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Writing Down the Story

Writing Down the Story

Tag Archives: #adventurelog

Adventure Log: Shunpiking in Lewis County

10 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in Adventure Log, writingdownthestory in Photograph

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

#adventurelog, #ilovewhereilive, Centralia-Alpha Road, DeGoede Bulb Farm, Lewis County, Mineral School, Mineral WA, Mt. Rainier, Paradise, Salzer Valley, shunpiking, skunk cabbage, what is retirement

It’s raining and blustery this morning. Again. Although 10-day forecasts are notoriously unreliable in these parts, each time I check it there is one sunny day in 10. As I am both a fair-weather adventurer and a fair-weather gardener, at least this time of year when I am also content still to be cocooned with indoor projects, it’s a problem.

Last Monday Flutterby—my new monarch orange Nissan Rogue—and I headed north and west for a hike on the Olympic Peninsula, the first of what I hope will be a weekly adventure from now into autumn. (Read that one here if you missed it). I huddled inside the next three days as the spring monsoons drummed on the roof and spattered against the windows and the valley below the house turned to lake.

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Friday we got a bonus sun day, warm even. I should have been fixing my garden gate, planting the beets and potatoes, cleaning up the property from the winter storms. But after an aggravating visit to my mother, full of demands and accusations and her own grumpiness, I was in a rainy mood and blew off the beautiful day. I stayed inside finally energized to do projects I should have been doing over the winter. (What a lot of shoulds in this paragraph.)

Yesterday I got a reprieve, another unexpected sunny day. And a Monday, adventure day! But there is all the work to be done outside. What to do? I check Weather Underground. The next predicted sunny day is a week from Thursday. I compromise: both/and.

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Screen shot of 10-day rain forecast may not show on your phone.

I run out to the Manor first thing and find Mama alone in the dining room still dawdling over her scrambled eggs while a staff person vacuums around her. We walk a lap of the hall then return to her room to listen to bad knock-knock jokes from Alexa. “Alexa, tell me a funny joke!” “I don’t understand that,” Alexa retorts. As pissy as Mama was on Friday, she is sweet today and when I take my leave we are both in a good mood.

I spend three hours working outside, then shower and eat lunch. At 1:30 Flutterby and I head out across the lake in the valley. I look at this valley everyday, from the vantage point of the hawks and eagles, but rarely am I down in it. We cross the water and head into the hills, traveling south across the Alpha-Centralia Road, an I-5 alternative to get to US Hwy 12 that goes to the mountains. (See it winding up the hill in the photo above?) My destination is Mossyrock to see if the DeGoede bulb farm is in riotous tulip color yet. I’m quite sure it’s not, but it’s a pretty drive, which is the point of this shunpike adventure.

As we roll along, south and east, I decide to go somewhere else first, in the delicious freedom of being master of my destination. I have driven by the road to Mineral, (population 202 in the last census) countless times on my way to Mt. Rainier, but I’ve never driven into the town. It is home to the Mineral School, an arts residency program in the former elementary school. It is also home to what was the smallest post office in the country (retired now), according to a friend who delivers mail in the Seattle area.

I stay on WA 508 to Morton. We travel through bucolic farmland and wind through deciduous and hardwood forests, not yet showing much in the way of spring green despite all the rain. I round a curve and run into Herself, having forgotten she would be here.

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I wait 20 minutes for a work crew to clear the road of a dead fallen maple trunk, finally getting one massive end lifted in the jaws of the bulldozer and chainsawing it into manageable chunks. In all that time only a handful of cars were lined up on both sides. This is rural Washington.

I’m enchanted by a watery grove of birches filled with the bright golden bloom of skunk cabbage. I pull off the road and revel for a few minutes.

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In Mineral, I stop at Mineral Lake and feast my eyes on Mother Mountain. Now I’m sorry I didn’t blow off the driveway cleanup and head up to Paradise early—another hour away—which according to the webcam yesterday looks to have a couple feet of new snow. I haven’t been up there in the snow since the then boyfriend, later husband, and I took his Mid-west parents up for a fourth of July picnic, eaten in the parking lot because everything else was still under the white stuff. That was more than 40 years ago. Next time. I make a date with Flutterby.

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We turn back toward home and skip over to Hwy 12 in Morton, heading back toward Mossyrock. There are no tulips yet, just vast fields of promise. That visit to Paradise will be timed to the bloom, perhaps at the end of the month. I’ll keep an eye on the 10-day, check the webcams, watch the farm’s Facebook page, make a plan; and then wait for what really happens. I guess this is what retirement is: not without work and responsibilities, but with opportunity to blow it off and live into spontaneity. Life is short, eat dessert first.

Adventure Log: Steam Donkey Trail, Olympic Peninsula

02 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in Adventure Log, writingdownthestory in Photograph

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

#adventurelog, #ilovewhereilive, Adventure Log, Dosewallips River, Dosewallips State Park, Maple Valley Trail, Olympic Peninsula, Rocky Creek Falls, Steam Donkey Trail

Flutterby and I went on our first adventure together today! (Well, not counting taking my mom for an Easter Sunday drive. She loved the heated seats!)

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There was snow on the deck when I left, but the sky was going blue. I did not start Flutterby from inside the house to warm her up before I climbed aboard. It was chilly out though—34º according the Flutter’s thermometer. Picked up my road latte at 8:20 and we were off up I-5.

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Left the interstate at Tumwater and headed toward 101 N. and the sparkling Hood Canal toward the snowy Olympics and the town of Brinnon to Dosewallips State Park. Temperature up to 42º.

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I hung my new Discover Pass from Flutter’s mirror and donned my knee straps, since the meniscus tear in my right knee has been bothering a bit after garden work. I skipped the ankle brace—didn’t have it, anyway, as it turned out. Took my trekking poles, but didn’t use them.

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I’ve finally found some new hiking pants that fit my criteria; i.e. crop length, not grey, zippered pockets. I didn’t realize until I got them home that they matched the socks a generous friend gifted me with. And not until I put on my shoes today (that need to be replaced), did I discover they also match the pants. Matchy-matchy.

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Washington Trails Association trip reports had confusing information about where to start the hike, so I just picked one: Maple Valley Trail. A mile or so in, I crossed the fire road to Steam Donkey, so named for the machine that dragged logs to the railroad—that also ran through the area—in the early 1900s.

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The trillium were blooming at the lower elevation, but other than a few buds, not much else in the way of spring. I chased a flicker with my camera as it flew from tree to tree, but wasn’t able to capture it.

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Nurse stump, dressed for the ball.

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It was a perfect hike for the first of the season. Not too long, about 3-1/2 miles or so. A lovely pond, many bridges across streams. Much of it looked not unlike the woods behind my house, but it was good to be out in the air and the mountains. I’m hoping to beat my epic hiking record set last year, with both new and favorite trails. I started a month earlier, so I’m on my way.

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Back at the campground, I ate my lunch at a picnic table then drove on up the highway to the Dosewallips Recreation Area and Rocky Creek Falls, behind the Rocky Creek hydroelectric plant, just a few hundred yards from the road. Breathtaking. Saw two gangs of elk along the road.

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Dosewallips River

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Rocky Creek

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Rocky Creek Falls

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Ended the day in Hoodsport with Lemon Lavender ice-cream as the cloud cover (the beginning of the next 10 days of it) began rolling in. Perfection. I love where I live.

 

 

 

Adventure Log: Nisqually Delta

14 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in Adventure Log, writingdownthestory in Photograph

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

#adventurelog, #ilovewhereilive, Adventure Log, Great Blue Heron, Great Horned Owl, Nisqually Delta, Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, Olympia Washington

I have taken my sweet time honoring my promise to myself to log more winter adventures, but I took the first step today. It was a nearby destination; just up I-5 to the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. I hadn’t even quite finished my 16-ounce latte when I arrived. I left home before dawn, hoping for a sunrise; but there was no color this morning (nor sun, until I got home), but it didn’t matter.

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The Delta is comprised of nine unique habitats: the Nisqually Flats, shrub, coniferous forest, freshwater marsh, salt marsh, open saltwater, rivers and creeks, mixed grasslands, and riparian woodland. Dikes and boardwalks provide limited access to the eight square miles of the Refuge.

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I beat the crowds for a ringside view of bathing and breakfast for some of the 200 species of birds that visit the Refuge over the course of the year.

Did I see a thousand geese? If you count the cacophonous announcing of unseen presence, I surely did. Too bad you can’t take an audio photo.

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I wish I knew the names of all the ducks, perhaps a new mission is to learn them. Here’s a start.

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Merganser

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Upside Down Duck

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American Widgeon

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Charlie’s Angels

The sweet sandpipers and the brilliant white gulls. How do they stay so clean?

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The Great Blue Heron. Really, is there a more cool bird? Certainly none better dressed. Or more photogenic.

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How the Great Blue got its name.

And a special treat, seen through my zoom lens and only because of the birdwatchers who have super human spotting abilities: a Great Horned Owl.

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I didn’t get the sunrise today; and the ebbing tide—halfway between high and low when I got there—revealed more mud, less water, than I had hoped for. I’ve never been there at high tide. But the Refuge is only a latte away; I can visit again and again. Once a month sounds about right. I’ll be watching the tide table and the forecast.

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Adventure Log: Willapa Bay

27 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in Adventure Log, writingdownthestory in Photograph

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

#adventurelog, #ilovewhereilive, Cape Disappointment, Discovery Trails, driving on the beach, Long Beach, North Head Lighthouse, Oysterville, Raymond on the Willapa, road trips, sloughs, Tokeland Washington, Washington Hwy 6, Washington rivers, Willapa Bay, Willapa Hills, Willapa River

After the weekend monsoon, it’s been a glorious week. I decide to play hooky from yoga on Thursday (though that also means no Daughter on Duty blog post and no Trader Joe’s for wine—which will be a crisis tomorrow) and take a road trip with CuRVy. I’ve been wanting to return to Willapa Bay, and on this beautiful autumn day it’s a no-brainer.

It was a sparkling diamond-studded hoar frost morning that day I went to Tokeland, on the north side of the bay, in 2013, and I was enchanted. I returned one other time with the summer crowds (less memorable) to visit Long Beach and Cape Disappointment on the south side of the bay (so named for a British fur trader’s failure to cross the Columbia in 1792, a few years before the arrival of Lewis and Clark).

The long, pencil-thin strand of Long Beach Peninsula—at 28 miles claimed to be the longest continuous sand beach in the United States— is Not My Beach, with its barren expanse of sand between ocean and bay providing a super highway for people loath to leave their vehicles. But I don’t go for the beach; I go for the drive through farm land and rolling hills. I go for the dots of small towns Highway 6 winds through: Adna, Meskill, Dryad, PeEll, Walville, Frances, Holcomb, Menlo, Willapa, Raymond, Nemah Junction, Naselle.

I start out—with my road trip latte, of course—under disappointing overcast skies, but with the promise of blue. As I turn west off the interstate, a few miles from home, I soon begin to see the sky clearing in the distance. Just west of Labam, I’m under a cloudless canopy.

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Willapa Hills

The beach is my destination only because that’s where the road ends, and I’m in no hurry to get there. As I cross the Chehalis River on Highway 6, I begin the 100 mile journey that crisscrosses waterways from creeks and sloughs (rhyming with through, not with tough, a testament to our confusing language) to rivers; all of them, however small, christened with a name as they make their unhurried meander to a confluence with the mighty Columbia or an escape into the Pacific Ocean. My mother—my favorite naturalist—tells me there are more varieties of birds and waterfowl in this area than in any one other place in the country.

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I pull off the road and walk to the bike/foot bridge over the Willapa River, part of the Discovery Trail system. I cross the Willapa River two more times, and the South Fork Willapa. I drive up to a hillside cemetery in the lingering thin veil of fog and gaze across the verdant valley of grazing cows to the sun shining a golden light on the tops of the Willapa Hills.

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Discovery Trail

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Willapa River

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“Willapa” is one of my favorite place names in this state of fabulous names. The inhabitants of the area clearly love it too. The largest town along the river is locally known as “Raymond on the Willapa”; and there are any number of businesses and parks named Willapa this and Willapa that.

The road crosses other rivers too: North Nemah, Mid Nemah, South Nemah, and Naselle; Bone, Niawiakum, and Palix. The sloughs: Skidmore, Potter, Caruthers, Stuart, Tide, Jorgenson, Teal, Greenhead, hop and skip with the creeks: Hope, Rock, Fern, Pinnock, Half Moon, Forks, Trap. It’s a perfect environment for cranberry bogs, and they are here too.

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I head to Oysterville first where blue meets blue, at the northern tip of the peninsula, at the urging of a friend, and realize I have been there before.

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Oysterville

I drive back south to Long Beach for lunch, then park at the access to the sea. I have no interest in being on the sand with the cars, but the Discovery Trail extends the entire length of this strip of land through the dunes to the rainforest at the southern end. I walk north on the boardwalk then down to the bike path and wander back through the grass on the footpaths. I can hear the pounding surf, but I can’t see the cars unless I top a dune. It’s a weekday, it’s not summer, there aren’t many cars; but still it would annoy me if I let it. I don’t, it’s too beautiful a day, and I feel no need to walk across the tire tracks to touch the glistening water.

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Long Beach

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Long Beach

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Long Beach

It’s mid-afternoon and I am tempted to return east to “Raymond on the Willapa,” then back west on the other side of Willapa Bay to Tokeland, a tiny fishing village (and casino, but that’s not my interest any more than the ocean is); I love the drive with more creeks and sloughs, and the old clapboard hotel. But I decide to go south instead to Cape Disappointment, at the peninsula’s southern end.

I remember, too late, my vow last time I was here and discovered trails through the rain forest and down to the driftwood beach, to make this a hiking destination. Head slap. And now I don’t have time, again. But I stop at the Beard’s Hollow overlook, then, making use of my annual Discovery Pass—that I finally find, not in the glove box with the broken latch, but in the drawer under the seat—I visit the North Head Lighthouse where I watch Coast Guard helicopter training maneuvers, and walk through a bit of the forest to Bell’s Overlook then on to another walk through forest and swamp to the dunes.

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Beard’s Hollow

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From Bell’s Overlook

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North Head Lighthouse

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Next time I will remember just to come to the Cape! But now it’s time to head back over the rivers, creeks, and sloughs to my home on the hill. What a day for a daydream. I love where I live.

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Willapa Bay

 

 

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Gretchen Staebler

Gretchen Staebler

I am a Pacific Northwest native transplanted to the southeast for 36 years. In 2012, I returned to my childhood home to live and care for my then 96-year-old mother. I am a writer, a hiker, and a back roads wanderer.

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