Tag Archives: Washington

Junior Ranger at Mt Rainier

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My niece kept forgetting where we were and saying how excited she was to be at Mt Everest, and she asked me once every seven minutes about s’mores — “Can we make s’mores now? Can I make a s’more to take back to my mom? How many s’mores can I eat tonight? Can we have s’mores for breakfast tomorrow?” This, my friends, is what it’s like to camp with a seven-year-old. This, in fact, is one of the best parts of being an aunt.

our campsite at Ohanapecosh

My sister has this ridiculously awesome job that sends her to cities around the U.S. to meet with research partners, including twice yearly trips to Seattle. Last September and this September, she’s also brought along my niece on her business trips, and I’ve driven over to the west side of the Cascades and hung out with Patience in the glorious fall sunshine of Seattle while her mother works. Last year we went to the Pike Place Market at least twice a day (my niece is such a hoot — she doesn’t ask for candy or toys, she begs for fresh fruit and flowers), hung out in various coffee shops (this kid really loves coffee shops, I think because she loves talking to new people and coffee shops are full of people), visited the children’s museum, stood at the bottom of the Space Needle and stared up (because this aunt is afraid of heights and wasn’t about to get on that elevator), took the ferry to Bainbridge Island (twice!), and walked the streets of downtown Seattle hand in hand while Patience sang at the top of her lungs and garnered applause from delighted strangers (no tips, people? come on!).

flowers from Pike Place Market, outside the original Starbucks

On this year’s visit I decided we should venture outside of the city and see Mt Rainier National Park as part of Patience’s trip. Her parents and I took her camping last Easter in North Carolina, the grandest adventure of her young life, and I figured she shouldn’t miss an opportunity to see the tallest mountain in the Cascades. The weather was fine, so in addition to driving out to play at the park, we also decided to camp for a night on the Ohanapecosh River. We pitched a tent, built a fire, cooked “the best mac and cheese ever in the world” (according to Patience, and who am I to argue?), and read library books by flashlight. It was wonderful.

hiking at Grove of the Patriarchs

The visitor centers at the park are open for a couple more weeks, until they close for the season at the first of October, so we also spent a little time talking to a park ranger and finding out what Patience would need to do to earn her Junior Ranger badge from the national park. The ranger gave her an activity book and instructions for which pages to complete for her age level in order to earn the badge. Over the next afternoon and morning, Patience completed a scavenger hunt, worked on sentence scrambles about wilderness safety, logged details about our hike through Grove of the Patriarchs, and told the story of our camping trip through her own artistic interpretation in colored pencil. She learned about the “10 essentials” to take along on a trip into the wilderness and insisted that I carry a bag of nuts and bottles of water on our 20 minute walk to a hot spring the second morning, just in case, because the book said you should always have extra food and water. I decided it would be easier to fill my pockets with nuts than to explain that if something happened to us that morning we were still close enough to the campsite that I could holler for help — better to reinforce the rules of the “10 essentials” at this stage.

junior ranger swearing-in ceremony

Thank you, Suzie, for bringing along Patience and allowing us to have a fantastic adventure at Mt Rainier.

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Mt. St. Helens

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May 18, 1980. I don’t remember the eruption of Mt. St. Helens on that actual day, but I do remember hearing about the volcano as a small child. (Side note: I do have a very distinct memory of January 1, 1980 and being super excited that a new decade was starting — weird thought for a four-year-old.) When my parents came to visit me in Washington a couple of weeks ago, we made a two-day trip to the Cascades and spent most of the second day driving and exploring in the area around Mt. St. Helens.

We approached the mountain from the west and got amazing views of the crater, which is not just a hole in the top of the mountain, but a hole plus half the side of the peak missing. It’s incredibly difficult to wrap my mind around 1,300 feet of a mountain top just exploding, but when you watch the video at the visitor center at the Johnston Ridge Observatory, you see that’s just what happened. Earthquake, massive eruption and landslide, blast of steam, tons of ash, mudslide. Catastrophic.

driving towards Mt St Helens on Hwy 504, view of volcanic sediment along the Toutle River

 

view of Mt St Helens from the blast zone

 

another view from the blast zone

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Maryhill

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On my trip up to Washington from Texas in January 2011, as my dad and I were driving on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge from Portland to the Tri-Cities, we noticed a huge mansion across the river on the Washington side, popping up in the middle of the desert seemingly out of nowhere. There was nothing else around it for a few miles, and it puzzled us why there would be such a large house stuck on the side of a mountain towering over the river. I asked a friend about it after we arrived in the Tri-Cities, and she immediately knew which house we were referring to: “Oh, you’re talking about Maryhill. It’s an art museum. Add that to your list of places you should go while in the Northwest.”

I did add it to my list, and on a recent road trip my friend Jen and I made plans to stop in and see what the museum is all about. Maryhill’s website touts it as “Without question, one of the most unusual and enchanting museums in America.” That’s a big claim to live up to when you’re perched on the side of a mountain a few hours’ drive from a metropolitan area.

Before we discuss the oddity that is this charming little collection of art, however, let me first mention the Stonehenge monument three miles to the east on Highway 14. I was driving along at a nice clip on our way to Maryhill and had to make a sliding stop and turn on two wheels to keep from missing the turn-off for the monument — but there was no way we were going to pass up seeing a replica of Stonehenge overlooking the Columbia, with a windmill farm in the background. Sam Hill, an influential Washington businessman, built the Maryhill version of Stonehenge to be a memorial for local soldiers killed in WWI, as a way of making a statement about the sacrifice of young lives to the cause of war. I really had no idea when I left my house that morning that I would be visiting Stonehenge in rural Washington before the day was out.

The Maryhill Museum itself was a very pleasant stop on our way to spend a couple of days in the Columbia River Gorge, and I recommend it for anyone traveling that direction. The varying collections on each floor are unique and seemingly random, but I was fascinated to read the placards telling how they were all connected — household and personal effects from Queen Marie of Romania (who??), Eastern Orthodox icons, a large number of drawings and sculptures by Auguste Rodin (including a plaster of The Thinker), 73 chess sets from around the world (yes, I did stop to count them), baskets from various Native American tribes, and a display detailing Sam Hill’s contributions to the road systems in Washington and Oregon. Among other things. Goodness.

It was the section on Sam Hill’s life and works that I found most intriguing. I’d never heard his name before arriving at the museum (named for his daughter), and he seems to have a rather depressing story as far as his relationships go, but I was interested to see how much he’d influenced the road system and a couple of the places I enjoy most along the Columbia. The Maryhill Loop on Sam Hill’s property near Goldendale was the first paved road in Washington state (!!) — and he was instrumental in building the Historic Columbia River Highway in Oregon and the Vista House at Crown Point, where you can stand high above the river (if the wind doesn’t blow you over) and gaze out in either direction at the grandeur of the gorge. It was also fun to note that Sam Hill was responsible for the Peace Arch at the border crossing between Blaine, Washington, and Surrey, British Columbia, near where my friends and I posed for this picture on a cold, cold day in January 2008. Who knew at the time that I was visiting my first Sam Hill monument?

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Snowshoeing in Wenatchee National Forest

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It had been a while since I’d taken a day off work to spend outdoors, so when my friend Laura and her parents invited me to go snowshoeing last Friday, I jumped at the chance to clear my schedule and spend a day away from my computer.

Laura’s parents are friends with a family who go regularly throughout the winter to cross-country ski in the Wenatchee National Forest. They have the key to an old cabin owned by the US Forest Service, which they make their base on weekend skiing excursions. The cabin is three miles off the highway, meaning visitors have to pack in their supplies in the winter when the forest service road and hiking trail are snowed over. For our day out in the woods, there were four of us on snowshoes with smaller packs who were only going for the day, three with large packs on skis, and one chocolate lab who didn’t seem to mind that she was the only one tromping through the snow without something on her feet to keep her from post-holing every step.

This was my first time on snowshoes and my first time to see SO MUCH SNOW. Feet and feet of it. It didn’t occur to me until Laura pointed it out — we were passing snow covered treetops at ankle-level. After I realized that, I kept thinking about being on this trail during the summer and looking up overhead to see where we had been walking in the air on this February afternoon.

When we got out of our cars at the trailhead on the highway, the man who had invited us all along pointed out that “This is not a beginner trail.” Great. My first time on snowshoes and it’s not a beginner trail. I think he mostly meant that in regards to anyone on skis, since as we soon found out the trail was uphill most of the way to the cabin. 1000 feet in elevation gain over the 3 miles. Rather exhausting, and torturous for my poor feet in borrowed snow boots that didn’t fit well at all. But the experience was worth the pain in my toes and my ankles (I might not have said that if I’d been injured that day, but I wasn’t, so it doesn’t matter now). It snowed most of the way up to the cabin, six inches by the time we got back to the car — you can see what had accumulated on my backpack after the first three miles. Our hats were covered with a layer as well.

We passed one privately owned cabin (pictured below) on our way to the much more rustic forest service cabin. With the falling snow and drifts on the roof, I dreamed of spending a weekend in such a cabin, cozy in front of the fire, tucked in the forest away from cell signals and traffic noises.

With daylight ending fast, we stayed at the forest service cabin only long enough to sign the guest book, eat a snack, and dry off for a moment in front of the wood-burning stove. During the summer, there are four steps up from the ground to the cabin door. You can see from the photo below, snow had drifted up around the cabin, and we had to step down from the drifts to get in the door. It was unreal to me to be inside a building with such a view out the window.

After our quick rest, the four of us who weren’t staying the weekend put our gear back on and started back the three miles to the highway, the snow still coming down around us. Not long into the return trip, it became dark enough that we needed to put on headlamps, and we finished out our trip with the odd vista of falling flakes illuminated directly in front of our eyes, the darkness of the forest on a snowy, cloudy night surrounding us from all sides. Aside from the crunching of our snowshoes, the forest was silent. All of the usual night sounds in a forest were covered with feet of snow.

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God in the Garden: God is in Control

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(This essay is the latest in the series on the Quinault Community Garden — previous essays include God is Good, God is Faithful, and God Works in His Time.)

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Genesis 50:20

With snow and ice covering the ground, it’s hard to imagine that anything can be happening in the garden plot behind the building at 5400 W. Canal Drive. The soil is frozen, not even visible, much less able to produce a green sprout from a seed. Winter time seems useless where gardens are concerned.

Many of us begin a Bible reading plan at the first of the year, in the starkest point of winter, and the stories of so many people from those early books in the Old Testament remind us of the long, cold, dark periods of life where the days and years seem to pass without any evidence of God’s life-giving work. Abraham, Moses, Joseph and others experienced years — decades — where they waited for God to keep His promises. They waited. And waited. And waited. Don’t you know Joseph more than once must have looked around his Egyptian dungeon and wondered if he would ever experience life and joy and the sunshine again? Surely at least once he wondered how things could have ended up this way and whether God really knew what He was doing after all.

The end of Joseph’s story tells the conclusions he drew from the evidence around him when all was said and done: God was in control all along and He was working out a plan to bring life to many people. God never stopped being in control, never stopped working in His creation, even in the deepest winter of Joseph’s life.

Even now in our garden, God is in control and He is at work. The ground rests and waits and produces no growth for the time being, but it is for a purpose. The compost pile appears to be a mess of limbs and leaves and coffee grounds and eggshells, but eventually it will become good black dirt, ready to give nutrients to the seeds we plant. God is in control of this whole process, and He will bring about life through this cold waiting season.

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What’s Stopping You?

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Lately I’ve been on a quest to overcome my dread of the cold. When I spent the summer in Alaska in 2010, I wrote about resigning myself to the fact that I’m a wimp in the cold. I’m not ashamed: I get cold easily and have to bundle up a bit more than the average person in Washington.

But I’m not going to let the cold stop me. (I will, however, let snowy and icy roads stop me.) I cannot let the four or five months of temperatures consistently below or around 40 degrees keep me from leaving my house everyday. As a full-time writer who works out of a home office, I start to go a bit crazy when I can’t get out for breaks to exercise or talk to people, to see something besides the four walls of my apartment. In Texas you can hunker down and not leave the house during the coldest days of the year — because they last for about four days. In Washington, though, I’ve come to terms with the realities of wearing wool underwear and socks, boots with fuzzy lining, scarves, and hats every day until Easter. I invested in cold weather running tights, so freezing temps don’t keep me from putting in a few miles a week. Long wool tights, socks that come up to my knees, and warm boots allow me to wear dresses and skirts year-round, something I never imagined possible. That one little consolation is helping me endure this winter — I love skirts and got used to wearing them year-round with flip-flops in tropical Yunnan, and I feel distinctly unfeminine if I have to wear jeans for months on end. I’m making the best of it and improvising with cold gear so that I can keep dressing and looking like a girl.

I’m trying not to let circumstances stop me in other areas, as well. At this point in life I don’t have the home furnishings or space necessary to have big groups of people over for dinner or to hang out. Having an open house is important to me, and I want my home to be a place where I can entertain, serve meals, show hospitality to people who might need a place to stay. Right now, I only have enough space around the table for six, and two of those people will need to sit on a patio chair or bar stool. Depending on what we’re eating, I don’t have enough place settings to serve those six. But I’m making do. I’ve determined not to be embarrassed about the little I have and to invite friends over now — not wait until I have a larger kitchen and table and plenty of bowls and plates for a big dinner party. I’m not going to let my limitations stop me. If I don’t invite folks over for dinner now, what makes me think I won’t find another excuse to prevent it in two years?

Writing is another example. It’s easy to wake up each morning and look at all the things I need to get done for my bill-paying freelance jobs, or the chores to be done around the house, and think to myself, “I wish I could be completely care-free and have all the time in the world to write each day.” But that kind of care-free scenario is the stuff of dreams. I can arrange my life so that I have as much writing time as possible, but ultimately I have to just sit down and do the writing, stop looking at all the obstacles, get down to business. I can’t let any number of hesitations or fears or distractions keep me from doing the tasks that will lead to my end goal: completed essays and stories and books.

And now I ask, what about you? What are some areas where you catch yourself saying, “One day when the stars are perfectly aligned, I would love to start doing this or that.” Could you take a small step toward preparing for those possibilities, not letting the present circumstances stop you from enjoying today what you desire for the future?

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Mt Rainier and My National Parks Year in Review

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view of Mt Rainier from White Pass Scenic Byway

Over the weekend I went to Seattle to visit my sister and niece. Since the weather was gorgeous (first time to reach 80 degrees in Seattle this year) and I’m on the last week before my national parks pass expires, I decided to drive the long way from here to there, through Mt Rainier National Park — or Mt Rainy, as my niece calls it.

view of Mt Rainier from Sunrise Point in the national park

view from Sunrise Point, in the opposite direction from Mt Rainier

It’s been a fun year, and I hope to have a reason to buy another annual pass soon. To celebrate a great year of parks, here’s a recap of stories from the blog:

Last July I took my first ride in a bush plane and experienced Alaskan mosquitos in Kobuk Valley National Park.

In September, I bought the annual pass at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and drove as far as I could on the Trail Ridge Road.

I fell in love with West Texas on a camping trip in Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains last October, but missed out on the opportunity to camp in White Sands National Monument in New Mexico.

On the drive to Washington in January, I stopped at Saguaro in Arizona and Joshua Tree in California for a quick intro to a couple of desert southwest parks.

I saw the end of the Lewis and Clark trail at the national historical park in Washington and Oregon in March — and the beginning of the trail at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia in April. I squeezed in a drive through Shenandoah National Park in Virginia on that April trip east, as well.

When my mom came to visit in July, we saw the Whitman Mission National Historical Site near Walla Walla, a couple of bonus parks in Canada (Kootenay in British Columbia and Banff in Alberta), and had a gorgeous drive through Glacier National Park in Montana.

I think I got my money’s worth this year.

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Murals in Toppenish

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close-up of Toppenish Depot Mural

On Labor Day I went with a friend to visit her grandmother in the Yakima Valley, and to get there we drove through the town of Toppenish, famous for its 70+ murals decorating buildings, walls, other flat surfaces. The murals depict scenes of the old West, native Yakama culture, and other history from the area, and the city adds a new mural each year during their Mural-in-a-Day event.

Toppenish Depot Mural

The town of Toppenish (pop. 9000) is completely surrounded by the Yakama Nation. Hops, grapes, and corn made up our view for a good portion of the drive through the area, with Mt Adams and Mt Rainier popping in and out of sight in the distance.

walking through Toppenish

One mural/map told us that Toppenish is 990 miles from Mexico, 198 miles from Canada, 198 miles from the Pacific, and 2376 miles from the Atlantic. In case you were curious.

 

looking at murals in Toppenish

I thought it was fun to find this mural mentioning the Cowgirl Hall of Fame — a great little museum in my hometown, Fort Worth, Texas.

Ruth Parton Webster, 1988 inductee to Cowgirl Hall of Fame

(Note: I’ve corrected the spelling of Yakama Nation — it’s different from the spelling of the city of Yakima. Thanks for the correction, Laura S.)

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Badger Mountain Sunrise

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“Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,

for in you I trust.

Make me know the way I should go,

for to you I lift up my soul.”

Psalm 143:8

The sun came up 10 minutes earlier today than it did on my last try at sunrise on Badger Mountain near the end of May. I was pulling out of my driveway by 4 am, and the sky was clear. On my walk up the mountain, the moon was still bright, and its light reflected in a silver strand on the Columbia River when I glanced back over my shoulder at the horizon behind me. The wind whispered early morning salutations in the tall grass, and birdsong rose from the hillside in reply.

Sunrise happens every day, but how often do I consider it? God’s love is new every morning, and I don’t want to miss it.

 

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