Fidalgo Island Crossings
Life and Living on South Fidalgo Island, Washington
Visit the blog »
November 16Living on the Edge Everyone knows that Western Washington is a land of rain. It is also a land of rivers, which may be less well-known. In fact, we have so many large river systems flowing into Puget Sound, that its waters are less salty then the ocean. Once in a while these characteristics, rain and rivers, collide to produce some big problems. During late fall and winter, very warm and wet tropical weather systems called “Pineapple Expresses” can come in off the Pacific and dump several inches of rain in a short time. When they hit, you can almost smell the frangipani and white jasmine. The warm temperatures may also cause a rapid snow melt in the mountains. Heavy rain and melting snow means rivers going out their banks. We had one such storm last week. It was not a large system, but three or four of our rivers decided to explore the insides of some area homes and businesses. Over three days, up to five inches of rain fell in some parts of lowland Puget Sound. Back on South Fidalgo, heavy rains bring different concerns for some of us. During these events, we start watching the ground. Puget Sound is rimmed by cliffs and hillsides which are some of the most coveted home sites in the area. When the hillsides become water-soaked, they have a tendency to move. I had personal experience with this phenomenon a few years ago. The record Anacortes, Washington rainfall for the month of November occurred in 1990 and I remember it well. 10.67 inches fell which is almost half of the usual precipitation for an entire year. A month later, December 30th to be exact, I was rousted out of bed at 0330 in the morning. The dog was having a fit. Half a dozen firemen on the front porch informed me that a landslide was occurring and I had to leave immediately. No debating; get the dog, pack some things and get out! At the time, I thought a landslide meant everything suddenly went whoosh. This slide took several weeks. Our good fortune was having a geologist among our neighbors. He provided valuable and reassuring information about what was going on. We were experiencing a “rotational slump.” Basically the heavy rains made the hillside unstable. A curved section of the hill rotates forming a terrace at the top with a scarp behind it. The toe of the slide comes up out of the ground at the base. Here, the toe was out in the bay and was quickly eroded away by tidal action. The signs of past slides were in plain sight. We were amazed to discover several of these slump terraces all around us. Ironically, they make ideal building sites. The entire Salmon Beach neighborhood near me sits on one of them. He revealed another sign, the bent trunks of our hundred year old Douglas firs. The bases of the trunks curve back into the hillside, while the tops of the trees are straight. In the past, the ground rotated and tilted the trees, but as they grew, they straightened themselves. Some of the big trees on my property curve in different directions, revealing a complex pattern of past ground movement. Yippee! I apparently inhabit a slightly deranged forest. Only a corner of my property was affected by the 1990 slide. I live just outside of the area designated unstable. In the end, only one family had to leave their home permanently. Most of the rest of us are still here, with our homes a few inches to five feet closer to the beach. The county made several improvements in how surface water is handled to mitigate future events. Nevertheless, when Hawaii sends her weather, we cast a wary eye to to the ground around us. Images: Wa Dept of Ecology, USGS6:49 PM GMT | Read comments(0)November 04Now I’ve Been to the Mountaintop Please allow me to go off topic for a moment. Something wonderful has just happened and I want to talk about it. Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States of America. The historical magnitude of this event is taking my breath away. Today, all Americans can hold their heads up with unabashed pride. I am old enough to remember Martin Luther King and his times. I wish he was here to see this. It is a cliché and quite unoriginal to proclaim, the long national nightmare is over. But it has been long, it truly was a nightmare and with this election, it is definitely over. The bad dream did not begin eight years ago. This country went dark in 1980. It only reached a self-destructive crescendo during the last eight years. Bad ideas, incompetence, arrogance, deception, greed, a perverse orthodoxy, an absence of leadership and doctrines of evil have nearly destroyed us. Then there is the astonishing debt we have accumulated with nothing to show for it. Let’s hope it doesn’t take 28 years to repair all of the damage. The Promised Land is in sight, but my thoughts and concerns now turn in a different direction. I beseech the Almighty to protect this good man and his family. Allow him to complete the mission he has been called to carry out, and to set this nation on a course to greatness again.9:05 PM GMT | Read comments(1)October 18Star Date: 5,000,002,008 There are many ways to measure time. Anything that has a constant rhythm can be used as a clock. Some familiar ones are the pendulum and the metronome. A large time interval can be measured by earth’s rotations (days), its orbits around the sun (years) or by lunar orbits (months). Very small intervals can be defined by atomic resonance which is used for the most accurate clocks. Units of time may be constructed from multiples or divisions of these rhythms. Tree rings, sediment layers and carbon-14 decay provide us with more ways of measuring time using nature’s rhythms. I have the good fortune to commute to work using some Skagit County back roads. With more than ten years of trips under my belt, I have noticed another very predictable rhythm. The Wrangel Island snow geese (Chen caerulescens) that migrate to the Skagit delta every winter always arrive precisely during the week around October 15th. This year, the cosmic clock chimed right on schedule. I spotted the geese from Fir Island Road at 11:00 AM on October 16, 2008. The entire Wrangel Island flock numbers between 30,000 and 70,000 birds, spread out among the Fraser, Skagit and Snohomish River estuaries. This gang of Russians can be identified by their orange faces caused by algae staining. I wonder how many tens of thousands of cycles can be counted by these migrations. We know that the earth once hosted a single large super-continent. In those times, is it possible the geese or their precursors had just a short trip from one spot to another? Then as the land mass broke apart, and the pieces began their tectonic journeys, did the geese have to travel an inch further every year? For me it is a privilege to witness one of the miracles of the planet. I can actually do this while driving to work. The next swing of the pendulum will occur around April 15th. I know that is when the geese will depart for the return trip to their Siberian Arctic home. The earth will complete another solar orbit and the cadence of time will register another beat. Photos: sonyaseattle at Flickr7:20 PM GMT | Read comments(0)October 13Memories of Columbus Day 1962 Columbus Day seems to be an ongoing theme here. It’s not by design, it just seems to keep coming up. My web site is about the weather so I thought I would describe one of my most memorable weather events. So far, it is also the most interesting Columbus Day. In 1962 John Kennedy was in his 1000 day presidency. Mercury astronauts Glenn, Carpenter and Schirra had achieved orbital spaceflight and the Beetles debuted on BBC Radio. What a different time it was. It was called Camelot. On Friday, October 12, 1962 a home game was scheduled for the Peninsula High School football team. That was to be the big event of the day. For the life of me, I don’t remember who we were playing. I was a Junior which is 11th grade for those not familiar with the term. There had been warnings about the weather all day. Our weather is usually benign, and Northwesterners typically don’t pay attention to it. It had become breezy, but the game was on and everyone was assembled. The teams, coaches, officials, bands, cheerleaders and grandstands filled with Pen High fans were all in place ready to go. Next to the field, the new Industrial Arts building was under construction. The wind started picking up just before game time. The game wasn’t starting on schedule and I remember the coaches and officials huddling in the center of the field trying to decide what to do. It was then, quite suddenly, when 4x8 sheets of plywood started blowing across the field from the construction site. A moment later, the field lights went out as the entire area lost power. The windstorm hit us with a rapidly accelerating fury no one had expected. Camelot was put on hold and the game would never be played. The drive from my high school at Purdy into Gig Harbor was normally about 20 minutes. That night it took us more than an hour to get home. The trip was a slow-going obstacle course of falling trees, telephone poles, sparking power lines and detours. Besides our headlights, the only illumination was coming from burning and melting transformers glowing hot-white and pink. The area where I grew up was largely covered by Douglas fir forest, with corridors cut through for roads and highways. The trees seemed to shelter us from the worst winds while taking the brunt of the storm themselves. When I finally got home, I found a three-foot diameter Douglas fir had made kindling of the carport. We were lucky the car wasn’t in there, and that our house was spared. We were also fortunate not to be the visiting football team. They may have faced a miserable and dangerous drive home. The Columbus Day Storm of ‘62 is now the benchmark for all windstorms in the Pacific Northwest. In the parlance of meteorologists, it was an extratropical cyclone, born in the central Pacific. Along the coasts of Oregon and Washington, peak winds comparable to a category 3 hurricane were measured. Further inland at McChord Air Force Base near Gig Harbor, peak gusts reached 88 mph. In Oak Harbor close to where I live now, 90 mph. The wind blew most of the night, but I recall the next day was calm, sunny and warm. The damage could be seen everywhere, made more prominent in the bright sunlight. It seems nature likes to play with us. In another three days, President Kennedy would be briefed on the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Camelot would end badly. Our season of storms is beginning again and we can expect it to last until January. We have had a couple of good blows already. The concern about global warming is not necessarily the warming. In fact, it doesn’t even mean it will always be warmer. Instead, it could bring about more large and violent weather events world wide. Imagine two or three 1962 Columbus Days every year. We didn’t pay attention to the warnings back then. Perhaps we can take a lesson from that experience. Photos: N.O.A.A.10:07 AM GMT | Read comments(0)October 06Columbus Day Redux Sorry, bugs again. A year ago I wrote about spiders on Columbus Day. This year I have a new spider story to report so I thought I would post a quick update. A while back I noticed something odd in my guest bath sink. Two legs protruded from under the drain stopper and the sink was lined with silk. My new guest was a Giant House Spider (Tegenaria duellica, T. gigantea) which had taken up residence in the drain. An original spinster, she created a silken trap around the sink and was now lying in wait under the stopper. I try to be a good host, but as I mentioned last year, there are limits. Sorry, my fair lady, two-legged guests only. Photo: Lamerie at Flickr10:15 AM GMT | Read comments(0)
Everyone knows that Western Washington is a land of rain. It is also a land of rivers, which may be less well-known. In fact, we have so many large river systems flowing into Puget Sound, that its waters are less salty then the ocean. Once in a while these characteristics, rain and rivers, collide to produce some big problems. During late fall and winter, very warm and wet tropical weather systems called “Pineapple Expresses” can come in off the Pacific and dump several inches of rain in a short time. When they hit, you can almost smell the frangipani and white jasmine. The warm temperatures may also cause a rapid snow melt in the mountains. Heavy rain and melting snow means rivers going out their banks. We had one such storm last week. It was not a large system, but three or four of our rivers decided to explore the insides of some area homes and businesses. Over three days, up to five inches of rain fell in some parts of lowland Puget Sound. Back on South Fidalgo, heavy rains bring different concerns for some of us. During these events, we start watching the ground. Puget Sound is rimmed by cliffs and hillsides which are some of the most coveted home sites in the area. When the hillsides become water-soaked, they have a tendency to move. I had personal experience with this phenomenon a few years ago. The record Anacortes, Washington rainfall for the month of November occurred in 1990 and I remember it well. 10.67 inches fell which is almost half of the usual precipitation for an entire year. A month later, December 30th to be exact, I was rousted out of bed at 0330 in the morning. The dog was having a fit. Half a dozen firemen on the front porch informed me that a landslide was occurring and I had to leave immediately. No debating; get the dog, pack some things and get out! At the time, I thought a landslide meant everything suddenly went whoosh. This slide took several weeks. Our good fortune was having a geologist among our neighbors. He provided valuable and reassuring information about what was going on. We were experiencing a “rotational slump.” Basically the heavy rains made the hillside unstable. A curved section of the hill rotates forming a terrace at the top with a scarp behind it. The toe of the slide comes up out of the ground at the base. Here, the toe was out in the bay and was quickly eroded away by tidal action. The signs of past slides were in plain sight. We were amazed to discover several of these slump terraces all around us. Ironically, they make ideal building sites. The entire Salmon Beach neighborhood near me sits on one of them. He revealed another sign, the bent trunks of our hundred year old Douglas firs. The bases of the trunks curve back into the hillside, while the tops of the trees are straight. In the past, the ground rotated and tilted the trees, but as they grew, they straightened themselves. Some of the big trees on my property curve in different directions, revealing a complex pattern of past ground movement. Yippee! I apparently inhabit a slightly deranged forest. Only a corner of my property was affected by the 1990 slide. I live just outside of the area designated unstable. In the end, only one family had to leave their home permanently. Most of the rest of us are still here, with our homes a few inches to five feet closer to the beach. The county made several improvements in how surface water is handled to mitigate future events. Nevertheless, when Hawaii sends her weather, we cast a wary eye to to the ground around us. Images: Wa Dept of Ecology, USGS6:49 PM GMT | Read comments(0)November 04Now I’ve Been to the Mountaintop
Please allow me to go off topic for a moment. Something wonderful has just happened and I want to talk about it. Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States of America. The historical magnitude of this event is taking my breath away. Today, all Americans can hold their heads up with unabashed pride. I am old enough to remember Martin Luther King and his times. I wish he was here to see this. It is a cliché and quite unoriginal to proclaim, the long national nightmare is over. But it has been long, it truly was a nightmare and with this election, it is definitely over. The bad dream did not begin eight years ago. This country went dark in 1980. It only reached a self-destructive crescendo during the last eight years. Bad ideas, incompetence, arrogance, deception, greed, a perverse orthodoxy, an absence of leadership and doctrines of evil have nearly destroyed us. Then there is the astonishing debt we have accumulated with nothing to show for it. Let’s hope it doesn’t take 28 years to repair all of the damage. The Promised Land is in sight, but my thoughts and concerns now turn in a different direction. I beseech the Almighty to protect this good man and his family. Allow him to complete the mission he has been called to carry out, and to set this nation on a course to greatness again.9:05 PM GMT | Read comments(1)October 18Star Date: 5,000,002,008
There are many ways to measure time. Anything that has a constant rhythm can be used as a clock. Some familiar ones are the pendulum and the metronome. A large time interval can be measured by earth’s rotations (days), its orbits around the sun (years) or by lunar orbits (months). Very small intervals can be defined by atomic resonance which is used for the most accurate clocks. Units of time may be constructed from multiples or divisions of these rhythms. Tree rings, sediment layers and carbon-14 decay provide us with more ways of measuring time using nature’s rhythms. I have the good fortune to commute to work using some Skagit County back roads. With more than ten years of trips under my belt, I have noticed another very predictable rhythm. The Wrangel Island snow geese (Chen caerulescens) that migrate to the Skagit delta every winter always arrive precisely during the week around October 15th. This year, the cosmic clock chimed right on schedule. I spotted the geese from Fir Island Road at 11:00 AM on October 16, 2008. The entire Wrangel Island flock numbers between 30,000 and 70,000 birds, spread out among the Fraser, Skagit and Snohomish River estuaries. This gang of Russians can be identified by their orange faces caused by algae staining. I wonder how many tens of thousands of cycles can be counted by these migrations. We know that the earth once hosted a single large super-continent. In those times, is it possible the geese or their precursors had just a short trip from one spot to another? Then as the land mass broke apart, and the pieces began their tectonic journeys, did the geese have to travel an inch further every year? For me it is a privilege to witness one of the miracles of the planet. I can actually do this while driving to work. The next swing of the pendulum will occur around April 15th. I know that is when the geese will depart for the return trip to their Siberian Arctic home. The earth will complete another solar orbit and the cadence of time will register another beat. Photos: sonyaseattle at Flickr7:20 PM GMT | Read comments(0)October 13Memories of Columbus Day 1962
Columbus Day seems to be an ongoing theme here. It’s not by design, it just seems to keep coming up. My web site is about the weather so I thought I would describe one of my most memorable weather events. So far, it is also the most interesting Columbus Day. In 1962 John Kennedy was in his 1000 day presidency. Mercury astronauts Glenn, Carpenter and Schirra had achieved orbital spaceflight and the Beetles debuted on BBC Radio. What a different time it was. It was called Camelot. On Friday, October 12, 1962 a home game was scheduled for the Peninsula High School football team. That was to be the big event of the day. For the life of me, I don’t remember who we were playing. I was a Junior which is 11th grade for those not familiar with the term. There had been warnings about the weather all day. Our weather is usually benign, and Northwesterners typically don’t pay attention to it. It had become breezy, but the game was on and everyone was assembled. The teams, coaches, officials, bands, cheerleaders and grandstands filled with Pen High fans were all in place ready to go. Next to the field, the new Industrial Arts building was under construction. The wind started picking up just before game time. The game wasn’t starting on schedule and I remember the coaches and officials huddling in the center of the field trying to decide what to do. It was then, quite suddenly, when 4x8 sheets of plywood started blowing across the field from the construction site. A moment later, the field lights went out as the entire area lost power. The windstorm hit us with a rapidly accelerating fury no one had expected. Camelot was put on hold and the game would never be played. The drive from my high school at Purdy into Gig Harbor was normally about 20 minutes. That night it took us more than an hour to get home. The trip was a slow-going obstacle course of falling trees, telephone poles, sparking power lines and detours. Besides our headlights, the only illumination was coming from burning and melting transformers glowing hot-white and pink. The area where I grew up was largely covered by Douglas fir forest, with corridors cut through for roads and highways. The trees seemed to shelter us from the worst winds while taking the brunt of the storm themselves. When I finally got home, I found a three-foot diameter Douglas fir had made kindling of the carport. We were lucky the car wasn’t in there, and that our house was spared. We were also fortunate not to be the visiting football team. They may have faced a miserable and dangerous drive home. The Columbus Day Storm of ‘62 is now the benchmark for all windstorms in the Pacific Northwest. In the parlance of meteorologists, it was an extratropical cyclone, born in the central Pacific. Along the coasts of Oregon and Washington, peak winds comparable to a category 3 hurricane were measured. Further inland at McChord Air Force Base near Gig Harbor, peak gusts reached 88 mph. In Oak Harbor close to where I live now, 90 mph. The wind blew most of the night, but I recall the next day was calm, sunny and warm. The damage could be seen everywhere, made more prominent in the bright sunlight. It seems nature likes to play with us. In another three days, President Kennedy would be briefed on the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Camelot would end badly. Our season of storms is beginning again and we can expect it to last until January. We have had a couple of good blows already. The concern about global warming is not necessarily the warming. In fact, it doesn’t even mean it will always be warmer. Instead, it could bring about more large and violent weather events world wide. Imagine two or three 1962 Columbus Days every year. We didn’t pay attention to the warnings back then. Perhaps we can take a lesson from that experience. Photos: N.O.A.A.10:07 AM GMT | Read comments(0)October 06Columbus Day Redux
Sorry, bugs again. A year ago I wrote about spiders on Columbus Day. This year I have a new spider story to report so I thought I would post a quick update. A while back I noticed something odd in my guest bath sink. Two legs protruded from under the drain stopper and the sink was lined with silk. My new guest was a Giant House Spider (Tegenaria duellica, T. gigantea) which had taken up residence in the drain. An original spinster, she created a silken trap around the sink and was now lying in wait under the stopper. I try to be a good host, but as I mentioned last year, there are limits. Sorry, my fair lady, two-legged guests only. Photo: Lamerie at Flickr10:15 AM GMT | Read comments(0)