, and who would pinch that tarsus and say, 'There, can't you feel it?')

Before brushing it off and examining it carefully... (Click for larger image.)

Later we have a cassin's auklet, wings of. With only the wings and it so tiny, nevertheless we're sure about this one. Beached birds: A COASST field guide is a work of genius, helps turn anyone into a useful citizen scientist. Later still we have a third partial carcass, this just one wing, which crumbles as we move it around, turn it over, try to measure; we decide not to count this one.

It's sunny at the start and up past the turnaround. Then I am distracted by watching the fog blow in in patches, and the ocean appear and disappear.

Sunny. Foggy. August 16, Hobuck Beach (Click for larger image.)

On the way home we stop between Sekiu and Clallam Bay for a sandwich. Three and a half hours of walking in sand, and levering ourselves down onto the beach and up again a few times, is enough of a workout to earn us a sociable treat, yes? From the windows of the restaurant the Strait is sunny, foggy, sunny, all at once.

And Then Home (Roadtrip, Part 6)

2011-08-12T08:45:00.000-07:00

The road home had its pleasures, like being among the fruit orchards near Marysville, and surprisingly, the stretch of I-5 past Castle Crags and Mount Shasta and over Siskiyou Summit. That's the high point of I-5, the signage informed me, and at 4300' it was just about the elevation of Cedarville, my first destination on this trip. Another sign on I-5, this one just south of where the 205 bypass leaves the mainstem, informed me that I was crossing the 45th parallel, and was halfway between the equator and the pole. This was entertaining food for thought for quite a few miles: nearly to the Columbia River and in everyone's geographical imagination far far north, but by golly just halfway to the pole.

Tweets, August 6-7. Properly read bottom to top. (Click for larger image.)

As expected, it did take forever to get out of California, forever to cross Oregon, forever... in part my own doing: by keeping an attentively light foot on the gas pedal, lengthening the trip by hours, for the trip overall the little 15-year-old Tercel averaged 42 miles per gallon.

You know you're from Port Angeles when you wake up in Roseburg, Oregon, and are thrilled to see that the sky is overcast after a week of relentless sun. Stopped along 101 and managed to get a picture of the North Hamma Hamma rainbow arch bridge through the south one. Yes there are two. I don't know why it pleases me so.

Almost home. Hamma Hamma River bridges (Click for larger image.)

Very Full Day (Roadtrip, Part 5)

2011-08-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Friday, August 5th, 2011. First we had some meeting-efriends-in-real-life: we went to see R&R in Grass Valley. We know each other through our blogs, and email; when they were blogging from Port Hadlock they were in my mind when I made up my mind to move from the desert to the Northwest; and the parallels and commonalities in our personal histories are practically scary.

They took us on their morning walk, up along ditches, and past meadows, and by a reservoir, and over a fence and home again. I had a violent allergy attack up there. The woods were full of kitkidizze (Chamaebatia foliolosa), a smell I remembered from all those decades ago—'asparagus', said V; 'bug spray', say I—, and it pleases me to think that's what made me sneeze, though there's no reason to assume it. After the walk, sweets and/or bagels and much talking.

Then we had to stop back home because we had forgotten I forget what :-| , and soon were on our way up CA20, destination Grouse Ridge. We stopped in Bear Valley just before getting on the forest access road, to study the map. Traipsed across the meadow through tall grass over to the bank of the Bear River, a place V. used to run away to when it's hot the way I used to run away to the Pecos River when I lived in the desert. Lots of seeds and stickers in the grass, made the dog sneeze and trashed my socks. We detoured to a rock outcrop with grinding pits worn into it. By the small deep shape, thought to have been for grinding pigment rather than food, but V. didn't know exactly what they would have been grinding, and I forgot to ask just who they would have been...

Pigment grind pits on outcrop overlooking Bear Valley (Click for larger image.)

So, then, up and up. Up Forest access road 18 and up forest access road 14, until it turned out the road was blocked by snow (in August!).

Forest on Grouse Ridge near where we parked. It was selectively logged some time ago, and looks good. (Click for larger image.)

Some big fierce vehicles had bullied on past the first or second or third snowdrifts, but sooner or later all the backpackers and the daytrippers each found a place to park and started walking from however far they had gotten.

Grouse Ridge Campground area, vicinity of 7600' (Click for larger image.)Sanford Lake (Click for larger image.)

We didn't make it to the lookout, there was a lot of snow in the woods. (The dog loved it, racing up the snowbanks then wriggling and shimmying down on her back.) But there we were, up up up there, lakes and granite in all directions.

Grouse Ridge, looking north and west: Island Lake, Feeley Lake, Carr Lake

It was properly alpine, sure enough.

Grouse Ridge overlooking Sanford Lake to the East

Then we turned around and came home, down through the woods to the car, down down down the forest roads to the highway; tired, sunblasted, (perhaps a little crabby), ever so satisfied.

Where we were:

Map of Grouse Ridge area (Click for larger image.)

Overview for August 4 and August 5th, putting towns and highways and two full days in the not-very-far-backcountry into context, thank god for acmemapper and I sure wish I would have seen this ahead of time, I'dve been way less confused for the whole three days...:

Overall map (Click for larger image.)

That's quite a neighborhood you have, VMW.

Three Short Walks in the Northern Sierra (Roadtrip, Part 4)

2011-08-11T08:35:00.000-07:00

August 3-6, 2011, with VMW in Nevada City in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills. I've known her 40+ years, and we talked and talked, about then, about now, about the in-between. Our memories run parallel, not the same. Our pasts are rooted in different realities, even for the parts that took place at the same time in the same place. "Why don't I remember that?" "Because I left the commune two years after you did." (Because we were mostly out of touch for about 20 years.)

Surprisingly low elevation, the town is at 2525'. The plan was, roughly, to show me places she has lived in, loved, took her son hiking and camping in, for the past 26 years; we kept veering aside to see this or that on our way to here or there, and looping around the back ways. As a result I was, roughly, disoriented much of the time despite having good maps in my lap... It is Yuba River country; the highways that define how you get anywhere are CA49 and CA20; the backcountry there is the lower-elevation northern end of the Sierra Nevada, peaks not more than 8000' to 9000'.

So I pulled into V's driveway about 3PM, handed her her hostess gift of Triple Ginger Snaps, and pretty soon we were on our way to short walk #1, 'to the river' she called it, though we were from my point of view up on the hillside following ditches and flumes (lotsa ditches and flumes and reservoirs and remains of mine workings in any local story there: this is the Gold Country) horizontally along the Independence Trail. Got as far as a viewing deck by a little pool and falls at what I think was Rush Creek. Introduced her new dog Tess to the pool; dog was a bit skeptical about water. Back to the car and continued on the the old bridge over the South Fork of the Yuba, just to get a look at it. This spot figures in everyone else's memory of the commune's first expedition to look for land, in 1969. I was along on that trip, but don't remember...

Best Roadsign Evah, west of Downieville along the North Yuba River on CA49 (Click for larger image.)

Thursday, up CA49 along the north fork of the Yuba River, through the picturesque gold-country town of Downieville (3888'), and sharp left at a place called Bassetts, and north past Sierra Buttes into the Lakes Basin Recreation Area. Short walk past Grassy Lake and on a ways. Retrace, and short walk to Frazier Falls (6200').

Sierra Buttes, elevation 8591' (Click for larger image.)Outcrop on the Frazier Falls Trail (Click for larger image.)

Unlike the higher country to the south with its granite batholith exposures, this is pretty well where the northern Sierra overlay by volcanics begins. There was sure-enough glacially smoothed bare naked rock on the trail to Frazier Falls, but it was the andesite of Sierra Buttes. Nevertheless extremely satisfying to sit on with legs stretched out flat and hands pressing down towards the heart of the earth. We were doing wildflowers all day, of which there were still plenty though it was August, but neglected to maintain a list of what we saw.

Unnamed Lake in Lakes Basin, August 4, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Agastache urticifolia (Click for larger image.)

Friday August 5 was a 3-event day, and will get its own post.

Five Hours Further South (Roadtrip, Part 3)

2011-08-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

Back over the mountains to Alturas, and then down down down US395, and over the Sierra Nevada to VMW's house. Somewhere along there I realized that although I was making all this southing off the Interstate, when it came time to go home from Nevada City, the only efficient thing was going to be to grind back up I-5 for hundreds of miles, starting from several hours further south than the point where I left it on July 31. Horrible thought. I put it out of my mind.

August 3rd, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Three Nights in Northeast Nowhere (Roadtrip, Part 2)

2011-08-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

Cedarville, California, July 31-August 3, 2011 (Click for larger image.)The Warner Mountains (Click for larger image.)

SA was my first boss at Santa Fe Public Library, back 26 or so years ago. ("My claim to fame is that I hired her," she told the librarian at the village library when she introduced us.) Now she's an online bookseller in distant Cedarville, California, elevation 4,300 feet, population 514; the internet and the Post Office are the poles of her work life. I slept in her book room. (They call it 'the sun room', which it was before being walled in for books.)

Views of the guest room... (Click for larger image.)

We hung around, and ran errands, looked out the windows at the fields and the fruit trees and the dry mountains, and went into town every day, and talked books and libraries and the book biz and computers and all. Each evening she checked her email for orders, and ran around the shelves locating what the patrons requested; and every morning she packed books and we'd go in town to mail them. We spent a lot of time watching the cats; and the deer, who came in bunches, with many spotted fawns (MC calls them 'The Bambis'), to feast on the clover patch and the fruit trees.

A Bambi (Click for larger image.)
Surprise Valley & Warner Mountains. Still bits of snow on Eagle Peak. This year the field next door is in grain, previous two summers in alfalfa. (Click for larger image.)

Getting out of the house with nonstop talking going on, and both host and guest's patterns disrupted by the visiting process, is somewhere between comic and tragic at our age. Forgotten wallets, forgotten baskets of books to mail, where is my whatever, oh god now I can't find this other thing. Happened both with SA, and later on in the week with VMW. Oh it's mortifying.

On Monday we drove over the mountains to Alturas, so I could meet SA's friend SM, whom I have known now for many years via our blogs and via email, and had never met. It was awkward for barely a moment, then we talked like the familiar friends we actually are.

On Tuesday the big event of the day was Senior Lunch at the Senior Center. SA is part of the crew who sets up and serves and cleans up. I met everybody, and ate (was directed to the table for the younger seniors, not the table for the older seniors),and listened to what people talked about, and won beaucoup admiration points for washing dishes—the molded plastic trays, the steam tray pans the food comes in (it is prepared at the community clinic), and so on. The pinochle game regulars settled in while we cleaned up. We went on about our errands. We delivered a couple of Gary Snyder books to someone who might be interested in buying them; he kept them to look at, later phoned to say he wanted to buy them. We visited the library and the weaving shop and the store, and mailed books and drove the handful of streets among the little houses.

Frontier has given up trying to fix the pay phone. (Click for larger image.)

Everywhere we went, everyone greeted each other by name. I missed a chance to take a photo of a kid on horseback right at the 4-corner intersection. I mailed @lagina two blurry postcards of local views, and my sister a postcard of the twice-a-year cattle-drive through town, when cowpersons on horseback move the herds from summer pasture up in the Warner Mountains to wherever the winter pasture leases are (didn't quite understand that part). SA had me take her portrait in front of the post office, as I had done 10 years ago when I visited.

It was a long wet winter and cool spring. Relative to being up there in the high desert, everything was very green. "The hotel is for sale," I said. "Is it open?" "It's open. It's always for sale."

Hotel. Library. (Click for larger image.)

On Wednesday morning after coffee and talking and a slow start, set off down the highway to Nevada City, for further visiting.

Started Early, Took My Car

2011-08-08T18:44:00.000-07:00

...and went visiting friends, a road trip I've been talking about for two or three years. The first day, July 30th, I got as far as Medford; had intended to go over OR58 from Eugene and then down US97 to Klamath Falls, and it would have been possible by pushing, but it already too late in the day by the time I reached Eugene, and I was scared to commit to back roads with few lodging options.

Blogger is hard to use from the iPad. It can be done, but it's hard. I posted to twitter instead of making a blog post that night, and so continued for the whole trip.

First Road Day, July 30, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

In the morning my route was free of the Interstate, I had a wonderful drive, and by noon arrived in Cedarville, California, in the Surprise Valley. I call it Northeast Nowhere, because it is so close to Oregon and to Nevada (you can actually see Nevada from their house) and so very remote.

Second Road Day, July 31, 2011 (Click for larger image.)White pelican in the sloughs between Upper Klamath Lake and the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge (Click for larger image.)Mount Shasta Looms to the South from West of Klamath Falls (Click for larger image.)Attempt to manipulate image so you can see Shasta (Click for larger image.)

I pulled in under the huge Siberian elms at SA and MC's house in the Surprise Valley. I gave them two containers of Triple Ginger Snaps for a hostess gift. We started talking.

Bobbin' Around Out There ; or, In the Albatross's Living Room

2011-07-28T08:53:00.000-07:00

As I have seen so many boats do when watching from the point, Monday morning around 8AM we went out from the harbor at La Push, passing through the channel between the jetty and James Island. The harbor and the jetty were filled with pelicans, probably thousands of them.

Tatoosh at the dock (Click for larger image.)Looking back at the harbor. (Click for larger image, and to admire the pelicans.)

The transect begins and ends at this buoy. We bobbed around there quite a while, so the observers could practice estimating distance and be sure they would be reporting things the same, and because Liam was having trouble with the laptop, so that the data logging program, which is called Seebird ('a program to gather seabird sightings during ship transects') wasn't behaving right. Then we got going.

The buoy which is the survey start point. (Click for larger image.)Our three observers, Bob, Bill and Ryan, sitting ready to observe, and Liam at the laptop ready to record data (Click for larger image.)

We record only what's visible up to 300 meters off the front quarter, from the bow to the port beam. If they aren't visible in that quarter of view, they don't count. We were only to break that pattern, to 'go off transect', either (a) to try to get individual identification of orcas if we saw any, which we did not (other marine mammals not of interest, simply recorded). Or (b) if there were something really rare. (STOP STOP STOP shouted all three observers, when they saw an albino cassin's auklet. A who?)

It was partly sunny for a while when we were at the outermost end of our transect.

Out there (Click for larger image.)

Bright out near the edge of the continental shelf, but closer in it was low clouds and murk all along my familiar coast: though it was goopy, heading out and coming back in again, there I was looking at my own home turf, La Push and James Island and Rialto Beach and Cake Rock and Dahdayla Island and the Giant's Graveyard to the south FROM THE OCEAN, and it was pretty exciting. The forecast was for 7-foot swells, yikes. The skipper said at the end it had never gotten more than about 6-feet. When we were on the outbound leg we were headed right into the swells and it was pretty 'lumpy' as the skipper called it. Bounce bounce. ("The Tatoosh is a cork," said one of our observers, Bob Boekelheide.) A couple of people got sick, and one of the observers carefully ate nothing all day but a few saltines now and then... I didn't get sick, because I had taken TWO bonine, but unfortunately they did make me nearly a zombie from sleepiness. Later in the day the swell settled down. Warm, no rain, and smoother going.

There were lots of birds. I usually had no idea what they were even though everyone else on the boat (including Nathan, our skipper) knew exactly. We also saw humpbacks, dall's porpoise, pacific white-sided dolphins, sea lions swimming, a female northern fur seal just loafing around out there with a flipper in the air (don't ask me how they knew that's what it was), a gray whale.

For myself I could just about recognize common murres and tufted puffins when I saw them, coastal birds I already knew. And humpback whale and dall's porpoise, those I recognized too. Maybe I sometimes had an idea a fulmar was a fulmar, if it was sitting still; or an albatross if there were other birds around for size comparison. But we were sighting vast numbers of sooty shearwaters, and I never had a clue that's what I was seeing or how to recognize it. 'Storm petrel, forktailed, 200 meters, flying, 120 degrees?' Nah. Gotta take their word for it. 'Bird-passing-by' is all I get with my own brain. These pictures are not good, but they're what I got, and are not inconsistent with the amount of detail I was able to observe with my eyes :-(

Dark morph of northern fulmar? (Click for larger image.)Albatross?

I don't know what I thought it was that pelagic birds DO all day, but I never imagined them sitting around in huge flocks, just bobbing on the water in the middle of the ocean— ok, not the middle, we were no further out than Juan de Fuca Canyon near the edge of the continental shelf, no I'm not sure we got even that far— enjoying themselves. Bill Tweit, the WDFW guy who was one of the observers, said they looked healthy and well fed, and thought it significant that they were so contented they could barely be bothered to move out of the way of the boat as we drove through their livingroom. (Bill also uses his nose a lot; he said it smelled good out there; and when the gray whale was around he knew it was gray whale blow not humpback whale blow he was smelling before he saw the critter at all.)

I hope eventually to have numbers and species lists. Liam has the official data for NOAA, and will have to process and correct and fuss with it before telling us anything even informally; but Ryan Merrill (another of the observers, who is on contract with the state for the summer to survey marbled murrelets) took a copy and thought he could email us some ballpark numbers by next week. (I just want the lists so I can remember and tell you about it. Bob Boekelheide, the observer from the Dungeness River Audubon Center, is really eager to get his hands on all the pelagic bird survey data for the past 8 years and analyze it to pieces. It's treasure.) I wasn't taking good notes for myself—the only time I knew what they were seeing was when I had the radio headphone on and was entering data, and all those sightings went right through my ears and into my fingers without having time to register on my brain. Press enter and start typing the next one. It was hard to keep up. I'd get on the little radio and say 'Wait wait,' and the observer wielding the outside radio would have to hold a WHOLE SEQUENCE of sightings in his head until I was ready for him. When it got really busy and there were lots of sightings I had to ask Liam to take over again.

While Chris was recording data, Bill teased her by reporting a kiwi. 'What's the code for that?' she asked in a panic, and then got the joke. Everyone knew she was after pelagic birds she had never seen before for her life list, and she did indeed get three (but not a kiwi).

About the humpbacks, a couple of times they were really close. Not spectacular, just the humpy back appearing out of the ocean just right there and going down again, but very big and smooth and RIGHT THERE.

Cake Rock from the Sea. It's usually on the western horizon when I take pictures on Rialto Beach... (Click for larger image.)

Addendum: (August 18, 2011)

Other highlights:

3850 Sooty Shearwater ; 1932 on survey
1050 Fork-tailed Storm-Petrel ; 761 on survey
2 Leach's Storm-Petrel ; both on survey, crossed close to boat and seen well
300 Black-footed Albatross; 169 on survey, most associated with the hake trawler/processor and in the wake trailing behind them for miles
Go to the ebird entry to see them all.

I sure didn't see a fraction of all that, you know. But we did.

Going to Sea

2011-07-24T13:36:00.000-07:00

Getting ready for tomorrow's boat expedition. 8 hours on the water, and Right Out Into The Ocean. This might be a map of where we will be going (the purple line),

Map of the Pelagic Seabird Survey Transect (click for larger image)

tallying pelagic birds all the way, as described in Barbara Blackie's account of the seabird study in 2006-2009.

Have to be at the NOAA office to get on the van at 6 AM tomorrow morning. With notebook at the ready, so I can scribble down whatever pearls of wisdom emerge during the drive to La Push. Will be riding with scientists and observers (and the skipper of the boat)! We sail at 8AM from La Push. Once on the boat I have an official role: 'data entry support'. Me and the other joyrider are data entry support. Liam Antrim, of the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, is organizer and 'data entry lead'. The core of the expedition are the three observers, experienced birder people, who will call out what they see. One of them is Bob Boekleheide, Mister Knows-Every-Bird-In-An-Instant, Director the Dungeness River Audubon Center. Liam will show us how to record what they call out (I think there is a little machine we type into), and if we data support people are seasick or too easily confused he will have to do it by himself all day.

Unlike when I have been on whalewatch boats in Johnstone Strait and Queen Charlotte Strait, we will be well out of sight of land. Never did that before. Liam says "The Tatoosh is a rolly vessel, so if you are susceptible to sea sickness, please bring something to mitigate this." How do I know if I am susceptible, if I've never done this before. Picture of the Tatoosh.

Pelican Heaven

2011-07-23T20:26:00.000-07:00

Saturday. High season in Olympic National Park. People everywhere. And pelicans. Warm enough for water shoes, and to walk in the water all the way to Hole-in-the-Wall. When I got out there, lots of pelicans, diving and calling just out past the seastacks, and right beyond the surf line. You could see the flash of fishes in their beaks; once I saw one tilt his head and let a larger fish drop into his pouch so he looked momentarily just like a cartoon pelican...

Pelicans, Rialto Beach Near Hole-in-the-Wall, July 23, 2011 (Click for larger image.)More pelicans (Click for larger image.)Plenitude of pelicans (Click for larger image.)

Did I mention it is the height of the season? The sun was out, tides were moderate, and all over the Olympic Peninsula people suddenly needed to go to the ocean to walk to Hole-in-the-Wall. In the winter, on a weekday, in the rain, you can be out there and pretend you are "the only man under the eye of heaven" (which is Peter Matthiessen's last line in At Play in the Fields of the Lord or so I strongly remember it). Not yesterday. It is best to be glad that so many people know the place, love it, might understand why it needs to be protected.

People everywhere (Click for larger image.)

No good pictures of the little beach right before Hole-in-the-Wall. Too bad. The first time I saw it, I thought , "I'm not sure I've ever been on such a beautiful beach"; and that might still be true...

Hole-in-the-Wall, Rialto Beach, July 23, 2011 (many better pictures elsewhere in the blog (1)(2)(3) (Click for larger image.)

I flung the camera up and took many pictures of empty sea and sky, and blurry pelicans, cruising and diving. And seventeen little movies, two of which almost show ... look closely, you'll see them dive.

Pelican movie #17, Rialto Beach, July 23, 2011.Pelican movie #16, Rialto Beach, July 23, 2011.

A ranger came along. I asked what the pelicans were eating. "Fish," he said. Oh, great. They are now hiring dolts to be Park Rangers. "What sort of fish," I asked. "Lots of kinds of fish under there." Thanks, dude. I'll ask Bob Boekelheide tomorrow what would be some good guesses. If he doesn't know he'll just say, "I don't know."

On the way home, stopped as usual at the pullout over the Quileute River, and got online to check email and twitter. It's my new bad habit. Apparently a handful of hours is the longest I can stand not to be connected. The maps say Quillayute River, but the tribe is the Quileute, and the river is theirs, as is James Island visible off the beach, in the background on the other side of the jetty...

Quileute River Movie. No seals, no eagles. Lots of green.

Momentarily Summer

2011-07-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the wind was so stiff you could see whitecaps on the Strait from all the way back here. Today the air is mild and still, the sun is shining. The Port Angeles dual view—Strait one way, Olympics the other— is doing its job in a hazy way. Am putting containers in the car: someday soon there will be blackberries on the roadsides.

The north reaches of Olympic National Park: Klahane Ridge, Mount Angeles, Hurricane Hill, Unicorn Peak (Click for larger image.)Strait of Juan de Fuca: Salt Water View, Zoomed in the Way My Eyes Always Do (Click for larger image.)

If it stays like this, I will have to go out to the ocean when I leave the Elwha this afternoon. Checking tidetables, forecast, webcams (1)(2). Bringing books, snacks.

Remembering an Apparition...

2011-07-20T12:19:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, OrcaLab's Orca-live website had webcams in the kelp forest at Cracroft Point. (Details of how it was done then. Understand, that was then and this is now: no cams. But yes, still delicious audio when the orcas are singing.) For months at a stretch, several summers in a row, we got to put our heads under the sea and watch the life there. If orcas passed by, there might be surface views from a handheld camera, but all day the kelp waved and flocks of fishies passed by and such beloved echinoderms as Waverly the sea cucumber and Spike the sea urchin (ok ok, there were LOTS of Spikey Guys and I madly loved every single one) performed slowly for watchers all over the globe.

And on September 17, 2005, a Pycnopodia helianthoides (sunflower star) fell into view (from where?), re-organized his topsy-turvey self, and slithered off camera. I happened to be sitting at my desk just then, with my finger on the screen capture button and my head joyfully under the sea...

Pycnopodia helianthoides, on September 17, 2005. All screenshots captured live and Copyright © Orcalab http://www.orca-live.net/ for non commercial, educational use only. (Click for larger images.)

PS. Note the Spikey Guy in the bottom left corner, a purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus. He's probably still around, somewhere. His close relative the red sea urchin is thought to live up to a couple of hundred years.

What People Say

2011-07-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting there in the Makah Marina at Neah Bay (see previous post), eating snacks and waiting for the talk to begin; and we're sharing stories about the rainy drive, about how many log trucks we had seen heading east along the lake as we were driving west— mid-afternoon they are just swarming, barreling enormously past in the other lane of the narrow road. A woman who had come 'over the hill' from Forks said, "Yes, the Park is adding big chunks of land, so they are cutting everything they can before that happens."

Map Showing Proposed Park Additions (only the red-dotted bits, you'll have to look closely at the full PDF image), as of July, 2010 (Click for larger image.)

Sigh. Reality rarely figures in what people believe. They are cutting everything they can all over the Pacific northwest, from BC down through Oregon and into California, yes it sure looks like it. Not for any local reasons, but because there is a market for logs in China, something I have been reading a lot about as I try to understand the log ships loading down in the harbor. And if the proposed expansions (proposed by the Wild Olympics Campaign, not by the Park, and lord knows not 'big chunks', nor certain to happen) are to be from willing sellers, those sellers won't be shaving off the trees first, for spite...

I will have to ask someone who knows about the present state of the proposed Park expansion.

Studying Birds

2011-07-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Friday afternoon I drove out to Neah Bay in the rain for a talk by Julia Parrish, the founder of the COASST program. She has been studying the birds on Tatoosh Island since 1990, and every year she does a talk out there for the community, to share what she learns. Beautiful meeting space, in the Makah Marina Conference Center. Got to hang out and watch the fishing boats come pottering in. Loons on the water. Tide coming in slowly. Boats and boats.

Rainy Day, Neah Bay Marina, July 15, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Nice spread of cheese and salmon and crackers and fruit, COASST helpers to greet people, etc etc. Lovely slide show, and Julia is an energetic and cheerful speaker. Lots of fieldwork stories, old and current photographs of the island, live and dead birds. And she LOVES her birds. In the midst of an ode to the tufted puffin, she said, "Look at that pink eye-ring. Who would not be attracted to that?" :-)

When she began inserting dead bird slides into the talk, she apologized; but kept putting them in there. Well yeah; as she said, "I run the largest dead bird program in the entire world."

She talked a lot about
—common murres, the birds she has been studying on Tatoosh Island since 1990;
—about doing fieldwork also on Protection Island, the world center of population for rhinoceros auklets, who are night-active and not very good at stopping so you have to wear headgear to keep from getting brained when they crash into you in the dark;
—about the rigors of studying marbled murrelets, where you have to be out in tiny boats at night spotlighting them and scooping them off the water to band, AND climbing up into the oldgrowth forests to study their nests; the murrelet scientists are all men, she said; she didn't say 'young men,' but I bet it's true;
— about the effectiveness of using streamer lines to reduce bycatch in the long-line fishery; and how it benefits both the birds and the fishermen, since otherwise birds get a significant proportion of the bait (did she say 20%?);
—about tubenoses: they are very long-lived. If you are going to study tubenoses you will be a long way past your graduate work before your banding projects bear fruit. She said fulmars can live 60 to 70 years, which made me wonder about the one I found on Rialto Jetty Beach last week, how much of a life had he/she had before washing up in the wrackline?

It was raining pretty hard when I blew out of there at 8:15PM, but was mostly merely gray and wet and constantly darker without ever quite being dark for the entire two hours home.

Ferry Came, Ferry Went : Performing Information Lady

2011-07-19T07:28:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple of hours on Monday behind the desk in the Olympic Coast Discovery Center, dispensing information about the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary largely to idle passers-by, people waiting for the ferry, or wandering the waterfront, or heading to or from the Downriggers restaurant. The ferry arrived enormously out the windows. Later it departed, equally large.

The sea otter pelt was borrowed for the Junior Oceanographers class going on at the Feiro Marine Life Center. The little beeper which calls over to the NOAA office for backup spontaneously called both us and our backup person; she came hustling down to make sure we weren't being attacked by an axe murderer/tourist. Children asked questions. A mom and I agreed passionately that we certainly never want to meet a wolf eel. Two parties of people were particularly taken with our photos of basket stars; they had just seen a live one down at the Feiro. There didn't seem to be any information offered about amphipods. Seems to me there should be a picture there on the table next to the baleen sample—had a hard time explaining to a couple of kids what the baleen was doing, i.e., how and what gray whales would be eating. Wikipedia, I might mention, says of amphipods, "Although they are very abundant, widespread and diverse, amphipods do not feature strongly in the public imagination." Uh, right. Need to find out whether the orca skull model is a transient or a resident, by way of helping to explain the two kinds and what they eat. Visitors of a certain young age continue to assume, even insist, that the skull must be that of a dinosaur.

It felt pretty odd to be performing Information Lady without the ability to look up answers I don't know. ("Where's Cannon Ball Rock?"). Next time I'll bring the iPad.

Canoes Arrived Yesterday

2011-07-18T08:15:00.000-07:00

They will have paddled away east at first light this morning. Story from this morning's paper.

The first canoe to land was from Quinault (Click for larger image.)

I almost didn't go to watch the landing. Since I was planning not to help out in the kitchen, I didn't feel that I ought to. But when the landing time began to approach, I couldn't stay away. I love the scripted ceremonial. I could listen a dozen times over (and get to do so) to, roughly, 'we have come from far away and are tired and hungry, may we land and share stories and songs with you' to which someone, perhaps a barely audible tiny child, replies in English and Klallam, 'Thankyou for coming to our territory. Come ashore, come ashore.' I thought on and off all afternoon about the other scripted ceremonial I am familiar with, the shuso ceremony at Tassajara and at Crestone, like this one no less moving for being prewritten.

Tlingit canoe, from Juneau, Alaska (Click for larger image.)Ahousat (Click for larger image.)

This all happens not out on the rez but right in Port Angeles Harbor on the beach in front of the Red Lion Inn. It is the tribe's annual reminder to the town that the last Klallam were displaced from the townsite and moved out to the present rez only about 80 years ago, and it was once all theirs. (The temptation is great to try to frame the photos to leave out the city dock, the motel, and so on. It's hard not to romanticize. But it ain't romantic. It is the restoration of the continuity of culture.)

On the beach (Click for larger image.)

The canoes spend the night on the beach below the motel, and everyone goes by van and car out to Elwha, where their support crews have set up camp and the festivities begin. They dance and sing much of the night, then climb back into the canoes in the morning, early if the tide says so, and pull away to the next landing. Day after day. A hundred canoes will arrive at Swinomish, this year's host, on July 27.

The landing schedule map. It's really complicated this year. (Click for larger image.)

PS It was warm mild and foggy, later colder and came on to drizzling...

PPS Mural on the Feiro Marine Life Center, showing the very same beach some time before about 1860. HistoryLink tells about the early days around 1850 when settlers first arrived to live among the Klallam, and descriptions of the village of I'e'nis.

Reading News

2011-07-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

I have lately realized that though my tagline on twitter and on my homepage itself is 'Librarian, reader, watcher of ships, denizen of beaches', here I mostly only address the latter two pieces of that description of my life. And nowhere address my present relationship to my life as a Buddhist monk, except in the context of journeying to Crestone Mountain Zen Center now and then.

Here anyway is my reading life at the moment. The widget being live, even when this post is no longer current, it will show what I'm reading at the moment you look at it.

Meanwhile I am contemplating what to do about my dusty cobwebby web pages about the Cerro Gordo Temple in Santa Fe, and whether I should construct a blog post here about the continuing struggle to restore my smallest oryoki bowl from the accident which befell it in November two years ago, while I was on my way home from Crestone from an occasion for which I needn't have brought the oryoki at all— no formal meals— but a proper monk always travels with her robes and bowls, now doesn't she...

Oh, By the Way

2011-07-13T05:53:00.000-07:00

News from the local paper about the log export market: Logs destined for China stacking up on Port Angeles waterfront. Roughly the same story, from a couple of months ago, that the supply of logs arriving has overwhelmed China's ability to unload the ships. I have intermittently spent a lot of search time failing to find out how they get the logs off the ships, especially out of the holds. I might just have to go down to the harbor and find someone to ask.

Meanwhile, I clicked on the the other Timaru Star by accident, the ship which I have been ignoring all this while—

because the one in our harbor that went to Astoria then Coos Bay then stopped transmitting was Timaru Star (HK)—

Timaru Star, evening, June 27, 2011. No activity. (Click for larger image.)

Timaru Star (BM) was here this week and I happened not to go down to the harbor but she was right here, and she is now in Bellingham. Huh? Also a cargo ship. Cue the Twilight Zone music. Deedledeedle deedledeedle.

Ships to China are everywhere. I'm reading Susan Freinkel's Plastic: A Toxic Love Story and learned that from the west coast, at least, most plastic waste bound for recycling plants is sorted, washed, shredded and goes by ship to China, where it is turned into this and that which might be useful (carpet? polyester clothing?), but not back into soda or water bottles. I knew our recycling went by truck to a sort facility in Tacoma, but apparently from there to China. Who knew?

PS. She says, also, "for every pound of trash put out at the curb, another seventy pounds is generated in the manufacture and production of their source materials." Nice to have a number, and a source. I have such a hard time explaining to people why I haven't bought beverages in single-serving containers for 15 months, not even when I'd sell my soul for a CocaCola. No soda machine to use to fill my reusable bevvy cup = no coke for me. That's 730 aluminum cans per year not produced on my behalf, and I haven't lapsed once.

Invisible Feast Drifting Along

2011-07-11T07:59:00.000-07:00

A day with a lot of critters in it. Seals, a little porpoise dude coursing by, invisible fish, pelicans cormorants gulls.

Rialto Beach, Quiet Ocean, Quiet Surf, July 10, 2011 (Click for larger image.)Looking Towards James Island (Click for larger image.)

There was a school of fish out there somewhere under the water. Gulls, cormorants, pelicans and seals were all working just offshore, the show moving slowly north as the invisible feast drifted along. Failed to get pictures of pelicans, but there were a few; any day with pelicans in it is a good day.

Quiet Soundscape on a Bright Warm Overcast Day, July 10, 2011

This was a COASST survey day. When I got back to the start point after the second beach segment, I settled on a bank of gravel against a log to listen to the waves, sift pebbles with my fingers, and read for an hour or so. Bharati Mukherjee, Miss New India. I am SO into it. Stopped again on the road home, at the pullout next to the Sol Duc River (around Milepost 210), to read some more.

Someone With a Really Interesting Mind Made these Cobble Henges... (Click for larger image.)

Usually after mentioning that I was out on a COASST survey, there is nothing more to say about that because I rarely find anything. This day there were indeed dead things. What appears to be the sea lion from last month is now far to the south along the jetty beach. Much deteriorated, in fact no head so I didn't try to measure it or fill out a marine mammal report sheet. The (cartilaginous) skeleton of a skate. And by golly a beached bird carcass to record for science, the first on the Rialto Jetty beach segment since November of 2009. A northern fulmar. I measured and recorded and identified, the proper citizen scientist (though God knows I'm often wrong). Didn't glove up, a mistake; got my hands well imbued with the curious musty odor of the Procellariiformes. And decay. Disinfected twice, washed, disinfected, washed, and could still smell it. Must have been on my clothes.

Northern Fulmar, bird #772, Rialto Jetty Beach segment, July 10, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Signs, Signals, and Webcams

2011-07-10T06:50:00.001-07:00

I went and asked at the Olympic National Park visitor center here in town about when the Obstruction Point Road might open. A volunteer docent said her husband had hiked to the end of the road this week, and had needed an ice axe to keep his footing getting across the iced-over drifts in the road in some places. She guessed mid-August. A ranger guy guessed late August. No houseguests are getting onto the Lillian Ridge Trail in the near future...

The road conditions recording says there are 44" of snow at the snow stake, wherever that is; somewhere on the north side of the hill above the Hurricane Ridge visitor center, perhaps the nubbin in the background on the northcam,

Hurricane Ridge Web Cam, Parking Lot View (Click for larger image.)

the view of the parking lot on Hurricane Ridge. There are almost always deer in the cam view that looks southwest towards Mt. Olympus. Are people feeding them, or is there just more fresh grass on this slope than elsewhere in the vicinity? There are those 44" of snow nearby to factor in...

Hurricane Ridge Web Cam, Looking Towards the Bailey Range and Mount Olympus (Click for larger image.)

Enough with the addictive-behavior reading orgy. I really am heading for the outer coast this morning.

La Push Web Cams (1)(2), Right Now (Click for larger image.)

Cook Strait Sailed

2011-07-08T20:08:00.000-07:00

Cook Strait was brimful of logs by the end of the day on Thursday. Still at the dock mid-afternoon on Friday, but set forth in the evening and is now already west of Sooke. She's headed for Putian, China (1)(2), according to the shiptracker.

Where? (Click for larger image.)

It looks like a Great Circle will still take her through the Aleutians even though Putian is way south, on the Taiwan Strait. I'd love to see what track a ship leaving from southern Oregon would take, but I don't think we know where Timaru Star is anymore, or where she is going. The AIS transponder is apparently turned off, or masked from the public trackers. She could be anywhere.

It's Not Every Day

2011-07-07T08:16:00.000-07:00

These are JK's photos, from Hobuck Beach last week. She got the light...

Hobuck Beach, June 29, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

It's not every day I get to offer a picture of myself.

Me. Hobuck Beach, June 29, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Log Ships

2011-07-07T07:24:00.001-07:00

Every day the behavior of the log ships grows more confusing. Timaru Star, you may remember, stopped here for a day or so, then left for Astoria. Spent several days moored off Astoria, then yesterday she sailed down to Coos Bay. Huh? Meanwhile, Cook Strait appeared at the T-pier and nothing happened for days. She had been at Astoria for a few days, and before that at Longview on the Columbia River. Huh? Every day I think, 'I'll go down to the harbor and take a picture of Cook Strait, try to understand what is happening, and make a blog post. Almost every day I don't.

Pacific Basin Cook Strait, Idle on Sunday, July 3, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

(I'm having a reading marathon, spend almost all my time on the couch mowing through the library books, but that's a topic for another post).

Someone took a gorgeous portrait of Cook Strait on Saturday, at a moment when something was definitely happening (note all the the log trucks lined up...) Way better than mine above. Go look at it. Thank you, Steven Blake. But by the time I went down to look Saturday afternoon quite early, all movement had stopped, no log trucks in sight, and the gate was locked.

Local news story on log exports, explains that these are all logs from private lands, by law logs from state and Federal lands must be for the domestic market. Letter in the Coos Bay paper about log exports. Seattle Times: Port Of Olympia busy with timber exports to Asia. None of this explains the apparently desultory movements of Pacific Basin's (and no I'm not going to give you a link to their web page and ship lists because it keeps crashing my browser) handysize shallow-draft bulk freighters. Timaru Star still seems to be idling off Coos Bay.

I think I need to go to the ocean.

47 Seconds of Sunshine

2011-07-02T18:32:00.001-07:00

Tuesday and Wednesday, continued running around with JK. We had a good time, talking about libraries and my former co-workers, about retirement, relationships, old age, and a meaningful life— and meanwhile laying on a tour of the Northwest Corner of the continental US, and the Makah Reservation. (Maps: (1), (2) and see below). It was warmish, grey weather; and the sky refrained from raining on us; that counted as good weather, both days. Tuesday we went to Cape Flattery; enjoyed some seabirds—(drat, the list has vanished) pigeon guillemots, black oystercatchers, tufted puffins, double-crested cormorants, sea lions at a distance, an eagle.

View from last viewing deck, Cape Flattery, June 28, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Then headed to Sooes Beach, which is along Makah Bay. We paid a very nice Makah lady to park in her frontyard parking lot, used the access trail down the road as she suggested rather than the one on her property, and didn't pick up anything on the beach because she said not to.

The tide was low. We walked north to a seastack covered all over with trees, cow parsnip, and nootka rose. Roses, and roses, the whole thing was netted with roses in bloom. We poked around in the tide pools. Did you know that black turban snails (Tegula funebralis) are believed to live as long as 100 years?

Small island on Sooes Beach (Click for larger image.)Nootka roses on the side of the small stranded island (Click for larger image.)

We had the beach to ourselves, a degree of solitude essentially unknown on California or East Coast beaches. When we turned back, JK walked ahead. I realized how completely and extensively there was nobody else there.

Walking South on Sooes Beach. That's JK there, above the purple marker on the image. (Click for larger image.)

The drive is two hours each way and we started late, so the Makah Cultural and Research Center in Neah Bay was already closed when we left the beach. We drove home through the Park, along Lake Crescent, and went back out there on Wednesday. We studied our way through the museum very very thoroughly, at least JK did, admiring the Ozette artifacts and reading every inch of display text. Then on to Hobuck Beach, where I decided J. and I were free to pick things up; because when we survey for dead birds at Hobuck, my bird mentors (one from the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary and the other who is Makah) always hand me little treasures as they find them... So JK got two sanddollars, and I got three limpet shells.

Hobuck Beach, after the minute of sunshine. (Click for larger image.)
Sand dollar. (Click for larger image.)

Early in our second beach visit, the sun came out for about one minute. Instant euphoria. We were capering and waving our arms to make our shadows dance. At the mouth of the Wa'atch River, JK stalked an eagle who was sitting on the sand, trying to get close enough for a good photo. The tide went out. The wide exposed sands were silky soft.

Wa'atch River, Hobuck Beach (Click for very much larger image and look for the eagle sitting on the ground on the other side of the river.)

On our way home we stopped at Washburn's store in Neah Bay. I needed caffeine, JK still lacked a couple of those bring-home-to-officemates presents. I got so invested in her hunt that I sent home presents with her for three of the people I used to cruise for souvenirs for on every trip away from the workplace. JK teased me. "Nyaah nyaah, four years later, and can't cut the cord."

There were LOTS of eagles around Neah Bay, handsome young ones as well as the white-headed oldsters.

Map:

Re: the black turbans, it's J. Duane Sept who says they live 100 years. Ricketts and Hedgpeth (whom I usually believe implicitly) say 20 - 30 years. Most of ours seemed to be occupied by hermit crabs, but some were going on their mollusc-y way, still doing their jobs. It's hard to walk around among the tidepools once you are aware of invertebrate life. You may have to Step On Them to get anywhere.

Black turban snails, and a limpet. (Click for larger image.)

Timaru Star

2011-07-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

The log ship that was at the T-pier on Monday was gone the next morning, enroute to Astoria, Oregon. She's been anchored at Astoria ever since. The peeler yard is full of logs, but they are not going to China on Timaru Star.

Visitor from the Desert

2011-06-28T06:42:00.001-07:00

JK visiting. The weather is not on our side, but we carry on. Below the Visitor Center on Hurricane Ridge, the grass is green between the snow patches. Fog moves in and out. The road spur to the trailhead for Hurricane Hill is still not open. All fogged in over that way, so we didn't hike down past the barriers. There are lots of deer, in the grass, in the parking lot, on the snowbanks.

Hurricane Ridge by the Visitor Center, June 27, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Meanwhile, Back At The Harbor

2011-06-28T06:10:00.001-07:00

The log ship that sailed on Friday was Kiwi Trader. She is en route to Penglai, the same destination as Sun Ruby last month. (1)(2). Thank you to David Sellars for letting me know what ship she was. Mr. Sellars writes about 'boats, ships and strolling the waterfront' for the Peninsula Daily News.

By Sunday there was another log ship at the T-pier, Timaru Star. JK is here, we have driving-and-hiking agendas for the next couple of days, but we will keep an eye on Star; to find out where she's going, we have to catch her on the shiptracker websites after she sails and before she gets out of range of the AIS receivers...

Timaru Star, evening, June 27, 2011. No activity. (Click for larger image.)

Las Conchas Fire, Jemez Mountains, New Mexico

2011-06-27T06:20:00.001-07:00

Sunday, mid-day, a new fire broke out in New Mexico, more or less exactly here (photo from a May, 2008, visit— at one time or another, over the 23 years I lived in Santa Fe, I probably took everyone I knew there):

Near the Las Conchas Trailhead, elevation about 8,400', Jemez Mountains

The Las Conchas Fire (location map; none of the fire websites have mapped it yet) exploded to 43,000 or so acres within hours (unbelievable acreage figure new this morning, based on overnight infrared mapping, and is official). "The fire burned actively all day to the north/northeast." (Time-lapse video.) The smoke was so heavy that it shaded the Pacheco Fire on the other side of the valley in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, reducing the fire activity there. For up-to-date news, faster than official sources, follow the #nmfire hash tag on twitter...

I spent the day glued to my desk chair, reading updates, looking at imagery. At dusk (there) when the flames began to show through the smoke on the Pajarito Ski Webcam, it looked like Armageddon. It was Armageddon. 43,000 acres in less than a day. By bedtime, I no longer knew where I was; falling asleep I kept thinking I was in my bed in the old 'tree-house' apartment on Hillside Avenue in Santa Fe.

Las Conchas IR flight confirms the fire is now 43,597 acres in size.less than a minute ago via txt Favorite Retweet ReplySanta Fe NF
SantafeNF

Update Tuesday morning, June 28. I just need a place to stash these links. Wildfire Today. KOAT. SF Reporter. rkr. nmfireinfo. IR flyover, 6/28 (where did they get this?). The PajaritoSki webcam is gone, I think because the Pajarito Ski area is gone.

Later still: adding this morning's 'Smoke Map'. 8AM PDT, June 28, 2011:

All Flags Flying

2011-06-27T04:50:00.000-07:00

Saturday, the Coast Guard station on Ediz Hook (map) was having an open house and air show to honor 100 years of Naval Aviation. I hustled myself out there. I had missed the air show, but this was an opportunity to get past that military gate, just outside which I usually park when I go out on the Hook. I've lived here going on 4 years without ever setting foot on that ground.

Visited various boats and helicopters and so on, took lots of pictures. All kinds of flags and pennants flying over everything, a naval signaling condition which is called something like 'holiday colors' or 'full-dressed in rainbow colors'. (I didn't take notes, and promptly forgot everything I was told).

Open House on Ediz Hook, June 26, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

USCGC Active, the cutter based in Port Angeles, was not at home; in her place was USCGC Mellon, looking downright enormous. This was not just a result of being so close to and then aboard a ship which I usually only see from across the harbor, or from outside the gate. Mellon is 378 feet long, nearly twice the size of Active (212 feet); her complement is 167 personnel. There were a lot of visitors, babies and oldsters and all; the Coasties seemed to be enjoying helping toddlers up and down ramps, and answering questions, and smiling a lot.

Aboard USCGC Mellon (Click for larger image.)

I took a tour of Mellon, except that the young officer leading our group got confused about the traffic flow he was supposed to be following (hope he never is the one who drives the ship!!) and kept leading us in the opposite direction of the other groups so that there was lots of confused bumping and jostling in narrow steel corridors; finally he gave up and took us back to the starting point without getting us up to the bridge or to any other of the more rewarding stops on the tour.

Mellon was launched in 1967. Her corridors are narrowed by 45 years of layers of paint.

Panorama: lots of ships and boats...

Going Away, Coming Back, Being Home

2011-06-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

KenmoreAir has been flying us in smaller planes than their Cessna Grand Caravans. These are Piper Navajos; only one less passenger seat, but much less baggage space and presumably more fuel efficient. Anyway off we went. Just after takeoff I had a good look at Ocean View Cemetery, where S. and I visited Raymond Carver's grave last month; the Olympics were looking all snowy and distinguished under a mostly cloudy sky.

Florida had four generations of my family in it, and ibises. I don't talk about them here.

I thought mostly about the Pacheco Fire above Santa Fe where I used to live.

The trip home was endless, nineteen hours from wake-up to walk-in-the-door-at-home. The nonstop flight from Fort Lauderdale to Las Vegas flew right past the southern end of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and I saw the fire plainly. It was still early in the morning, no towers of smoke but only a steady low puffing, with winds spreading the smoke and carrying it east across Puerto Nambe and Santa Fe Baldy. (Later the same day the fire was very active and burned into Rio Capulin, lofting 24,000' columns of smoke.) On the Las Vegas/Seattle flight had a fantastic good view of Crater Lake. I was too busy looking to think of getting out the camera, until it was too late.

Back on Kenmore, flying in past the harbor, I could see a log ship, which appeared to be already fully loaded, and several other big ships moored around. I meant to get down to the harbor Friday after I went to work at the tribe, but somehow didn't manage it. Looked out the window in the afternoon and there by golly was the log ship steaming west. No, I never looked it up, have no idea who she was. Shame on me. I'm disgraced as a ship-watcher.

oh my

2011-06-21T20:30:00.000-07:00

I'm not there. Pacheco Fire, Santa Fe National Forest. Our hearts are breaking.

Back in the Land of the Ibises

2011-06-19T19:19:00.000-07:00

Tamarac, Florida, and environs. Ibises here are like crows at home. Not nearly so numerous as crows, but perceived by locals in the same way: not exactly pests, city birds, and so commonplace as to be invisible. I love seeing them in the sky or on grass verges, with their wonderful curvy beaks, even if nobody else around bothers to see them at all.

When I'm not thinking about family stuff, my mind is not here at all, and not home either. The fire everyone in Santa Fe feared has begun, burning— as near as I can figure out— in the steep timber up above Rio en Medio and heading for the Pecos Wilderness. This was my backyard for 23 years. Here is how I think of it: a hike up Raven's Ridge in 2002. That was then. Now, oh now doesn't bear thinking about.

Melting Proceeds Apace (and Other News)

2011-06-16T21:36:00.000-07:00

Remote sensing, not eyewitness report: it is suddenly rapidly melting, up on the Ridge. The grass has not turned green yet, but any day now...

At the Waterhole SnoTel, halfway between the Visitor Center and Obstruction Point. (Click for larger image.)The Hurricane Ridge WebCam (Click for larger image.)

In other news, the Research Coordinator for the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary looked at the pictures I took of the (dead) marine mammal at Rialto Beach on Sunday. He's a marine mammal guy by training, and he says it is definitely a Steller sea lion.

Leaving at dawn tomorrow to go see my ma in Florida.