Lying flat on my back on the wet grass after the race, a guy behind me says, “That was hard as f&*#.” I smile and say to my sister, “What he said.” The previous afternoon, as JoDee and I previewed the final mile of the 30K/50K courses, she was tearful. My sister had injured her IT …
Category Archives: Recreation
Let’s Destigmatize Thoughts of Suicide
“I love you and the kids, but I need to die…,” are the words I spoke to my husband one day in January of 2004. He hugged me, loaded the family into the car, and drove to our local hospital, where a nurse handed me half a tablet of Ativan and, when it had little effect, …
Race Report: Ragnar Trail Cascades
“Eat my dust,” said no runner EVER, but that’s what over 1,700 participants in the inaugural running of Ragnar Trail Cascades did (and I theirs), literally, while on the trails and in The Village at Loup Loup Ski Bowl this past weekend. Fifteen four-person ultra and 204 eight-person regular teams converged upon this little known …
How Washington State Adopted Rigorous Common Core Standards…Then Quietly Backpedaled
“Be afraid. Be very afraid,” is what I would have said to Washington State’s Class of 2019 students and their parents a year ago. In July of 2011, the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction adopted Common Core State Standards. Since then, assessments required for high school graduation have become more difficult. Five years after …
Sisters, a Trail Run Along a Road, and Some Stuff About Gravity
Gravity. It’s not something most of us spend much time thinking about, including me, until this summer, when I read Chuck Klosterman’s essay collection But What If We’re Wrong? It begins (p 3), ‘Like most people, I like to think of myself as a skeptical person. But I’m pretty much in the tank for gravity. It’s …
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Ten Books Islanders Ought to Read
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 …
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 …
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