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A Short Visit to the West/Green Side

Last weekend I had a wedding to photograph at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake. It’s a beautiful location and a terrific venue for a wedding. There are rooms for guests to stay and wonderful food – much of it locally sourced. Diablo Lake is just over the crest of the North Cascades via Highway 20. It is one of three dammed reservoirs on the Skagit River and its color is a wonderful turquoise from the glacial runoff of the high mountains. To get to the learning center, you have to cross Diablo Dam, an old structure, quite unlike the dams of the Columbia River. Sunday morning we had a nice hike to Sourdough Falls before returning home.

Dams were built prettier in those days.
Looking straight down
Can you imagine what the Skagit River was like before the dams?
I hate to see dogs lumped in with guns and smoking.
Sweet looking berry growing by the trail
my new friend
Rock stairs near the end of the trail
Shadows on wet rocks
A spent mayfly
Tiny little garden tucked into the rocks
Sourdough Falls
Big growth rings

Fire, Flood, and New Growth

We drove up Lester Road and walked to Campbell Lake yesterday. This is an area that burned in the Cougar Flats Fire, part of the immense Carlton Complex of wildfires started by lightning last month. This is the fire we could see from our house. Photos of it burning are here. We got home just as the next big rain storm with thunder and lightning was beginning.

These aspens are already sprouting new growth from the roots.
The patterns of green and burned are pretty amazing.
aspens
A huge mudslide that followed the last big rain event.
The rocks of Pipestone Canyon.
I think this is snowberry
New lupine growth!
What triggered this serviceberry to start blooming?
Rosehips – good food for the birds.
Chokecherries that survived the fire
We drove farther up Lester Road to get a closer look at the mud slide
Can you see MA and the dogs?
Snowberry?
Snowberry?
Currant
Yesterday the surface was parched dry and cracked
A spot of color
Yesterday’s storm turned out to be another wild one causing far more destruction to homes and roads.

American Kestrel

This male American Kestrel perched near our bird feeders this morning searching for a meal. Since most of our hillside is blackened and many of the small mammals were killed in the fire, it makes sense that birds of prey might be hanging around our house. Chipmunks, gophers and mice have found some refuge in our ‘green’ spot. I am happy to see the kestrel as well as the Great-horned Owls that we’ve seen and heard after dark. We don’t want to be overrun with these small mammals.

The American Kestrel also eats small birds and insects. It is North American’s smallest falcon. Its eyes are huge for the size of its head and that makes it an effective predator. They are cavity nesting birds and will use nest boxes. Our neighbor has built two or three boxes specifically for kestrels and this bird may have used one earlier this year. I know that at least one box was active. This species has sexually dimorphic plumage, meaning that the male and female look quite different. These images were made looking through the dining room window.

Scanning the sky for something to pursue
He turned his head a full 180 degrees
And there he goes

Something to Celebrate

Sky had her first birthday yesterday! Where did the time go? Do you remember when we first brought her home? What happened to that cute little puppy? She’s still adorable and we love her to pieces and she’s a pretty good dog.

So what to do? How about a party? We invited dogs and their friends to an evening picnic on the lake featuring sticks, lots of sticks. People even brought her fresh sticks since they knew her sticks burned or were covered in soot. We discovered that she can retrieve sticks from the lake longer than we can throw them. I’ll bet she jumped in the water close to 100 times last night. She’s tired today but still ready for agility practice. We walked, biked and boated to this sweet beach and had a very nice evening.

Happy Birthday Sky!

Traveling in style to the party
Jennifer could not be here but she sent along the birthday tiaras anyway
The one image that features all seven dogs
Luna wants to know what all the fuss is about
Sweet Mavi is 14
Little Bear
Here, I brought two of them!
A lovely evening on Patterson Lake

Photo Points

We are in the clean up process of recovering from the fire. We know that our landscape will continue to reflect the fire’s effects for as long as we live here. Many of our beloved ponderosa pines will not live. Some will. Most of the shrubs are gone. A few will sprout back and seeds spread far and wide by birds and other animals will sprout in the spring. Grasses will return too. We have an opportunity to watch these changes and document them. It will be exciting as we see each new green thing poke through the ash. So far I am mostly seeing invasive grass and knapweed but yesterday I found a wild rose coming up on the edge of the road.

I am going to make photos from three photo points that I have selected for as long as I feel like the changes are occurring. I did this at my neighbor’s place starting two years ago and it was fascinating to compare the images taken just months after the fire. Here, I have selected a point at the bottom of our draw looking up at several boulders that we didn’t even know were out there; the brush was so thick they were completely obscured. A second photo point looks down a hill that was once covered with bitterbrush and at the bottom is our neighbor’s garage which burned in the fire. It will be fun to see the ruins disappear and the new garage emerge. The third point looks down on the bench of land in front of our house and across the valley bottom too. That bench of land had some of our biggest weed problems and we hope to work hard on a restoration project across that flat to bring back the natives and once again enjoy watching the deer as they make their way across there in the evening.

I started out with wooden stakes but they were too short plus a certain labrador retriever was very interested in them. Yesterday I replaced those with rebar.

Photo point 1

High winds knocked the needles off of the pine trees
We had heavy rains causing some erosion
Looking back. Sometimes there will be dogs.
I replaced the wooden stakes with rebar yesterday.

 

Photo point 2

 

Photo point 3