As I’m writing this post I only have two weeks left in Washington and a 1-week road trip until I’m back in Kentucky. It’s amazing how quickly the time has gone by, but I’m not done yet!!!!!
I still have a lot to learn here, but slowly the pieces of the puzzle are coming together in my mind. Just these past few weeks have made me feel like I’m finally starting to be able to apply what I’ve been going through all summer, which is an amazing feeling.
- Fire Regeneration Study and Other Fun Work Things
- Volunteering with WTA
- Keeping the PNW Weird
- Hiking Mount Rainier
- Hiking the North Cascades
Fire Regeneration Study and Other Fun Work Things
Most of what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks has been a regeneration survey of how trees have been recovering since the 2017 Norse Peak Fire.
What the forest service is trying to do is see what species are regrowing after the fire so that plantings can be better planned in order to give areas a head start for recovery. So far, we’ve been working around a lot of dead standing trees with loose soil, so it’s been pretty challenging! We’re also noticing that in a lot of areas of high elevation and large amounts of sunlight, environments are shifting from being forested to becoming alpine meadows, which is a result of climate change.
That’s an ongoing project, but we should be finishing it up pretty soon.
Between the surveys, though, we’ve been going out to see some cool things in the area. The place where the fire happened is close to state route 410, which is the route a lot of people use when going from Enumclaw to Mount Rainier. As a result, there are a lot of good opportunities for recreation!
The ice cream I’m holding is huckleberry ice cream, which people in this area really enjoy, and for good reason- it’s absolutely delicious! We stopped at an outfitter store that’s a bit like Miguel’s Pizza if it sold more stuff and didn’t sell pizza. Also shout out to my co-worker Jean who reads this blog and took those photos of me napping after lunch!
One of the coolest things we went to see after work one day was the Sun Top Lookout, which is still an active fire lookout! There’s a group called the Washington Fire Lookout Association that manages them for volunteers to staff, and we met one of the people in the lookout for the weekend. She was super nice and answered our questions, and it’s something I really want to be able to do next year. The part I liked the most about the lookout was that since it was active, it had an active fire scope wheel (not sure if this is the right term or not) that is calibrated to a compass to read the azimuth of where a fire is in relation to the tower and what elevation it is. The device I’m talking about is in the first three pictures above. It’s original from when the lookout tower was built in the 30s and I’m absolutely amazed that it’s still in service!
While we were visiting, there was a trail crew making the lookout ADA accessible and adding a deck, which would make the Sun Top Lookout the first ADA accessible fire lookout in the area.
On another day, we checked out lonesome lake after work. One of my coworkers told me that the city of Greenwater, WA has their annual canoe races there usually later in the season, and it seems like its a whole community affair!
Aside from fire regeneration studies, I’ve also been hanging out some with our wildlife biologist to check out wildlife trees and to check up on grazing habitat for elk that’s being created by the timber thinning we do. While a lot of those pictures of cuts look gruesome, it’s because the were just freshly done and plants still need time to take root in the area. After a few years, the thinned areas start to look more like this:
This is a lot better for elk and deer to forage in, and it’s a big improvement from the little browsing they had before the thin!
One of the coolest things I did with the wildlife biologist was check out a northern goshawk nest in a future timber sale to see if its young had left the nest yet or not. I wish I had more room to write about the goshawk, but it’s a super cool raptor that prefers old growth forest and is very temperamental when it comes to its living environment. We ended up seeing a juvenile hawk and it flew around us while we were checking out its nest, but we didn’t see its mom or any other siblings.
One other cool thing we can do for work if there’s not much going on at the office is to partake in “familiarizing ourselves with the forest.” Astute readers will probably remember when I did that to check out Cedar Notch in June, and just a few days ago the opportunity presented itself again! My coworkers and I went and checked out Snoqualmie Falls, which Twin Peaks fans will recognize from the intro (I’ve also been getting into watching Twin Peaks since I got here because it was all filmed around North Bend). So here are a few photos from that!
Volunteering with WTA
One of my favorite things about being outdoorsy in the pacific northwest is the existence of WTA, which is a hub for all things outdoor recreation. They have basically every trail in the state on there as a detailed guide, with tips and tricks in case there are closures, trail reports from users, photos, and a whole other side of the website dedicated to volunteering for trail work. Coming from the Kentucky Red River Gorge Trail Crew universe where volunteer work is run by one forest service person, I had no idea that such an organization could exist and be so effective.
Long story short, I found a work party that was meeting a weekend I was free and had an amazing time making friends and doing trail work on the Lower Quilcene trail, which is on the Olympic peninsula. The coolest part of this crew was that it was only for LGBTQ+ folks, so everyone on the crew was totally awesome to work with.
Our goal for the day was to clear out drainage ditches in the trail and repair some culverts to allow for better drainage. That particular area has a lot of high use from mountain bikers and hikers, and we ran into a bunch of them while working!
One cool thing you can do when you’re signing up for volunteering with WTA is list yourself as being able to carpool with people on the way there. So I did that and managed to make a friend who is visiting from Mexico, who you’ll be reading more about in this blog post because we went backpacking two different weekends here. Thanks, Iara, for being my hiking buddy for the past few weeks!
Keeping the PNW Weird
Something I’ve been wanting to do since I first heard about it when I went to folklife in May has been the Seattle Sea Chanty group that meets monthly at the docks to sing sea chanties. I finally went and it was totally awesome. We sung for about two hours and covered songs from the high seas to how proud everyone was to be from Seattle, to my favorite – the library.
Afterwards I walked around Lake Union Park and enjoyed a lovely sunset. So if you ever find yourself in Seattle and free on the second Friday evening of the month, definitely check out the sea chanties!
Hiking Mount Rainier
My friend Iara and I both really wanted to check out Mount Rainier so we went and had a totally amazing time! We explored the sunrise area and some areas around S.R. 410 where I’ve been working for the past two weeks. We were supposed to meet up with one of my coworkers and hike with them, but weren’t able to because of timing and circumstance.
Our itinerary was seemingly pretty simple, but the more I learn about backpacking in the pacific northwest, the more I learn how truly difficult it is to do anything in wilderness inside a national park. I was also amazed to learn how popular the Sunrise area is because we showed up at 9:30am on a Saturday morning to the entrance and got turned away because the wait time to get to the visitor center was over 2 hours.
The good news was that I knew of some hikes in the nearby area on forest service land that didn’t need a permit and that hardly anyone knew about, so we did that instead and had a wonderful time!
We ended up taking the deep creek trail up to Noble Knob and made it about 3/4 of the way up before we decided to turn around to get to mount Rainier in time for the sunset. But before you get mad at me and say “WAIT! Why did you turn around when you were so close?!” Hear me out. Iara and I were pretty tired from gaining so much elevation, and the view of Mount Rainier was obscured by a bunch of clouds. So we figured we’d get to the park in time to make and eat dinner and catch the sunset, which is a plan that worked out really really well! So even though we didn’t get to see Noble Knob, I still am happy because of the amazing sunset we caught.
We ended up camping at the trailhead for deep creek since we weren’t able to get wilderness permits, and it was a pretty uneventful night. I am still amazed at how quiet it is here at night, though. There are hardly any bugs, birds, or nighttime noises which can be a little unsettling at times.
The next morning we got up and tore down camp at 4:30 to catch the sunrise at sunrise and we were not disappointed! This time we got there early enough (thank god) that there was no line to get in and we joined the other 100+ people strewn about the grounds of the visitor center clamoring to watch the sunrise. Our plan, though, was to go to the Fremont fire lookout tower, which was about a 2 mile hike from the parking lot and eat breakfast there while soaking up the morning sun.
What was cool is that once we got to the tower, we were able to see the Puget Sound and Seattle, albeit hazily. And the eagle-eyed among you will see some mountain goats I found down the ridge from where we were eating! The sunrise was super memorable and unlike anything I had seen before, and I was really happy I got to experience it before I went back to Kentucky!
The hike back was also really interesting since we got to talk to a lady who had been thru-hiking the Wonderland Trail and she was telling me that she used to work in Lexington a few years ago. Small world! I also got some nice photos of the alpine meadows and of a human-habituated chipmunk that posed for me when I got close to it.
Overall my lessons learned from going to Rainier is to come on an off day or either extremely early or extremely late in the day to avoid traffic and crowds. But no matter what you do and where you go there will be a lot of people in the park, which can be both a blessing and a curse.
Hiking the North Cascades
Just this weekend I hiked in the North Cascades National Park with Iara, and other than driving to the Olympic Peninsula, this has been my longest drive yet, especially when dealing with driving through the entire park to get to the trails. There’s only one road through the park and the rest is designated wilderness, which makes for both scenic views and some traffic jams during busy weekends. Luckily our trip was Friday and Saturday so we only got stuck with traffic on our way out.
For this trip, I got extremely lucky and managed to snag a campsite at the Newhalem campground, which is right next to the visitor center. We ended up getting there around midnight since I picked up Iara late in the day. All in all I was in the car for about 4 hours total that night getting there, but the campsite was worth it after a long drive. We slept in a little bit to recover from the drive and did a few day hikes around Lake Diablo and Ross Lake, which are both hydroelectric projects from the 30s. The dams around those areas are super cool and worth checking out if you have time!
Our main hike was Cutthroat Pass, which I had read about on WTA as a good overnight trip and wow were they right! This hike was slightly out of the park which meant that we didn’t need to get a wilderness permit which was the biggest selling point for me. We started hiking at 5 after eating a big lunch and got to the top a little before 8 just in time for the sunset. The views on this trail were absolutely amazing! Since it was on the east side of the cascades it was a lot drier than the other trails in the area because of the rain shadow effect, which made for views I wasn’t used to since I spend basically all of my time on the west side!
The sunset was perfect, but cold! We made a hiker friend who came to setup camp around the same time as us and we stargazed most of the night. The sky was so clear and beautiful. I hadn’t seen the milky way as clearly as I had that night. And we saw a handful of shooting stars!
The sunrise was just as beautiful and was made better by the sun making things a heck of a lot warmer! Iara and I ate breakfast and parted ways with our friend who was headed down the ridge to do more hiking. We were headed to cutthroat lake and then back home.
Once we got done we gorged ourselves on the food left in the car and then headed back home.
So as of 7/30 I only have 11 full days left in Washington. Where has all the time gone! I have a few more trips planned both for work and for fun. I’ll be going to Portland on the train this weekend, so expect a full report on that, and I’ll be headed back to Verlot one last time to do some timber sale layout. After that I’ll be on my way back home and won’t be back in Washington until May…
But there’s no sense in getting sappy just yet! Stay tuned for more updates because even though my time is almost up, I’m not done yet!
Mushrooms and Arches 
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