Part of a Team

There are things in life that are unavoidable. You won't always like your roommates, or your coworkers... Unless you've been incredibly lucky like me. Through-out college and into my working life, I have had great roommates. And also, great, interesting coworkers. The ultimate of this combo was living and working with Leonie. You remember my long lost sister, Leonie?

This past year have I worked with a team of women. They're awesome women. And we like each other so much that we do things together outside of work! Brandon and I went backpacking for the first time (ever) with them, in the Boulder River Wilderness. It rained on and off for the whole trip. It was also warm. So between sweating due to trekking with the pretty minimal pack, and the on-off rain, by the time we hiked out I was soaked through. Despite this, spirits were high. And Brandon immediately began coveting backpacking gear...

Lots and lots of this saxifrage, and several gorgeous falls to be had

We spent a lot of time stopping and staring at falls, plants, mushrooms...

Nothing says WASHINGTON! more than low cloud cover

Ferns, especially deer ferns, were unfurling left right and center. It might be pertinent to mention that this was at the end of May...

 Wintergreen in bloom

Some sort of false morel

A how-to for a group photo: find slippery log bridge, have all of group stop and pose on logs... Katie, Claire, Le Otter, and Peter, Katie's husband.

 My favorite, fern-like moss

 More friendly fungus

Liverwort! Whole carpets of it in places. Clearly a very wet clime.

 Another saxifrage, with delightful and odd structures.

We picked a nice tree right on the river to camp under. I had a nightmare that the river rose several feet and was lapping at our toes... Fortunately that was not the case, in fact we stayed cozy and dry, the Otter and I, in my little one-man tent. We tried our best to coax a fire into being; unsurprisingly the result was a weak smoky thing. 

A dinner so tasty the Otter and I recreated it later at home: Pasta, pesto, smoked salmon and dried tomatoes. Mmmmm!

 Two color morphs of stink currant, pretty, but very much lives up to its name

Doing what I can with the poor camera, which amazing has survived all of my adventures thus far with very minimal complaint.

Lots of Oak ferns too

Lots of bunch berry, and some tiny lily-ish flower

The hike out was just... Damp. Regardless fun was had by all, and we have yet to be deterred (save perhaps by our lack or appropriate gear) to try backpacking more!

Much more recently we (Claire, Katie, and I, NSEA's AmeriCorps Team) were given the go-ahead to take a trip to the Elwha. We did many other things along the way, to make the most of our time on the peninsula. First we dropped by to visit a sister enhancement group, North Olympic Salmon Coalition (NOSC) and got to learn a little more about their work. Our tour guide also briefly showed us these amazingly detailed trading cards of plants, animals etc of the PNW. When all collected and put together, they created a map of the watershed and provided clues to find enormous cast bronze Dragon prints through-out the watershed. Pretty wild!

We went on to meet Fin, NOSC's rad, portable salmon. Inside of Fin is a mural of a healthy functioning PNW watershed. Much though we wished to climb inside to get a closer look, there was a grate over her mouth.

 Not every day you get to visit an enormous salmon!

 Next we visited Finnriver Farm & Cidery, a salmon safe farm with a restoration project along the creek running through the property (Chimacum Creek) There was even an interpretive trail with all kinds of signs...
 Also there were pigs.
On the other side of the creek there was a pen of pigs that we had been told about by one of the employees. A pen and a little lean-to told us we were in the right place. Then Katie called out 'piggies' and out trots one, then several snuffing, snorting pigs.
We hung out there a while taking in these wondrous creatures. Whether intentional or not on the farm's part, the pigs were grubbing out reed canary grass, one of the big bads of  the invasive plant spectrum here. Where the pen had once been, nothing remained but some grubbed down rushes where were already making a come-back. Go piggies, go!

 This one had a good wallow while we watched.

We then went on to a different part of Chimacum Creek, where we were told there was old growth spruce. We didn't find that, but we did find...

A bajillion caddisflies!
And a pretty dang healthy riparian ecosystem.

 We stopped at one of NOSC's near-shore habitat restoration projects at Discovery Bay, where some parts are complete and others are still ongoing.

And then we booked it down past Port Angeles at Salt Creek to claim a camp site. Then back into town to watch the pre-release of a documentary focused on Elwha dam removal and restoration project. It was called Return of the River, and it was quite interesting, doing its very best to inform viewers of all 'sides' of the project.
That night we were harassed by a couple raccoons that were thoroughly convinced that what was ours was consequentially theirs as well. One got as far as sneaking onto the picnic table behind us (it was full dark), and only gave itself away because it crinkled something. Did my very best to give it a de-taming whack with my marshmallow roaster, but missed, it being full dark and all. Anywho, the tidepools at Salt Creek are pretty phenomenal. I could have spent many, many hours there.

 Juvenile harlequin?

 Incredible density of mussels

 A limpet, limpeting away

 A huge colony(?) of tube worms, or at least their tubes, and so many chitons!

 How many sculpins do you see?

 There were several sea-stars that looked healthy, which was grand!

 Our exploring was cut short by the need to return to Port Angeles to meet up with my old boss, Josh, who kindly let us tag along on a tour for the day. The upper dam site and surrounding area is still closed and the dam is not completely removed yet.
The green thickets are almost all natural regenerating alders, 7-8 feet tall already.

 Looking upriver... so many alders!

 Some of the alders are dying back in spots, maybe too wet, maybe something else?

 Its just as beautiful as I remembered, and even more so now with these lush green upper terraces!

 Yarrow was part of the seeding mix that has been broadcast multiple times.

 Wild blue rye, holding the sediment in place and helping create soil! This seeding is one I took part in, albeit further back  in the reservoir bed. In areas like here, it was very dense and made my heart sing. Slowing sediment entering the river, adding biomass to the infant stages of the soil, bringing insects and birds, animals to eat eats, vegetation...

 A lot of the raspberries are doing remarkably well. In fact the plants being monitored for part of a study had shown very low over-all mortality rate. But these suckers in particular are shooting off every which way, laden with fruit. Again the slowing of overland water/sediment flow, but in particular attracting all kinds of animals to feed on and disperse seeds to encourage further spread of these tasty berries. It was so encouraging to see plants thriving in these minimal conditions. And to see something that I had a teeny tiny itty bitty part in being successful is pretty powerful. I often let the negatives cloud my sight, this provided a particularly powerful confirmation of the positives, not only in my singular personal life, but in the world as a whole.

 Oregon sunshine and lupine, part of a subsequent seeding project. I can't wait to see what this terrace looks like in a few years, a field of blue and yellow!

 We were let loose to explore.

 Some of these are human-planted, lots of these are nature-planted cottonwoods, hundreds and hundreds of them. Who knows what will happen as the water table fluctuates, but for now they are just dandy.

 Layer upon layer of sediment that was deposited over the 80 year time period. This cut was formed by Boulder Creek re-establishing it's route down the river bottoms to the Elwha.

 The wind can get pretty powerful through the valley, some plants get uncovered. Some nice young women stop to cover the exposed roots back up.

 So much new vegetation!

 Looking downriver to the dam, cottonwood seedlings by the dozens

 A rush with pinkish purple flowers

 Knee deep in rushes and horsetail. It was a beautiful moment.

 Fleabane starting to bloom, showy purple flowers dotting the vivid green backdrop

 The river has moved tons (literally) of sediment since last I was there a little more than a year ago. Only a little is left of the 200+ ft dam.

 This blog was going to be a lot sappier. About how we work well as a team and have pretty great dynamic going. But you have to be pretty special to get a blog written about you. So thank you Katie and Claire for sharing your love for the natural world, and making this year so great!