MISTY MORNINGS AND A MUSTANG.

A wild mustang occupies the other side of the fence from my front yard in Oregon, where my son built me a house.

I was lucky to find Susan Scott to work with me, painting and cleaning out my storage building. She also hand-picked designated  weeds for me, since I don’t spray anything poisonous on my property. She was helping me get a picture of this wild horse, who won’t hold still for a picture.

She dropped the carrot, but I caught the tattoo on the horse’s neck from the BLM round-up and sale. She is temporarily pastured here to munch down the weeds and she is doing a good job. Why I didn’t take time to shoot the work we did? My brain doesn’t always function on all four cylinders.

Saturday morning turned out to be cool and I started for home late, after 8 a.m. and dawdled, enjoying the beautiful mists that drape the mountain sides surrounding Evans Valley.

My neighbors get mists like these since they live on the river side of the road.

Beauty that burns off within a couple of hours.

About the time I snapped this photo, the weather report warned of snow over the pass and I had to quit dawdling and press the metal.

Then I had to stop again for this photo. I’ve never seen Mt. Shasta surrounded by a ring of clouds.

Glimpses of Shasta poke through periodically as you drive. The best view is from Weed Airport, on the opposite side of the freeway.

The mist lifted as I got within range. Even from the wrong side of the freeway, with the light shining on my camera’s viewing screen, I took the picture out the window-blind. She is a stunning piece of nature and I have better pictures of her than this. I have to return in a couple, maybe three weeks, to finish the storage building. I need the sheet rock taped and textured and painted before the electric fixtures are installed. I finished the inside because it was so hot in the afternoons and freezing in the mornings. It stored things, but no one could work inside of it. When finished, my building will have a place to rinse brushes and plug-in and use power tools.

The Evans Valley is turning into a very popular place for permanent residences and I keep meeting new neighbors every trip I take. Like Susan.  I also brought home with me a new boyfriend. More, tomorrow.

CLALLUM BAY, SEIKU, FISHING PARADISE

We are camped at Clallum Bay. The weather was beautiful and we walked out on what the locals call an agate beach. From this sand spit we could see nearby Sekiu, pronounced see-Q, across the bay.

The waves bring up piles of polished stones. You could pick them up by the handful. It is very pretty and an excellent place to kayak. But, we found no place to rent a kayak.

We walk over a bridge to get to the beach. A channel of clean, shallow water flows on the land side of the sand spit, which is where I had hoped to kayak.

We drove the short distance to Sekiu and looked down on their fishing fleet.

Each one of these long plank piers has a fish cleaning station.

The gulls wait for any little morsel the cleaners drop or throw to them.

Then they bring it to the water’s edge and fight over it.

Most of the campers come her to fish. They bring in King Salmon and we saw it at a fish house for $6 a lb. Unbelievable. Unfortunately, they were closed. A note on the door explained:  Closed “Dale is gone… ” couldn’t read where he was gone from the car window. Hope to get salmon today.

Right in the marina parking lot are three huge “stacks.” The sea eroded the land around them. This harder block of rock, didn’t wash away. But it tells you how deep the soil was and how much of it washed into the water.

On the road here, multiple logging trucks, whiz by loaded with what looks like toothpicks. The locals say they haul them to Port Townsend to be shipped to China. It seems wrong to me, and one guy we talked to, that we ship our natural resources to China and leave the locals looking at clear cuts for such skinny trees.

This clear-cut, taken from the moving M.Home is much uglier than shown. I didn’t get the  huge mounds of graying cut slash. It seems stupid to let China have our wood to make stuff and sell it back to us, when we are threatened by forest fires and cutting down our carbon sink. Right now it is the freshest, cleanest air you can breathe. Hope it stays that way.

I don’t vote in Washington, but it seems to me a serious enough issue to rate National Curbs on cut size and method. My rant for the day, I guess.

 

 

 

AMERICA’S BEST ROAD

From Mary’s Desk”

Someone may quarrel about what road is America’s best road, but for Jim and I,  its the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Dr.  Despite the rain and the mists and the haze (partly from air pollution), we hated to descend into the land of stoplights, sirens, traffic and, well, life in the fast lane.

Our last night, at Big Meadows Campground was bathed in light after the rain of the previous day. Wooded campsites, knee deep in wildflowers, spacious and comfortable. Our lovely temporary yard.

On the road, bicyclers and motor cycle enthusiasts were out in numbers. We never heard loud motor cycles. Its as though their machines recognize the wonder of this peaceful drive.

We stopped at the Big Meadow Visitors Center. The Big Meadow is visible outside the window where 11 deer were grazing. When the Shenandoah National Park was under construction, the construction crews and one  CCC Camp set up in this big meadow. This park had five CCC Camps working here. The first CCC Camp was nearby, as an experiment, to see how the project would work. It worked very well and gave some of the mountain people that lived in the park, employment as well. It was a time when hog cholera, the depression, and a horrible drought hit the area and many mountain people appreciated the work though not the eminent domain that eventually took their lands.

Shenandoah was built with more private funds from the states than government funds. A government parks commission, made up of movers and shakers, along with Virginia’s Governor Byrd, got the project moving when they invited President Hoover to visit the area. He was “hooked”. An avid trout fisherman, he loved the area and bought 165 acres and built a cabin on it. The cabin was a four mile hike in and we didn’t visit it although its available to visitors and is part of the park system now.

The Massanutten Resort, built in the late 1800’s, was one of the most popular places for the affluent people to escape the nearby cities where population was swelling and automobiles were everywhere. The first national parks were in the west, where nature was preserved and population was thin. It was a new concept to make a park so near the heavily  populated city areas. The ridge line road  was carved out of these Eastern mountain ranges, yet still preserves nature in all of its glory, quite a feat. The Appalachian Trail was realigned in some places to make way for the motor cars, and what we have is a grand place with over 500 miles in hiking trails, campgrounds, beautiful rivers, waterfalls, overlooks to horizon to horizon mountain views, and peace-giving nature not far from the cities.

We saw part of the Appalachian Trail and many backpack laden walkers using this great resource. The beauty of it is that you can walk it all or just a short part of it on a weekend.

We were saddened to see it come to an end. Back to the world of traffic and noise and all those things we can’t do without. A laundromat, a wonderful Martin’s Grocery Store in Front Royal where you can buy already prepared foods, and good bread. And, best of all, a visit with Glen and Karen Littlefield, with new grandbabies, I’ve never met.