Chattermarks

You would think it wouldn’t work.

First of all, the wolverine is an elusive creature. It inhabits the untrammeled heights of mountain ranges and is rarely seen or documented. So far this season, with ten traps open every day, we’ve captured just one wolverine. We’ve seen few tracks. But still, this winter we’re trying something new—getting photographs of the chests of wolverines. It is an idea only recently pioneered by Audrey Magoun, a wolverine researcher in southeast Alaska. And it is a brilliant idea.

Wolverines, it seems, have variable markings of light fur on their throats and chests. So variable, in fact, that each wolverine, if looked at closely, has a unique chest pattern. And therefore, with the right picture, we could tell them apart. A brilliant idea, truly, but in practice… It would seem that getting any picture of a wolverine would be a lucky convergence of circumstance, but to get a specific picture—a wolverine in a specific pose, well, it seems like wishful thinking. But then again, most great accomplishments start as silly dreams. The credit for the accomplishment of this silly dream lies to the north, with Magoun and her team of field people, who took an idea—getting pictures of wolverine chests—and made it happen. We’ve just followed their lead. But it is still exciting.

» Continue reading Capturing the Cascades wolverine

It is the radio call we’ve been waiting for all season.

Adam and I linger beside the truck, waiting to unload a couple of snowmobiles and get on with our assignment for the day—setting up our first camera station. But our attention is focused on the Forest Service radio. Waiting. Sherrie and John are up Twisp River checking on two wolverine traps that emit a “closed” signal from their radio transmitters. They have checked the first, and found it occupied by a marten. They should be at the second trap at any moment.

After fifteen minutes of fidgeting, kicking at snow and checking our watches, the radio comes to life. We eavesdrop on static and garbled voices, and finally make out words that change our day. There’s a wolverine in the trap. Our afternoon becomes more interesting. And longer. We pile back into the truck and drag our snowmobiles toward Twisp River.

This winter, ten or more Forest Service employees and volunteers tend ten wolverine traps on the outskirts of the North Cascades. We’ve been at it for two weeks already—replacing bait, checking the function of the traps, dealing with radio transmitter malfunctions and shoveling snow off of the traps. The status of the traps is checked each morning with radio receivers. We physically inspect and test the traps every three days or so. It is a fair amount of work, and the crew comes home each afternoon a bit weary and smelling of snowmobile exhaust. So far we have caught nothing but martens.

» Continue reading Encounters of a wolverine kind

An alder leaf on a trail. A chance encounter between a weasel and a hawk. The mad rush of a waterfall.

These images – and more – were captured in words by the participants in the North Cascades workshop Sit, Walk, Write: Nature and the Practice of Presence, held at the Environmental Learning Center on October 23 – 25, 2009.  For the past two seasons, Kurt Hoelting and I, Holly Hughes, have had the pleasure of leading this workshop the last weekend in October. At this workshop, we literally sit, walk and write as a way to more deeply engage with the natural world. Kurt- a writer and teacher of meditation – and I -poet, essayist and teacher of writing – both believe strongly in the value of combining meditation with writing as a way to deepen and reflect on our experience of the natural world.

Our time together goes like this – We begin the day with sitting meditation, followed by a brief period of walking meditation or Qi Gong, eat breakfast together in silence, then gather to read poems and prose that illustrate the practice of paying attention that meditation encourages. In the afternoon, we hike with an North Cascades Institute naturalist, learning more about the woods around us, and spend the rest of the day writing and reflecting on what we are observing. In the evening, we gather to share our writings then end the day by sitting together in meditation. Throughout, we are practicing attention – attention to our breath as we meditate, attention to the shimmering gold of the aspen leaves as we hike up a trail. Our hope is that by paying attention, we will become more present to ourselves and our world, and in doing so, we might feel called to bear witness.

» Continue reading Watching the waterfall, bearing witness

Over the second weekend in September, 12 photographers joined me (Benj Drummond) at the Learning Center for a weekend seminar on digital photography. We enjoyed clear sunny days and took advantage of the beautiful fall light from dawn until dusk (and then kept shooting). After returning from the field, we edited and tweaked our images in the computer lab. On Sunday we wrapped up the weekend with a group critique of the weekend’s work. Below are a selection of favorites, though it was a hard edit to make!

Above © Jason Ruvelson

© Russ Dalton

© Seaton Gras

© Ed Gastellum

© Emily Weisberg

© Shelley Langton

© David Green

© Louise Kornreich

© Beth Wisotzkey

© Don Fisher

© Seaton Gras

Pioneer Building with 50-million-year old sandstone from Bellingham, specifically from the Chuckanut quarries.

Guest post by David Williams

(David Williams is leading “Seattle’s Wild Side: Natural History in the Streets” tour on Saturday, Sept. 26. Sorry, the tour is full!)

As a hard-core geogeek, I often need a fix of rock.  Since I cannot always get up into the mountains to check out our wonderful geology, I regularly head downtown in search of stone.  This may seem odd but in Seattle I can find rock ranging in age from 3.5-billion-years old to less than 80,000 years old.  I can touch rocks from places as diverse as South Africa, Germany, Italy, Brazil, and Finland, as well as Indiana, Minnesota, Washington, and California.  I can gaze at fossils as big as a cinnamon roll and ones that resemble an ice cream cone.  And if those fossils drive my hunger, I can even find those foods nearby, something I cannot do in the field.

I first became infatuated with building stone in the Metro bus tunnels.  Under Westlake Mall I found a spectacular rock that looks like a marble cake.  I later learned it was the oldest commonly used building stone in the world and that it was a popular building material during the period when Art Deco architecture was popular.  As I began to look at stone in other buildings, I continued to find interesting connections between rock and people.

For example, when Seattle burned to the ground during its Great Fire of 1889, stone replaced wood as the main building material.  You can see this in the older parts of the city around Pioneer Square where 50-million-year old sandstone quarried in Bellingham, Wilkeson, and Tenino and a 33-million-year old granite from Index make up many of the buildings.  The stones were popular because they could easily be transported to Seattle and withstood erosion.

Following the fire, as city residents became wealthier they sought out stone from further and further away.  Limestone from Indiana, serpentine from Vermont, and gneiss from Minnesota first appear in buildings in the late 1920s.  Now, as noted above, stone arrives in Seattle from all over the world, which makes geologists such as myself quite giddy.  These are some of the stories that I have written about over the years as an urban naturalist. I will tell a few more and lead us to some of my favorite stories in stone on my program.

On August 30th the Parks Climate Challenge team gave their final presentations at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park in Seattle. They split into three groups that spoke about what they did, what they learned and what’s next. It was an amazing evening of sharing stories and knowledge from their month-long experience in the North Cascades, and looking forward to what’s ahead – from their upcoming trip to DC, to service projects in their home communities and beyond. For friends and family that couldn’t join us, the students recorded their presentations for you to listen to below.

» Continue reading Parks Climate Challenge closing presentations

I met Jim Harris 30 years ago on one of my first hikes up Thunder Creek into the North Cascades when I was a young, brand-new backcountry ranger. Who was this guy who seemed to have been around forever, since “before the park,” and had all these stories about logging and mining and cougars? At first I found Jim intimidating. He wasn’t cut from the same “the most important thing is wilderness” cloth as most of my friends. And he wasn’t shy about sharing his opinion about those of us who didn’t have much use for the old days when the story of the North Cascades was written by explorers and loggers. But we shared a deep love of these mountains, and over the years, Jim, along with Bill Lester, backcountry area ranger, became one of my most important mentors. He helped shape my understanding of the North Cascades as a place where people lived and raised families, as much as a place of wild summits and raging river valleys. He was a great friend and supporter of North Cascades Institute – one of our most popular instructors, contributor to many of our curricula and always good for a story and a laugh. I miss him.

– Saul Weisberg

ps. A tribute to Jim Harris is planned for Sunday, August 16, at 2 pm at Howard Miller Steelhead Park in Rockport. More information at orcasfireval@live.com. If you have a special Jim Harris memory or remebrance to share, feel free to leave a comment at this end of this post.

They Claimed these Mountains : An Interview with Jim Harris

Bacon and Nip and Tuck Claims were the ones that started all of the excitement up here, around 1878. Most people didn’t stay long. For so many it was the lust for gold and the adventure. When they saw that it wasn’t easy, they left. The few that stayed, like George Holmes, John and Emma McMillen, Lucinda Davis and Lillian Bulldog Brown, really left their stories. When I was a kid, we had neighbors that had claims up here, were trappers and so on, who’d come by and often spend the evening at our place in front of the fireplace telling those stories.

In ‘68 the Park bill was signed and I quit teaching school and went to work with the Park. Today is my birthday; it’s also the birthday of the Park. It was created in 1968 and I’m 68 years old. Just days before the Park bill was signed, Rocky Wilson and his wife Lenore were up on the high hunt in Fisher Basin. Rocky was, at that time, in his mid to late seventies. They had spent years mining, prospecting, hunting and fishing in the backcountry. In the evening they set up camp and a big bear came down off the hillside to the creek. Rocky was able to get off a good shot and it dropped. It wasn’t only a big one, it had grizzly grey all up over the front with a big hump! A neighboring camper came by and took pictures. They skinned it out and stopped by school to show us teachers and the kids. It was part of the story of their life. I wondered how they felt about it. Years later, I asked Rocky, “What if this was the last grizzly bear in the whole country?” I remember him sitting there quite a while before he responded. The Park was created by that time, and that eliminated hunting, eliminated their lifestyle. He said, “Well, my life will never be the same. These are all things of the past.”

» Continue reading Jim Harris Remembered

Join North Cascades Institute for a special literary engagement with Village Books and their popular “Chuckanut Radio Hour” program. On Wednesday, July 29, at 6:30 pm, we’ll welcome renowned writers Rick Bass, Kathleen Dean Moore, Holly Hughes and Jim Bertolino to Bellingham’s Leopold’s Crystal Ballroom to celebrate the connections between wilderness and the written word. A fundraiser for the Institute, this evening gathering will also serve as the kick-off event for the Eleventh Annual Thunder Arm Writing Retreat , a 4-day literary mountain rendezvous to be held at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center July 30 – August 2 for eager newcomers and seasoned writers alike.

There is still time to sign up for this weekend’s Writing Retreat, and a sweet deal too: When you and a friend or family member sign up together at the same time, we’ll take 20% off your total registration fee. Details are here. Email nci@ncascades.org or call (360) 856-5700 ext right away to get in on this very special literary rendezvous!

“The Chuckanut Radio Hour,” a regional spin-off of Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” show, features an engaging, well-paced blend of comedy, music, performance and author readings. After each author has read some of their work, I’ll  lead a panel discussion with the writers and the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions too. Tickets are available at Village Books (1200 11th Street in Fairhaven), at the door and at Brown Paper Tickets.

You can read a story I wrote about the “problems with nature writing” for the Cascadia Weekly by clicking here.

North Cascades National Park geologist Jon Riedel teaches students on a misty moraine ridge on the flanks of Mt. Baker

Elisabeth Keating, a freelance writer covering the Parks Climate Challenge, accompanied the students on their hike to a glacier on Mount Baker the second week of July 2009 and filed this report from the North Cascades.

On July 8, I arrived at the Horseshoe Cove campground at Baker Lake where the Parks Climate Challenge students were setting up camp and preparing for their glacier exploration. There are 19 high school students in this new program, each a young leader drawn from five urban areas around the country: Denver, Washington D.C., Seattle, Chicago and the Bay Area.

There are three phases to the Parks Climate Challenge: Phase 1 consists of 30 days in the North Cascades meeting with scientists, camping, exploring and learning. Phase 2 is a trip to Washington DC where students will meet with legislators and work on a service project on the Mall. For phase 3, the students will returnhome to create and lead an environmental project in their local communities. Possible projects could include planting trees, hosting a climate change day at their school or starting a recycling project at their school.

“We weren’t necessarily looking for students who are interested in careers in the environment,” explained Megan. “What’s most important is that they demonstrate leadership potential and that they return to their urban communities as ‘climate change ambassadors’ that the community will respond to.”

For most of these urban students, it’s been a process of many of “firsts”: first camping experiences, first time bathing in a stream, first time eating hummus, first time at a rodeo (the July 4th celebration in Sedro-Woolley!) and even the first time some had “s’mores.

Home Sweet Home: Setting up camp at Horseshoe Cove on Baker Lake

Everyone had fun putting up tents and cooking dinner, along with testing out the mosquito hats. “It’s not cool-looking,” one student noted, “but we don’t care as long as it gets the job done!”

Two Parks Climate Challenge students demo their “campfire style”—mosquito netting hats and sweats!

» Continue reading Parks Climate Challenge meets Mt. Baker’s glaciers

Guest Post by Bob Valen, National Park Service Public Information Officer

Smokey bear is renowned for a few simple 1950s quotes, all of them are asking you and me to “prevent wildfires.” The message is straight-forward, sensible and appropriate in specific situations.

Well, the world of wildland fire management has grown in scientific sophistication. Our understanding of fire and its essential role in ecosystems has increased exponentially. It’s no surprise that some people become confused and frustrated when a wildland fire continues to burn with the blessing of fire managers.

One such fire is the recent Panther Creek Fire. Not large in size, this blaze is currently burning in a fire-adapted ecosystem in Ross Lake National Recreation Area. The Panther Creek fire is a lightning-caused fire burning in a heavily-forested area on steep terrain on the east flank of Ruby Mountain above Panther Creek. Due to steep, dangerous terrain, firefighters are not on the mountain at the wildfire.

View of smoke from Panther Creek Fire above Ross Lake; photo by Kerry Olson

» Continue reading Essential Fire: Blaze on Panther Creek