Strait, River, Mountains. Sand.

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.

New Land in the Nearshore (Click for larger image.)

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.

... (Click for larger image.)

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.

Strait on left, River to the right. (Click for larger image.)

Mute your sound before you watch these videos. All you can hear is the wind blowing across the camera.

Elwha River Meets the Salt, February 25, 2013 High tide, the whitecaps washing over the new sandflats, February 25, 2013.

Maybe I'll go back on Friday afternoon. The tide will be lower.

Interlude for Travel Geeks

A look-about on the plane hints that tablets are taking over. Three iPads in my row on the first flight home. Tablets in sight everywhere, in the terminals and in the air. And Southwest seems to have wifi on all flights now. It costs $$, but the Flight Tracker is free and I love it madly.

Waving to my niece in Bradenton (Click for larger image.)Five states map, over Kansas: Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico (Click for larger image.)

February Ibis Walks Away

Even though I'm not in Florida any more, came home on Saturday, here's another ibis. Also taken from mom's sliding glass door. Well actually, I dart out and stalk them. Him. I'm guessing it's the same bird, though that represents an assumption that ibis have some kind of site loyalty, which of course we don't know AT ALL, nor where they sleep at night, or basically anything else about them...

Late update: I love them because they show, as EW says below in the comments, "the combination of elegance and goofiness is so obviously possible." Though in fact I'm a bit old for either quality...

Florida Does Ibises

Away in Florida doing family stuff. Not much to look at, really. Everything not plastic is paved in inhabited Florida. But there are ibises hanging around the lawns and median strips, perching on the light standards... These are photos from last month. January ibises, not February ibises.

Ibises Leaving a Parking Lot (Click for larger image.)

There is no place wild, yes I know that. Humans have amended and affected everywhere, the air the ocean the swamps and deserts and forests. But I rejected this particular way of tailoring the earth 48 years ago, moved to the west and never moved back. Tho here I am for the moment.

Ibis By Momma's Window (Click for larger image.)

Top Dead Center

By the time I made it to the Outer Coast on Sunday, the especially-high tide was at its highest. There was no beach. I sat at the top of the drift behind the first couple of logs, and watched the highest waves sploosh right over the foreground. Whee. In a 9.8' tide, the ocean is at eye level as you sit on the crest of the backshore drift, but since there wasn't much of a swell, those highest waves never washed across or under the logs to flow down into the Rialto picnic area.

I was reading, not always paying attention, so I stayed well back; only once thought, 'maybe I better grab my stuff and retreat...' Never succeeded in catching one of those sploosh events in the camera.

No eagles anywhere along the way. A fabulous red-tail hawk flying low across the highway in front of the car, showing his tail so I'd be sure to know who he was. No elk.

Rialto Beach, February 10, 2013. Variable light. (Click for larger image.)

Soundscape for Cee

Pretty soon, I'll have to start going to First Beach instead of Rialto, in hopes of seeing the gray whale migration passing by. Thank you, Olympic National Park.

Where Water Comes Together With Other Water

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.

The mouth of the Elwha River on January 16, 2013. Photo by Tom Roorda. (Click for larger image.)

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.)

Portland Again Again

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,

In the Piper Chieftain, February 3, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

van to Seatac, Alaska Air to Portland,

Best view ever of Mount Saint Helens, from the Alaska Air flight; always sit on the Cascades side of the plane, just in case. February 3, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

light rail (MAX) to the motel. Streetcar to Powell's.

The Mother Church for book people, Powell's City of Books (Click for larger image.)

In the morning, streetcar to OHSU

Portland Streetcar N-S Line at sunrise, February 4, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

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,

MAX signage always tells you when the next two trains will arrive (Click for larger image.)

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.

Waiting at Hillsboro (Click for larger image.)

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.

The mouth of the Columbia River, out to the west (Click for larger image.)

Approaching Port Angeles, we had to descend through the overcast below us,

Descending into the cloud, the Olympics disappearing (Click for larger image.)

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.

Elwha. No point in artificially straightening the view, the plane was tilting :-). The river mouth on February 4, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

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.

Arrived in Port Angeles, February 4, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

Midwinter Spring Is Its Own Season

Definitely glad to be home. Went to the outer coast yesterday with my beach-buddy JL, and took the hike to Second Beach. Foggy/overcast here in town as it has been for days, cleared up before Lake Crescent. Perfect sunny weather out on the beach, then later fog moving in.

Lake Crescent, Olympic National Park, January 20, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

JL was in bliss. Sunshine! Beams of light in the chilly woods on the 30-minute hike to get down to the beach. And sunshine sunshine sunshine by the ocean with the tide retreating, giving us more and more beach to wander on. We shed layers, ambled, had a picnic.

Sunny Sunday in the Middle of Winter, Second Beach, Olympic National Park (Click for larger image.)

While we picniced, the fog began to drift ashore. The sunshine went, and came back, went and came back, over and over.

Fog moving around, Second Beach, January 20, 2013 (Click for larger image.)

Not a lot of wildlife. Some really distant elk off the highway at Beaver Prairie, raccoon footprints on the beach, flitty chirpy birds (that we never saw clearly) in the woods, and hardly any critters in the tidepools. I kept joking that the sea stars and anemones, and the mussels on the rocks that the sea stars eat, had all gone south for the winter; but really, where were they? On the way back to the trailhead, in a sunny interval we saw a nice show of the garnet sand Rau tells about. (Washington Coastal Geology between the Hoh and Quillayute Rivers, about 2/3 down the page.)

Raccoon Feet; and Garnet Sand (Click for larger image.)

I had Philip Whalen's voice in my head all day, as he wandered the main path at Tassajara more than thirty years ago, coffee mug in hand on a spectacular sunny February day and offering his very best T.-S.-Eliot-as-an-old-man impersonation. "Midwinter spring is its own season," he creaked, passing by.

Thank you, Phil; and thank you, Olympic National Park.

Second Beach, before the fog moved in, and after. January 20, 2013

The Dock at Mosquito Creek

The floating dock which came ashore in the Marine Sanctuary last month, presumed to have been set loose from Japan by the tsunami in 2011, remains in the news. (1)(2)(3)(4).

There's another story I saw earlier, with a closeup image of the concrete-with- rebar-encasing-foam material of the dock. Sounds like the same sort of stuff that PG and I found a piece of on Second Beach in October. Can't relocate the story now, and am on my way down the street to the airport. May add link if I find it.

Ah. Here. And photos galore, thank you Washington Department of Ecology.

P. S.

It's wetter here, and snowier, than anywhere else in the country right now.

River Basin Snow Water Content, 01/10/13 (Click for larger image.)

There's a dynamite picture of Glines Canyon just before the dam was built on the Dam Removal Blog.

We may try to be optimistic about the Elwha, but overall, the state of Washington's watersheds is poor, and there are fewer and fewer fish.

Travelling Fool

Weeks pass. I travel, rest up from travelling, and travel again. On January 2, WC came over from Victoria on the noon ferry and we set forth for Portland. Seriously clear sunshiny day, except for mysterious foggy clouds blowing in from the west across 101, from somewhere above Shelton to Olympia. On the 3rd, beginning before sunrise, the usual medical adventures at OHSU. What was not usual was such clear weather, and a huge leisurely space in the middle of the scheduled day. We went joyriding on the aerial tram.

Mt. Hood from the Third Floor, before sunrise, 01/03/13 (Click for larger image.)

The tramway cars are called 'cabins'. (Click for larger image.)

You fly over neighborhoods. Notice the shadow of the cabin :-) (Click for larger image.)

See lots of landscape, urban and mountainous (Mt. Hood) (Click for larger image.)

You arrive on Marquam Hill at the main OHSU hospital complex.

Looking down towards OHSU's waterfront complex from the station at the top. Cabin sailing up towards us. (Click for larger image.)

For future reference. Sunrise at Ziddell Marine on the Willamette River waterfront, viewed from the windows of the Center for Health and Healing. This barge will keep growing, month by month.

01/03/13 (Click for larger image.)

We hit the road as fast as we could after the appointment, heading home. Ran into rain about the same time as we ran into darkness, at approximately Olympia. The heaviest weather was, yes, from Olympia to somewhere above Shelton; it was snowing onto the windshield in the dark, I wasn't happy. Then it lightened up, and by about Hoodsport the weather was intermittent.

Next, Florida again for family stuff. Have I mentioned lately how I hate to travel? Naturally, therefore, I must go to Portland twelve times a year, and hypotenuse the coterminous US over and over and over again, especially lately. Just for the record, it was on purpose that I moved to the west 47 years ago this month, and never moved back to the East Coast. Sigh.

High Tide at the Edge of the Ghost Forest

On Sunday, did went west. It was gray here in town all day apparently, but by golly there was sun at the ocean. It began opening up at Lake Crescent, and just kept getting better.

Lake Crescent, Olympic National Park, December 30, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Eagle at the Lake (Click for larger image.)

Pretty much all I wanted to do was to sit on the beach and read, but it was high tide. No beach. I found a log to sit on that seemed likely to be above sneaker-wave range, and watched the occasional extra-high waves wash salt water right into the forest edge among the ghost trees for a whole hour after the high-tide time marked on the tide tables.

Rialto Beach, Olympic National Park, December 30, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Where I was sitting I could see to the north, and my body shaded the book. Almost right away I fell into it— Louise Erdrich's The Round House, wow— and would be gone away; and when I'd come back each time, there it was, the sunny ocean, the sound of the waves:

... (Click for larger image.)

The closest a wave came, it only caught my attention because I was taking a picture of two hikers as they came along the beach, and it washed them up to their thighs. I did a quick assessment: do I need to grab my stuff and scramble further back? No. But just in case I was wrong, I picked up the book and held it above my head.

That wave is probably the one that got them... (Click for larger image.)

There were a few eagles in the day, one in the tree on the point along Lake Crescent (where one often is); another at a turn in the shore along the Quileute River (ditto), one along the highway somewhere past Bear Creek. Not much of gulls, or ravens, or little flitty birds in the woods, or sea ducks.

To look south I'd have to be squinting into the sun, so I didn't, hardly at all.

James Island, Rialto Beach (Click for larger image.)

The web doesn't yet have a way to grant @vcmcguire what she wants, "Wish I could get a few deep breaths of salty Pacific air." But probably Cee is willing to share her soundscape, which might gratify a different sense:

Soundscape for Cee (Click for larger image.)

Thank you, Olympic National Park.