Chattermarks

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

“I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.” ~ Neil Armstrong

In the fall, the Skagit River is flooded with dying salmon. I have spent three weekends in the past two months trying to capture the essence of these amazing creatures on camera. I am still not sure whether I succeeded in doing so, but I am happy to share my experiences.

Hanging out with snorkeling gear in 36-degree water probably isn’t everybody’s favorite thing to do, but since I moved up to the Environmental Learning Center, it has become my preferred hobby. The place I like to go is the Cascade River just upstream of where it enters the Skagit. When the salmon are running, you know where to find me!

There’s something extraordinary about being amongst these primordial beings and watching them in their natural habitat. It’s like I get to peer in through a secret window into the lives of one of nature’s wildest creatures. While watching the fish swarm around me and make their redds, defend their territory, court a mate, or just plain get feisty with each other, I begin to understand a little more of the complexity of this species. I don’t know their whole story, but I try to imagine all they have been through. Seeing their scars and bacteria loaded scales gives me a clue.

A dying, diseased female humpy on the final legs of her journey back to her native spawning grounds.

» Continue reading Swimming with the Salmon

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.

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

Who would have dreamed that a national forest, a housing non-profit and an environmental education organization would team up to provide Seattle-based Asian and Pacific Islanders with meaningful outdoor experiences? Starting in 2001, the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, the North Cascades Institute and the International District Housing Alliance began a partnership that has expanded over the years to include intergenerational learning for elders, stewardship projects for youth and paid internships for youth. The partnership sparks a better understanding of the connection between the forest and urban environment, and provides mentoring and leadership opportunities.

The United States Forest Service recently awarded these partners with the 2011 Urban Communities in Conservation Award. The conservation award is part of the Forest Service’s Wings Across the Americas program, which works to conserve birds, bats, butterflies and dragonflies.

Each of the three partners plays a distinct role in the program. The first partner, the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in the Puget Sound Region of Washington State, is the largest urban forest in Region Six of the Forest Service. The staff works directly with the program’s youth to get hands on experience in a natural setting, often their first time outside the urban environment. The second partner, the North Cascades Institute, is a non-profit organization focusing on education. The International District Housing Alliance, the third partner, is a non-profit organization located in Seattle’s International District…that has successfully worked to improve the quality of life for Asian and Pacific Islanders by providing community building and housing related services to low-income individuals and families.

Youth and elders from Seattle’s International District learn about old growth forests and tree ecology from Rockport State Park staff

» Continue reading Institute Receives USFS Conservation Award

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

Summer has finally arrived at the Environmental Learning Center! Diablo Lake has regained its characteristic green color, peregrine falcon fledglings are learning to hunt near the dam, a new fawn is sporting spots around campus, and the tenth cohort of graduate students have begun their academic journey.

Cohort 10 at Diablo Lake.  Field journaling with Libby Mills (above).

Cohort 10 began classes in Bellingham on June 22nd. The eleven students who are enrolled in the graduate program come from a variety of backgrounds, ranging from education to environmental science to multi-media studies. Their summer coursework consists of three classes: Introduction to Place-Based Education, Resource Issues in the North Cascades, and Cultural History in the North Cascades. These courses are interwoven into a series of field excursions in the region, supplemented by readings, projects, and discussions in classes at Western Washington University.

Students learn about mycorrhizae from Brandi Stewart, cohort 9

» Continue reading Welcome graduate cohort 10!

A flit of gold. A flicker of green. Soft song notes from within a tangle of blackberry vines. A surprising whoosh of hovering wing-sweeps, mere inches above ground.

Birds. They are some of the Skagit Valley’s most compelling and charismatic creatures. In winter, the Skagit farmlands teem with all kinds – song birds, raptors, shorebirds, local and migratory waterfowl. You need not have fancy equipment nor years of experience to be a birder here. What it takes is the curiosity to know more and the patience to practice deep observation.

(Title) Graduate students of Cohort 9 extend their birding eye on the Skagit flats (Above) The Hayton Reserve is one Skagit Valley location to go bird watching

» Continue reading Becoming bird observers

My dreams within Environmental Education are like that of the Skagit River’s watercourse.

From its headwaters, my dream begins in the tiniest of raindrops, collecting in glaciers perhaps and trickling down to alpine streams. The dream builds to a river, solidifying as do the sturdier banks supporting the way of the water. Weaving out and around, the dream’s course is composed, at times, of rapids raging, then pooling in softer shallows. It exits the mountain peak domain to enter a gentler, more gradual flow—that of farmland and forest—though still bringing with it reminders of the lessons learned in higher places. The channel widens, as does my dream’s scope, the hint of salt in freshwaters. As river converges with ocean, a chorus commences. Ideas, like nutrients, swell. Life is rich, vibrant. Just as the Skagit River feeds the Salish Sea, so the sea replenishes the river.

» Continue reading From headwaters to sound

When the crops of the Skagit farmlands are put to rest for winter, they come.

With the sky’s gray backdrop so common to a winter in western Washington, they glisten like diamonds. Birds. By the hundreds, thousands even, they flock from near and far to the fertile, tilled soils at the mouth of the Skagit River, one destination of many on their migratory journey.

Snow geese. Trumpeter swans. Bald eagles. These are but a few of the many species you will find on an adventure of bird watching across the flats. Other local residents, such as a variety of hawks and ducks, the barred owl, and the infamous great blue heron, paint an elaborate portrait in winter, making the Skagit Valley one of the most prized destinations for bird watching in the Pacific Northwest.

» Continue reading Watching winged friends