Padilla Bay

This past week my crew, along with around 10 others from Washington, met up in Padilla Bay to learn a little bit more about the Americorps program and receive extremely basic wilderness first aid training. We left on Sunday evening, and arrived at a luxurious Holiday Inn Express a couple hours and short ferry ride later. Sleeping 2 in a room, I was lucky not to get stuck with a snorer.

See how far we traveled?

Early the next morning we rode to some conference center to meet up with everybody else. Both Monday and Tuesday were long days of sitting and listening, but all in all I left with some solid information. From my page of doodles and notes...

** A piece of legislation signed in by Comrade Obama will expand the Americorps program from 75,000 annual volunteers to around 350,000 in the coming years

** The general life cycle of the Pacific Northwest salmon is as follows: they are born in freshwater (river or lake) and feed off of insect larvae and the like... then they migrate to the ocean where they just eat and eat and eat (all the different types of salmon are silver at this point, so they are very hard to distinguish)... after a couple of years, give or take depending on the type, they return to the fresh water body they were born in to start spawning... at this point the males grow a hump on their back, somehow wind up with a hooked nose, and both genders take on their better known and much more fashionable hue and pattern... finally, the salmon bite the dust and decompose, giving off their vital nutrients, most importantly nitrogen.

** If you come up on somebody who looks hurt, make sure the scene is safe to approach, get their permission to help out, and then start with the ABCs. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. You now know about as much as I do about wilderness first aid.

** Don't conventionally or sexually harass anybody, or you will be fired.

A tsunami of incredible but non-fatal force crashed just outside this building. Crazy enough, all the untrained people who just happened to learn a little something about crisis management and checking/maintaining lifelines were safe inside, and sprang in to action to help care for the highly trained individuals rendered helpless and stuck outside.

Everybody is really in to Frisbee and hackey sack... but you already knew that, didn't you?

A look inside the classroom.

For food, we get 10 dollars each per meal to spend at Safeway. Everybody is really in to healthy, organic foods here... but you already knew that, didn't you?

I think, but am not positive, that those are the Cascades in the background. I dunno, the car was moving, I had to be quick with the camera... it all happened so fast.

This bridge that we're crossing is called Deception Pass.

Port Townsend. Apparently a very hip, artsy town with a younger crowd than Port Angeles. I'll be the judge of that.

Cheeky birds, aren't they?

After throwing my camera in to the sea and capturing this perfectly centered and focused shot, I retrieved it with a fishing line. A look at the mountains... nay, my mountains... the Olympic Range.

Bear Hang

So Erin asks what a bear hang is. (What's goin' on Erin??)


(Illustration by Mike Clelland)

All it is is a bag or canister or some other kind of holding device that is tied to a rope that is tied to a tree in a pulley fashion (depicted above). This way, a bear (or any other menacing beast) can't get to your food, even if she smells it.

There aren't too many bears around here, but there are some. A quick geology lesson ...


That's my drawing, hold the applause.

Basically, hydrothermal vents allowed lava to spew from beneath the Farallon plate (shown moving underneath, or subducting, the North America plate, above). The lava cooled really really quickly when it hit the water, forming basalt rock. As the Farallon plate kept diving down in to the depths of the Earth, the North American plate scraped off all the sediment and hardened basalt, forming the Olympic Mountains. Just that easy.

A little side note that I think is super cool... scientists think they know that the Earth's magnetic field reverses its polarity every several hundred thousand years (meaning that your compass will one day point south, rather than north). One supporting fact for this theory is that as lava cools to form basalt, its iron-oxide magnetite crystals align with the earth's magnetic field. So what that means is that if you look at a section of basalt rock, you'll notice stripe patterns that correspond to the polarity of earth's magnetic field at the time that rock formed.

OK, back to the point. After the mountains formed some tens of millions of years ago, a bunch of glaciers hiked down from up north and setup shop right between the Olympics and the rest of North America. That seperation prevented a lot of species from making there way over... grizzley bears being one of them.

But I just heard two days ago that a ranger saw a cougar (or mountain lion, or puma, or whatever you wanna call it) crossing a jeep road. Uh oh.

Rialto Beach

Last week my crew drove about two hours west of the park to Rialto Beach, a section of the wilderness coastline of Olympic National park. Its publicly owned, so there are no hotels or large commercial buildings of any kind... that tends to make the landscape a lot nicer to look at.

I realize that I've been busting out all of these names and places when you guys (most of you, anyway) don't have any point of reference. So, here's a basic map of the park. Port Angeles is on the top, and the most popular place to go (because of ease of access, proximity to major road, and spectacular view) is Hurricane Ridge, about 17 miles south of town. We've been doing most of our work at Lake Crescent (where we are roofing) and the Heart O' the Hills area (where we are painting). We've also been to Sol Duc to do some trailwork, but generally the weather hasn't been the best for that.


The farthest we've gone is the subject of this post... Rialto Beach, which is next to the Mora campground in the very west and about 2 hours away. (If we go any farther than that in a day, than we stay for the entire week at a bunkhouse so that we only have to do a commute once.)

Now, this was my first trip to the Pacific Ocean, and being such a noob, I had to bring my camera along.

The place was totally badass, and we didn't even get rained on.


There are lots of islands off the coast that are undoubtedly home to man-eating carnivores, primitive cults, and various deadly mushrooms. No one really knows though, because nobody who has ever ventured to these unimaginably savage places has returned to tell the tale. I'm going to swim out to see for myself when it gets warmer.


These coastal areas act as buffers to the inland, and as you can see, take quite a beating from storms. I'd hate to be a giant walking along these beaches... just think of the splinters.








Prolly the coolest thing about the coast here is that it sits right next to the forest. (As opposed to sand dunes, or something) Its a cool contrast. It also makes it pretty dangerous to walk along for long periods of time (seriously.) For many portions they advise hikers to have tide charts so they don't get caught in a situation that requires them to swim to an accessible beach.


We picked a nice big trunk to sit on for lunch. After we ate, we played a little soft toss with stones, skipped some rocks in the surf, and posed for a poorly prepared picture...




People way up the beach were tossing nets in the water for some reason or another. You can vaguely see somebody at the top of this picture.








The reason that we even traveled out here was to take apart a wheelchair access pathway from the beach. The winter gets pretty nasty along the beach I guess, so they avoid any potential for damage. This is an "after" picture.


A banana slug! We found this fat little critter when were cutting down deciduous trees at the ranger station.

After we finished for the day, the ranger who we met at Mora let us all share an apple pie that his wife made for him. It was über tasty, made from apples picked in the park. Everybody is so nice around here... makes it easy to work.

Also, a couple of random things:

First, congratulations to Jen for getting a permanent job and embarking on scuba diving lessons this week.

Second, I sauteed some wild picked mushrooms from the park the other night, and found out I like them. Who'da thought?

Third, I am volunteering at "Streamkeepers", a county organization that monitors water quality and conducts other hydrological research. Specifically, I'll be using ArcGIS (woohoo!!) to help prepare the county for potential storm water ordinances (development is greatly affecting the route/rate of runoff, which could be bad news if it floods). So that's fun, and I'll get to use my brain along with my chiseled biceps.

Fourth, I shot a 44 on a par 37 this weekend, and didn't lose one golf ball. I'm pretty sure that's a first for me.

Hot Springs

Here's my new thing: I'm going to post something every Monday. I know this isn't a Monday, but I just want to say that now, starting next week. There are a couple of reasons for this, the first of which is to make it so that you don't have to check back randomly to see if I posted something. This will give things a certain regularity. Also, I think that by having a post a week, I might be able to make this blog last. Eventually, I'm going to run out of things to show you, especially now that the weather is turning for the worse and apparently won't let up until Spring. One more reason, I get Mondays off, so I can actually put some care in to what I write down.

Now, last weekend I went to the hot springs of the Elwha River Valley with some friends from work. It was about a 20 minute drive to the trail head, and then two miles and change to the campsite from there.




The trees are just stunning here, and when you really get in to the park and down in to the valleys (rather than on a ridge or peak or something), you feel just overwhelmed by them... in a good way, of course. I visited New York City in the summer, and I got the same sort of feeling when I walked the streets of downtown Manhattan.




On the trail up to the campsite. I was the only person wearing shorts.






Some wonderful rock art left alongside the path.


There used to be a road here, but now its just a rudimentary wooden bridge. Ya see, there is sooo much precipitation in the forest here that any type of construction, especially one smack dab in the middle of a drainage, doesn't stand a chance.


Some friends greeting us at our campsite. I really need to figure out how to set my camera for motion shots.


That's mine on the left. The campsites here at Olympic are phenomenal... extremely clean and well maintained. Many of them have a port-a-potty, many of them have bear hangs, and all of them have wide open spots to set up shop.


The bear hang.


Over the bridge and to the hot springs...





OK so here are some shots of the hot springs. They are natural, and reach upwards of 90 degrees. We spent all day here, and met some nice folks while we kicked back. A couple of guys from Seattle were on a weekend trip, a group from near by was happily sipping on Champagne, and many others walked by as we chatted.


There are a bunch of springs, maybe around 10-15, and they all end up in the river...


...in a leisurely, meandering fashion.





I really dig the ferns around here... they are all over the forest floor, and complement the giant trees nicely.




Plenty of mushrooms around here. My crew supervisor, Kelly, has become something of an expert while working in the park, and takes advantage of the 5 mushrooms (or some number like that) that a person can harvest a day.


The whole of us: Me, Kylan from PA, Rebecca from Georgia, Rebecca from Oregon, Callie from Oregon, and Luke from Minnesota.


We got the fire blazin' early, because it got cold quickly. Getting wood took a good bit of time, because most of the park is old growth forest (an uncommon thing these days). What that means is that the land has never been logged, and so the trees are, you guessed it, old. What that means is that there are no low branches on the trees. And finally, what that means is that you sometimes have to travel aways from camp to get burnable stuff.


A dam along the river... there are many here. Oh, those poor salmon.