Chattermarks

Notes from Disappearing Lake: The River Journals of Robert Sund
A reading by Tim McNulty
May 15, 2012; 7 pm
Readings Gallery at Village Books, 1200 11th Street, Bellingham

Join North Cascades Institute at Village Books’ Readings Gallery May 15 at 7 pm for a free reading from the new book Notes from Disappearing Lake: The River Journals of Robert Sund. Edited by Sund’s close friends Tim McNulty and Glenn Hughes, this volume assembles poem-like journal entries by the esteemed Pacific Northwest poet from his shack on the Skagit River estuary. With freshness and immediacy, these pieces reveal the poet’s ongoing artistic discipline based on close attention to the natural world, as well as his spiritual insight, humor, and love for all that illuminates the mind and lifts the heart. Notes from Disappearing Lake captures a creative spirit and an artistic moment in one of the Northwest’s most mystically beautiful landscapes.

Robert Sund and Fishtown fans will also be excited to know that the Institute is leading a canoe voyage to Robert’s shack and the lower Skagit River estuary on May 20 as part of the Skagit River Poetry Festival. There is also a special panel on Fishtown and barbeque celebration at Pioneer Park that night that the public is invited to. Details on all of these related events are on our Bulletin Board.

Robert Sund (1929 – 2001) grew up on a small farm in Washington’s Chehalis Valley and studied with poet Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington before settling in the Skagit Valley. His poetry reflects a deep, lifelong engagement with landscape and community. He is the author of Poems from Ish River Country: Collected Poems and Translations, and Taos Mountain.
Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, and nature writer. He is the author of two poetry collections, In Blue Mountain Dusk, and Pawtracks, and ten poetry chapbooks including Cloud Studies, Some Ducks, and Through High Still Air. He is also the author of eleven books on natural history, including Olympic National Park: A Natural History.

July, 1973

Snipe walking through the

flowers & grasses

picking worms & bugs out of

the mud —
Wren on the front porch

tiny feet

tick tick.
Robin, swallow

crow, seagull, heron

goldfinch, duck

blackbird . . .

Who needs a radio?

Song at morning

song at evening

and all day long . . .
This is the real news:
   Local, regional, & world-wide.

Photos courtesy of Erik Ambjor.

Because of humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, we are warming our planet beneath a cloak of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

Here in Washington State, rising temperatures and a warmer climate are causing our glaciers to melt faster than they can replenish themselves. This is leading us toward a future with less fresh water for agriculture and drinking and less resources for inexpensive hydroelectric generation.

More than 40 of our coastal communities are threatened by rising sea levels. Sagebrush-steppe and alpine ecosystems will disappear as the tree line shifts, and growing seasons are changing in unpredictable ways. The loss of several amphibian species, alterations in bird and butterfly migratory patterns and invasions of unchecked, voracious insect infestations are already underway. Ocean acidification is choking the abundant life in Puget Sound and bays of the outer coast. Eastside forests are drying up and wildland fires will become more prevalent. We humans will face a deadly spike in infectious, respiratory and heat-related illnesses as the natural world around us smolders.

Heard this laundry list of doom before? Most likely you have, and it’s because scientists have done an impressive job of both studying the phenomenon of global climate change and communicating the causes and effects to the public. The effort has been so heroic that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.”

While the data, interpretations and subsequent warnings from the scientific community are essential pieces of this puzzle, Kathleen Dean Moore, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, recognized that something was missing.

Moore, the author of personal essay/nature writing books like Riverwalking, Holdfast, and Wild Comfort, teaches environmental ethics and moral reasoning to students and she soon realized that the scientists’ arguments, no matter how comprehensive, were not going to inspire us to act to save our world.

“Clearly, information is not enough,” she writes. “A piece is largely missing from the public discourse about climate change: namely an affirmation of our moral responsibilities in the world that the scientists describe. No amount of factual information will tell us what we ought to do. For that, we need moral convictions.”

In Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, Moore and co-editor Michael Nelson assemble 80 of the world’s leading visionaries, leaders and writers to create a compelling call to action. The goal of the anthology is to confront the challenges of climate change based on moral and ethical grounds. It is a chorus featuring the sterling voices of the Dalai Lama, Barack Obama, Desmond Tutu, John Paul II, Barbara Kingsolver, Paul Hawken, Thich Naht Hanh, E.O. Wilson, Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Terry Tempest Williams, Gary Snyder, and many others from cultures and countries around the globe.
“Do we have a moral obligation to take action to protect the future of a planet in peril?” the editors asked of their contributors, “and if so, why?”

The answers—inspiring, creative, sobering and grounded in reason—are presented in thematic clusters, including “Yes, for the survival of humankind,” “Yes, to honor our duties of gratitude and reciprocity, “Yes, for the stewardship of God’s creation, “Yes, because justice demands it,” “Yes, because the world is beautiful.”

Moral Ground strives to start the conversation about “who we are when we are at out best, what we must do to be worthy of our gifts” and how we might live on Earth “respectfully, responsibly and joyously.” These are essential questions to ponder here at the most crucial turning point our planet has ever faced.

Hear Dr. Moore speak on the issues raised in Moral Ground at a free presentation at 3 pm on Sunday, March 18, at Skagit Valley College.

North Cascades Institute is celebrating the arrival of spring and a new year of exciting programs for people of all ages! Plan ahead to join us in the North Cascades (and beyond) for our most popular programs — Learning Center classes and retreat, field excursions, Sourdough Speaker Series – and take advantage of our Early Bird discount.

From now through April 15, when you register for any class with tuition over $100, you will receive $20 off each registration. It’s a great opportunity to sign up for as many natural history or art classes, field excursions and retreats as you like and save!

To register with the Early Bird discount, visit www.ncascades.org/classes or call our friendly registrars at (360) 854-2599.

Tuition must be paid in full at time of registration. This discount is not valid for Family Getaways, Cascade Adventure Camp, Skagit Tours or Base Camp and cannot be combined with scholarships or other offers.

EVENT INFO:
Join North Cascades Institute for a book release celebration for John Scurlock’s Snow & Spire: Flights to Winter in the North Cascade Range. November 30, 2011 7-9 pm. Skagit Station Meeting Room, 105 E. Kincaid St, Mt Vernon. Free!

John Scurlock makes his living working as a paramedic for the Bellingham Fire Department, but finds his soulful calling soaring high above the North Cascades in a small yellow aircraft that he built with his own hands. Flying in all varieties of unpredictable weather above the raggedy peaks and yawning glaciers of our American Alps, he leans out the window, does his best to focus his digital camera and snaps photos.

The results reveal a vast landscape buried in snow and encrusted in ice, a wintery terra incognito of terrifying beauty and austere grace: the frost-bound North Face of Mt. Triumph, impossible cornices on Cloudcap Peak, fire lookouts encased in rime, the Pickett Range hidden in mist, Mount Baker’s shining snowfields, Ripsaw Ridge and Skagit Queen Creek and Park Creek Pass in snowy, silent repose. This is the terrain that holds the world’s record for most snowfall ever recorded in a single winter, and Scurlock’s photography unveils the artistic potential of this seldom-seen northern range: something primitive, forbidden and inaccessible, yet also profoundly and exquisitely beautiful, according to Scurlock.

Cornices on the Southeast Ridge of Cloudcap Peak

» Continue reading Snow & Spire: Flights to Winter in the North Cascade Range

By Hank Leftner — Join us at the Learning Center on October 22-23, 2011 for a Sourdough Speaker Series presentation by Hank as he introduces us to his acclaimed new memoir Faith of Cranes: Finding Hope and Family in Alaska. Details at www.ncascades.org/speakerseries of by calling (360) 854-2599.

Beneath moon or sun, storm or calm, in every moment of every day for over ten million years the voice of a sandhill crane has called out somewhere on the planet in a seamless lineage of sound.  There is cohesion in the chaotic calls of cranes; an invisible thread binding living beads, stitching the flocks, tying each generation to the next.

Cranes talk to their egg-bound chicks with murmurs and clicks.  The chicks imprint on the sound; they yearn to follow that voice even before breaking free of the shell.  The birds grow, add their high peeps to the throaty calls of the larger flock and are soon clucking to their own offspring. Our lives too are embedded in a rich sea of sounds.  While still in the womb a fetus listens and responds to the muted tones of the world it will soon enter.

The rich diversity of sound, music and wind, laughter and bird song, sobs and sea surf, poems and snow fall, stories and crane calls, – guides us through our lives and hold us in place as surely as gravity keeps our feet pinned to the spinning earth.  In the absence of sound and story prisoners, locked in solitary confinement, lose all orientation and quickly tumble toward insanity.  The lineage of voices that hold us in place come from near and far, the furred and feathered, the newly born and the long dead.

» Continue reading The call of the sandhill crane

By Debra Daniels-Zeller, author of The Northwest Vegetarian Cookbook — Join us for a special vegetarian harvest celebration at the Learning Center when Debra is the guest presenter for our September 24-25 Sourdough Speaker Series event!

This tray of fall fruit from Grouse Mountain Farm at the University District farmers market is a rainbow of culinary possibilities that can fill fall kitchens with sweet scents of the season. Decades ago friend Margie made this cake.  It’s so simple a child could make it.

Margie’s Raw Apple Cake
(Makes one 8-inch cake)
2 cups raw diced apples (use your favorite sweet-tart local apples)
1 egg
1/4 cup oil
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon soda
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt (optional)
1 cup flour (use Nash’s whole wheat pastry flour)
1 cup chopped walnuts or hazelnuts

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. degrees.
2. In a medium mixing bowl, blend egg with raw apples. Then add oil, cinnamon, soda, sugar and salt. Mix well. Stir in flour and nuts, leaving some out to decorate the top of the cake. Place mixture in baking pan. And bake for 35 to 45 minutes. Test with toothpick. Cool on cooling rack before slicing.

Here’s another easy recipe perfect for the end of summer!

Coleslaw with Apples and Carrots
(Make 6 servings)
Cabbage and carrot lovers in the Northwest can rejoice because these are available most of the year. For this recipe, I use traditionally made apple cider vinegar from Rockridge Orchards in Enumclaw, Washington. For ginger flavor variation, add ginger juice (squeezed from 1 tablespoon of grated ginger.)

1/2 cup aioli or mayonnaise
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon ketchup
1/2 tablespoon chopped bottled hot peppers (optional)
Pinch of salt
2 medium Granny Smith apples, peeled and shredded
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 medium carrot, grated
4 to 4 1/2 cups thinly shredded green cabbage
1/4 cup chopped dried fruit such as apricots, figs, or sour cherries

1. Whisk together the aioli or mayonnaise, vinegar, ketchup, hot peppers if desired, and salt in a small bowl. Toss the shredded apples with the lemon juice.
2. Combine the apples, carrots, cabbage, and dried fruit in a large bowl. Toss and mix well, and blend in the dressing.

To find more of Debra’s recipes, visit her blog Food Connections at http://foodconnections.blogspot.com.

By Debra Daniels-Zeller, author of Northwest Vegetarian Cookbook — Join us for a special vegetarian harvest celebration at the Learning Center when Debra is the guest presenter for our September 24-25 Sourdough Speaker Series event!

Fall, apples and pears naturally flow together. Summer harvest is over and rainy winter days loom on the horizon. This time of year, baking with autumn fruit refreshes my seasonal passion. The fragrance of baking apples mingling with cinnamon brings back memories of my grandmother’s delectable homemade apple pie. Locally grown apples were always the essential ingredient.

Today, Washington provides an abundant selection of crisp apples and juicy pears. But the tree fruit industry also is vital to the state’s bottom line, reminding us of why it’s important to buy local.

The State Horticultural Society reports that Washington tree fruit is first in the state for overall economic value. More than 142,000 jobs are generated, from field work to advertising and sales. The total cumulative value is greater than that from Microsoft and Boeing combined. It’s also greater than the value of the biotechnology industry, which reportedly employs 19,300 statewide and generates only $1.8 billion in revenue.

The economic value of Washington tree fruit is more than $2 billion a year from the Yakima Valley alone. Half the apples grown in the United States and approximately 64 percent of our nation’s pear supply comes from Washington.

» Continue reading Why local matters, Washington apples and pears

We are pleased to offer a special limited-edition poster commemorating North Cascades Institute’s 25th anniversary. This high-quality poster features a new painting by watercolor artist Molly Hashimoto, who also is the featured artist on our catalog this year and is teaching two workshops at the Learning Center. Her piece depicts an iconic view from the Learning Center of Pyramid Peak, Diablo Lake and a detail of Diablo Dam.

We’re selling these posters for $10 in all five of our bookstores, including the Learning Center, Stehekin, Newhalem and Marblemount. We’re also making them available to purchase by phone or email for $15 includes tax and shipping/handling).

To purchase one of these keepsake posters from afar, please email nci@ncascades.org or call (360) 854-2599. All of the proceeds from the sale of these posters will help us to fund outdoor education opportunities for local youth!

Here’s Molly sharing some thoughts on her painting and this particular view:

» Continue reading 25th Anniversary posters for sale

As much as we love North Cascadian landscapes, we here at the Institute are still called to visit and experience other amazing places on our planet. We publish accounts of the places Institute staff and graduate students visit in our Road Trip series.

About this time last year, summer solstice, with its long days filled with light and birdsong, I left Bellingham and headed out on a pilgrimage to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons national parks. It is a tradition of mine to spend some portion of my summer out there in the glory of western Wyoming. Having lived for a few years as a snowboard bum/river rat in Jackson Hole in the late 1990s, I have tasted the ineffable sweetness of summertime in the Tetons and the surrounding Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Once you sip that nectar, it is impossible not to go back for more whenever possible.

This particular road trip with two good friends, one from Portland, another from San Francisco, started with a visit to Yellowstone’s northeastern Lamar Valley, an area of the park renowned for wildlife viewing opportunities and a more remote feeling than other popular attractions like Old Faithful or the springs at Mammoth. We spent two nights at the lovely Lamar Field Station in the heart of the valley, a rustic outpost that is operated by the Yellowstone Association as accommodations for many of their field excursions.

Approaching the Yellowstone Association’s Lamar Field Station

Out the front door of our cabin was a view across the verdant valley in fresh flush, studded with silhouettes of hundreds of bison grazing with their young. Out the back door, a trail followed a creek back to Druid Peak, the famed mountain where Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt let loose Canadian wolves in 1995 to reintroduce this vital carnivore to the ecosystem. It felt like a holy place, this ground where our culture made an attempt to right a wrong from the past, where the food chain thrives in all of its perfect, intact elegance.

» Continue reading Road Trip: Yellowstone

This month, our 25th anniversary year really starts hopping with a wide range of public events, field excursions, readings, open houses and the first family getaway of 2011. Here’s a round-up of what we’re doing — read on and see how you can plug in.

May 6: Book release party for Ana Maria Spagna’s Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness
Reading, book sales and hor d’eouvres at the Libation Station in Mount Vernon, 5 pm, free!
www.ncascades.org/more_info/news/detail.html?news_id=2189

May 7-8: The History of the Legendary F-Style Mandolin with Stan Miller and John Reischman
Join Bellingham resident and master luthier Stan Miller as he shares his experiences in constructing of one of the most revered stringed-musical instruments ever developed. In our first-ever musical Sourdough Speaker event, mandolin legend John Reischman (Tony Rice Unit, The Jaybirds) will join Stan to demonstrate the range of sounds that these exquisite instruments are capable of producing. As Stan tells the fascinating story of the mandolin in words and images, John will provide a soundtrack of tunes, techniques and commentary.
www.ncascades.org/speakerseries

May 12 (Seattle’s Town Hall) and May 13 (Bellingham’s Sehome High School): Richard Louv
Hear the author of the best-selling book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder” introduce his latest publication, “The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder.” The Seattle event will feature an environmental education fair with over 20 organizations and a special on-stage conversation between Louv and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William Dietrich.
www.ncascades.org/events

May 12 and May 14: Mountain School Open House
Join us to learn more about this award-winning residential environmental education program Thursday, May 12, 9am-4pm or Saturday, May 14, 9am-4pm. We’ll meet at our office in Sedro-Woolley and travel up the Skagit River together to our wilderness campus for a tour of our LEED-certified facility and a chance to meet Mountain School staff. Thursday attendees will have the opportunity to observe the Mountain School program in action. We’ll provide a hot lunch in our Dining Hall and organize transportation.
http://www.ncascades.org/more_info/news/detail.html?news_id=2188

May 14-15: Naturalists’ Delight: Spring Magic in the Methow
Join us for a weekend outdoor adventure with local naturalist Dana Visalli, editor of The Methow Naturalist and an attentive resident of the Methow for four decades. Meandering through the aspen-laced hills with all of our senses open, we’ll learn the basics of identifying the bewildering array of plants, mushrooms and mosses at our feet, while keeping an eye to the sky for birds, butterflies and bugs.
http://www.ncascades.org/programs/seminars/course.html?workshop_id=1042

May 20-22: Learning Center Stewardship Weekend
Join the National Park Service and Institute naturalists to tend to native flora and the habitat surrounding the Learning Center. You are invited to form a relationship with this piece of the planet by contributing to its well being by way of shovel, shears and some elbow grease. We’ll have a variety of projects for all abilities and we’ll provide all of the tools too. Your hard work will be rewarded when our talented kitchen staff serves up hearty and delicious meals. After a satisfying day of giving back to the earth, give yourself a treat and head out for a sunset stroll, relax in our library or spend an evening around the campfire sharing stories of this place. $50 suggested donation.
http://www.ncascades.org/programs/seminars/course.html?workshop_id=1043

May 24: Wendell Berry in Seattle
Critics and scholars have acknowledged Wendell Berry as a master of many literary genres, but whether he is writing poetry, fiction, or essays, his message is essentially the same: humans must learn to live in harmony with the natural rhythms of the earth or perish. Join North Cascades Institute and Seattle Arts & Lectures for our annual “Wilderness and Imagination” event at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall.
www.ncascades.org/events

May 28-30: Memorial Weekend Family Getaway
As spring emerges in the mountains with longer days and explosive green growth, gather your family in the North Cascades for a slate of engaging, hands-on activities including big canoe paddling, hiking local trails, outdoor games and nature crafts, campfires at nights and delicious meals in our lakeside dining hall.
www.ncascades.org/family

And coming up in June….

June 3-5: Spring Birding Weekend
Discover the diversity of avian life that wings into the Pacific Northwest every spring during its annual migration from Mexico and Central and South America to summer grounds in the north. Joining expert birders Libby Mills and Tim Manns, we’ll gain deeper awareness of those wonderful creatures that bring beauty and song to our days. We’ll explore forests, meadows and mountain streams in the Methow and Skagit valleys, spending the first night at the Learning Center on Diablo Lake and the second night camping in the Methow Valley.
http://www.ncascades.org/programs/seminars/course.html?workshop_id=1044

More programs, information and registration at www.ncascades.org/get_outside or (360) 854-2599.