Chattermarks

They say it is winter here in the North Cascades. With the shadowed days and the sting of cold to cheeks as you step outside, one might even believe it is true. But missing from this crisp landscape is also the white beauty of snow. While it is easy to lament the bare ground in January or the undeniable wish for skis and snowshoes, we can also find appreciation in winter’s more subtle forms. The hoar frost feathered like brandished fur on a fallen twig, the crunch of elegant crystalline ice rods pushing their way through hardened soil, the prominent, frozen stalactites dripping from mountain wall. Winter is here, and while we eagerly anticipate a world transformed by snow (the next couple weeks, they say!), we can still appreciate its other poetic manifestations.

Below, a few winter inspired poems.

Winter Song in the Foothills

Tim McNulty, from In Blue Mountain Dusk, 1992

 

On the colder nights

when the scattered chips

of winter stars

light the valley with frost,

the frozen lakes will sometimes

sing to themselves.

 

Their song

echoes through the snowforest hills

and still dense midnight air

like a great kettledrum

rumbling deep and hollow

in the belly of the earth.

 

Plates of ice shift and settle

against their banks of pasture

and wood,

while this strange and restless music

drifts past the frosty ears

of cows, owls

tucked in the hollows of night,

the gentle sleeping bears,

 

and carries up the hillside creeks

to startle us from sleep

- no song like we ever heard before -

and rock the house softly

on its moorings of ashes and dust.

Crystalline rods of ice, formed during cold, clear nights, push through moss and soil. Photo by Kiira Heymann.

» Continue reading Poetic Visualizations of the Winter Season

Written by North Cascades Education Intern, Matt Kraska.

It’s hard to believe it has already been two weeks since Thanksgiving. As many North Cascades Institute staff said their goodbyes and left to spend Thanksgiving with family and friends, others were saying hello as they arrived at the Environmental Learning Center for the Thanksgiving Family Getaway. Families traveled from a variety of places to spend a few days celebrating and feasting together. In contrast to our fall Mountain School programs that fill the dining hall with 5th– 8th grade youth, this event was filled with folks of all ages.

The giant snowman built in the middle of the amphitheatre, a tribute to the winter wonderland of the North Cascades.

The forest around Diablo Lake was blanketed with snow from days earlier, and there was more in the forecast for the weekend. All afternoon on Thanksgiving day the drizzle was on the verge of becoming snow, and soon enough flakes of white began to fall from the once gray sky. For many, this was the first snow of the year. Laughter filled the campus as everyone began catching snowflakes on their tongues, throwing snowballs, and building giant snow people. A little winter weather is sometimes all it takes to bring people together.

» Continue reading A Weekend of Warmth and Snow

For several weeks I have had the goal of pedaling from the gate marking the seasonal road closure on Highway 20 (near mile post 134) to the snow wall–where clearing of the snow-covered highway ends. Near the end of each winter season, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) begins plowing the North Cascades Highway once the snow has ceased to fall and avalanche danger has subsided throughout the region. This typically occurs in March.

However, it’s a bit different this year as WSDOT was still plowing Steven’s Pass on Highway 2 well into the first half of April, and is still busy with avalanche control as another slide occurred just last week! With the recent heavy snowfall in spring and the majority of the state’s snow equipment on Highway 2, it’s been difficult for WSDOT to swiftly clear the North Cascades Highway. The pass on Highway 20 is usually open by now, but this year it will be a lucky day if it opens before Memorial day–the latest opening since the highway opened in 1972!

» Continue reading In Search of the End of the Road

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

When I signed up for North Cascades Institute’s M.Ed. Gradute Program, I knew it would be an incredible opportunity, but I did not fully anticipate the diversity of experiences I would have. Based at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center, the winter quarter is a quieter time, primarily focused on group projects for our non-profit and curriculum classes.

These class projects, combined with research on a natural history topic which we are passionate about, comprise the bulk of our academic work. Luckily, our schedules also allow for outdoor learning adventures to explore other places and natural events in our region. Cohort 10 recently returned from our three-day winter naturalist retreat where we experienced some of the incredible assets that western Washington has to offer.

» Continue reading Grad Retreat: Exploring Heather Meadows to Samish Flats

So far, winter in the North Cascades has brought us snow, rain, more snow, and until this week, several weeks of consistent rainfall. For now, the majority of snow at the lower elevations near the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center has disappeared.

On a recent rainy Saturday, I slipped on my rain gear and headed into the wet forest to poke around and explore our wooded neighborhood during the heart of winter. I began my walk on the Sourdough Creek Trail near the Learning Center, right outside my back door. The trail meanders through a mossy, lichen-clad forest of large Douglas fir, western redcedar, western hemlock and a variety of deciduous trees, including big leaf maple, vine maple, alder and paper birch. The forest’s understory is thick with undergrowth, including Oregon grape and salal. The trail ends above the Learning Center at Sourdough Falls, which flows through Sourdough Creek into Lake Diablo.

I was most interested in exploring this path because it is the trail I frequented the most this past fall with Mountain School students. With the large amount of rain and snow over the last few months, I wanted to explore the changes that may have occurred on or near the trail since autumn. I was also curious to see how the heavy rainfall that flooded Sourdough Creek in December impacted the landscape near the waterfall.

» Continue reading Exploring the Winter Forest

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

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