Leaving Stehekin for the season

Once again the season has come to an end and the time has come for us to leave Stehekin.  Here are a few last pictures of our season there and our way out.  Our view from our apartment there will always be unforgettable:

Playing around with an infrared filter, I had fun taking a few pictures, including this one of the Harlequin bridge, near where we lived last year:

When the Stehekin School came back into session for the fall, Kate and I put together some presentations for the kids.  First, we told about our time in Nicaragua and showed a video we made with the kids in El Jocote.  We also showed them pictures of us showing the el Jocote kids pictures of the Stehekin kids.

We also did an astronomy program with the kids.   Here we are with the solar telescope outside of the school:

There was a big lightning storm that I watched and photographed one night.  That red glow behind the mountains is a forest fire from some previous strikes.

That storm started over 100 forest fires that night.  A handfull of them turned into monster fires, burning tens of thousands of acres of forest around Wenatchee and Chelan.  We didn't see any of the fires, but the air in Stehekin was full of smoke our last couple weeks.  It made for interesting colors in the sky, though.

One of our friends and co-workers, Sonya, got married a couple days before we left.  Kate helped out by planning much of the ceremony and we all attended that beautiful day in the orchard:

For our departure, we decided to hike out to Highway 20, since we had never had the chance to do that before.  We took one of the longer routes, Park Creek Pass and Thunder Basin, about 32 miles total.  As we left Stehekin by foot, we ascended through smoky autumn hillsides:

And near the pass we hiked right up and out of the smoke:

Only the view back down the Park Creek basin towards Lake Chelan reminded us of the fires we were leaving behind:

The fall colors near the pass were incredible.  Kate's red backpack complimented the colors well as she hikes past Storm King mountain through a field of blueberries and mountain ash:

In the meadows near the pass, a bear came lumbering down the trail towards us.  We turned around temporarily and then had to yell and drop boulders in the streambed to scare it off of the path straight towards us. 

The larch trees, some of the few coniferous trees that lose their leaves in the winter,  were just starting to turn golden yellow:

The summit of our hike was a rocky and snowy U-shaped pass where we got our first glimpse of more  endless mountain ranges, this time on the west side of the divide:

Finally, we descended back into the temperate woods.  The ground was covered in moss, a sight we hadn't seen for a long time since living on the dry side:

Our last morning of the hike, we woke up to clouds hanging onto the slopes of Tricouni peak:

And near the end of the trail, at the head of Diablo Lake, we walked through an incredible grove of giant cedar trees.  Kate took a panorama shot up into the canopy with me next to the tree for scale.  The shot didn't stitch together perfectly, but you get the idea.  We'll leave it at that for now, but we are back home safe, visiting friends and family and getting ready for our next trip down to Central and South America.  And here's the tree, you'll have to scrroll down.  Adios! 

Planning next winter

We’re back in Stehekin this summer, and yes, it has been a while since we’ve written in the blog.  Our daily lives here are similar to last year, so there is not a lot new to tell about, but we do finally have our plans laid out for this winter, so we’ll start with that update.

On October 24, we fly to Nicaragua for just over a month.  A few entries back we talked about Finca Bona fide, an organic farm on Ometepe Island that impressed us with their restoration work and the community service, training, and education they do in the small town of Balgue.  We will begin by volunteering/interning with them for one month.  The typical day there consists of doing hard farm work in the mornings, with afternoons free to either relax or do community service—we’ll probably do a mix of the two.  Lunches are traditional fare made by locals and dinners are communal efforts shared by us, the interns.  If it sounds like a hippie commune, it may have a little of that flavor, but it will hopefully be a learning and cultural experience as well.  After our stay at the farm, we’ll have a week to visit some people in Nicaragua, most importantly the community of El Jocote, where we worked last year.  Here's a picture of the farm from last year:

On December 3^rd, we fly to Ecuador.  There, we will work for three months as reserve managers at Las Tangaras, a nature reserve in Mindo, a town sliced cleanly in two by the equator line, just west of the Capitol Quito.  Las Tangaras is a small reserve on the edge of a national park in Ecuador famous for its cloud forest biodiversity and world-class birds. The reserve has a small hike-in lodge, a few miles of trails, and some facilities to maintain including a potable water system, a generator, and some gas appliances.  Our job is to keep everything in working order, to accommodate visiting guests, and to keep the place supplied with food and fuel.  We’ll be the only ones living permanently there.  If anyone out there suffers from wanderlust and wants to visit us, we’d love to see you there! 

This will be our home for three months at Las Tangaras:

After finishing in Ecuador, we decided to travel through Colombia, since we’ll be so close.  So we booked tickets home, flying out of Bogotá, on March 14^th. 

After a couple weeks to get our affairs back in order and pay taxes, we’ll head to Bryce Canyon for the month of April, where we will be volunteering as astronomy rangers.  We met Bryce’s head “Dark Ranger” at our astronomy conference last year, who has developed a popular astronomy program there, and he invited us to help out for a while during their early season.  Then, assuming the feds have not cut our jobs in the North Cascades, we plan on returning to Stehekin for at least one more season. 

And what have we been up to this summer?  We’re doing the same programs as last year—Kate is doing her geology talks, and Jeff his plants and fire talks.  Kate is also developing a program on the Stehekin River, a fascinating but somewhat controversial topic here.  And Jeff traded with Kate in developing an astronomy/stargazing program (Kate did one last year).  Though not as many as last year, many people have come to visit us, including our mothers, niece Alex and her bf Nathan, Carol and the Rockettes, Jeff and Kristen, Betty whom we met in Nicaragua, my old roommate Jamie, and we have more family members coming in September. We’ve been backpacking on our own and with guests to Horseshoe Basin, North Fork, McAllister Pass, McGregor Mountain, and the Lakeshore Trail.  And we’ve been cooking a lot from scratch.  Culinary developments include tortillas produced from raw corn according to the traditional method that we shared in an earlier video, and we’re still working on perfecting the art of making peasant-style cheese (cuajada) from fresh cow’s milk. 

And here are just a few of the thousands of pictures we took this summer.  Here is jeff at his astronomy talk, showing constellations in the Milky Way with the laser sky pointer:

 Kate is hanging out on the deck during her informal demonstration about glaciers:

Here's Kate, Alex, and Nate on the Rainbow Creek trail viewpoint:

McAllister Pass trail:

 Us with Betty at North Fork:

Us at Horseshoe Basin:

A bear over Kate's shoulder near Basin Creek Camp:

Kate on the Lakeshore trail during a wet start to our hike:

That's it for now.  Maybe we'll post again before we migrate south in October, who knows?  We'll definitely be blogging when we get traveling again.  Always remember to look us up if you are in our area--we always love having visitors.

Cheers!

Eclipseiness

Whew!  These weeks between work are truly nuts.  In a good way, but they're still nuts.  The nutsiness has been compounded by Jeff starting work on time, just before Memorial Day weekend, and my paperwork delay, so I'm still unemployed for another week.

Mostly, for the last little bit, we've visited family.  It may not sound grand, but it is.  Why do we not take pictures of this?  We celebrated my last birthday before I'm 1/3rd of a century old (Jeff is -still- older), and Mother's Day with both mothers.  We had planned to have a party with both mothers together, but then nature interceded, and my mom got sick - so we celebrated separately.  Still fun!

Then, there was the solar eclipse.  I have never seen a solar eclipse before, and this may have been "just" an annular solar eclipse (Ring of Fire instead of a total blackout), but we decided it would be awesome enough to drive almost 1000 miles each way to see.  So we did.

The closest the eclipse would get to us was southwestern Oregon, but we didn't trust the weather there, so we decided to head for northeastern California.  That required driving through friendly territory - my friend Fawn had just moved to Portland:

 

where she re-introduced us to good (pretty?) coffee:

Then our friend Richard is just finishing up in Eugene:

where we got a very nice tour of town from him.  We also stopped by the West Eugene Wetlands and got a fantastic tour of the educational facilities there:

used to show why a plain-looking but unbelievably gorgeous wetland is worth saving:

The best bit of serendipity was finding camas, a plant that Jeff had yet to find the edible version of for his talk on Native American uses of plants:

Quite a pretty flower for being all useful and stuff.

After being social, it was time to move on to being National Park geeks.  Lava Beds National Monument, with its views and its campground, filled that slot.  Our North Cascades experience taught us to go to a high point for a view, so we went towards the hill on the left:

and we went up.  There was a pretty view and a pretty firetower - makes me almost want to be a fire scout.  Except now, they mostly don't exist.  Boo.  We got up to the top right before sunset, which made for some awesome pictures:

 There's our car! (bottom right):

So we got back after sunset, to a sausage and foil veggie dinner (veggies from the Saturday Market in Eugene!), where we ate babies:

baby carrots, that is.

The next day, we took our time looking around, then headed southeast for the current prediction's clear skies and good eclipse viewing.  We ended up pulling into the Honey Lake Rest Area near Susanville, CA.

We immediately saw other telescopes and cameras with fancy filters, and figured we were in the right spot.

Jeff had recently bought a solar viewing filter for our little regular telescope, plus a second solar-dedicated scope, and a mount that could be hand-controlled and hold both of them.  This was our first try setting them both up, so it was a trial by fire:

But whether they were set up well or not, they had great crowd draw:

although many people had different viewing methods:

Like just pointing binoculars backwards and using a screen (that's the whole shebang, folks!):

Then there was nature's viewer: leaves!  The easiest way to see a solar eclipse without blowing your eyes out is to make a pinhole in something (paper, whatever), and projecting an image through that pinhole onto a screen a few feet away.  Leaves naturally do this, just by overlapping.  At some point, about midway through the eclipse, someone went "WOW!  Look at the wall!"  The wall became our favorite general viewing apparatus:

As we got closer to the mid-point of the eclipse, we noticed that it had gotten dark enough to turn the parking lot lights on:

And then, center of the sun, ring of fire, unbelievable oh-my-lord-I-can't-believe-this-is-happening annular eclipse:

And then it was done.  As seen through the dedicated solar scope, PacMan:

PacMan with solar flares:

FIRE!

Ring of Fire and solar flares!  Ohmilord!

C is for cookie?

After all the excitement, the shadow wall started to seem artistic and stuff:

Did I mention there were fellow geeks around?  There were eclipse chasers, telescope freaks, and just plain astronomy fans.  We had a ton of fun meeting and greeting other folks who thought this kind of thing was worth driving many hours for.  And a couple even had t-shirts, which I tried to track down for purchase later, but couldn't:

That says "Susanville California, Annular Solar Eclipse, May 20,2012."  Aaaawwwweeeeesome...

Our time since has included entirely too much time in a car.  We drove from Lava Beds, CA to home (Nooksack, WA) on Monday, loaded up the truck and drove to Chelan, WA on Tuesday, got Jeff on the boat and I drove home Wednesday, and since he has been working and I have been packing and shopping.  Oh, yeah, and visiting my nephew.  CUUUUUTE!

Soon, I will be off to Stehekin as well, and the posts will be fewer and farther between.  We will have some more Nicaragua videos to upload and hopefully pictures of interesting things for another blog post, but that won't be for a while.  Does anyone else find it strange that we had better internet connection in Nicaragua than in Stehekin?  May I point out that Stehekinites prefer it that way, and that I'm glad that some corner of the US still thinks like that?

So adios, for now.  We'll type at you soon, and we all wish you well in whatever you may be doing right now.  Wish us well, if you would, in hiking off all the excess rice-and-beans-and-oil weight.