Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. II

Addendums to the post of 3/29/14 (Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. 1):

Milepost 90: My mom recalls that years ago a man was killed in a slide coming down one of the chutes or stream channels just outside the town limits of Concrete. His name may have been Sullivan.

Milepost 91: My mom informed me that my grandpa and great uncle did indeed save the barrels of flour that were lost in the Skagit River when a mass of pink salmon or humpies rushing out of the mouth of Jackman Creek and tipped over their canoe as they poled past. They only lost the very outer layer of flour which was like a glue or cement from contact with the water. Most of the flour was saved. I think I had been told that at one time but had forgotten until mom reminded me.

Also at Milepost 91, mom told me that there was once a sawmill with a millpond in the flat area across Highway 20 from Van Horn Lane and the former store. Evidently a man was killed in this mill in an electrical accident. The mill closed and the pond was filled in just before or just after I was born so it was before my time. I now vaguely remember references to the Van Horn mill but had completely forgotten about them until mom mentioned it.

Milepost 94

Milepost 94 is in the middle of a section of Highway 20 rerouted around what is now Sauk Store Road. The Sauk Store Road was the old main east/west road. There has been quite a bit written about the town of Sauk, which no longer exists, and the Sauk Store. The Sauk Store building still exists but it is no longer a store. The old road continued past the Sauk Connection Road to Highway 20 and up the side of a ravine to the big flat where Rockport State Park sits.

The old road is now a county road and it dead ends near the bottom of the ravine but you can see what remains of the old road from the present Highway 20 and follow the power lines along it. The present Highway 20 cuts across two ravines as it goes up the hill just east of the Sauk Connection Road. The second ravine it cuts across, a little over halfway up the hill, is the one that the powerlines and the old road follow. This part of Highway 20, between the Sauk Connection Road and the top of the hill was cut when I was very young or maybe just before I was born. I recall riding the school bus at a very young age and looking at the fresh road cut. This road cut has taken a long time to grow back.

Milepost 95

Milepost 95 is near the top of the hill just above the point where new Hwy 20 crosses over the old road. The flat at the top of the hill and a smaller hill to the south of Highway 20, where the county dump or transfer station and a gravel pit are located, are evidently a large deposit of sediments left by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. I understand there are some very interesting land forms created by these glaciers in the area of the gravel pit but I haven’t seen them myself.

The old road following the ravine from Sauk connects to the current Highway 20 at the west end of the aforementioned flat. I think it is now a county road called Hornbeck Road or Hornbeck Lane.

There used to be lots of deer in this area of Highway 20 when I was kid. When I was very small, I remember a guy, some teenage kid in a hotrod of some kind, passing us at very high rate of speed. Just as his car reached the limit of our headlights, near what is now Littlefield Road, we saw the hood of his car fly up in the dim light turning end over end. Dad rolled up to the scene, avoiding the crumpled hood in the road and expecting the worst. The guy in the car was somehow okay but his car was destroyed, as was the deer that he hit. We knew this guy, pretty much everyone knew everyone in those days, but I can’t recall exactly who it was. I think we gave him a ride to his house.

At the west end of flat, very near MP 95, my dad hit deer while driving a bunch of us kids back from a junior high basketball game when I was 13. It was one of those perfect hits, though it was not intentional. The deer went to cross the road. My dad jammed on the brakes. The deer wheeled to go back the way it had come. It looked like it would be a clean miss and, at the last moment, it wheeled back around as if to go back across the road, putting it’s head point blank in front of the passenger’s side headlight. It was too late to do anything at that point. The car hit with a solid Whump! And the deer spun around, its rump hitting the rear quarter panel of the car and I was shouting something like "Yeah, you got it!!" The deer, a nice two-point or “Y” was dead with no meat ruined and with minimal damage to the car, a little bent sheet metal and a broken plastic grille.

It was late November and I had just finished my second unsuccessful deer hunting season. I was so pumped up that I grabbed the deer and dragged to the opposite (wrong) side of the road all by myself. When you kill a game animal on the road you are supposed to call the state Department of Transportation or the Department of Wildlife for them to pick it up and dispose of it. I was all for us keeping it and was lobbying dad hard to do just that. Dad wasn’t too enthusiastic about the idea, saying it would be illegal to take it.

As I look back now, the legality of the matter was probably a pretty minor issue. Dad had worked all day then driven 16 miles down to Concrete to watch the game and bring a car full of noisy kids home, where he probably wanted to either relax or work on a long list projects. We had plenty of beef in the freezer for the winter. So probably the last thing he wanted to do was spend several hours gutting and skinning that deer in the cold and dark and then having to cut it up and get it in the freezer a week later. All of this on top of the damage to the car, which, though it was minor, would need to be fixed. The deer was also rutting, with a big neck and a strong smell, which would make the meat less appealing. The rut might have also explained the deer’s behavior just prior to being hit. Rutting bucks aren’t the most wary and they often act pretty stupidly.

Finally this rough looking guy rolled up in a flat bed truck. He commented that it was a nice deer. Then he asked if dad was going to keep it. Dad said, “No. You can have it if you want.” So the guy loaded it up and headed down the road. I was so disappointed.

The whole event from first seeing the deer to hitting it unfolded in several seconds or less. This was before car safety was really big. There were about seven of us, three in the front seat and four or five in the back seat of a sedan. My friend, Jerry, sitting next to me in the front seat had put on a pair of sunglasses that my mom had left on dash and was clowning around, acting cool saying “Check me out, I’m wearing sunglasses at night.” He missed the whole thing even though it happened right in front of him, literally the length of a car hood away, because he couldn’t actually see out of the sunglasses because they were too dark. This predated the Corey Hart song “Sunglasses at Night” by about six years. I laugh every time I hear that song.

There used to be a lot of deer in the area on the flat between Mileposts 95 and 96. I haven’t seen any here in years. I think the DOT has even taken down the deer crossing sign. I don’t know what the cause of the deer disappearing was, whether it resulted from natural changes in vegetation and habitat or from land use changes by people living in the area. 

Alder Lane used to be woods. This area was developed sometime when I was in grade school or junior high-late in the 1970’s. I don’t think this has anything to do with fewer deer being on the road here because at the time it was developed and for quite a few years afterward, there were still a lot of deer.

Sauk Mountain dominates the area here and there has been a lot written about it. One bit of knowledge that is recorded but probably less well known is an Indian name for Sauk Mountain, Penelomah. I don’t know, or remember, what this name means or what tribe or tribes used this name. I have seen written accounts that this mountain was (and probably still is) believed to be a place where a good spirit and an evil spirit reside. I had also heard by word of mouth that this mountain was a place of strong spirits though no distinction was made as to whether they were good or evil.

People wishing to know the outcome of some future important endeavor would climb up to the base of the steep rock cliffs and watch eagles soar in the updrafts. If an eagle soared smoothly then the good spirit held sway and the omen was good for the future. If the eagle fluttered, then the evil spirit held sway and the omen was bad for the future. I read this somewhere in the late 1980’s but I don’t recall the source.

My dad had a story about a couple guys hunting up on Sauk. I don’t recall any names but it seems like the lookout had been built at that time since, if I remember correctly, these guys were staying in the lookout. It was after the fire season so there were no U. S. Forest Service personnel using it. These two guys could have even been Forest Service employees laid off for the season.

The story goes that it had begun snowing a lot and they wanted to get the heck out of there. About that time they spotted a mountain goat (Oreamnus americanus). The first guy wanted to shoot it and the second guy told the first guy something to the effect that if he, the first guy, shot it, he, the first guy, would have to stay in and eat it because he, the second guy, was headed out and wasn’t going to stay and help pack it out. Well the first guy shot the goat and the second guy abruptly headed down the mountain without the first guy. The first guy was missing for a couple of weeks and folks were starting to get suspicious but eventually he showed up back down in the valley. He had stayed and eaten the goat, or at least enough of it that he could pack the rest out.

This is the only account I had ever heard of goats on Sauk Mountain and I was always a little skeptical about it. But a few years ago, a friend of mine who does a lot of hunting and knows what he is looking at, saw a goat on the north side of Sauk Mountain. Diobsud Buttes and Bacon Peak aren’t too far from Sauk Mountain and there are fairly healthy goat populations in both places so it is probably well within the realm of possibility for a goat to travel from either of those two areas to Sauk.

In 1993 I worked on a helicopter logging job on U.S. Forest Service land on Sauk Mountain. Most of the Douglas-fir on this job was heavily infested with laminated root rot (Phellinus weirii). Sometimes this fungus completely rots the roots of a tree out and it falls over. In other cases, the rot is isolated to the center of the bole of the tree while a solid, apparently healthy living shell remains like a rind on the outer part of the bole. This is the way the most of the trees on that sale were. The centers of the trees were rotted out in the lower 15 to 20 feet.

So we ended making a lot of long butts, logs bucked off the lower parts of the trees that were essentially waste because they just shells with rotten centers. This was in late October and it was cold and wet. There was a fire in the landing for warmth and the guys were burning these waste long butts.

One morning we showed up to work and, as I was getting my boots on, the guy who ran the machine that picked up and moved the logs dropped by the helicopter to the shovel or loader, came back to the crew bus with a pale face and stunned expression and said that his machine was burned up. At first I thought he was kidding and laughed but then I saw he was serious.

I went to the far side of the landing and looked. He had parked his machine well away from the landing fire but he had parked it with a tire about a foot from the end of a 20 foot long hollow log. Unfortunately, the other end of the log was on the landing fire. The wind had picked up and the landing fire burned into the hollow log and then, evidently, the wind blowing the fire through the hollow log was like a blowtorch, igniting the tire.

In an ironic twist, the friend of mine who had been wearing the sunglasses the night we hit the deer at the base of the mountain worked with me on that job. I hadn’t seen him in a few years but, at the time, he was also living just below the mountain on Hornbeck Road within about a quarter mile of the deer incident.

That timber sale was pretty big and quite a bit of timber was harvested. But being as it was a thinning sale, you couldn’t see from Highway 20 where the logging was, even while it was being logged, unless you happened to see the helicopter. To this day, there is no sign that the forest in the area of that sale has been logged. At some point the remaining trees in that area may succumb to the rot. Commercial thinning can exacerbate laminated root rot problems but not always I understand.

Milepost 96

The western boundary of Rockport State Park is at Milepost 96. There is a lot of recorded history for this park and this is probably a more reliable source than my memory. I recently found out that some information that I thought I knew about the park is wrong according to the official record, which was written down long before I was born.

The one thing I do remember about Rockport State Park that probably isn’t written down anywhere is about the lights for the entrance intersection. I believe state law says that intersections meeting certain criteria must be lighted at night. Evidently the Rockport State Park entrance meets this criteria because four lights were installed to light the intersection.

These lights were kind of a pain years ago when headlights weren’t as bright as they are now. The intersection lights were much brighter than car headlights and could cause temporary night blindness. Some of my friend’s fathers every so often made a point of shooting out those lights. I think it might have been after hours entertainment when the local taverns closed at 2:00 a.m. After a few years, they finally gave up on that activity, possibley after a conversation with the local sheriff’s deputy.

Milepost 97

Milepost 97 is just east of the eastern boundary of Rockport State Park. Just east of this milepost, Alfred Street intersects the eastbound lane of Highway 20. Alfred Street is also known as Rockport Hill and leads into the town.

Just east of Alfred Street on Highway 20, there are now two patches in the eastbound lane of Highway 20. These patches cover a spot in the road that steadily sinks. There has been a problem with this spot in the road for as long as I can remember. The road has even been reworked twice here to my knowledge. One of those times they went about 10 feet into the road prism in the area of the sinkhole and rebuilt the roadt. Yet the sinkhole persists. It may be associated with a small perennial stream which flows under it at this point. I believe this stream was also the water supply for the town of Rockport at one time.

The Rockport Store is a little further down the hill off the eastbound lane. When I was a kid, Mel and Myra Benton ran the Rockport Store. They may have also built the store in the present location. I don’t know this for sure. Both have long since passed away. Once my dad told me that Myra knew him since he wore three cornered pants (diapers).

East of the Rockport Store and just east of the intersection of Highway 20 and Highway 530 a big slide came across Highway 20 sometime in the 1970’s. I remember watching from a school bus as a front end loader worked at clearing that slide from the Highway. The school bus I was on was rerouted to what is currently known as the Rockport/Cascade Road. The slide went into river and the lower part of it is still there below Highway 20. This lower part is a large mound of earth extending into the river from a large pull out that is popular during eagle watching season. Now the slide is not really obvious because it has become overgrown over the years.

Milepost 98

Just east of the previously mentioned slide is Milepost 98. Shular Road (County) intersects the westbound lane of Highway 20 here. Shular Road goes up a hill on its west end and down a hill on its east end to reconnect with Highway 20. It is part of the old east/west road up the valley. The new section of Highway 20 has been routed below, or south of Shular Road, and is fairly flat.

My dad died somewhere in the straight stretch on Highway 20 just around the corner from the west end of Shular Road. His car hit a maple tree on the east end of the straight stretch almost immediately across Highway 20 from the eastern intersection with Shular Road. We don’t know exactly what killed him. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt and his body was so badly damaged that the coroner couldn’t determine the exact cause of death. Maybe his heart stopped before the car ever left the road or maybe the crash killed him.

There is a house made of rock at the intersection of the east end of Shular Road and Highway 20. My mom and dad knew the guy who built this house. His name was Red Severe. I think my dad worked with him for a construction company on the new Gorge Dam. Red still has some descendants living in Marblemount. Evidently artistic talent runs in the Severe family. Red had a cousin (who might still be living) named Duff Severe who was a renowned saddle maker, famous for his ornately decorated saddles.   

A little east of Shular Road, Highway 20 goes through a narrow spot with a cut rock wall close by on the west bound lane. This is a very bad spot in the road and is very active, especially during times of heavy rainfall. Rocks and debris are constantly falling off the high bank. My sister put a car in the ditch under the rock wall one snowy day and I have had a tire blown out by rocks in the road and have run over one small tree that fell into the road. I am sure many a tire or oil pan has met its end here. There have been no car crash related fatalities here that I can remember.

There is a big open marshy area on the south side of Highway 20 across from the rock cut. This is Washington’s Eddy and the whole area along the highway here is generally known as Washington’s Eddy. The marshy area used to be a great big eddy in the Skagit River. The river has now migrated away to the south leaving the area to fill in with sediment. The area gets the name Washington from an Indian family named Washington who lived there and still owns land there.

There is a gravel road between Highway 20 and the marshy area of Washington’s Eddy. For most of its length it is below the level of the highway. This was originally developed and envisioned as eagle watching area but this fizzled out rather quickly. The eagles don’t hang out here much, though you can sometimes see lots of other wildlife.

There are lots of areas immediately on the highway where eagles are usually abundant from November through early February during the chum and coho runs (actually the chum are usually done by early January but their carcasses sometimes persist into early February, providing food and an attractant for eagles). Everyone goes to these spots. There are some designated, well set up, safe pullouts to look at eagles. Many of the other places where one often sees eagles near the highway are not very good places to park. Many eagle watchers drive irresponsibly and park irresponsibly and walk into or stand in the roadway in these areas where the eagles like to hang out. Many of these areas have posted speeds of 50 m.p.h.

To this point in this post I have written seven pages in a word document. That is enough for this post. More to follow later. 

Foot Valve

I had big plans for Saturday the 12^th of April. I was going to move the cows to the Stump Farm and then start working on a long list of spring projects.

Moving the cows went off pretty much without a hitch. The new calves who hadn’t been to the stump farm before stayed with the rest of the herd and they all moved together. Because they don’t know the way and they are usually difficult to herd, the new calves can sometimes cause problems if they get separated and lose sight of their mothers. There was some minor damage to a fence that took less than a minute to fix and one of my favorite trilliums along the trail through the woods got stomped. But other than that, it was as smooth and easy as I could have imagined.

Then I decided that I had better check the pump. The Stump Farm well house isn’t heated so I always take the pump out over the winter so it won’t be damaged by freezing weather or stolen. I had installed it the previous Saturday and it took a prime and pumped water. I had a little more trouble than usual getting it primed that day so, even though there was plenty of water in the tanks, I thought I had better check it. It had lost its prime.

Generally problems with the cow water pump are fairly simple but they eat up a lot of time, sometimes days. Often a pump will just lose its prime so all you need to do is re-prime it and you are ready to go again. Of all the possible problems, this is probably the easiest to fix so that is where I started. I dumped about a gallon of water into the pump’s priming port. All of the water drained away when it should have, after a few burps, stayed full to the top of the priming port.

This meant that there was most likely a problem with the foot valve. The foot valve is essentially a check valve at the bottom of the pump suction line. A spring holds tension against the valve disk to keep it closed. The spring is aided by the weight of the water in the suction line above the valve disk. This prevents water from running out of the suction line and allows the pump to keep its prime. When the pump is turned on, the suction overcomes the spring tension and the weight of the water in the suction line and the valve opens, allowing water to flow from the well and into and through the pump. Obviously, if there is a problem with the foot valve, the water in the suction line will drain out and the pump will lose its prime.

I unscrewed the suction line, a 20 foot length of black plastic pipe, from the pump and pulled it from the well. The foot valve and fitting by which it was attached to the suction line looked bad. The whole end of the suction line was covered with rusty mud and the fitting attaching the foot valve to the suction line had a thick crust of rust that disintegrated when I touched it.

I cleaned everything up as best I could, flushing water backwards through the foot valve in case some debris was stuck between the valve disk and seat. Then I did a leak check by pouring water down the upper end of the suction line and lifting that end into the air, forcing all of the water in the line down to the foot valve end. If the foot valve was functioning properly, no water should get past it.

I immediately saw that there was a leak in the fitting that attached the foot valve to the suction line. This fitting was galvanized which should have made it corrosion resistant. I had put it in only about 6 years before, but evidently 6 years sitting in our acidic water was too much and it had rusted to the point of leaking. I pulled the foot valve off and did a separate check of it. With the 20 foot suction line no longer attached, this was much simpler. All I had to do was pour a little water, probably about an eighth of a cup, on the top side of the valve. It also leaked.

So I needed to replace the foot valve and the fitting that attached the foot valve to the suction line. I had another foot valve of the right size that didn’t leak but I couldn’t find the right size fitting to attach to the suction line. One of the gas stations in Marblemount has a hardware supply and I was hoping to find a fitting there. If they didn’t have it, I would have to go to Cascade Supply in Concrete, the next nearest hardware store, a half hour away, one way. Cascade Supply is pretty well stocked and I was sure they had the fitting I needed.

They didn’t have it in Marblemount so down to Concrete I went to get the fitting. I decided to replace the galvanized steel with plastic which wouldn’t rust.  While I was in Concrete I also took care of a few other errands. On the way back, I stopped back into Cascade Supply to get a galvanized fitting as a back up in case the plastic one didn’t work.  If the plastic fitting didn’t work and I wasn’t able to get back to Concrete by the time Cascade Supply closed, I would be out of luck or I would have to go to Darrington Hardware on Sunday, the next day.

While I was in the hardware store the second time I discovered that they had the same fitting in brass. The brass fitting was about three times as expensive as the galvanized fitting and over ten times as expensive as the plastic fitting but it was much stronger than the plastic fitting and it wouldn’t rust. So I went with the brass.

At some point during this whole process, I had gotten my days confused. There was a memorial service in Concrete that afternoon, or so I thought, that I needed to attend. So I didn’t go immediately back to fix the pump. I went home and got cleaned up and went back down to Concrete only to discover that the service was the next day on Sunday.

So I changed back into my dirty work clothes and went back to the Stump Farm. I got the fitting and new foot valve put on the suction line. After a leak check, which seemed okay, I put it down into the well. Again, I had trouble getting the pump primed. I thought the foot valve was leaking again but when I unscrewed the suction line, water was standing in it. That meant that the foot valve was fine and I had gotten a good seal on everything. I finally figured out that the pump had probably drained more than I realized so I needed to dump more water than I expected into it to get it primed.

I fired the pump up and it pumped like it was supposed to. I topped off the water tanks and the priming jugs and shut the pump down, hoping it would still be primed when I checked it the next morning. It was.

Simple little things like this can burn up a day, even if they don’t evolve into something more complex and time consuming, which they sometimes do. Between this little project and my getting days mixed up, I burned up most of a Saturday. I burned up several weekends last year on a problem with a fuel line on the tractor. These things can’t be ignored though. No matter how much I would rather be doing something else, the cows need water and they need to be fed. So almost everything else takes a back seat to these concerns.

I am just glad I decided to check the pump on Saturday when I had the time to fix the problem without having to take time off from work. If I had waited until Sunday afternoon when the cows were out of water and all of the local hardware stores were closed, I would have been in a real fix. I have good neighbors who would have let me use their water for a bit until I got things squared away so I am sure everything would have worked out but I try to be careful not to wear out my welcome.  

The foot valve on the right. The spring underneath the nut holds tension on the valve disk, keeping it shut. The perforated cone to the left is a screen that keeps larger debris out of the foot valve. The screw holds the screen on the end of the foot valve. 

Foot valve looking down at the valve disk. 

Foot valve and suction line. The fitting in the middle attaches to the suction line at its upper (left in this photo) end and the foot valve at its lower end, connecting them. Note the rusty mud on the suction line. 

Close up of foot valve and hose fitting. It is hard to see in this photo but about an eighth of an inch of material fell off the hose fitting. This was the source of one of the leaks. If one looks at the lower end of the threads, there appears to be a bulge. The material to the left side of that bulge crumbled away to the touch, leaving fairly clean metal behind. All of the material that crumbled away was the galvanizing which helped protect the steel underneath from corrosion. With the galvanizing gone, if I had reused the fitting, even if I managed to stop the leak, the fitting would have likely corroded and failed even more quickly. 

Cows might not be the smartest animals in the world but they are quite curious nonetheless. The cows weren't really thirsty, they were just wondering what I was doing and if I had anything good to eat. This is why I try to get the pump taken care of before I move the cows. You can still work around them but it is much harder with them poking into everything and you yourself having to avoid getting stomped on.

I cut the lower few inches off the suction line. There are ribs in the fittings that leave an impression in the plastic that sometimes makes it harder to get a seal. 

Suction line with new brass fitting. I carefully heated the plastic to soften it, pushed the fitting into the suction line and tightened the hose clamps around the ribbed section of the fitting. 

Preparing to put on the new foot valve. The crescent or adjustable wrench was used on the hex part of the fitting to keep the fitting from spinning in the suction line when the foot valve was tightened on to it. The pipe, or Stilson wrench was used on the foot valve itself. This photo is not entirely accurate. The crescent wrench pictured is a 12 inch crescent and it was too small. I rad to run back to the house and get a 15 inch crescent to do the job. 

Teflon tape. The white stuff in the roll and on the threads of the fitting is teflon tape. Teflon is well known as a substance that nothing sticks to. In tape form it also makes an excellent thread sealant. 

Leak test. I poured some water into the suction line and then stood it up in the limbs of an old apple tree nearby. Gravity caused the water to run down the suction line against the foot valve. In this way I could check that I got a good seal on the hose fitting to the hose and to the check valve and that the check valve was working before I took the trouble of lowering it down into the well, a rather tricky process. 

The well house. The suction line is lowered into the opening below the pump. This is a 8 or 10 inch pipe that is used for a casing. Inside this pipe, about ten feet down, is another pipe about 3 inches in diameter that goes all the way below the water line in the well. The suction line goes into this inner pipe. Getting the suction line into the 3 inch pipe is tricky. It usually involves many minutes in a cramped area dangling the suction line with many missed attempts before you get the suction line in just the right spot to thread the needle and get it into the three inch pipe. 

Water! The water in the tank is murky from stirred up mud and rust that will eventually settle out.

Priming jugs. Since this pump is the only nearby location for water, I always make sure to keep the priming jugs full. This way, if the pump loses it's prime, I have a ready source of water to re-prime it. Note the jugs are not filled all the way up. I leave the jugs in the well house over the winter and the extra space is left in them so they won't be broken by ice if they freeze. 

Well house in operation. Note the lid over the casing and around the suction line. I built this from steel to replace a wooden one that had rotted away. The lid keeps dirt from getting into the well. I spent several weeks in 2008 cleaning the well out when, because I hadn't been paying attention, the wooden lid rotted away and dirt got into the well and almost filled it in. I also blocked several holes in the cinder block walls that allowed a lot of dirt to get into the well. 

P.S. The next Saturday, the 19th, I spent part of the day harrowing the pasture at the house. This is the winter pasture and it is where I moved the cows from.

The view from the tractor seat. Now imagine this scene slightly blurred from constant bouncing with a rough landing after each bounce. Then imagine how stiff your back would be from doing this for several hours. I'm glad the field isn't any bigger and that the tractor seat has a spring to somewhat mitigate the bouncing. 

Marblemount Community Hall Spring Cleaning Work Party 4.5.14

Saturday the 5th of April we had a work party for the Marblemount Community Hall. This was for spring cleaning and work on a few ongoing projects. The weather was kind of nasty, cold, with off and on steady showers but we had a pretty good turn out, probably a dozen or more people. A lot of the people there were the regulars but there were several new faces as well. These people all gave up a big chunk of their Saturday and many worked outside in not the greatest weather to help maintain the Community Hall. I hope all the work will be appreciated. 

The grass hadn’t grown much yet but the lawn was mowed and the parking area edged. The message board was cleaned up and the playground gravel was weeded. In addition, the storage shed in back was cleaned out and organized. A number of bleach bottles had broken, making a mess there and everything was stacked to the point where nothing was accessible. The hall windows were cleaned. Finally, concrete patches were poured on the front steps so the handrail could be reattached.

There is not a lot more to say here. The following photos tell the story better.    

The start of the day. 

Lawn mowing. 

Weed eating. 

Cleaning up grass clippings and cleaning side of hall. 

Edging parking lot asphalt. This is important if you don't want your parking lot eventually taken over by grass. The grass traps soil and adds to the area available for it to grow. Edging removes the trapped soil (mostly sand and road grit) and grass growing on the asphalt. 

Sprucing up around the hall reader board. 

Cleaning the reader board. 

Weeding the playground gravel. 

Cleaning the windows in the hall. 

Starting to clean out the storage shed in back of the hall. 

Storage shed cleaning and sidewalk cleaning in progress. 

The hand rail for one side of the front steps was torn off a few years ago. We made a patch in order to remount the hand rail. The first step was to clean the existing concrete so the concrete of the patch would bond to it better. 

An electric powered wire wheel was used to clean the existing concrete. 

Next holes were drilled in the existing concrete in order to anchor reinforcing wire for the patch. 

Adding reinforcing wire. 

Reinforcing wire completed. The concrete of the patch will bond with the wire making the patch stronger.  Both repair areas had reinforcing wire added to them. 

The concrete of the patch probably wouldn't get down into the holes for the reinforcing wire so we anchored it with a product called Rockite which appears to be a special compound of mortar and other substances. They make really good epoxies for anchoring things in concrete these days too. The Rockite was good because it was simple, you mix it with water and, since we didn't need a whole lot of anchoring compound, we could make a small batch and not waste most of a tube of expensive epoxy.   

Fitting the forms for the patches. We put the tarp up to protect ourselves from the rain as well as protect the concrete patches from the rain. Rain will prevent the concrete from setting up. 

Drilling holes to anchor forms to the existing concrete. 

Screwing the two halves of the form together. 

The finished form. 

Mixing concrete for the patch. We used Quickrete which is pre mixed concrete. Again, fairly simple, just add water. The tricky part is to get just the right amount of water. 

Pouring the concrete into the patch forms. 

Working the concrete into the form. The sides of the form are tapped to try to make sure no voids are left in the concrete. 

Finished patches. We placed an old tarp over the patches to protect them from the rain so they would set up. 

Close up of patch. When the patches set up, the handrail will be set in place and holes will be drilled in the patches for new anchor bolts. The anchor bolts will be secured with Rockite or epoxy. 

Vashti's First Morel Hunt

A little earlier this week I was home early from a doctor’s appointment so I took Vashti out to look for morel mushrooms (Verpa bohemica), a spring tradition in my family. This was her first morel mushroom hunt. We managed to find one morel but the whole trip was pretty anticlimactic. The mushroom was a camouflage drab brown and Vashti didn’t even want to touch it.

I didn’t push things. We didn’t pick it. If Vashti didn’t even want to touch it, good luck getting her to try to eat it. In time she will hopefully come to like hunting mushrooms. I can see where this activity, intently studying the forest litter, looking for drab mushrooms, might be pretty boring to a two year old, certainly not in the same league as hunting brightly colored Easter eggs.

We did see a lot of interesting things though, which is why I think the tradition might be passed on. Like any type of activity outdoors, there is often a lot more to the experience than the main objective. The salmonberries (Rubus spectabilis) and osoberries (Oemleria cerasiformis) were beginning to bloom. Vashti knows salmonberries. She ate a lot of them last year though she might not yet be able to make the connection between the flower and the fruit that follows.

We also saw some yellow violets (Viola glabella) that have a number of common names including stream violet, yellow wood violet and Johnny-jump-up. The last is what my dad called them. I like this name and it is appropriate because these violets are one of our early bloomers. Though I most often use the name stream violet or streambank violet even though these violets grow in a lot of places far removed from streams. And we saw another favorite flower of mine, spring beauty or toothwort (Dentaria tenella). This delicate pink to lavender colored member of the mustard family seems to be pretty picky about where it grows. From my observations, it seems to prefer sandy, loamy stream bottom soils. I only know of a few places where it grows but I don’t think it is a rare plant. It seems to be quite common in the areas where it does grow. I have seen Trilliums (Trillium ovatum) blooming along the route I walk the dog but we didn’t see any of these plants that evening.

I have been teaching Vashti both the common and Latin names many of the plants and trees we encounter as well as which ones are edible or poisonous. Last year Sacha taught her Vaccinium, the genus for blueberries and huckleberries. Poor kid is going to be a plant nerd without knowing it. 

Vashti looking for the morel. I spotted it and helped her a little bit to find it. 

Stooping over for a closer look. The mushroom is actually visible in this photo at about 45 degrees left of center frame just to the left of a small cluster of green leaves (piggyback plant Tolmiea menziesii). The skinny white stick that crosses this cluster of leaves almost touches it. 

Closer view of the morel. It was a little early in the year for this area but they should be plentiful in the coming weeks. 

Vashti also got in some practice walking in the woods. 

She tripped several times over sticks but fortunately out here everything is pretty soft. 

I don't often think about it because I have been walking in the woods my whole life but one has to learn how to walk in the woods, how to lift or maneuver your legs and place your feet.  

Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis). Vashti ate a lot of salmonberries last spring and summer. This year she noticed the blossoms. I explained that these will become berries but I don't know if she has made the connection yet. I'm trying not to push too hard and overwhelm her to the point where it isn't fun anymore. 

Spring Beauty or Toothwort (Dentaria tenella). 

Yellow Wood Violet, Streambank Violet or Johnny Jump-up (Viola glabella).

Bouquet of Yellow Violets and Spring Beauty that we picked added to a vase of Daffodil and Plum blossoms from the tree in the yard. The violets and Spring Beauty are pretty common so I don't have problem with picking them. I wouldn't pick a rare flower or flowers in public places and will hopefully be able to get this message across to Vashti as well when the time comes.