Surreal Trip Experience No. 2: Road

Published at 09:58 on 15 July 2015

Highway 20 is officially the northernmost road through Washington State, much like the Crowsnest Highway is the southernmost one through British Columbia. Both roads are very scenic as they engage in feats of engineering to circumvent obstacles which otherwise could be circumvented by crossing the 49th parallel.

But I digress. Highway 20 is officially the northernmost road through Washington state. While studying my map of the Okanogan National Forest, I discover another road even further north going from the hamlet of Loomis to Winthrop. It involves a long gravel segment, and there are two Forest Service campgrounds along it, which is convenient, since if I’d take that road I’d probably be going by at about the time when I’d want to stop for the night. One of those campgrounds is listed as having an elevation of 6800 feet, which is the highest campground I’ve ever run across in Washington. This pretty much decides that I’m going to take that road.

It’s signed as Toats Coulee Road and breaks off from the road to Palmer Lake just north of Loomis. I pass several fire camps before I make the turn. Oddly, there’s no column of smoke visible anywhere on the horizon.

The road starts as your typical primary paved county road: narrower than your typical state highway, with tighter curves, but still a pretty good road. Soon it loses lane striping. It starts climbing. After I pass the site of an old power plant and cross a cattle guard, the quality of the maintenance decreases and the number of potholes increases. Pretty soon it’s obvious that it’s been some time since the road has seen any sort of maintenance at all. Huge potholes crater it. In a few sections, the pavement has crumbled entirely and it’s now a gravel road. Since these have been recently graded, they offer a superior ride to the pothole-cratered paved sections.

I see a pickup truck with the name of a fire agency on it parked at a scenic viewpoint. I stop to take a few pictures myself then query the occupant about the fire. It apparently was burning pretty vigorously up to a few days ago, but recent rains have really put the damper on it, hence the lack of a smoke column.

The road continues to get worse. Weeds and shrubbery encroach on it from the sides. Aside from the one parked truck, I haven’t seen any other vehicles on it. The empty nature of the road plus its decripitude gives an eerie, post-apocalyptic feeling to my drive. Deer cross the road in front of me multiple times.

After miles of dodging potholes, a welcome sight: the end of the badly-maintained pavement. What appears to be the “main” road continues ahead as a recently graded two-lane gravel road, but my map clearly indicates it dead ends after a half dozen more miles. The road I want is the one-lane gravel one branching off to the left.

It’s very lightly traveled. Grass grows in the middle of it. Yet the worn ruts are grass-free, and my sources indicated that the road is indeed open all the way through to Winthrop. It enters a burned area and for mile after mile it goes from one ridge to another, switchbacking its way up and down the ridges when it crosses valleys. It’s mostly in pretty good shape but the odd eroded spot is hard to see in advance, which keeps me from going faster than about 20 mph. I eventually do meet a vehicle coming in the other direction. We’re both startled to see someone else on the road. The other driver confirms that he started from the other end, and is floored when I say where I have come from on it. Apparently he didn’t have a map and is just following the road to see where it goes.

It’s about 5:00 in the evening when I finally come to the campground. It’s small (only six sites) and completely empty. I snag the best site (the only one with fully intact trees around it; the others all have varying degrees of fire damage).

I discover that the water jug in the back of my truck, despite being secured, has tipped over. Worse, despite there being a plug in the air hole, the pressure difference between 900 feet elevation (at Tonasket, where I verified it was securely plugged) and 6800 feet (where I was then) had caused pressure to build up to the point where the stopper had popped out of the hole. So not only was I virtually out of water, there was a mess in the back of the truck.

Thankfully, the ribbed design of the truck bed plus drain holes intended to let rain out had minimized the impact of the mishap. The campground’s name is Tifffany Spring, which was a big hint at a solution to the water shortage, and indeed the namesake spring was easy to locate. It had but a small pool, largely obscured by a lush growth of sedges, but with clear cold water which was deep enough to fill containers with. Between spring water for cooking and washing with and the remaining water in my jug for drinking as-is, I was set for an overnight stay.

It was a treat to have the luxury of car camping with sheets and blankets off the ground in a location so remote and high-up that one would normally have to backpack there and sleep on the ground in a small tent with a thin pad on irregular surface.

Surreal Trip Experience No. 1: Hail

Published at 09:48 on 15 July 2015

The day warmed up rapidly as I worked my way north from Wenatchee on US 97. By the time I was in Tonasket the temperature was between 95 and 100 (a bank thermometer said 112, but no way was that correct). A black cloud loomed over the highlands to the east, my destination for the day.

As I drove up into the highlands, I noticed winds, evidently downdrafts from the thunderstorm ahead, were blowing. I opened my window and it was about 70 degrees outside, a good 25 degrees cooler than it was just minutes ago. No more need for the air conditioner.

Soon the road became damp, then outright wet as I chased the rain retreating southwards (I only ever experienced light showers on this drive). More and more runoff was evident; the storm I had just missed was a real gully-washer. The temperature fell into the sixties.

Ground fog loomed ahead. I knew what that probably meant: hail on the ground, creating a temperature inversion close to the surface. Indeed, my hypothesis was soon verified. The temperature was now in the fifties and I had my headlights on as I crept through the fog in a white landscape. In July, in eastern Washington, at 2:30 in the afternoon.

The campground that was my destination for the day was in the heart of the hail zone. It was about three inches deep when I got there, and didn’t completely melt until the next day.

Well, Scratch That Approach

Published at 21:08 on 6 April 2015

It took a day’s exploring to find Kitsap Forest not long after moving to the west side of the Sound. The location is not publicized, because it’s a sensitive area and hasn’t been developed with visitors in mind, but it is public land and visitors are allowed.

The past winter I while studying my public lands quadrangle map of the area, I realized it probably would be possible to get there from the opposite direction that I found. So last February, I set out to do just that.

The results were less successful than my attempt from the other direction. I spent most of a day wandering around old logging roads, turning back after one dead end after another. Eventually I found the most promising old logging road of the day, but couldn’t fully investigate it because doing so would have meant completing my hike in darkness (and I had no light with me). So I made a note to return someday.

Well “someday” ended up being yesterday. This time I brought my knobby-tired bike, so I didn’t have to walk so much. Unfortunately, the promising old road gets very overgrown quite quickly, and it peters out before it reaches any interesting areas. Technically, it does reach the preserve, but at that point it’s not the old-growth forest yet; it’s just a buffer area of regrowing clear cuts.

After a lot of pretty intense bushwhacking, I realized that a) it was going to be very hard for me to follow my exact trail back, and b) if my GPS batteries died, I’d be pretty screwed (i.e. lost). And I still was in old clear cut territory. I had been chasing large trees, but they were all the occasional older tree the loggers had left behind to provide seeds to revegetate the area.

So I turned around; better safe than sorry. I did indeed promptly lose my trail, but it was of little matter because it was easy to home in on the waypoint I had entered at the end of the old road.

After downloading my GPS track and putting it in both a GIS database I have of Kitsap County and in Google Maps, it became clear that I had actually been only about 150 feet from the start of the old growth where I turned around. So if I had persevered for ten minutes or so more, I would have found what I sought.

But it is of little matter. Even with that knowledge, it’s so much more difficult coming from that direction. The first way I found has old roads going straight to the old growth. It’s a bit of a confusing maze, and I only found the correct way after eliminating virtually all other possibilities, but now that I know it, it’s a snap to get there. No bushwhacking involved.

So I don’t think I’ll be revisiting the more challenging approach any time soon.

The QGIS GIS: A Steal at Twice the Price

Published at 20:18 on 18 February 2015

I wanted to create a track to follow for my GPS based on property lines which are part of the public record. A little searching revealed that most GIS software can do this these days.

Years ago, I supported an installation of the GRASS GIS at the University of Washington. It was notoriously difficult to install and configure. About three years ago, I played with installing GRASS on my home computer, and discovered that it’s approximately as difficult to learn to use as it is to install. A pity, as it is free and by all accounts very powerful.

So I did more searching to see if someone had come up with an easier-to-use open-source GIS. Indeed they had, and it’s called QGIS. Actually, that’s only about half-true; from what I’ve been able to gather, QGIS is mostly a user-friendly front-end for GRASS.

And user-friendly it is. In an evening, I managed to import a bunch of GIS data available for free from my county of residence and use the resulting GIS project to draw and export the desired track to my GPS. It took a fair amount of web searches and searching through the documentation, I never did figure out how to import the road and place labels, and the process of exporting the GPS track was more than a little bit fiddly.

But no matter. In an evening, I managed to do what I had set out to do. That’s far more than I ever accomplished trying to bend plain old GRASS to my will.

No doubt a professional-grade GIS like ArcGIS would likely have been even more smoothly designed and documented. No matter. Professional GIS software doubtless costs thousands of dollars, an expense that cannot be justified just to occasionally create a GPS track.

Having something affordable (better yet, free!) which is usable by mere mortals is a major win.

A Great Sunday

Published at 16:02 on 3 February 2015

I’m not much of a sports fan, so when it became evident that the forecast storm on Sunday was instead breaking up as it hit the Olympics, I decided to load my fat-tired bike in my truck and ride the logging roads near Port Gamble. Part of the motivation was that it’s one of the last good chances to go off-island (for outdoorsy stuff) in the next month, as the Agate Pass Bridge is scheduled to have maintenance done on it, which means huge backups for anyone using it. That leaves the ferry, which does not head to a convenient destination if easy access to outdoor recreation is one’s goal.

So, anyhow, after lunch I hit the trails. Well, the roads. But many of them in the northeast part of the Port Gamble tree farm are more like trails, because they are so overgrown they might as well be mostly fictional (if you can even find them in the first place). That made for some unplanned adventures and detours.

Overall, though, it ended up being a day of hitting an aggressive stride and trying to go as fast as possible down those old roads. I had them pretty much to myself, because the masses were at home transfixed by their electronic screens. It was a wonderful afternoon of feeling great to be alive, and great to be an animal on a living planet.

I have yet to visit the southeast part of the tree farm. It was on the route plan for Sunday, but the unplanned detours due to the differences between the map and reality put me behind schedule as the afternoon light was starting to wane. If the map was correct, I’d have enough time to take a route through the southeast quadrant, but I had just learned that said map cannot be completely trusted as to its accuracy.

So I played it safe and took the way back I was already familiar with. The southeast quadrant will probably have to wait until March.

Wild Cranberry Sauce

Published at 21:58 on 14 October 2014

Last June, while on a botanical survey, I happened across a peat bog on the way to the survey site. I find all bogs to be fascinating places, because of the unique flora they have, and this one was even more so because depending on where you are in it there’s two distinct types of bog: the more normal (for this latitude and climate) terrestrialization type, created by a rain-fed pond filling in, and the far less common (here; worldwide, most peatlands are this type) paludification type, caused when beavers dammed the pond after the land was clear-cut, waterlogging the soil and causing the sphagnum moss to spread onto it from the adjacent bog, expanding it. The old logging road bed itself was even revegetating with bog plants.

Amongst those were wild cranberries, which were flowering profusely at the time. That naturally made me want to return in the fall to see if they were fruiting profusely. I did, and they were. I harvested just under a gallon of berries.

The following recipe is adapted from “averaging” the measurements of several recipes for cranberry sauce I found on the Web and in my old copy of The Joy of Cooking.

  • 6 cups cranberries
  • 2 cups water
  • 3 cups sugar
  • 3 whole cloves
  • 1 large, fat or two skinny sticks of cinnamon

If you’re going to can the result, have the necessary number of clean mason jars, lids, and bands ready in a boiling-water canner. Do this first. It takes a long time to get such a large pot boiling. By the time the cranberry sauce is ready to can, your canner should be ready as well (i.e. boiling hot).

Wash the cranberries well in a large bowl. Agitate the water vigorously with your fingers to dislodge any old petals or sepals from the tips of the berries. Repeat until all such debris are removed.

Bring the water to a boil, then add the cranberries, cinnamon, and cloves. Return to a boil and cook until the skins on the berries crack (for me, this was basically when the berries returned to a boil). Remove the cinnamon and cloves and put the berries through a food mill or ricer.

Bring the cranberry purée to a boil and add sugar. Stir until dissolved then return to a full rolling boil then remove from heat.

Yield about five pints.

If canning (which is what I did, Thanksgiving is still nearly two months off), leave 1/2″ head space in each jar and process for 15 minutes in a boiling-water canner.

Well, I’m Back

Published at 10:30 on 14 July 2014

I survived. Actually, the warmth was quite nice — provided I was sitting in the shade doing nothing and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. The rub is, I was often hiking off-trail wearing enclosed shoes and long pants to protect me from thorny shrubs (of which there are many in that area).

This is the week of a big annual convention put on by my employer. Today’s attendance is being made unpleasant by two facts:

  1. The sandals, which I had thought were not provoking my tendonitis, proving that they actually were this morning. (I hadn’t worn them for the past few days, going barefoot when not wearing enclosed shoes, and my sore toe had gotten better all the while. This morning, on the walk from the ferry to the convention center, it stared getting sore again.)
  2. The pissy and uptight staff at the convention center, who are continually trying to order me to put shoes on. Sorry, not gonna happen. I’ll be damned if I re-injure myself and jeopardize my ability to lead a weekend hike just to comply with some uptight firms’ prejudice against bare feet. They can take their prejudice and stick it where the sun don’t shine.

The Time of Impatient Waiting is Over

Published at 00:15 on 26 June 2014

Berry season has begun. The blackcaps* and best of all the thimbleberries† are ripening everywhere. Salmonberries have been ripe for several weeks now, but they don’t have the flavor of our other berries.

The wide variety of edible berries are one of the things I like best about this region. Many parts of the country are lucky to have one or two good wild edible berries. I can offhand think of nine types of native edible berries found on this island alone (so I’m probably overlooking a few), plus a couple of common introduced species.

* My namesake; I chose it because the species of blackcap they have in the Midwest is probably the first wild food I remember eating.

† A flavor, which together with the thoroughly non-native durian, I probably crave more than any other.

Back to Normal

Published at 19:14 on 11 February 2014

Actually, it was back to normal by yesterday afternoon. A day of temperatures in the forties and mild sea breezes made quick work of almost all the snow.

The suddenness with how these winter arctic cold waves could both begin and end was one of the things that surprised me when I first moved to this region. It’s like a switch is being thrown, engaging and disengaging Cold Mode surprisingly fast. Before I moved to this region, I visited once a few days after an episode of cold and snow, expecting to find lingering piles everywhere. Instead, there was almost no snow to be seen; I had to search to find the rapidly-melting remains of what had been significant piles of shoveled snow only a few days before.

At this stage, it’s something I expect, and when it happens it’s a sign that all is still right and as it should be, and that this winter wasn’t a disappointing repeat of last winter, snow-wise.

The Answer is Yes

Published at 20:24 on 16 September 2013

When I moved to Bainbridge Island last spring, there were areas of woods on the island which looked just right for chanterelles. On my way to checking to see if the dead alders were bearing oyster mushrooms again, I investigated the areas of suspect chanterelle habitat to see if my suspicion was correct. The subject line says it all.

Most of the chanterelles were in the button stage, so even though I only found two of pickable size I have more harvesting to look forward to, hopefully quite a bit more. If somebody else doesn’t get them before I do, that is.