Soggy fun

We spent the weekend in Newport, OR with some darn awesome ol' buddies - Mike and Jennifer! I've known them since 2000 when I first started working with them in Glacier Bay and Jay first became friends with them on a 5-day paddle up the bay in 2003. We haven't seen them since their wedding a few years ago - jeez. Too long. We consumed only a few beers each night and spent the day wandering around in a soggy and gorgeous rainforest. They also dragged us to the Rouge Brewery where we were vastly overwhelmed by the choices of tasty beer and spent almost more time deciding what to drink than drinking.

This was an awesome day hike - filled with HUGE trees, loads of rain, and great friends.

On our way home we drove up a tiny bit of the northern Oregon coastline. It was filled with as many saltwater taffy and fudge bars as you would expect in the occasional cheesy east coast beach towns. BUT - what a coast!! Just like the east coast, cheesy beach towns here give way to beautiful open space and coastline. Some parts of it even reminded us of the outer Cape! The cliffs just might be a bit higher here. And there is a rainforest. =)

Fantastic weekend, too bad they are not just a bit closer to us! But there are loads of protected bits of land to explore halfway between Anacortes and Newport. You will have to stay tuned to find out what kind of adventures we get into this summer with Mike, Jennifer, and Denali the wonder dog.

Olympic National Park

Wow. We spent the weekend over on the Olympic Peninsula and now we are hoping to go back and spend many, many, many weekends over on the Olympic Peninsula. What a magic place! It didn't start out great though - when we arrived at the ferry terminal on Friday evening we found out that the ferry was canceled due to high winds. Hmmmm.... how to get there? We ended up driving around part of Puget Sound and taking two other ferries to get there. But we got there! And it only got better from that point on. This national park is quite famous for all the rain it gets - and here is where we got lucky! It was sunny! Sort of, a type of WA sunny. But unreal and grand nonetheless. We were given wonderful views of the Olympic Mountains and sun rays shining through the Hoh Rainforest inside the park. A real treat, especially for my poor Mom and Dad who had been stuck with gray, rainy weather since they arrived.

We also saw a bunch of Roosevelt elk - a surprise! We totally didn't expect this and yet, there they were, grazing right along the side of the road. We had great views right from our car, a true national park moment. Ha! No hiking involved. Some schmuck in the car in front of us decided to get out and walk right up to them though - scaring them and sending them a bit further away. My yelps at the dumb dude didn't seem to bother him....why must people harass wildlife?

Moss paradise in the Hoh Rainforest

Barber #1, 2, and 3 plus a Dimond. Huge Sitka spruce.

Bigleaf maple covered in moss

This was the other super awesome moment from the park! An American dipper!! Yahoo! Now, I'm an east coaster - so this was a totally new bird for me. It is the only songbird that will regularly swim in fast-flowing rivers, chowing on aquatic insects. We watched two individuals swimming, dipping, and doing a cute little dance/bob on the rocks when they got out. Very VERY cool. If you go to my Picasa album you can see a video of this little bird.

On our way back to the ferry, we stopped at Dungeness Spit - a national wildlife refuge. We didn't have the 5 hours it would take to walk to the end of the spit and back, but we enjoyed the long beach and the views of the horned grebe offshore. After leaving the spit, we took the ferry back to Whidbey Island and headed home to Anacortes. The ferry ride was a wildlife sighting mecca! Not only did we spot harbor porpoises, but there were a bunch of Rhinoceros auklets!!! As Jay would say... "oh my word" (in a southern accent). That was another new bird sighting for us and a very exciting one. Anyway, it was our first weekend leaving the nugget cats and we were sooo happy to arrive home to find them in one attention-craving piece. The next day, Monday, I brought my parents to the airport and now they are safely back east giving their own cats some needed love.

Here is a picture from earlier this week of my mom and me at the Lime Kiln Lighthouse, San Juan Island.

While the folks were here we bottled our beer.

Julie and the kitties.

Lots of photos are on Julie's Picasa site!

Barber visit!

I don't have a lot of time to write about what we have been up to this past week, but I believe my parents bring great birding luck with them (great baldie views, varied thrush, pileated woodpecker, loons, creepers, grebes, etc). Their weather luck, however, has not been that good. No sun since they arrived, but clear sunny days abounded for weeks before they arrived. Tomorrow we will head over to San Juan Island for a day trip and then we are going to the Olympic Peninsula for the weekend! We have been working hard at making sure we visit every brewpub we can find. This is tough work, but someone must sample all the local brews. More stories later!

Funny kitties

Lester is a real lover boy, he knows when I'm sick of writing cover letters and comes to cover me with kisses. I caught this moment on our web cam.

Here is Darwin after catching "Da Bird" - he really treats it like prey that he has caught and he doesn't like it when Jay gets too close to his "dinner". Turn up your volume. =)

Lester is loopy. Did we mention that he farts A LOT? Especially when you get him going, the room fills with these exquisite odors......ahhhhhhh.

Wimpy Washington

The people in Anacortes crack me up. This is where I get to puff my chest and say "I'm a proud east coaster" because these folks are wimps! When it comes to snow that is.... So, we got a few flurries yesterday. And today, probably about 1/4 inch of fluffy and gorgeous snow covered the roads and the ground. Hours later and it is already gone!

But this morning when I headed off to the post office and the pool it was really snowing. At the post office everyone was whining and complaining and fussing over the snow. Two middle-aged dudes in line were talking about "global warming" and how it clearly is a farce (obviously they missed the bit about how climate CHANGE can also mean more extreme weather, the snow in Anacortes actually serving as a perfect example). All the lovely old women at the pool were freaking out about driving (the roads were fine, covered with a dusting of snow, but not slippery) and blabbing about having to pull their long underwear out again. It is very obvious they come from an area that really doesn't get much snow ever. So I walked around listening to all these conversations with a funny smirk on my face. I know and love snow because I grew up with it. So I usually know when the roads are O.K. and when they are not great. But these folks don't really understand snow, the state doesn't even own plows in many of the coastal towns, coastal Washingtonians don't know how to drive in snow, and mostly they see the flakes as a big nuisance rather than a beautiful fluffy treat. I must say, I'm quite happy about the snow and sad to see that it is already gone.


Moving along to another note. Jay and I headed back over to Deception Pass State Park for some more exploring. We saw some great birds! Does anyone care about our bird sightings that reads this blog? I could blab about birds forever. Here is who we saw on our walks: red-necked grebe (YAHOO!), bald eagles (everywhere), ravens, brown creeper, a kinglet (probably golden-crowned), goldeneye, buffleheads, great blue heron, laysan albatross (just kidding, making sure you are awake), red-breasted merganser, pigeon guillemot, and more ring-necked ducks. We checked out the campground in the park too because it looked really nice. It is only about a 20-minute drive from our house, so it would seem silly to camp there, but it was so awesome!! We may just have to camp there anyway. And finally, we headed off to some rocky intertidal areas so Jay, who works five days a week with anemones, could look at anemones on his day off. What a guy! On his way to the anemones he practically stepped on a snoozing Steller sea lion. She (we think) alerted us to her presence with a snap of the neck, a slow blink, and a gaze in our direction. We were obviously not worthy of further attention because she went right back to sleep. Then we were treated to quite a sunset, freezing arses, and baldies chattering overhead.

Red-necked grebe. Bad shot, cool bird!

Quick! Find the snoozing sea lion!

Panoramas from New Zealand

Here are some panoramas from New Zealand that we put together over the past week. We have even more and those will be uploaded to my Picasa account sometime in the next month. Since we have over 3300 pictures from New Zealand, putting together a "best of NZ" slideshow is proving to be a time-consuming project!

Stewart Island - one of the few places where the forest is untouched in New Zealand

Maori meeting house

Jay and view of Nelson Lakes NP

Jay, after hiking into Nelson Lakes NP and a wonderful hut (in the distance)

Julie giving some love to a massive kauri tree

Conservation land in our own backyard

One of the BEST aspects about where we live is that we are a two minute walk from conservation land. If you couldn't hear the roads, you could almost imagine that you were in a pristine wilderness! Cranberry Lake is gorgeous, we hear in the summer you can even jump off the rocks into a deep pool and there are no leeches. I'm done with leeches after Nepal. It snowed last week and I went out for a wander around the lake. This weekend Jay and I went for a longggg walk around parts of the land we had not explored yet. Both days involved some serious treats for us little baby birders. Maybe ring-necked ducks are common around here, but we have never seen them before. What a great view and a really striking bird. Almost every time we come to the lake we are able to see hooded mergansers. And we saw two wood ducks this weekend! I don't think either one of us has ever seen a wood duck before, so we just sat on a bench and stared through our binoculars as long as we could at this gorgeous bird. Little wrens twirped around us and I even heard a varied thrush, bringing back memories of Glacier Bay. A bald eagle flew down toward the lake while we were watching the wood ducks - causing a commotion among all the buffleheads and other ducks, even the ravens added in a squawk or two to express their displeasure at the arrival of this large predatory bird. We were pretty happy with all these sightings. Backyard birding!

Cranberry Lake with snow (above) and no snow (below)

Ring-necked ducks

Hooded merganser

Sadly, the wood ducks were close enough to view with binoculars, but not for a photograph. You will just have to imagine all the colors!!