Dry Ice Factory

I took another one of my trips out to La Push on the Olympic Peninsula, by way of Astoria, where I like to go to drink beer. It was good to get away from work, which has continued to be very stressful, but one of the things I unfortunately discovered is that my levels of anxiety continue to be very high after reaching catastrophic levels this past summer. One effect was that I wasn't able to do much hiking, because heavy exertion just seemed to amp up my nervous system. Very weird, because I would've expected it to be a release, but it seemed to have the opposite effect.

In any event, I did hike down Rialto Beach one day and spent some time sitting in the sun, which felt great. That's where I captured the picture above -- one of those storybook images the Olympic National Forest is so adept at presenting. The weather was unexpectedly sunny Sunday through Wednesday, but then on Thursday a storm blew in and dumped a ton of rain -- so much water that the river flooded, trapping me at the resort for an extra day. Although it threw me off my stride a bit having to juggle my plans, I wasn't too upset by having another day to read and lollygag.

Now I need to figure out how to get my stress levels under control. I actually don't think the causes of stress in my life right now are nearly as bad as they were in August, so I'm a little confused to find myself feeling so anxious. I suspect my nervous system still hasn't fully recovered from the earlier overload.

Over the past few years I've sort of lost interest in Potlatch -- the small, literary science fiction convention founded to, amongst other things, support Clarion West. For that matter, even at times when I was more interested I only went to one of them in California. (Potlatch has traditionally alternated years between Seattle and the Bay Area, with two or three stops in Oregon as well. I went to the one in Eugene.) In recent years it has seemed that the convention was on its last legs, but so far someone has always stepped up at the last moment to keep it going. This year, for the 23rd in the series, it was Tom Becker and a band of hearty, hard-bitten Bay Area veterans. I wasn't going to go, but then Spike told me that the Fishlifters would be there. Well, shit. I couldn't pass up a chance to see the Fishlifters! So a week ago Thursday I flew to San Jose, and I'm so glad I did. In fact, this was as much fun as I've had at a Potlatch since I can't remember when.

( Hither and not far from yon )

Beach reading

This time it just sort of happened without my planning on it. A couple of weeks ago it occurred to me to ask for Friday the 15th off to give myself a nice four-day weekend, what with today being President's Day and a holiday. I didn't really have anything on my mind other than thinking it would be nice to have some time off. A few days after that I thought to myself, "Well, since you've got a four-day weekend, maybe you should go out to La Push again. There's no better place to get away from everything that demands your attention." Brilliant idea! I only made my reservations at the Quileute Oceanside Resort last weekend, and by then there was only one room in the motel available for the three nights I wanted. Hm. In the past I've always gone during the middle of the week, and there haven't been many other people around. Sounded like it was going to be a full house this time.

( More details and photos ... )

Fanboy that I am, my latest obsession -- the Olympic peninsula -- has driven me to read books. First up was The Olympic Rain Forest: An Ecological Web by Ruth Kirk with Jerry Franklin (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1992). This is a terrific large format book with many beautiful color photos and an extremely informative exploration of the rain forests on the peninsula, which as I've mentioned before are some of the rare remaining temperate rain forests on the planet. My two recent visits to the peninsula left me with proliferating questions about the forests, and this book answered a whole lot of them.

I think the last time I wrote on this topic, after my last visit, I was still grappling with how many rain forests there are out there. This book confirms that there are four main ones, each located in a river valley on the western slopes of the Olympic mountains. The four rivers are the Bogachiel, the Hoh, the Queets, and the Quinault. The geological description of the river valleys is fascinating, as well as the sense I got of how the rivers tie the forests to the ocean. Kirk writes about how these forests produce as much biomass as any tropical rain forest, and the sheer fecundity of these areas is awesome. How is it that I was blind to this nearby wonderland until now? There's a lot more mammalian wildlife out there than I imagined, from common Pacific Northwest animals like elk, deer, black bear, cougar, bobcat, otters, chipmunks, raccoons and such to relatively exotic species such as flying squirrels, martens (which can apparently travel miles through the canopy), water shrews and snow moles. Then there are the invertebrates, amphibians, fish, birds, insects, epiphytes, and fungus. The section on fungus alone was mind-blowing.

There's also a bit of human history, both of the Indian tribes who arrived on the peninsula about 12,000 years ago and of the white settlers who started really exploring the area in the 1880s. I'm curious to read more about this history as well, which I think I'll get in the book I just started, Olympic National Park: A Natural History by Tim McNulty (University of Washington Press, 2009). McNulty writes, for example, about the Seattle Press expedition of 1889, which was the most famous expedition into the heart of the Olympic mountains -- still, at that late date, terra incognita to settlers. McNulty's account of the geology of the mountains makes my brain hurt, although it's also full of fascinating details such as his description of how rivers shape the ocean floor:

As river deltas stacked higher and steeper, earthquakes regularly triggered massive collapses. Undersea landslides of sediment peeled off deltas and flowed out over the shelf onto deep ocean floors in dense riverine slurries called turbidity currents. These undersea rivers formed channels and fans across the deep ocean floor. Propelled by the density of sediment-heavy water, they flowed in some cases for hundreds of miles. The current Cascadia channel, fed by the Fraser, western Olympic and Columbia rivers, extends 1,300 miles across the Pacific Ocean basin.

"Dense riverine slurries called turbidity currents." Again, I'm getting a strong feel for how the immense downpour of rain in this area, particularly along the coast, shapes both the land and the ocean. Amazing stuff.

Meanwhile in today's Seattle Times there's an obituary that ties into all this: Carsten Lien had deep love for the Olympic Mountains. Amongst other things, Lien wrote another book that would probably be worth digging up, Olympic Battleground: The Power Politics of Timber Preservation, which the Times article describes as 'a landmark book on the forests of Olympic National Park and the fight to save them from logging.' Even more intriguing is this tidbit: 'When Mr. Lien wanted to learn how to use Microsoft Word, he taught it to himself by copying the Seattle Press edition recounting the 1889-90 Press Expedition, the first documented crossing of the Olympics, word for word. That book, "Exploring the Olympic Mountains," also brought together accounts of many other explorers' bushwhacking into the mountains he loved so well.'

Somehow I don't think my pile of books To Be Read is going to get any shorter.