Chattermarks

I’d like to share a poem with you, on this rainy day in Bellingham. It’s called The Message of the Rain:

when i was a child
i was a squirrel a bluejay a fox
and spoke with them in their tongues
climbed their trees dug their dens
and knew the taste
of every grass and stone
the meaning of the sun
the message of the night

now i am old and past
both work and battle
and know no shame
to go alone into the forest
to speak again to squirrel fox and bird
to taste the world
to find the meaning of the wind
the message of the rain

- Norman H Russell

At Mountain School, we try to teach our students how to be stewards of the earth. When we visit the students at their school a few weeks after they came to Mountain School, we try to get them to make connections between the environment out here in the mountains and the environments closer to their home and their school. At some of these post-trip visits the students participate in stewardship activities at parks near their school. We wrote about this back in 2011 when we first began facilitating these stewardship events.

Here are some shots from the Sunnyland Elementary stewardship event at Memorial park in Bellingham. The students, their teachers, and Institute staff removed blackberry, mulched and planted red-osier dogwood and Sitka spruce. They also got VERY muddy!

» Continue reading What does stewardship look like?

Saturday, April 27^th marked the fourth annual Migratory Bird Festival, a day that brought together 113 people of all ages at Fort Casey State Park on Whidbey Island. This celebration of spring and migrating birds was hosted by North Cascades Institute, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, the International District Housing Alliance, and the Mount Vernon Police Department. Despite overcast weather, the day turned out to be a huge success filled with games, exploration, and learning about the cultural and natural history of the area.

Youth Leadership Adventure students joined the International District group for a fun game about migration

One group consisted of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino elders from the International District in Seattle accompanied by youth who assisted by translating what was being said. The second group was Kulshan Creek, a group of enthusiastic kids from Mount Vernon who are primarily Hispanic and range from age 8-16 years old. The third group included high school students who will participate in North Cascades Institute’s Youth Leadership Adventures this summer.

The group circles up to learn about migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest

» Continue reading Fourth Annual Migratory Bird Festival at Whidbey Island

My touring partner, Ian, and I found ourselves looking out across Ptarmagin Ridge toward our distant objective, Coleman Pinnacle.  The only noise was that of the wind coursing through the wings of a passing raven.  The sun shone down on our faces, lighting up the snow and landscape beyond.  I turned to Ian and asked where we were going.  He simply replied “Narnia,” and we continued along the skin track toward the jagged peak in the distance.

» Continue reading Following Tracks

My cohort-mates have heard this a few times by now, but I’ve been to the Olympic Coast four times and despite its reputation for tempestuous weather, I’ve had blue skies each time. I must be pretty lucky. But then again, so many fortunate things happened on Cohort 12’s spring Natural History Retreat that “lucky” probably should have been the theme of the whole trip.

For one, despite arriving at the ferry terminal at the exact time the boat should have been floating away from the dock, we still somehow made it on board. This initial triumph colored our moods for the rest of the trip—we beamed as the boat sailed towards menacing rain clouds that obscured most of the high Olympic Peaks.

Tracking, on the shores of the Elwha. Photo by Hillary Schwirtlich

» Continue reading Graduate students explore natural history on the Olympic Coast

I am on my horse at the Pilchuck Tree Farm in Arlington with my mom. The air is cool and moist; the sun reflects off the glinting dew drops on the foliage repossessing the battered stumps and scars on the landscape. We travel on this trail silently, allowing our horses to navigate this place we have all visited so many times before.

The Tree Farm, once actively logged, is now home to a local recreation association, mostly horsemen and women, who come to this place to seek solitude from motorized vehicles and hunters amongst the recovering forests. My horse’s ears flick forward suddenly as he registers some sound known only to him, but a dismissive swivel back towards me indicates that whatever he heard has not been perceived as a threat.

The world is a different place from the back of a horse.

View from the back of Sheena

» Continue reading Reflections from the back of my horse

As winter comes to an end and we transition into the spring and summer months, something really exciting happens. I’m not talking about plants flowering and birds singing and the sun coming out, although all of those things are definitely exciting. No, I’m talking about the spring opening of Highway 20.

Also known as the North Cascades Highway, this road is our outlet to civilization. At its highest point (Washington Pass) the highway rises to an elevation of over 5,000 feet, so it tends to build up quite a bit of snow. In the fall, snowplows clear the highway until there’s too much snow or too great of an avalanche danger for it to be safe. Generally, Highway 20 is closed from late November through mid-April or May.

(above two photos) Floyd the Flamingo hanging out at Washington Pass and under Liberty Bell. Floyd sits in avalanche zones to warn the highway crew that they need to be extra cautious

» Continue reading In my backyard…

Exciting news from our friends at North Cascades National Park:

Look at the paws on this guy! Last summer, a visitor reported … that they had seen a wolverine chasing a marmot while hiking just to the west of the Park boundary in the Skagit watershed. North Cascades National Park biologist Roger Christophersen set up a scent lure to attempt to attract the wolverine to a hair snare and motion camera. The remote camera captured these photos of a male wolverine and the snare caught a useful hair sample.


Keith Aubry, Wildlife Biologist with the US Forest Service had the hair sample analyzed and recently reported that the DNA analysis confirmed this report as the westernmost verifiable record of a wolverine in the last 15 years! In addition, the hair sample identified this wolverine as “Special K”, a previously captured wild study animal. Special K was caught in a trap near Bridge Creek back in February of 2012, but would not go down during immobilization and had to be released without a radio-collar intended to track movements across its home range. Luckily, biologists had taken a hair sample that allowed this identification that gives researchers another example of how wide-ranging these animals are – the two sites are separated by more than 45 miles and a mountain range!

» Continue reading Wolverine in the Skagit!

Letters from Yellowstone is an account of a fictional 1898 botanical survey of Yellowstone National Park, written entirely through letters. Howard Merriam, a professor from Montana is the leader of the group, which includes an entomologist, someone from the Smithsonian, an agriculturalist, and a botanist.

As Professor Merriam is setting up this field study and looking to finalize his team, he receives a letter from an A. E. Bartram at Cornell University. Bartram studies medicine and is very interested in botany, having extensively studied the Lewis expedition (currently, more commonly referred to as the Lewis and Clark expedition) for several years. Professor Merriam is delighted and extends A. E. Bartram a warm invitation to join the team. At the arrival in Yellowstone of said Bartram, however, Professor Merriam is frustrated and discouraged to find that Bartram is in fact a woman, not a man as he had previously assumed from their written correspondence.

Mimulus Lewisii, or Lewis’ Monkey Flower. Illustration from the book

The book continues as they set out into the front-country and backcountry to draw, observe, record, name, and take specimens of as many plants as they can find. This is not, however, a story without adventure—throughout their summer, the characters encounter hypothermia, snowstorms, exciting botanical discoveries, sabotage, and wildfire.

» Continue reading Letters from Yellowstone: Natural History in the Nation’s Park

It’s been hardly a year since the last concrete remnants of the Elwha Dam were removed and already the rebirth of the rainforest river is underway. While most people watching the Olympic Peninsula experiment have been excited about what they hope will soon move upriver—steelhead and all five species of Pacific salmon—the first chapter in the river’s restoration has been more about what is moving downriver: sediment, up to 34 million cubic yards of it in total, with the motherlode of that amount still trapped behind the 2/3rds-demolished Glines Canyon Dam.

“Scientists recently learned there was about 41 percent more sediment trapped behind the dams than originally thought,” reports The Seattle Times’ Lynda Mapes, who recently published Elwha: A River Reborn, “and that the river is transporting more mud and wood than they expected.”

The flushing of the river’s channel, after being pent up behind two dams for the last 100 years, is creating new ecological dynamics that have scientists scrambling to keep up. Fish are adapting to murky waters by pioneering new side channels and feeder streams. Riverbank erosion has been chaotic and unpredictable. And down at the river’s mouth, where the Elwha’s glacially-fed freshwater merges with saltwater at the Strait of Juan de Fuca, all kinds of interesting things are happening: dramatic loss of kelp beds under smothering sand, making way for ecologically-valuable sea grass pastures; a new sand spit emerging, one-third of a mile long and expanding; reinvigorated habitat for important species like sea smelt and sand lance.

It’s only the beginning of an audacious experiment, the demolition of two century-old dams and restoration of a river, a $325 million endeavor that will open up more than 70 miles of pristine spawning habitat. It’s the largest dam removal project in the world, undertaken in a part of the world renowned for harnessing its raging rivers for hydropower, shipping and agriculture.

» Continue reading Elwha: rebirth of a rainforest river