Chattermarks

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.

As graduate students immersed in developing a sense of place within the rich, rugged landscapes of the North Cascades, we spend a lot of time attending to, and exploring, the natural world outside our doorsteps. At the Environmental Learning Center, our academic studies of the history, culture, ecology, art, and conservation of this place are integrated with actual feet-on-the-ground learning. This type of naturalizing is a practice that takes patience, and a willingness to move through our surroundings with careful observation as we slowly make sense of its many patterns and intricacies. The deeper we go in this process, the more the meaning and being of the North Cascades opens up to us. We begin to understand the stories written on and of this landscape, and our place in it.

For many of us, this practice of Natural History in all its interdisciplinary forms roots us intimately and specifically to the high mountains and steep river canyons of this region. The nature of this type of learning means that, for many graduate students, we will leave this program knowing the North Cascades better than we know our own, native homelands. How then, do we translate the tools we are learning here to other river drainages, mountains, high deserts, or valley bottoms?

In an effort to explore this question during our month-long respites from the North Cascades, Kiira and I reflected on how the practice of natural history can be used to cultivate awareness and develop a deeper sense of connection to any landscape that we move through. While Kiira’s travels took her home to the rolling hills of southern Vermont, mine took me south into the austral summer of the Patagonian Andes.

» Continue reading Latitudinal and Longitudinal Explorations of Natural History

Written by Special Guest Blogger Elisabeth Keating.

On a cool Thursday evening in late July, a group of adventurers gather at the Environmental Learning Center for the 24th (and possibly final) year of one of North Cascades Institute’s most popular courses: Ross Lake By Boat and Boot a three-day exploratory workshop on the people and places of the Skagit River Valley, led by Gerry Cook and Bob Mierendorf. Both Bob and Gerry have had celebrated careers with the National Park Service – Bob is in his 25th year as the North Cascades National Park Archaeologist, and Gerry, recently retired from 44 years as a Park employee, has been a North Cascades fire lookout (1967 and 1971), a Park designer and architect, and an instructor and captain of the Ross Lake Mule. Bob and Gerry have led this class since 1997, labeled fondly by those who know them as The Bob and Gerry show.

At orientation, Bob welcomes us to what he and Gerry call Up River University: Nature’s classroom in general, and the floating classroom on board the Ross Lake Mule in particular. In our handout is an essay about the history of the area’s indigenous people, a map of today’s current Ross Lake, the class field itinerary, and a timeline of key events in the Upper Skagit reaching back 24,000 years to the present day. Before the creation of the dams along the Skagit River in the first half of the 20th century, the heart of the North Cascades was so rugged and inaccessible that few outsiders ventured in.

Looking out across the great expanse of Ross Lake on board the NPS Mule.

Gerry gives us a brief orientation to our home for the next few days – The Ross Lake Mule built in 1968. The North Cascades National Park inherited the NPS Mule from Katmai National Park in Alaska in 1976. The Mule hauled tons and tons of sand, gravel, cement, and materials of all kinds until it met its most noble calling: a floating wilderness classroom for students and adults.

» Continue reading Reflections on the Upper Skagit: Ross Lake by Boat and Boot

Hello friends of Mountain School! If you haven’t yet heard, we’ve started a new Mountain School Stewardship program in Bellingham. After a class has come to Mountain School, we meet them at a city park within walking distance of their school to do a service project. The students revisit what they learned at the Environmental Learning Center, explore the nature in their backyard, and learn about their role as stewards of the forest. So far, we’ve had trips with Whatcom Hills Waldorf and Lowell, both with great fall weather, a lot of hard work and lots of fun. Here is an update from our latest trip with Lowell.

First and foremost, I want to thank our grads, Kiira, Susan, Matt and Ashley for coming. They did an amazing job organizing the kids, keeping track of their groups, doling out little educational tidbits, and keeping the kids motivated while pulling blackberries and mulching. I think they deserve the “making blackberry removal fun” merit badge. Its a skill. Plus, they’re just plain cool. Thanks again you guys! We’ve also been working with Rae, the Volunteer Coordinator with Bellingham Parks and Recreation. She has invaluable tips of the trade, like how to doggy-dig mulch into a bucket and how to drive a pickup filled with blackberry vines with the equipment for 35 volunteers stacked on top. She’s amazing. Join us next time for when she saves the world!

» Continue reading Mountain School Stewardship

Last weekend Cohort 11 graduate students had the chance to step away from our roles as Mountain School Instructors and again return to being students of Natural History during our three day Fall Grad Retreat. After weeks of training and teaching 5th and 6th grade youth about the diverse ecosystems of the North Cascades, the respite from such high activity was much appreciated by all. Our explorations took us by hand and knee through douglas fir forests near home, and by car and foot through the ponderosa pine and fire-scarred forests in the Methow Valley.

Day one of the retreat was spent near the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center campus with M.Ed. graduate alumna and mycologist Lee Whitford discussing the amazing yet unfamiliar world of fungi and their fruiting mushroom bodies. After learning some basic facts and characteristics about our earthy friends, we set out to do some local harvesting of our own (on Forest Service land, of course!). It took some time to adjust our eyes and hone our observational skills to the often unnoticed specimens hidden between leaf, detritus, and tree trunk, but half an hour and handfuls of mushrooms later our forage had yielded an impressive and diverse variety of them.

» Continue reading From Teacher to Student and Back Again

By Ana Maria Spagna

I’ve driven Washington’s Highway 20, the North Cascades Highway, for years. I used live in Rockport right along the highway, and I used to work for the national park that straddles the highway, and for one interminable summer when Laurie worked on the east side of the crest and I worked on the west, I commuted over the highway. I’ve been wowed by the mountains and soothed by the rivers, sure, sure. I’ve hiked from trailheads and watched wildlife and even taught writing at North Cascades Institute’s Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake. It was there, at the Learning Center, that I first thought seriously about the dams.

To reach the Learning Center you drive right across Diablo Dam. Overhead the power lines buzz. But when writers sat down to describe their surroundings, they usually wrote about birds or fish or trees or clouds. Never the dams. I was as guilty as anyone. The three dams that line the Skagit River, Gorge, Diablo, and Ross, are all more or less visible from the highway, but, in writing as in life, I’d mostly ignored them. Why? I knew the answer: because we nature-loving types have a kneejerk reaction against anything human-made. While we’re in the woods, we want to see the woods. But part of why people come to the Learning Center is to learn about things they know little about, to appreciate them anew. For me, I realized, that meant the dams.

So I was delighted this spring to see that my old friend Jesse Kennedy would teach a class at the Learning Center on the History of the Skagit Dams. Jesse can bring enthusiasm to any subject (you’d have to attend one of his defensive driving classes to believe me) and in this case, the subject could not have been more perfectly suited to him. Dr. Kennedy, who studied both ophthalmology and diesel mechanics extensively before migrating into cultural resources, described dam construction with an engineer’s precision and told the story of J.D. Ross and his battle to bring public power to Seattle with a historian’s heart. Turns out it’s a wild story with several wild subplots. Ross single-handedly fought off proponents of privatization and brought the dams in on schedule and under budget to provide more people in Seattle with more power sooner than in other American cities.

Ross was also a renowned expert on lilies and tea plants, who borrowed monkeys and albino deer from Woodland Park Zoo to place on islands in Diablo Lake. The animals, along with a colorful light show and a hearty chicken meal and a ride up the dramatic cable incline used in dam construction, served as attractions for generations of city folks Ross wooed upriver for inexpensive tours from the Depression through the 1960s. When he died, Franklin Roosevelt offered space in Arlington National Cemetery, but Ross had specified that he’d prefer to lie for eternity along Highway 20 in Newhalem. A plaque at the site quotes Roosevelt who heralded Ross as one of “the greatest Americans of our time,” which is particularly impressive considering that Ross was Canadian.

When at last we visited the dams, we saw a rare sight. The dams, overfull from late snow in the high country, were spilling. The spill would be dramatic in any case, all that water, all that power, but when Jesse turned our attention to the construction, the graceful concrete arc to keep the force of the water from shaking the dam to the ground, my heart swelled the same way it does to see the larches on Liberty Bell backlit in fall. Pure beauty. And this, I realized, was why I’d come. Sometimes it takes a little knowledge to nudge you out of your ideological safety zone, a few good stories, to make you see things anew, to make you think.

These days, I’m thinking a whole lot about reclamation. More on that soon.

Originally published August 10, 2011 on Ana Maria’s blog.

By Mike McQuaide Originally published in The Seattle Times, August 3, 2011

Atop Diablo Dam, in the heart of the North Cascades, Sara Beaver unscrewed the top of her water bottle and, holding it out at arm’s length, prepared to demonstrate the dam’s unique anti-gravity properties.

“I’ve never tried this before,” said the North Cascades Institute naturalist, “but I’ve heard that it’s impossible to pour water down the front of the dam.”

Holding her bottle over the edge of the 389-foot-high dam, she tilted the bottle and poured. But instead of the water falling straight down as the law of gravity, as well as personal experience, would lead one to expect, the water sprayed horizontally, right back at her. Almost like she was squirting herself in the face with a garden hose.

Explanation for this “Mythbusters” myth confirmed-type moment? Westerly winds barreling down narrow Diablo Gorge run head-on into the front of the dam’s massive concrete wall (at one time it was the highest dam in the world) and have nowhere to go but up. So does something relatively light, like water from a bottle.

“It’s kind of a microcosm of the weather out here,” offered Daphnie Leigh, an interpretive ranger with North Cascades National Park, who was also with us atop the dam.

“Clouds coming in off the Pacific Ocean hit the mountains and, just like the wind has nowhere to go when it hits the dam, they rise and eventually cool, releasing all their moisture in the form of snow and rain.”

Ah, learning. Cool. We were spending our day on North Cascades Expeditions, a new-this-summer tour, combining van rides and short hikes, offered as part of the Skagit Tours operation of Seattle City Light, which operates this hydroelectric dam. Like Beaver, Leigh was providing various and sundry answers to the area’s hows, whys, whats and whens on this six-hour guided foray through this truly spectacular Upper Skagit-North Cascades part of the world.

» Continue reading See the wild side with new North Cascades tours

Going out on a stewardship day with Mike Brondi makes me feel like a kid again. True, he is old enough to be my father, but it’s his style of storytelling, his kind face and vast knowledge that puts me in a child-like awe. Mirroring my wonderment was Alexia, the three-year-old steward out with her grandma for the day. We were Mike’s biggest fans. This man is a field guide. No, not just a field guide, but a keeper of knowledge. He knows the history, stories, family and genus of almost every native (and invasive) plant out there. He’s got the stuff that Wikipedia will never have.

» Continue reading Service Learning through Stewardship

I’ve gotten used to the rush of the office day. My fingertips on a keyboard, phones ringing, get up, go to the bathroom, sit down, think about what’s next, check off the list, shut down the computer, go home. I marvel at how much time I’ve spent sitting in the same place trying to get something done. One day ends, and work at home begins, when I drive back, go for a run, make dinner, pack my things, brush my teeth, go over it in my head, remember everything for tomorrow, don’t forget, you have to remember, plan, plan, plan….

And then I breathe Saturday morning, looking out over Baker Lake, and all those things start to fall into place. I greet my volunteers for the day and unload my kayak. The day is cool, with low hanging clouds, weighted by the drizzle that falls in the afternoon. Things are calm and nearly silent, our voices and paddles the only ripples in the damp air.

» Continue reading Stewardship: Immediate Gratification

After a week of food and gear packing, the Summer Youth team ventured to Ross Lake for the annual recon trip. The purpose of the trip was to transport food and gear to Ross Lake Resort for the summer, familiarize ourselves with the lakeside campgrounds, learn program curriculum and test out the camping gear and food menu. This year the recon was a bit different as leaders from both Cascades Climate Challenge and North Cascades Wild joined forces on the lake, allowing us all to better get to know each other and the program content we’ll each will be involved with.

The crew began the trip by loading the canoes with bucketfuls of food and personal gear at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center, where we eventually departed. The group paddled through the gorge in Diablo Lake toward Ross Dam. At the first destination we pulled canoes from the water and carried gear and buckets to meet our shuttle who would portage our gear to Ross Lake Resort. Once at the resort we stored our food for the summer, met with resort staff and prepared for an afternoon of paddling to McMillan Camp, our first destination of the trip.

Kate and Ian fill canoes with bucketfuls of food that will be stored at Ross Lake Resort.

» Continue reading Summer Youth Recon 2011

I have a motto for hiking in the Northwest: “I may not get a tan, but at least I’ll get a shower.” This winter did nothing but confirm my beliefs. During the longer-than-usual dark months of rain falling outside my office, I sat at my desk planning volunteer projects in the hopes that the sky would someday dry. Lo and behold, it did.

On May 28th we had our kickoff day for a brand new North Cascades Institute program, North Cascades Stewards. The first event was held in Marblemount at the North Cascades National Park Native Plant Nursery. And guess what, there was some sunshine. The weather was finally warm enough for me to take off my jacket and work in short sleeves. Spring showers may later have forced me to put my hood back on, but for a blissful 30 minutes, I worked outside in the balmy 60-degree weather, soaking in the sun’s rays. It was there in Marblemount that I sat under a patchy blue sky and started the program I had been planning for so many months. The birds were chirping, the leaves bright green with buds, the air heavy and laden with the sweet smell of cottonwood trees, together, these things added up to the change of the seasons.

North Cascades Stewards bear their tools have working in the nursery.

Reveling in this glimpse of spring, me and seven volunteers got our hands dirty, pulling non-natives and edging the beds of the garden. National Park employees Cheryl Cunningham and Mike Brondi led us in maintaining the garden and taught us about wilderness management. Soon the beds we maintained will be used to grow native plants to restore the Park. This simple day of stewardship marked the beginning of our summer volunteer season.

» Continue reading Summer Kicks Off with Stewardship