In August, my sister and I signed up for the November 8, 2015, Silver Falls Trail Half Marathon, my fourth and her first trail race. Registration for the super popular 1,000 participants race, in existence since 2010, typically fills up within an hour. We looked forward to the chance to run along the Trail of Ten …
Author Archives: ggsmith42
Another One Bites the Dust
It was just a blip on Hollywood action movie fans’ radar screens when Nicolas Cage’s camp announced that a plane used during the filming of his latest movie, USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage (2016), was unintentionally destroyed. According to Tyler Rogoway, “After four days of being half sunk and rocked by the surf on a sandbar near …
Leavenworth Half Marathon 2015
Standing stock still at mile five, I knew I was in trouble. I’d already given up on the sub-8:00 min/mile pace I’d been training for the past few months. Now I was just trying to keep going. I inspected the neon pink headphones my sister foisted on me in the car on the way to …
“All That the Rain Promises and More”
A barred owl’s call lured me into the woods yesterday evening near Heart Lake in the Anacortes Forest Lands. “Who cooks for you. Who cooks for you all,” provides the correct pattern of this species of owl’s call, but it doesn’t do justice to the super soft, spectacular sound. I grabbed my camera and headed out …
Brag Brag Braggity Brag
Back in the day, people politely filtered out personal information that they would willingly share with close friends and family when conversing with acquaintances. Boasting was considered bad form. More recently, the line between the two has become blurred. Bragging to acquaintances and a general tendency towards oversharing is, sadly, on the rise, as is …
North Beach, West Beach and Cranberry Lake at DPSP
There are several locations within Deception Pass State Park that a person could spend an entire day: Bowman Bay, Cornet Bay, and Rosario Beach (plus the satellite sites: Kikutali Preserve, Dugualla State Park and Ben Ure Island), but most folks wanting to check out the “4,134-acre marine and camping park with 77,000-feet of saltwater shoreline, and …
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Sage Hills Trails
During the safety briefing, I realized that my fire shelter had been breached. I had never been so scared. It was the summer of 1986, the year before I graduated from college, and I was one of a group of many Gifford Pinchot National Forest employees highly encouraged to volunteer to help fight forest fires …
Libbey Beach County Park
A predicted minus 2.6 foot low tide, as low as local tides go, drew me to a different beach this summer in early July. It was Libbey Beach County Park, located just north of Fort Ebey State Park, accessed by following Libbey Road to the west for about 1.5 miles from Highway 20. I had …
Rookies Race the Reserve
“Never leave your wingman,” is what I always think (and sometimes say) when my race running partner starts to fret about us sticking together during a race. In this case, it was my 11 months older, 52-year-old sister JoDee, who took up running in April and now, fewer than four months later, was running her first …
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
When our son was eleven, we agreed to get him a dog. I had in mind a quiet, loving, sweet-tempered, mid-sized creature that would race to the door to greet him, wag its tail often, walk obediently by his side, sleep at the foot of his bed and spend a little time on my lap. …
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