Chattermarks

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

Back row, left to right: Jacob Belsher, Elise Ehrheart, Sarah Bernstein, Mollie Behn, Susan Brown, Katie Tozier, Kiira Heymann, Erin Soper, Ashley Kvitek, Alex Patia. Front row, left to right: Emmanuel Camarillo, Colby Mitchell, Jess Newley, Christen Kiser

On June 21^st, fourteen new students in North Cascades Institute’s graduate residency program started their first quarter of classes at Western Washington University. In late August, they will move to the Environmental Learning Center to start a one-year professional residency, working towards a Master of Education in Environmental Education and a Certificate in Leadership and Nonprofit Administration.

The three courses that students take the first summer are all taught by professor John Miles, creating a cohesive summer block that is a combination of classroom time and field excursions to local public lands. During their first week of classes, students explored the Lower Skagit River and the Puget Sound. During the second week, students journeyed to the Environmental Learning Center to study the Upper Skagit River.

» Continue reading Exploring the Upper Skagit

Each season the graduate students at North Cascades Institute go on a retreat. The purpose is relaxation, fun, and to learn a little more about natural history. For the spring season, myself and the other planners decided that getting out and exploring places closer to home would be perfect. A canoe ride across the lake, riparian exploration along the Skagit, and working the land at Blue Heron Farms became the main activities for a three-day stretch in May.

Imagine gray clouds. Cool and wet, the wind licks the skin. The 11 graduate students of Cohort 10 and their fearless leader, Tanya, piled backpacks, fire wood, food, and themselves into six tandem canoes, despite the 180 degree change in weather from the previous day. Spring had teased us with sunny skies while we worked with Mountain School students in and amongst the newly budding plants the day before. Making the best of it, our group set out towards the destination, Thunder Point campground, situated on the other side of Diablo Lake in North Cascades National Park. Canoes slide in, paddles hit water, and the day began.

» Continue reading Closer Connections

It’s been a long winter in Washington. Though it is late May, temperatures remain cool at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center and the surrounding mountains are still blanketed in snow. Leaf buds are just opening and most wildflowers have yet to make an appearance on our trails. An occasional errant butterfly gives us hope that spring is here, only to be chased back into hiding by rain or cold. Perhaps the most celebrated harbinger of spring in the North Cascades is the opening of Highway 20, six miles east of the Learning Center. Late snowfall and slides have kept the Department of Transportation busy this spring, and the highway that usually opens in late April is still closed, keeping those of us living at the end of the Highway in relative solitude.

» Continue reading The Ephemeral Beauty of Solitude

Why is it that kids, and adults, truth be told, love throwing rocks? Nearly every Mountain School student spends some time learning and exploring along the shores of Diablo Lake. And without fail (for my trail groups at least) the first question we hear as soon as we get to the shore is, “Can we throw rocks?”  Although our packed schedule usually only allows for 5-10 minutes of rock throwing, I’m fairly certain my students would happily spend the entire afternoon engaged in this timeless pursuit. Thrown, plopped or skipped, every student becomes engrossed in this activity.

One lovely, sunny afternoon, as I sat below Sourdough Creek Falls and watched my students gradually start tossing rocks across the creek after lunch, I couldn’t help but wonder, what is it about throwing rocks that is so captivating? Is it the sound? The splash? The hunt of finding the perfect skipping rock? Or the challenge of successfully hitting a target?

Mountain School students see how far they can skip rocks across the lake. Photo courtesy of Glenda Runge

» Continue reading Rockity Rock Rock

At the beginning of the M.Ed. residency, every graduate student writes down several goals. These personal goals are for both our teaching practicum as well as for what we hope to accomplish during our residency experience. One of my residency goals was to go on a full moon canoe every month. So far, I have only been on a few due to weather and being offsite. But every time I have been able to, it fully reinforces what motivated me to write down that goal.

There is something magical about gliding across the still, silent, black surface of a lake, moving solely by your own exertion. I always feel connected with the water when I go canoeing. But something about being on the water at night heightens this sense of oneness. It almost seems as if your paddle is an extension of the water, linked by an arc of tiny droplets.

» Continue reading Full Moon Rising

Despite the fact  it seems like we just said goodbye to the final fall Mountain School group only a few weeks ago, the spring season is fast approaching. Staff and graduate students at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center  began spring Mountain School training on February 28th to share new ideas for programming, reacquaint ourselves with fun logistical details, and immerse some new team members in the curriculum.

The snow we have been blessed with over the last few weeks—though unfortunately intermixed with rain most days—has added an interesting element to the training.  Our first group of students will arrive in a week, and there is a possibility that snow could be on the ground–which could take some of our Mountain School lessons to a whole new level.

» Continue reading Finding Our Inner Child

Several weeks back, North Cascades Environmental Learning Center was abuzz with talk of an animal kill on campus near the Peninsula Trail behind the dining hall.

A chunk of fur found on the peninsula by Remote Medical International instructor and former North Cascades Institute staff member, Adam Russell, was the first clue to the kill. Adam had found the hair while observing a rescue scenario conducted by Wilderness EMT students who were staying at the Learning Center at the time. What was unique about the hair Adam found was how it was clipped from the missing carcass in clean cuts, as if it had been cut by scissors. Naturalist sleuths made hypotheses that it was a feline kill, as cats use their incisors to clip their prey’s fur in chunks.

Adam and several others did a brief sweep of the peninsula to look for further signs of the kill, but none were found. Several days later, Institute staff member, Katie Roloson, and some friends were out for a canoe on Diablo Lake when they noticed a deer skeleton splayed on the rocky shore of the peninsula. The clues were starting to fit together, but the mystery remained. Many thought the carcass was less than a week old based on its condition, but no one knows for sure.

With the excitement of the new discovery, I decided to examine the evidence for myself.

» Continue reading Unsolved Mystery: Dinner on Diablo’s Shore

By Molly Hashimoto

Teaching landscape watercolor in summer and autumn at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake encompasses everything I love best: peaks, forests, water, wildlife and enthusiastic fellow artists. When I am at home in Seattle, I seek out the quieter parks nearby, especially Union Bay Natural Area, also known as the Montlake Fill, which seems to have a little of all those things I treasure in the North Cascades.

It is surprising that a place so rich with wildlife is less than a mile from the University Village shopping center, right off Sandpoint Way east of the University of Washington, and adjacent to its enormous parking lots. You can be entirely unaware of all that bustle, although in winter you can see the buildings to the north through a grove of leafless cottonwoods. The Natural Area is on land owned by the University of Washington.

In 1895, Lake Washington was lowered and the University was moved from downtown to its present site, which included the marshy land exposed by the lowering of the lake. At that time no one could think of a way to use this area, so in 1926, when the City of Seattle asked the University if they could pay to use it as a dump and a landfill, the university agreed. In 1971, the Fill finally closed. In 1977, the University’s regents approved a plan that would create an arboretum and keep a natural area for the study of horticulture, as well as a wild area.

Top: First Light, North Cascades, watercolor on paper. Above: Swans, Union Bay, woodblock print. One of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen at the Natural Area were the trumpeter swans in Yesler Cove in late winter of 2009. They are rare visitors, and that year they graced us with their presence for several days—seeing them inspired the design for this woodblock print.

» Continue reading Union Bay Wild: An Artist’s View

The sheer power of water was apparent in the North Cascades this last weekend after a recent Pineapple Express hit the Northwest. Warming temperatures combined with a significant amount of rainfall fell onto several weeks worth of snow in the Cascades. Consequently, mountain creeks filled to the brim and several landslides covered Highway 20, closing a stretch of this road between the towns of Diablo and Newhalem. Several M.Ed. graduate students and our graduate coordinator were staying at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center and in the town of Diablo, and got to see this dynamic shift in nature first-hand.

At the Learning Center, the recent weather demonstrated how quickly land is shaped by water as we watched Sourdough Creek quadruple in size Sunday afternoon. This was an amazing shift to see as Sourdough typically runs as a trickle in late summer to a swiftly-flowing mountain creek in late spring. Sourdough Creek runs next to the Learning Center’s parking lot under a “Texas dip,” a removable piece of roadway designed to prevent washout. But this road feature was barely recognizable as the creek filled with brown, fast-running water that undercut the bank, causing large chunks of earth to collapse and wash away into Diablo Lake.

» Continue reading Natural Shifts in the North Cascades