Red Rock Canyon: Landfill to Park

The eastern Colorado plains is a series of huge stationary swells moving west toward the Front Range, up and down, up and down. Where the swells meet the Rockies, they bunch up into shorter, steeper waves. In Colorado Springs the rock waves break into pieces against the mass of Pike Peak, sandstone exposed and standing … Read more Red Rock Canyon: Landfill to Park

May Flowers on Yellow Island

Eleven-acre Yellow Island lies south of Spring Point on southwest Orcas Island and west of Crane Island. In 1979 The Nature Conservancy acquired the island and administers it as a kind of laboratory to study the invasion of grassland by woody plants and how to resist or reverse it. So, for instance, the group does … Read more May Flowers on Yellow Island

Ice Age Floods and Steamboat Rock

Many times during the last ice age catastrophic floods unleashed by failing ice dams that created Lake Missoula in Montana raged across central Washington in waves 700’ high, scouring out canyons, redirecting rivers, creating huge scablands and moving huge Rocky Mountain boulders hundreds of miles west, some into the upper Willamette Valley in Oregon. J. … Read more Ice Age Floods and Steamboat Rock

Return to the Islands: An Introduction

Ballard, July 2019 Our return feels different Something was different this time going to Orcas and Crane Islands: we felt like tourists more than former residents; less connected, with warm memories of course, and dear friends but we were no longer island people. We had become city people. In February 2014 we had moved from … Read more Return to the Islands: An Introduction