Chattermarks

North Cascades Institute is very excited to finally share with you a multimedia piece made in celebration of our 25th anniversary. “The High Ridge: Celebrating 25 Years in the North Cascades” was created by three staff members from our marketing/communications department — Christian Martin, Jessica Haag and Amy Wilcox — in partnership with Benj Drummond and Sara Joy Steele of bdsjs.com. It aims to tell the story of where the Institute originated from, how it has evolved over the past quarter-century, what we hope to accomplish in our teaching and natural history work and where we’re going next. Not an easy task, especially in only 11 minutes!

The piece features interviews with Institute founders, instructors, board members and friends, including Tom Fleischner, Saul Weisberg, Jonathan Jarvis, Robert Michael Pyle, Libby Mills, Chuck Robinson, John Miles, Jeanne Muir and Brian Scheuch. Special thanks to Bill Frisell and John Reischman for providing the music, and countless photographers for sharing their work.

Watch it now in high definition — full screen viewing essentail!

We’d really love it if you helped spread this story around — you can share this link: http://ncascades.org/discover/multimedia/high-ridge

Sara wrote up a blog post outlining some of the creative process it took to produce this piece:

When the Institute first approached us about creating a story for their 25th anniversary, they didn’t necessarily have a workshop in mind. But the more we discussed the project – along with the organization’s expanding needs, staff interest and new website – building in-house capacity to produce videos and multimedia made the most sense.

The workshop took place over five days on Canoe Island in the San Juans. In the months leading up to our week together, three Institute staff members – Amy, Christian and Jessica – purchased a video camera and learned how to use it, conducted a dozen interviews, transcribed them into more than 60,000 words, and sorted through archival footage.

Read more at http://bdsjs.com/blog/2012/01/multimedia-workshop-the-high-ridge/

I knew that when I moved to North Cascades Institute’s Environmental Learning Center to begin the residency portion of my Masters in Environmental Education degree, it was going to be an amazing year. I have always wanted to live on a lake in the mountains, so this part of the program was a big draw for me. Unsurprisingly, the year flew by and, before I knew it, summer was drawing to a close and it was time to return to Bellingham for the last two quarters at Western Washington University. But before returning to that more “civilized” and academic sphere, I decided to both symbolically and physically transition away from my amazing year living in the midst of the North Cascades by backpacking from Ross Lake to Bellingham with another grad student and several North Cascades Institute staff.

Map of our route, heading west from Ross Lake to Hannegan Pass Trailhead

We only had four and a half days to make this trek, so we had to cut a few corners:  we took a boat from Ross Lake dam up to Little Beaver Creek, and were then picked up from the Hannegan Pass Trailhead.  If we had been purists, we would have hiked the entire route. However, that would have taken a bit more time than we had. Our roughly forty-five mile, 7500′ gain route, camping at Perry Creek, Tapto Lakes, Copper Creek, and Egg Lake, still gave us long, but breathtakingly beautiful days.

» Continue reading From the Learning Center to Bellingham: A Grad’s Transition Back to the ‘Real World’

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.

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

In celebration of our 25th year of connecting people to nature through hands-on experiences in the outdoors, North Cascades Institute has opened over 50 new programs for registration, ranging from natural history classes focused on birds, butterflies and bugs to family camps, art and writing retreats and backcountry adventures in North Cascades National Park. All the details are now available at www.ncascades.org/get_outside or by calling (360) 854-2599.

Plan ahead to join us and take advantage of the Early Bird discount. From now through the Spring Equinox (March 20), when you sign up for most programs with tuition over $100, you’ll receive $25 off each registration. It’s a great opportunity to sign up for as many as you like and save! (The Early Bird discount is not valid for Family Getaways or Base Camp and cannot be combined with scholarships. Tuition must be paid in full at time of registration.)

To register with the Early Bird discount, call us at (360) 854-2599.

The 2011 slate of North Cascades Institute programs for people of all ages includes Family Getaways, Base Camp, the Sourdough Speaker Series, Diablo Downtimes and over 30 different classes and extended retreats that explore the natural and cultural history of the Pacific Northwest. Class topics range from art (watercoloring, digital photography, cedar weaving), biology (corvids, dragonflies, rare carnivores, butterflies, mushrooms, birding), history (of the Skagit dams, of Ross Lake, of Washington State trails), writing (poetry, natural history essays, blogging) and field excursions (exploring Mt. Baker, Seattle, Ross and Diablo Lakes in North Cascades National Park). The roster of teaching staff includes Robert Michael Pyle, Dennis Paulson, Tim McNulty, Libby Mills, Molly Hashimoto, Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Langdon Cook, Mark Turner, Ana Maria Spagna, Jennifer Hahn and Nick O’Connell. More information and registration at www.ncascades.org/get_outside

Most Institute classes take place at North Cascades Environmental Learning Center, our award-winning green facility on Diablo Lake in the heart of the North Cascades run in partnership between the Institute, National Park Service and Seattle City Light. Other classes take place in the field, exploring the natural history of Seattle, the Skagit and Methow Valleys, the Arid Land Ecology Reserve and North Cascades backcountry.

There’s a sense of amazement that overcomes me each winter when I approach a muddy farm field turned white. It’s not from snow, per se, but snow geese, who travel hundreds of miles from their Siberian nesting grounds to winter and feed in the lower Skagit Valley. The fields this time of year, particularly near Fir Island, come alive with a buzz of honks and squawks as flocks numbering in the thousands cover the landscape and fill the sky as they come and go.

“Thousands of snow geese taking off from a field is one of the most spectacular sights one can imagine,” says Howard Armstrong, a Skagit Audubon member who has birded in the Skagit Valley for 40 years.

Top: An enormous flock of snow geese is a common sight during the winter months in the Skagit Valley. Photo by Christian Martin. Above: Snow geese return to the large farm fields in Skagit each year to feed on cover crops. Photo by Codi Hamblin.

Snow geese migrate to Skagit County each winter from their Arctic breeding grounds of summer. Photo by Codi Hamblin.

But snow geese are only one of several species who winter in Skagit County. Other birds include the thousands of trumpeter and tundra swans who leave their boreal and arctic pond breeding grounds in Alaska and Canada to feed on the open crop fields. The trumpeter swan, Howard says, was nearly extinct at the turn of the 21st Century, but this largest of north american waterfowl can now be seen in the Skagit Valley.

» Continue reading Winter Treasures of the Skagit Valley

North Cascades National Park archaeologist, and long-time Institute field instructor and former board member, Bob Mierendorf is prominently featured in an excellent new article just published in Washington State Magazine, published by Washington State University. In “Of Time and Wildness in the North Cascades,” Mierendorf interprets his important work in documenting native presence in the higher elevations of the North Cascades:

Mierendorf has spent the last couple of decades trying to convince the archaeological establishment that pre-contact Northwest Indians did not confine themselves to the lowlands, but lived in the North Cascades and frequented the high country. When Mierendorf first started working at the park, Cascade Pass was one of 17 archaeological sites identified within it. Since then, he has identified nearly 300 more. Forty-five of those sites are located between 4,000 and 7,000 feet.

Obviously, population densities in the mountains were nowhere near what they were along the more hospitable coastal lowlands. Mierendorf argues simply that lower density does not mean absence. An earlier assumption by archaeologists was that Indians actually avoided the mountains, and any contact between coastal and interior tribes was accomplished by traveling along the Columbia Gorge. Mountains were a barrier, not a destination. The idea that prehistoric people crossed the Cascades on foot was simply incomprehensible.

Such an assumption is certainly understandable. The North Cascades is tough country. Even though only two volcanic peaks are higher than 10,000 feet, the deep glacier-carved valleys create dramatic local relief, often as much as 6,000 feet between valley floor and peak.

Alexander Ross, a fur trader with the North West Company, made the first non-Indian crossing of the North Cascades in 1814, from east to west, guided by an Indian. “A more difficult route to travel never fell to man’s lot,” wrote Ross.

So why was the question of the Indians’ presence in the mountains such a mystery? Why didn’t archaeologists just ask the Indians?

This article is a significant contribution to the public’s understanding of the cultural history of the North Cascades, and the Institute is understandably very excited to share it widely. You can read the rest of the article here.

In the next week or so, we’ll be opening registration for our spring and summer programs in the North Cascades, including Mierendorf’s long-running, popular field excursion on Ross Lake that explores the region’s cultural history, from native uses through to miners, fire lookouts and the park service (see photo at top of post). “Ross Lake by Boat and Boot: People and Places of the Upper Skagit” takes place July 22-25, with Captain Gerry Cook piloting the Ross Mule, your floating classroom for this exciting learning adventure. (While we can’t offer registration quite yet, you can send an email to nci@ncascades.org and we’ll let you know as soon as it is open for sign-ups!)

» Continue reading Bob Mierendorf and the pre-history of Cascade Pass

May 30 was a great day for a paddle in Seattle, with full sun and a light breeze to take the edge off. With a myriad of wild lakes, rivers and open sound waters to choose from, the Duwamish Waterway hardly seems like a choice location for an excursion. An EPA Superfund site, the Duwamish River flows through the backsides of various industries – shipyards, cement factories, and scrap plants to name a few. It is a heavily traveled waterway, where industry supercedes habitat. But don’t tell that to the osprey, purple martins, killdeer, bald eagles, great blue herons and other birds we saw out on the water that day.

Cruising past a cement plant

» Continue reading Surfing a Superfund site

Winter may be time for hibernation, but spring is fast approaching, ready or not! Our field excursions have been hitting the trails the past few weekends and watching the signs and cycles of of change. Last weekend the Nooksack Snowshoe excursion went to the riverbed again. No hoar crystals anymore, but there was plenty to see. We checked out elk tracks, followed a female coyote preparing for pups and traced a set a of striped skunk tracks directly to the source! (“Whoa, everybody take a step back, there she is!”)

» Continue reading Gettin’ out on the flats…

Top photo: Red crossbill found at the Environmental Learning Center

A ball of fluff caught my eye on the road headed to work. Absolutely a bird. I got out and crossed the highway, trucks at high speed just feet from tackling me. With a grocery bag wrapped around my hands, I lifted the great horned owl to determine the cause of death: high-speed truck.

Why would any reasonable person risk her life for the sake of picking up a mangled, bloody bird carcass? Perhaps a few stories will explain this phenomenon.

» Continue reading Playing with dead birds