Here is an aerial photograph of the Elwha River flowing into the Strait, on August 21. Thank you to photographer Tom Roorda and to Coastal Watershed Institute for continuing to capture and share this record of ongoing change...
Found this draft post hanging around in blogger. Why not share? Was out there two days later with GF and SF. All the sandbars were covered with gulls.
According to the photos in the camera, the following things happened in the three weeks since I last posted.
On June 14, I attended a field day at the west side of the mouth of the Elwha, where various little fishes were seined up, identified, measured, scanned for tiny embedded wire tags that say which hatchery they were born in, and let go again. There were lots of scientists, interns, and locals participating. The Peninsula Daily News had a very nice story about the day.
June 16, a deer hung around the neighborhood, performing such deer-ish tricks as eating all my landlady's beautiful new deep orange pansies, and parading down the middle of 8th Street grazing the yellow paint of the center line.
June 22, I went to Tukwila to a support group meeting for people with my kind of cancer.
June 25, LR texted the tribe's Education Director from out by the mouth of the Elwha on the tribe's side; there was a super-low tide, and she said we had to come out immediately, it's amazing. So we tumbled into the car and went. We were playing hooky from work in the education building, but when it was time to head back lest we miss Elder's Lunch (lasagna!!), I announced "I'm walking to Victoria!" and headed north toward the soft silty edge of the mudflats. LR and TH followed me out to as far as we could get. It was amazing.
June 25, picked WC up at the ferry, and June 26 we drove down to Portland for the bimonthly CT scans. I'm still stable, still in the clinical trial, still a science project. We did it as a day trip, left at 4:50 AM and made it home in time to put him on the 9:30 PM ferry.
June 28, the canoes were out of the storage shed and arrayed on the lawn between the Education Building and the Tribal Center. Canoe journey is less than a month away, there must be practicing and preparation and cold-water training and all for the pullers.
I never got to the ocean at all.
On the whole, every picture in the camera is as flat as my spirits these days. This is a beachbunny blog, supposed to be a mostly effortless, nearly chirpy picture of places gone and things seen. I don't much want to change the ground rules I set for myself and start posting lugubrious paragraphs about my state of mind. I also don't want it to be drudgery to post. Yet I don't want to lose three weeks at a time out of the record I have kept of my life since I decided to move up here, even if all I really want to do is read, not write. It's a puzzle.
Meanwhile, here is a picture showing the Elwha River's east and west shores and the shifting channels, taken by Mike McHenry of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe on June 11, 2013.
Sorry. The image template changed, and I don't have time to deal with it. Am packing to leave for Santa Fe and then Florida at impossible AM. It will just have to be what it is until I get home.
This post is for KL and RC, who were worrying about my silence.
Tom Roorda flew over the river again on May 28. As usual, thankyou to Mr. Roorda for permission to share his images.
Seeing it whole. Thankyou to Tom Roorda for permission to show these images, and to Anne Shaffer of the Coastal Watershed Institute for emailing them to me.
Shoutout to @jfleck , who writes about water and climate at the Albuquerque Journal, for this new-to-me visualizer, the WPC Quantitative Precipitation Forecasts. I really shouldn't complain, but it's relentlessly sunny here right now. My inclination is to cower indoors.
Journey North's Gray Whale section says it's "rush hour for moms and babies". Since I'm not going to get out to La Push at a low tide before I have to head for Florida again, that will have to do for whale news. For not-news, look again at the post about seeing a whale on April 21.
Work on the Elwha River's dam removal project is stopped for at least another month while the National Park and the contractors and the city and the tribe and other water users sort out the sad fact that the new water treatment plant and all its intake works were underdesigned and have been overwhelmed by silt and debris coming down the river from behind the former dams. It's more fun to think about the ever-changing re-making of the river itself and the nearshore. Once again Tom Roorda has been way up in the middle of the air looking at it, and sharing what he sees. New land continues to grow on the rez side of the river.
Did I mention the days are long?
Saturday
4 May 2013 Pacific Daylight Time
SUN
Begin civil twilight 5:15 a.m.
Sunrise 5:50 a.m.
Sunset 8:32 p.m.
End civil twilight 9:08 p.m.
It's starting to melt up on Hurricane Ridge, but there's still a lot of snow up there and on into the high country. Will the Obstruction Point Road open for July 4th weekend? Seems unlikely; last year it wasn't open until the middle of August. I stare at the lines on the graph and try to guess.
Went to Portland on April 29. The daylight is long, we did it as a day trip. Drive drive drive, lab work, consult clinical trial doctor, drive drive drive some more, back home again. I'm still stable, still in the trial. There was big news for a shipwatcher: Zidell Marine's current barge under construction, which I've been watching month by month from the windows of OHSU, seems to be finished. All fresh paint, and waiting down on the ramp leading into the Willamette River. It's now five days later, but either it hasn't launched yet, or the Portland news sites aren't reporting on her launch. She's not listed yet on the amazingly long list of barges Zidell Yards has built in its various incarnations, presently Zidell Marine.
Where the Elwha River flows into the Strait, the new landscape architecture remains, at least as of March 29: flowing straight out, the new sandspit gone or rather smooshed strait-wards creating wide shallows even at low tide. There were eagles hanging around, and black oystercatchers, grebes in the water and maybe a loon or maybe no. The light was murky, it was hard to see. The camera wasn't happy at all, nor was JL who had had sunshine at her house and dressed accordingly.
We found a drift card buried in the sand behind the beach, released only two days before and already washed over to the backslope. We threw it back into the river to try again to get somewhere, though this may not have been the intention of the middleschool scientists who had made it.
Later we wandered back through the woods along the riverbank well inland; in New Mexico you'd call it a bosque. There were itty bitty birds, and some mergansers on the river. Exuberant red alder catkins.
Later still, we went to the Blackberry Cafe in Joyce. It was sunny in Joyce.
That was then, this is now: Tom Roorda's March 23rd image of the Elwha River flowing into the Strait. (To see the sandspit that is no longer there, look at the image in the Kitsap Sun article.)
Thank you to Mr. Roorda for permission to show his image, and to Anne Shaffer of Coastal Watershed Institute for sending it.
Another of Tom Roorda's terrific aerial photos of the mouth of the Elwha River appeared in a most informative article by Chris Dunagan from the Kitsap Sun on March 2nd. I went out Place Road and walked the dyke there on March 7th, after work at the college, for a late-afternoon low-ish tide. I wanted to see whether, if you walked as far east as you could get on the new sandspit, a different angle up the valley could give you Mt. Olympus framed by the river mouth. But it was cloudy to the south. No mountains. I walked out anyway.
There was not a coincidence of sunny-over-the-Olympic-Mountains plus low-tide-at-an-accessible-hour until the 18th. I was working in the tribal library. The sun was out, and the wind blowing hard. People blown into the library either talked about the sunshine, or complained about the wind. I kept my eye on the clock and went, in good time. And all was changed. The river is just now flowing straight out, and turned the eastern end of the sandy flats into an island accessible only to the gulls; with side channels beyond, on the reservation side of the river.
Anne Shaffer of the Coastal Watershed Institute tells me that they had been out sampling the new and old side channels in the newly formed habitat that same sunny windy morning, and found chum salmon, coho salmon and smelt. By the time I arrived the scientists had left, and there were three schoolbuses of kids from Crescent taking their own samples from further inland along the riverbank on the west side.
So many people are watching so passionately as the river is restored. Even when there is no work ongoing on the dam removal (it's in a pause), the river is changing and changing and changing.
PS. I learned from JR that there is a cemetery belonging to the tribe to the west along the shore at the end of Place Road. How have I worked at the tribe for five years and not known about it? When I left the river, I ventured west towards the end of Place Road to see where it was. There were people in the cemetery tending to a grave, so I didn't stop to look. Wouldn't have taken pictures anyway; it's not mine to show.
Strait of Juan de Fuca under a very windy sky. Monday, I drove out Place Road and walked along the dyke path to where the Elwha River enters the Strait. High tide washing across the new sandy flats (1) and into the river. This all used to be a cobble wilderness, no sediment at all escaped the dams for a hundred years. But the dams are gone.
A baffling array of ripples of fibrous debris, well back from the edge of the Strait. Olympic Mountains to the south, whence the river flows.
The windchill was fierce. A sunshower blew in for a moment. Sand. There was sand everywhere, burying the cobbles. Sand everywhere. I just couldn't believe it.
Mute your sound before you watch these videos. All you can hear is the wind blowing across the camera.
Maybe I'll go back on Friday afternoon. The tide will be lower.
Here is Tom Roorda's January 16, 2013, photo of sediment outflow at the mouth of the Elwha River. Thankyou to Mr. Roorda for permission to show it here. The nearshore is being remade all along our part of the Strait as the river brings down the vast quantities of sediment released by removal of the two dams.
I keep meaning to get out there on my own two feet and take a photo from the spot where I have brought so many visitors, the end point of the 'Freeing the Elwha Tour'. But weather and the distractions of life have been against me. It makes more visual sense from the air anyway.
PS You probably already know that the title of this post is borrowed from a Raymond Carver poem. (Here's the text. Lots of people have put it on the web. Thx to Justin Moore for this version.)
Two days devoted entirely to modes of transportation, with an interlude in the arms of Big Medicine.
Flew south in cloudy overcast foggy sorts of weather: from Port Angeles on Kenmore Air's Piper Chieftain to Boeing Field in Seattle,
van to Seatac, Alaska Air to Portland,
light rail (MAX) to the motel. Streetcar to Powell's.
In the morning, streetcar to OHSU
to be examined by my clinical trial doctor (I'm still a science project), at the Center for Health and Healing—airy name notwithstanding, a 13-story building full of suffering people (and that's all I'm going to say about that). After the appointment, streetcar to the light rail station at City Center,
lightrail to Portland-Hillsboro general aviation airport. Hillsboro Aviation's FBO is a 10-minute walk from the MAX station. I just cheerily rolled my roller-bag up the sidewalk and was there.
AngelFlight home to Port Angeles through murky skies on a Cessna T182T Skylane. Not good camera conditions, but I clicked the shutter all the way, just to keep paying attention.
Approaching Port Angeles, we had to descend through the overcast below us,
sliding slowly downward buried in the cloud; then once under the ceiling, looped out to approach the runway from the west. Got a good view of the Lower Elwha Klallam Reservation which is so familiar to me from the ground, and an oblique glimpse of mouth of the Elwha at the edge of the rez, already much reshaped by the sediment coming down the river from the dam sites.
Thankyou to my pilot Hunter Handsfield, and to AngelFlight, for getting me delivered to the airport practically on my own doorstep with such wonderful ease.
Update on the Japanese dock that washed up on the outer coast.
Update on the Elwha River. Sediment outflow is building sandbars at the river mouth. The present 'fish window' ends January 1, and the work crews will be lowering the remaining face of Glines Canyon Dam again. Given the amount of sediment which has been coming down the river even without the addition of what demolition might have stirred up, it seems silly that they even bothered to stop... but anyway, we should be seeing cranes and tractors and guys doing stuff in view of the DamCams again, beginning next week.
There's a really nice article about the dam removals, with good current photos. The local paper had a gorgeous photo of sediment outflow at the mouth of the Elwha River, but I can't find the story online, so offer you instead a really nice one about salmon jumping on the Sol Duc. The dam removal process is in a fish window for the rest of the year, to avoid stirring out more sediment, a precaution which seems silly given how much will be on the move anyway if rains continue.
It's been raining. Overcast, fog, rains so light nobody bothers with raincoats or umbrellas. We are looking great for precipitation up in the Olympics and the Cascades as the water year begins. But it hasn't been cold, so it hasn't snowed yet in the mountains. This is pretty much as we have been promised: as the climate changes, more floods because storms arrive solely as rain; less water storage in snowpack to carry through the summer.
There was a sunbreak the morning after I got home from Florida (I did eventually get home.) And there have been several brief ones since. Everyone looks out the door or window, and wishes each other, "Enjoy the sunshine." Then it is gone.
Lots going on in the realms I don't talk about here.
