Chattermarks

This past Earth Day Weekend, the North Cascades Institute hosted the 3^rd Anuual Migratory Bird Festival! The event was sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service and brought people together from across western Washington for a day to explore the natural history of migratory birds and the cultural heritage of Ebey’s Landing National Historic Reserve.

Students and elders from Seattle’s International District, Mt. Vernon’s Kulshan Creek Neighborhood, and North Cascade Institute’s NC Wild 2012 program joined together to celebrate and learn about birds by migrating through four different educational stations.

Participants dined on a multicultural feast featuring Chinese food from Seattle’s International District and homemade Mexican tamales and sopes from Yolanda Zamora of Mt. Vernon. Delicious!

The first station was the Sea Lab, where students and elders could see, touch, and learn about some of the marine invertebrates that help fuel the birds’ migratory journeys along the Pacific flyway. This hands-on lesson covered the basics of the ecology and dynamic interplay between Puget Sound’s marine life and the migratory birds that utilize northwest marine ecosystems in order to complete part of their journey.

Graduate student Jacob Belsher teaches students all about the joys of being a moonsnail.

» Continue reading Bird Migrations at Ebey’s Landing

Since first moving to the Environmental Learning Center last August, many people have told me, “You must go see the snowy owls!” This advice has been on my radar since migratory birds began returning to their winter feeding grounds in the Skagit Valley. Who are these snowy owls that everybody speaks of? After doing some research, I learned that not only were these birds magnificent and beautiful creatures, but that this was an unusual year for the North American Snowy Owl. This year is known as an “irruption” year. An irruption is caused by a shortage in the Artic lemming population in the Arctic Tundra of Canada. As a result, snowy owls, whose primary food source are lemmings, must travel in search of additional food and can be found as far south as the United States. This event occurs every four to seven years as predator-prey dynamics change, and in those years snowy owls can be found in hospitable places like Boundary Bay Park in southern British Columbia and occasionally along the Skagit Flats in Washington. The owls are expected to return north sometime this month.

In anticipation of their departure, I knew a trip over the border to Boundary Bay had to be made. The snowy owls were also spotted just north of Bellingham at Sandy Point, but the word on the birder streets was that it was possible to see 20 to 30 of them at once in British Columbia. So we chose to cross over, and the adventure was well worth it.

Here are some pictures from our wondrous day with the snowy owls.

Just off of 72^nd Street in Delta, BC, we were lucky enough to witness about 25 snowy owls hanging out along the dyke path in Boundary Bay Park.

These large owls breed in the Artic Tundra, and as you can tell by their unmistakable white plumage they probably blend in very well up there. Females and juveniles are more heavily marked than males. Adult males can be almost pure white.

» Continue reading Following the Snowy Owls

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