Exploring Deception Pass by Jack Hartt This week, Jack Hartt’s new book Exploring Deception Pass was published. A recent Whidbey News Times Article by Ron Newberry on the subject (State park manager shares tales and insight) suggests, “When one of Washington’s most breathtaking state parks is part of your everyday life for 12 years, you tend to …
Author Archives: ggsmith42
Get a Piece of The Rock
1922 Deception Pass Land Becomes a State Park [6]“The Deception Pass area was recognized in the middle of the nineteenth century for its potential as a location to defend against an enemy wishing to enter Puget Sound. The federal government set aside about 1700 acres of land on both sides of the Pass as a …
Traversing the Tursi Trail
A pair of butterflies (possibly Papilio rutulus) fluttered along beside me as I neared the Tursi Trail head along Donnell Road on Fidalgo Island a few weeks ago. As I began my hike along the dusty trail, a garter snake slithered off to safety. Thimble berries and trailing blackberries lined the primitive path during the first …
On Golden Frog
Like the sirens to Odysseus, the frog chorus beckons me. From dusk to dawn I hear the call, pause, perk up my ears, wander towards the pond. Within a tiny plot of land, less than a tenth of an acre, an amphibian-friendly habitat exists where adults reproduce, eggs hatch, turn into tadpoles, finally form frogs. …
Rookery Dookery Dock
In a small patch of March’s Point in Anacortes is a big secret: a heron rookery, also known as a heronry. Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve claims, “The heron colony on March’s Point is believed to be the largest nesting area for Great Blue Herons in all of Western North America. Herons have nested at …
Show Me the Study: Local District Poised to Adopt Discovery High School Math Curricula
How did the Anacortes School District (ASD) decide to ditch their Holt Mathematics text book curricula for high school in the fall of 2014 and replace it with Mathematics Vision Project, a discovery style Integrated Math sequencing Open Educational Resource (OER) that consists of a collection of worksheets? The ASD mistakenly accepted the notion that Washington …
Leave it to Beavers
Hear that sound? It’s a call to action for North America’s largest rodent to make it stop: running water. Of all of the species of rodents in the world, Castor canadensis is second in size only to Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris, the capybara. My curiosity about this creature began while I was running. During a morning trail …
Eaglemania
Bald eagles are found only in North America. In Washington state, “The early summer bald eagle population when white settlers first arrived in Washington may have been around 8,800…Persecution, the cutting of forests, commercial exploitation of salmon runs, and finally the use of DDT reduced the state’s population to only 104 known breeding pairs by 1980…The population …
Washington State Ferries
I began this post as a way to share a few ferry photos, but controversy concerning the Washington State Ferries (WSF) sent me in a different direction. I feel fortunate to live in an area that allows me the opportunity to choose to travel occasionally by sea rather than land, typically along the Mukilteo-Clinton route, …
Padilla Bay Estuarine Research Reserve
Migrant Trumpeter swans from the north dotted farmlands along the road to my destination a few weeks ago: Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Skagit County. Paraphrasing from the PBNERR site: Padilla Bay is an eight mile long by three miles wide estuary at the saltwater edge of the large delta of the Skagit River in the …
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