Skyeball's Trip to the Vet

Saturday the 17^th of May I showed up at the farm with a long list of things to do. I was in the midst of a big project that I hoped to wrap up that day before moving on to some other things. I was a couple of hours late that day because I had gone to Concrete on errands before heading up to Marblemount.

As is my custom on weekend days, I went to walk our dog Skyeball. To my dismay I saw that the right side of her face was swollen to the size of a softball. This problem had cropped up about a month earlier and Sacha had taken Skyeball to the veterinarian where it was determined that there was some kind of blockage or infection in the salivary glands. Skyeball was sent home with some medications that appeared to eliminate the swelling. Everything seemed okay for several weeks but now here it was again.

Sacha wouldn’t be able to take Skyeball in this time so I would have to do it. It was already late in the day because I had run errands earlier but I decided to see if I could get Skyeball in to the vet’s. If I was lucky, I would be able to get Skyeball in and maybe get the problem resolved without taking a day off from work at my regular job. It was already late, so the day would pretty much be shot. By the time I got Skyeball to the vet’s, an hour away, got her seen and got her back, there wouldn’t be much time to do any work around the house.

I was in luck that they had room for an appointment. And the appointment time left me about two hours to work on a project before I had to take Skyeball in. Unfortunately, once I got her in, it was determined that I would have to bring her in on Monday for surgery to lance and drain the abscess. This meant I would have to take a day off from work.

I took her in Monday and the surgery was completed without any complications. We will have to give her medications for several weeks.

I took her back in to the vet’s the following Saturday to check on her progress and everything looks good so far. The swelling is gone or nearly gone and Skyeball appears to be on the mend. I will probably have to make at least one more trip down to make sure everything is okay.

Skyeball is a little unruly around some other dogs and she can be quite willful at times but she is overall a very good dog and handled the whole situation quite calmly, even though she doesn’t like the vet’s.

Skyeball before the trip to the veterinerian. 

Skyeball just after getting back from the vet's. The swelling is already noticeably reduced by the drain. 

Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. V.

State Highway 20 (North Cascades Highway) Milepost 104

Milepost 104 on Highway 20 is about a quarter mile east of Clark’s Cabins. On the northwest side of the road there are some large fields. At least when I was a kid they were fields. There is still a lot of open space here but there are also a lot of houses. There is also a vineyard and a winery.

When I was a kid this whole area was a series of fields owned by Karl and Dorothy Lindall. At least I think they owned them. For most of my memory, cattle were grazed here. They also grew wheat for a year or two. The wheat might have been after Karl and Dorothy were gone.

When my dad was a kid, this whole area was an orchard. I don’t know what all was grown in this orchard but I do know there were cherry trees. The summer of 1952, after his junior year in high school, my dad sat in a tree in that orchard eating cherries and watched B&W burn from almost the valley floor, an elevation of about 400 feet, to about 4000 feet in elevation. He saw the whole thing happen from beginning to end and said it all happened in about 45 minutes. He spent quite a few later years after he graduated high school on fire crews with the U.S. Forest Service.

About a quarter mile east of Lindall’s old place is the driveway to Newby’s old place. Newby’s Knob takes up the entire skyline to the northwest at this point. A little farther east are some houses along the highway that no one lives in any more. A couple named Jones lived in one of the houses when I was a kid. They were the people whose door I knocked on to call home when I got tired of running away when I was 10 or 11 years old.

I had read My Side of the Mountain one too many times. I got in trouble for lighting a fire in the back yard (practicing for when I went camping out in the woods) so I decided I would run away and do the My Side of the Mountain thing up on Corkindale Creek.

I got my gear together, extra clothes, bedding, matches, hatchet, hunting knife, .22 rifle, fishing gear and a few other things and started walking along the highway. I got about four and a half miles before I was tired and the blisters in my rubber boots became unbearable.

I camped out in a grove of small alders by the highway and lit a fire with some pitchy Douglas-fir for a starter and settled in. It was pretty comfortable. It was early spring but it wasn’t windy or rainy or snowy. After a while I got tired of looking at the fire and realized that this type of thing, at least at this point, was pretty boring (if I had actually stayed out for an extended time and had to forage my own food I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been bored and I would have been pretty hungry too).

So I decided that it would probably be best to go home. However, I was pretty tired with some big blisters on my feet so I went to the nearest house and called home. I didn’t get into too much trouble.

The sign designating the west boundary of Marblemount is just a little further up the road (west) from Jones’s house where I called home.

Milepost 105

Milepost 105 is a quarter mile west or a little farther west of the Marblemount sign.

There is a shake mill here that hasn’t operated since sometime in the early 1990’s. When I was a little kid, my dad was a business partner with the many who operated this mill. I still remember him coming home at night with his sweatshirt wet from rain and the smell of saw gas and cedar sawdust. To a lot of folks I would imagine these sensations would be unpleasant but to me they bring back good memories.

Dad found that being in business meant he had to spend a lot of time away from home to keep things going. He wanted to spend more time with me and he and mom were also planning on having more kids that he would want to spend time with so he got out of that business and went to work for a construction company finishing Gorge Dam and, a year later, hired on with Seattle City Light.

The shake mill operated for many years, providing probably a half dozen or more good paying jobs in Marblemount. The Northwest Forest Plan, implemented in the early 1990’s, was pretty much the end of that business. The guy who owns the mill retired, though he still putters around with different things from time to time.

Across the highway from the shake mill there was a building that stood empty for as long as I can remember. Dad said that this building used to be a pool hall. It fell down a few winters ago.

For a stretch starting somewhere around the Marblemount sign to about Milepost 105, there are some building lots along the highway that are about half a lot off. So there are theoretical property lines running through people’s houses. Dad remembered when this land was bought and then sold for lots. They guy who did it did the survey by himself and evidently figured something wrong.

About a quarter mile past shake mill is cinder block bldg. I remember as kid a man named Pete Cuthbert operated a gas station and car repair shop here. Again, I have lots of good memories associated with this place that a lot of people might think strange, gasoline and grease and electric space heaters and an adding machine used to calculate people's bills. I remember Pete being a great guy. 

It was during a conversation that my dad had with Pete that I first heard about wolverines in the local vicinity. Something had been raiding a trapline and whatever it was, it was smart and acted like a wolverine. This was probably in the early 1970's. Over the following years I had heard of several wolverine sightings in the North Cascades vicinity. Sometime in the 2000's wildlife biologists managed to trap several wolverines in the North Cascades and officially "discovered" that they were present here. 

Maybe a hundred yards farther west on Highway 20 is Ranger Station Road. There was an Indian burial ground near this intersection. Of course it wasn’t an intersection then, there weren’t any roads, and burial ground probably isn’t the proper term for the place. The deceased were placed on platforms. I have heard of similar customs among other Salish people. When the flesh was gone, the bones were removed and interred somewhere else. I haven’t heard that this is specifically what happened here but I think this was the case becasue dad never mentioned any bones being buried there, only the platforms. Dad remembered my grandpa and some of the other old timers of his childhood talking about how bad this place tended to smell as they went by on the river.

I learned about the burial ground through a story my dad told about a couple of guys, whose names I don’t remember. The use as a burial ground was before my dad’s time and, again, these guys were the old timers of my dad’s childhood. The one had built the house there and the other was always asking the house builder if he was seeing any ghosts, since they were both aware of this place’s previous use as a burial ground. When I was a kid, I spent a bit of time in that house being babysat and I didn’t see or hear anything unusual or hear any of my friends who lived there for several years say they saw or heard anything unusual.   

Near the intersection of Highway and Ranger Station Road is an old shop building for a small logging outfit. This logging outfit operated well into the 1980’s employing a lot of people in the area with good wages. The owner of the company and his wife adopted four kids and raised them-not the typical stereotypical logger I often see portrayed by the anti-logging community, out to destroy beautiful nature for no apparent reason other than cash. Many loggers I have known over the years don’t fit this stereotype. They have generally been honest folks trying to make an honest living. The owner retired in the late 1980’s I think. One of his sons took over the business and ran a construction company for quite a few years afterward.

Also near the intersection of Highway 20 and Ranger Station Road is an old tavern. In it’s heyday, this was Blackie’s Tavern, advertised on the reader board as “The Last Tavern for 89 Miles” referring to the distance one would have to travel east over Highway 20 and the Pass to get to the next tavern. This was in the days when, while drinking and driving was strongly frowned upon and there were healthy penalties, the enforcement and penalties weren’t nearly as tough as they are today. .

For several decades in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s there were big dances at Blackie’s Tavern that drew huge crowds. This lasted somewhat into the early 1990’s before finally fading away. The tavern closed sometime in the early 1990’s.

Just east of Blackie’s Tavern there is a deep ditch on the north side of the road and a little farther on, a channelized stream. This is Olson Creek. Olson Creek dries up here in the summer but it used to cause a lot of problems during floods. Sometime when I was a kid, maybe in high school, they reinforced the area near the highway with gabions, heavy wire baskets filled with rock, to stabilize the stream channel and keep it under the road. This is probably one of the first places I had every seen rock gabions used.  

About a quarter mile east of Olson Creek is a large field on the north side of Highway 20 with a small Quonset hut on it’s east end. This is the site of the old Marblemount School and the Quonset hut was used for years as a bus barn for the school bus that drove the Marblemount route. It was used as a bus barn well into the 1980’s but I don’t remember exactly when they stopped using it for this purpose.

The site of the last Marblemount Elementary School is in the field just west of the Quonset hut. There were at least one or two prior to this one and one of these may have been the Rocky Creek School. Evidently the Marblemount School that predated the aforementioned school was in town, somewhere in the vicinity of the current Post Office. It was somewhere just west of the former Post Office which is in a house at the east end of town.  

Kids went through 8^th Grade in Marblemount I think. Then they went to Concrete for the rest of the grades. I think this was the arrangement when my dad was in school too. They closed the Marblemount School 3 years before I would have attended.

I remember walking through the rooms in the school before it was torn down. They had the standard fine grain old growth Douglas-fir floors and I remember pictures of all of the presidents of the United States in chronological order in one of the rooms. It also seems to me that the chalk boards were all still in place at that time. When I was 8 or 9, they tore down the main building.

There was also a gymnasium or at least a basketball court attached to the school. They left this for a year or two and I remember a lot of the local kids playing basketball there. Ironically, if I remember rightly, we couldn’t get in to play ball when the school was entire but access was pretty easy when it was only the gym.

The gym was torn down a year or two after the main school building. I don’t remember the exact reason but I imagine the school district couldn’t afford to keep the building up. A guy ended up salvaging the gym. It was made from very high quality lumber. A friend and I got permission to salvage the nails from this guy. We pulled them and straightened them and then used them to build a tree fort.

At the western edge of the field where the old Marblemount School sat, there is a large backstop for a baseball diamond. My dad salvaged this from either Newhalem or Diablo when they closed the schools there and abandoned those ball fields. We had a little league team in Marblemount and he was the coach. He put the backstop up on weekends and after work. Someone else may have helped him, probably someone did, but I don’t remember this so my apologies to any others who helped out with this project.

There was a little league team in Marblemount for quite a few years after I moved on. Then interest and maybe numbers of kids dwindled. Later there was a resurgence of T-ball and little league for a few years but Marblemount hasn’t had a Little League baseball team in years, well over a decade.

A couple hundred yards east of the old school site, on the north side of the road there is an old shake mill, no longer operating, where my dad worked for a number of years. The owner of the mill was named Harlan Blankinship and I remember my dad talking about him a lot but no specific stories. I think my dad thought a lot of this guy. I have heard that Harlan had some pretty innovative bridge building methods. He was also a pilot and built an airstrip north and east of Marblemount along the valley wall. This airstrip is now overgrown with trees, at least where there aren't houses and yards. It was turned into a development called Emerald Lane.

About a quarter mile farther along Highway 20, one enters Marblemount proper after passing through a stretch of woods. My Great Grandma, Matilda Clark Buller may have named Marblemount. The story goes that a man came into town one day and was telling everyone about a mountain of marble and Great Grandma said “We’ll have to call the town Marblemount then.” I have seen this referenced in the book Origin of Washington Place Names by Edmond S. Meany published in 1923 though it merely mentioned my Great Grandma naming the place, not anything about the guy and his mountain of marble.

I have also read an interview with Glee Davis, an early homesteader in the area, at the Skagit County Historical Museum where he relates the origin of the name of Marblemount. His was a version was little more generic, if I remember correctly, just mentioning that they always found a lot of marble in the area streams. I believe he also referenced Marble Creek up the Cascade River.

Up above Ross Lake there is a large deposit of marble that stands by itself as a sub-summit on a ridge running almost directly due east from Mount Prophet. From the right perspective, this ridge gives one the impression of a mountain, or at least a peak of marble. The guy who named Mount Prophet and the circumstances of the naming are well recorded. I don’t recall the story exactly and I don’t have the reference handy, but I wonder if it wasn’t the guy who named Mount Prophet who was in Marblemount talking about a mountain of marble. I seem to recall from the written account that this guy seemed to be prone to drama and promotion of ideas. This is just a theory and I don’t know how you would prove it.

Almost nothing is same in Marblemount as when I was small kid. And Marblemount was a quite different place when my dad was kid. The only buildings in town that are the same as when I was a kid are a restaurant on the south side of town with a log façade, the house immediately east of this restaurant, the hewed log hotel on the corner on the north side of town, the house/restaurant just past the hewed log building and the Community Hall and Fire Department building.

The rest of the buildings in town have all been built in the last 20 years after the pre-existing building was torn down. The Shell gas station on the west end of town was built in about 1995. The building that occupied this site before was torn down in the name of standardization of all the Shell gas stations. I am sure the previous building had a number of issues with it as well that made harder to do business but it was pleasant looking and had character. The current building looks like most of the other Shell gas stations in North America. The old gas station here was just a store when I was a kid, operated by a lady named Sadie Vail. The gas pumps were added later. Prior to it’s use as a store, this building was a tavern, according to my dad.

East of the Shell station there is a restaurant, currently called the Buffalo Run. When I was a kid, a building with a bat and board false front stood here. It was painted red and had white trim. There were large white letters that said Sadie’s Place over the entrance. This was an boarding house run by a lady named Sadie Cudworth. I understand that Sadie was quite the character and quite independent for a woman of her era. As I think about it, there were quite a few independent women with a lot of character in the Upper Skagit area long before anyone had ever heard of women’s liberation.

When I was about ten (1975 or so), the people who owned the building got a grant to move it. I think they wanted to use the lot for a restaurant and needed the building out of the way but still wanted to preserve it as for its historical value. I have heard that some of the structural elements of the building were too rotten to stabilize to move, making the structure unstable, or, they didn’t know what they were doing (I don’t mean to be too critical here, I don’t claim to know how to move a building), which would also make the structure unstable. I guess when they tried to move it, it almost fell on several of them. So it was torn down, or maybe more accurately, it fell down and a restaurant was built on the site. It was over 30 years before I could set foot in that restaurant and by then different people owned it.

Where the Post Office is now was a vacant lot when I was a kid and it remained this way until the mid or late 1990’s when they built the present building.

Just east of the Post Office is the aforementioned restaurant with a log façade. This building was a store for years, and was remodeled in late 1980’s early 1990’s to have the logs façade put on.

The house just east of store has been there since before my time. The lower front rooms of this house were used as the Post Office until the 1990’s when the Post Office was moved to its present location.

Across the street from the Post Office and restaurant, on the north side of town is another gas station. When I was a kid this was Merv’s Service, a service station operated by Merv Peterson. It was in a cement building right along the Highway. The gas pumps were between the station and the highway and if your rig was on the highway side when you were filling up, you were just off the white line. This was a neat place. Merv also had a lift for car repairs and tools for tire repair as well as carrying a small selection of hardware. A lot of the local kids worked here in the summer, back when gas stations were full service.

This building was torn down, in the late 1990’s, I believe, when they widened the highway through town and added a center turn lane. You can still see the slab where the old service station was. There is an espresso stand on part of it.

Just east of the gas station at the sharp corner on the east end of town is a square log building with dove-tail joints. When I was a kid, this was mainly a restaurant. It is now a hotel, the Buffalo Run, associated with the restaurant across the street.

This building was originally built as a boarding house. The current sign along the highway says it was built in 1885 but I think this is wrong by a couple of years.  My grandpa helped build this place and he wasn’t here until 1888. They rough split timbers out of some big cedar logs on Illabot Creek and hauled or floated the  timbers to the building site and then hewed them to size with broadaxes. This building is a good example of the high degree of skill with hand tools that people possessed in those days.

This building may have been moved since it was built but it has been in the same place my whole life.

The ferry across the Skagit River was directly east of the sharp corner at the east end of Marblemount. The steel bridge that is there now has been there for all of my life. I think it actually predates the bridge over the Skagit for Highway 530 in Rockport by quite a few years. There used to be a house on the flat below the bridge but it got submerged every time the river flooded so they finally tore it down some time in the 1990’s I think. There are stories of people walking caterpillar tractors across the Skagit in this area before there was a bridge. I imagine they had to wait for low water to cross. I understand that as long as the exhaust was still exposed, the engines would operate just fine underwater.  It would have been a very cold trip for the person operating the cat.

There is a house/restaurant just around the corner (north) of the hewed log building. I don’t know when this was built but it has been there my entire life. The restaurant was added sometime in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s.

Just north of the house/restaurant is the Marblemount Community Hall. This has been there my entire life as well. The history of this place is pretty well recorded, at least in the Community Hall papers. The property was donated by Frank Pressentin’s wife Mabel and The building was a surplus bunkhouse left over from the construction of the Upper Baker Dam in Concrete. The Marblemount Community Club acquired the building and moved it to its present location in about 1957, I believe. The shake siding was cut from cedar at the present site of the Colonial Creek Campground when this was still in the hands of the U. S. Forest Service.

For its entire history, the Community Club/Hall has always been a non profit community service organization but in recent years there have been problems with its non profit status. The mission hasn’t changed but it’s non profit status is not one that qualifies for a lot of tax breaks or encourages donations. An attempt is being made to change the status to a 501 (c)(3). The hall is presentable but not pretty. It is real though, and it is all we have and all we are likely to ever have for a secular gathering place for the people who live in the Upper Skagit. I am hoping it will continue to exist for future generations. It may not.

The Fire Hall is across the parking lot from the Community Hall and actually rents the land from the Community Hall. It has been there for as long as I can remember but it hasn’t been there as long as the Community Hall.

I mentioned the mountain B&W earlier in the post. It isn’t named on maps but it is the big knob at the point of the junction of the Skagit and Cascade River valleys. It is the end of a ridge running southwest from Lookout Mountain and it is almost directly northeast of Marblemount dominating the valley in that direction.  

After the fire people started calling it B&W for Bartell and Weeden, the logging outfit that started the fire, if I have it right. Two people were killed on that fire, a father and son. It looked like the father had actually had a heart attack and may have even been dead by the time the fire reached them. The son may have had a chance to escape but stayed behind. If I remember correctly, they didn’t burn, it was smoke and heat that got them, or the son anyway. I don’t know what their names were. There is the wreck of a truck off of one of the switchbacks on the road up this mountain and I often wondered if that was the rig they were in, though it might be from something else.

Before the fire it was called Scotty’s Knob for a guy named Scotty (my dad told me his last name but I have forgotten it) who lived at its base. My dad had a story about Scotty. Someone, whose name I have also forgotten was taking a bunch of cedar out in the area and got permission to use Scotty’s road. This road probably wasn’t a modern, engineered road built with solid fill and all of the hauling created a great big sinkhole in the road. This was patched up, or at least camouflaged by throwing great piles of cedar spalts (waste wood) into the hole and giving it light covering of dirt. Well, it rained, as it often does here and Scotty was on his way into town or on some other errand when his wagon fell into the sinkhole and got stuck. Needless to say there were some pretty hard feelings over the whole affair.  

I worked on a logging job on B&W in the winter and early spring of 1995. It burned that year also. The fire started in May if I remember it right. It was the day before the official start of fire season which helped save the logging outfit’s bacon. If it had been during fire season, they would have been liable for damages. That was a very dry spring with day after day of clear hot weather all through April and May. The haulback from the yarder ignited the fire as it threw sparks off from rubbing some rocks.

It was fortunate that no one was killed or hurt and there was minimal damage to the equipment. It was also fortunate for me because I worked for this outfit for many years during my off seasons with the Park Service. This work was dangerous but it paid much better than the seasonal wages I was getting and it definitely helped my financial stability.

More in the next post. 

The ridge running east from Mount Prophet. The gray stone in the peak on the left is solid marble or at least a significant deposit of marble. It looks like there is a lot of iron here too as evidenced by the rusty red color on the left shoulder of the marble peak. Mount Prophet proper is just out of the frame to the left. From this perspective this ridge appears to be the dominant feature. Mount Prophet is actually quite a bit higherthough. When I first saw this marble peak from fairly close, something in the back of my mind told me that the color of the rock was odd but I just shrugged it off, assuming that it was granite like much of the other rock in these parts. It wasn't until I was walking through the scree below the peak that I realized it was marble. I was walking through a talus slope made up of marble. 

Same location as previous photo, different perspective.

Another view of the marble peak. 

This is Mount Prophet from Sourdough Mountain looking across Big Beaver Valley.  The marble peak is the third peak from the left on the skyline and should be recognizable from the first photo in this series. The summit of Mount Prophet is the first peak from the left I believe. There are also marble deposits on some of the ridges running from the west side of Mount Prophet. 

Another view of Mount Prophet from the Sourdough Mountain area. This photo doesn't really add any more information to this post. I just liked the color of the lake in the foreground and the way the clouds reflected on it.  

Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. IV

Milepost 102 Continued

About a quarter mile east of Milepost 102, Highway 20 crosses Rocky Creek at the top of long, fairly gentle hill. The land on either side of Rocky Creek is U.S. Forest Service land.

On a hot spring or summer day, this spot in the road has the effect of a refrigerator. If you roll your window down as you near the bridge and cross the creek you can feel that the air is noticeably cooler and quite refreshing. This is a result of air, cooled by the creek, funneling down a narrow canyon about a quarter mile upstream of the road crossing.

This phenomenon has dramatic effects at other times of the year. Plants in the area bloom one to two weeks later than their counterparts just out of the effect of the cold air. And there have been a number of car crashes here over the years as the cold air lowers the temperature enough to form ice on the road, usually on the west side of the creek, when the rest of the road, out of the cold air effect, is ice free.

The constricted canyon above the road crossing has other effects as well. If you look out in the forest for several hundred yards on either side of the bridge crossing, you will see a number of dry stream channels cut into piles of gravel and boulders, covered with moss and grown up with trees.

These channels were formed over the years during floods when the stream exited the constricted canyon. Inside the canyon, there was less area for the increased volume of flood water. This increased the pressure of the water moving through the constricted area. The increase in pressure also increased the ability of the water to move sediment, kind of like holding your thumb over the end of a garden hose, which allows you to gouge holes in the dirt. When flood water exited the constricted canyon, the area increased, the pressure dropped, along with the water’s ability to move sediment and the boulder and gravel fell out of it in piles. Stream channels were cut in these sediment deposits by the lower flows of the flood that deposited them or by later floods.

The Rocky Creek bridge has washed out at least several times I am told. The last time was before I was born during the Columbus Day storm of October, 12th 1962. It has been channelized with riprap on either bank from the mouth of the canyon to below the Highway 20 bridge. This riprap has held up for many years but at some point it might fail under the right conditions.

Near the east end of the Rocky Creek, the Rocky Creek Trail into Cow Heaven takes off up the ridge. I have been told that this is the trail the Skagits, or the local bands of Skagits, used to access the part of Cow Heaven that they burned to enhance the blueberry crop. So this trail might actually be hundreds of years or even millennia old and predate European contact. We know the area today as Cow Heaven but it sounds like it was an important food gathering place for the local Skagits and I imagine they had their own name for it, though I don’t know what it was or is, maybe this knowledge still exists. There is more on Cow Heaven and the Rocky Creek Trail in my posts “Know Your Forest, Cow Heaven” of 7/2/13, and Know Your Forest, Cow Heaven Addendum” of 11/24/13.    

On the west end of the Rocky Creek bridge, off the west bound lane, there is a blocked off road. The road used to lead to a house that sat at the bottom of the hill near the creek. The people who lived here rented the property from the Forest Service. As far as I know, the U.S. Forest Service has discontinued this practice. The folks who lived there by Rocky Creek were grandfathered into the rental but when the last one of the original renters finally passed away, the Forest Service had the house removed and the road blocked off.

On the east side of Rocky Creek, Highway 20 goes back down a hill. Near the top of the hill east of Rocky Creek, outside the timbered U.S. Forest Service land there is a former restaurant and current motel called the Totem Trail off the west bound lane. Some folks named Ed and Dot Johnson were the original owners and operators of this establishment. I mostly remember going to the restaurant to eat as a kid. The restaurant quit operating sometime in the early 1990’s I believe. The motel is still operating.

About a quarter mile east of Rocky Creek there is a corner in the road. Off the east bound lane on this corner there is a house and farm buildings. When I was a kid, the poor guy who lived here had the worst luck with his hay. He regularly got it rained on and quite often put it up too wet. Two or three of his barns burned down because he put up his hay too wet and it caught fire from spontaneous combustion.

Across the corner on Highway 20 from this farm, there is a black walnut tree. This tree marks the spot of my family’s homestead. There was once a house by the walnut tree but it burned down before my dad was born. Unfortunately, many of my grandma’s journals were destroyed when the house burned. My grandma was an avid diarist, recording all sorts of things from births and deaths and activities to the first blooming of many plant species as well as fires, and storms and floods. So a lot of information about the early history of this area went up in smoke. We do have one journal with entries from about 1914 to the early 1920’s I believe.

Supposedly, this black walnut grew on my grandpa’s grandma’s grave in Pennsylvania. I assume that it came out as a seedling with the family in 1887 and sailed around Cape Horn with them. If this is true, this tree is probably the last living thing to have made that ship voyage around Cape Horn.

The large fields east of the black walnut tree were part of the family homestead. They have now been subdivided for development. These fields and the ones behind them and the ones further east are or were collectively known as Windy Flats.  

Probably because of its position in the valley, Windy Flats often gets fierce Northeasters in the wintertime. It is a straight shot from here to the valley of the Skagit above Marblemount, even though the river itself wanders and meanders a bit. The valley above Marblemount is quite constricted and this serves to funnel and direct north and east winds straight at windy flats. You can also see almost straight east up the Cascade River above Marblemount from Windy Flats. This also undoubtedly influences the winds.

In years gone by, Windy Flats was well know for snowdrifts. The Washington State DOT used to put drift fences in the fields on the north side of Highway 20 to keep the snow from piling up here. This was discontinued a number of years ago, I am told due to liability concerns. I nearly didn’t get to work one morning about 20 years ago because there was a snowdrift across the road at Windy Flats. The drift was probably 6 to 8 feet high in the west bound lane. It was only about 3 feet deep in the east bound lane but the car I was driving at the time sat very low to the ground and I was just barely able to punch through after getting a run at it. If I remember rightly, there was a logging truck in front of me that broke trail a bit.

The year one of my uncles was born there was a snowdrift 18 feet high against the house where the black walnut stands. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was my uncle Ez. He was named after a doctor from Concrete whose hospital is now the Lutheran Church. The doctor’s name was Ezra Franklin Mertz. He was, in turn, named after a general in the Union Army during the Civil War. If there was an 18 foot drift against the house at Windy Flats, it probably took quite some doing to get there all the way from Concrete to deliver a baby, which would probably merit naming the baby after the doctor, though I must admit, this is all pure speculation on my part.

It is also not uncommon for Windy Flats to flood. One winter when my dad was a teenager, the Flats flooded and then it snowed. A lot of ducks were drawn by all the standing water and dad and a friend decided to go duck hunting.

As the story goes, they were sneaking up on the ducks behind a rise in the ground when my dad’s friend slipped or tripped and did a face-plant in the snow. Right then the ducks took off. My dad’s friend lifted his shotgun, a double barreled 12 Gauge to shoot. Dad saw that both barrels were plugged with snow and tried to warn his friend but too late. The guy let fly with both barrels and the force blew him back off his feet and into a snow bank.

My dad and his friend survived, though I think my dad’s friend was a little sore for a few days. The shotgun barrels also survived. They often end up peeled back in ribbons like a banana when they are fired when plugged. Maybe it was luck or maybe it was the design of the barrels. The design is what is known as Damascus barrels which are strips of metal that are twisted and welded together to form a tube. Dad ended up buying that shotgun a few years later and we still have it.

Milepost 103

Milepost 103 is on the bridge over Corkindale Creek. Corkindale Creek is in Windy Flats and runs through my family’s old homestead. Many people now refer to this whole area as Corkindale. Years ago the area was also referred to as Rocky Creek. The Rocky Creek schoolhouse was about a quarter mile east of Corkindale Creek and thus farther from Rocky Creek than Corkindale Creek. My dad told me the name of the guy that Corkindale Creek is named after was actually McCorkindale. Evidently the name got shortened over the years.

There is a small tributary stream to Corkindale Creek that flows in from the west near the valley wall, or base of the mountain if you prefer. This stream is sometimes referred to as Little Corkindale Creek but the older, and I think more proper, name for it is Pro Creek. I spelled this name as it sounds. I don’t know its origin or if it should be spelled Peroux or Perot or some other way. I have been told that it is Pro not Peroux.  The water supply for my family’s sawmill came from this creek and there was an old trail in this area that a man named Fred Trudell built to take his cows from the flats into Cow Heaven. In fact, I believe it was Fred’s use of Cow Heaven under a U.S. Forest Service grazing allotment that gave the place its current name.  

Corkindale Creek proper drains the west side of a large rock that sticks prominently out into the valley. This rock is probably more competent or harder and erosion resistant that the rock that once surrounded it so it wasn’t eroded away by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. This rock is called Newby’s Knob after a family who arrived in the Marblemount area a year before my family and homesteaded at the base of the knob. I have seen Newby’s Knob recently referred to as Corkindale by folks probably not very familiar with the history of the area. I have also heard that local bands of Indians placed a good bit of spiritual significance on this rock.

Maybe a quarter mile up from the flats, Corkindale Creek used to flow over a large rock, maybe 15 or 20 feet high and about half as wide as it was high, creating a very nice waterfall for a stream that size. When I was back home on leave from the U.S. Navy in 1986, I went up to look at this waterfall only to find that the rock had broken in half and the stream was flowing through the middle of the bottom of it. This rock had been intact less than two years before. In the short span of my life, I witnessed, or pretty nearly so, a major fracture in this great rock that had been, to all appearances, impervious and unchanged for hundreds of years or even millennia. I was by myself so I didn’t do any talking out loud but my thoughts were pretty much a stunned “wow”.

When I was a kid, a man named Bernard Hambleton owned most of the fields in the Windy Flats/Corkindale Creek area. He raised registered bulls and most of the fields were in use most of the time, either for grazing or for hay. Around this time we also used to see herds of deer, easily numbering in the 30’s to 50’s which is pretty rare, even in those days, for blacktails (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus), which is what these deer were. There are still quite a few deer around but I haven’t seen that many in this area since I was in high school.

Highway 20 is a long straight stretch when it crosses Corkindale Creek. This straight stretch continues for about half a mile past Corkindale Creek. About a quarter mile before the east end of this straight stretch, on the north side of the highway, there is a barn with a small apartment in it. In the easternmost stock pen associated with a this barn is the site of the Rocky Creek School. There used to be a twin Douglas-fir here. It was cut years ago and only the stub of a stump remains. I don’t remember how many years the Rocky Creek School operated, it was long before my time. I don’t think it was around for too many years before they decided to send everyone to school in Marblemount.

The son of some people who owned a café and tavern in Rockport, the locally famous Fish Inn, hit a deer on the highway here years ago and was killed. I don’t know a lot about him but I do remember that he and a partner were working a talc mine up on Illabot Creek when I was a kid.

About 100 yards or a little more east of the old Rocky Creek School site are the ruins of the house my grandpa built when he was 80 years old. He bought the Rocky Creek Schoolhouse from the School District for salvage, tore it down for the lumber and built the house from it. He had to cut a few new boards and timbers but most of what he needed he got from the schoolhouse. We moved out of that house when I was about a month old. My Grandma planted an ash tree on the west fence line near the house. Her ashes and my grandpa’s ashes were scattered under this tree.

Across from the old Rocky Creek School site there are rental cabins. The main building here is built in the style of a chalet. A guy named Wolf Lancendorfer lived here when I was a kid. He built the place and started the cabin rental business. One of his sons was a few years ahead of me in school. My place is just east of here and across the highway from the ruins of my grandpa’s house.

Just a little farther east is a sharp, 35 mile-per-hour corner. There is a business that sells honey near this corner and it is often referred to as the honey corner. The older name for this corner is Curnutt’s Corner.

Because it is so sharp there have been many car crashes at Curnutt’s Corner over the years. My dad had a story that I only half remember about a friend of his went to Concrete for the first day of school there (everyone around Marblemount went to school there until about 8^th Grade, I don’t remember which, and then went to Concrete for the higher grades), quit school and hitchhiked back home. He caught a ride with a guy who was working on Ross Dam I think, who was headed back up to work. Evidently this guy had had a little too much to drink or maybe wasn’t very familiar with the road because he didn’t make Curnutt’s Corner and piled his car up. My dad’s friend wasn’t hurt but this was the second or third time he’d gotten a ride hitchhiking to have the driver crash. He made some comment like “I can’t catch a ride with anyone who knows how to drive.” He still didn’t go back to school.

Curnutt’s Corner is where the old road to the O’Brien ferry landing meets the current Highway 20. The O’Brien place was on the other side of the river here and a creek on that side of the river bears their name. Midge O’Brien was the postmistress for Marblemount for many years and, from what I hear, regularly operated the ferry by herself to get back and forth across the river.

My Uncle Bud lived in a house near Curnutt’s Corner. At one time it sat much closer to the road. Uncle Bud didn’t want to be so close to the road so he cut the house in two with a powersaw (chainsaw), moved the two parts back from the road and reconnected them. The house is still there today.

This whole area is now often referred to as Corkindale. As I have already noted the Rocky Creek Schoolhouse was further from Rocky Creek than it was from Corkindale Creek. I seem to remember old timers often referring to the area as Rocky Creek. This stream seems to be the significant one that everyone used as a marker years ago. When everyone still had a land line phone, the phone prefix here was (and still is) 873, the same as Marblemount. The mailing address here, however, is Rockport, zip code 98283. I don’t recall exactly how the voting districts were set up.

At Curnutt’s Corner, the road turns to the northeast and there is a short straight stretch before some short turns in the road. There is a resort here called Clark’s Cabins and the road serving it is called Clark Cabin Road.

At one time this area was known as Bullerville. I don’t think it was ever a serious attempt at establishing a town. There was a dance hall here with a regular dance floor and where they had dances on Saturday nights. My grandpa played fiddle and guitar and I assume he played here.

Most people I know who remember this place had very fond memories of it. It sounds like people had a lot of good times there. I have heard of epic drunkenness and partying here, not, I am sure, that this was all that was going on. I think this was the only place for public entertainment for miles around when transportation was very limited so Bullerville kind of had the entertainment market cornered. My dad and his friends and brothers used to entertain themselves when they were kids by observing all the drunks. Dad had lots of amusing stories about inebriated people at the dances.

This was back in the days of bottle refunds and dad said they could get a significant amount of money for a little kid in those days by collecting the bottles after a big dance.

I don’t know when the dance hall closed. I assume it was sometime in the 1940’s. I think that there a quite a few people around who remember this place so there are probably quite a few stories still around.

There is a slough on the river here that is known as Buller’s slough.

About a quarter mile east of Clark’s Cabins is Milepost 104 which will be covered in the next post.

Lesser Know History of the North Cascades Vol. III

Milepost 99

The area around Milepost 99 is also considered the Washington’s Eddy area. The west end of Conrad Road intersects the westbound lane of  Highway 20 here. Conrad Road, now a county road used to be the old east/west road up the valley. The old trail up Sauk Mountain takes off in this area. The trailhead was relocated several years back so people wishing to use it didn’t cross private land here against the land owner’s wishes.

Swift Creek, which drains Sauk Lake, flows under both Conrad Road and Highway 20 about half a mile east of Milepost 99. On maps this creek is called Barr Creek. Swift Creek is the local name for this creek. The Highway 20 road sign for this creek says Swift Creek as well. You can tell if someone isn’t familiar with this area when they refer to Swift Creek as Barr Creek.

I don’t know if the name Barr Creek predates Swift Creek or not. It is interesting that people, myself included, would stick so strongly with the name Swift Creek. It is not unique. Like Rocky Creek and Boulder Creek, there is a stream named Swift Creek in every major watershed in this area. Barr Creek would certainly be more unique but, nonetheless, if you ask me, the stream draining Sauk Lake is Swift Creek.

If you look in the right spot off the westbound lane of Highway 20 between Swift Creek and Sutter Creek, you will see a flat area cut between two low hills. This is the old railroad grade.

Milepost 100

Conrad Rd meets Highway 20 at Milepost 100. Immediately across Highway 20 from Conrad Road is a pull out and rest area called Roadside Park. This pull out is also a popular eagle watching spot during eagle season. The whole sweep of roadside park from its connection to Highway 20 on its west end to its connection with the highway on its east end is part of the old east/west road up the valley.

There is a Darius Kinsey photo that dates from about 1925, I think, that shows almost this exact spot on the road. Many features are still quite recognizable today. I believe the barn and farmhouse across the highway are original though the house is now hidden behind some poplars. The cement silo of today appears to have been built since the 1925 photo and is a different place than wooden structure in 1925. The mountainside behind the farm is quite different. In 1925, the ridgeline in the far background recognizable but most of this mountainside was logged and burned. There are a few patches of old growth trees but most of the timber on the mountainside is gone. It is heavily timbered today.

The Saint Martin/Saint Francis Episcopal Church off Conrad Road visible from the highway used to be Seattle City Light’s office/train station in Rockport. It was later moved to this location. I don’t know exactly when it was moved. The man who moved it is still alive.

When I was in grade school and high school there was a very big log jam in the Skagit River that roughly paralleled the Roadside Park pull out area. This jam had a lot of big red alders and maybe a cedar or two growing on it. It slowly washed away over the years, probably as key logs that held the it together slowly rotted away. There is a remnant of this jam, with alders growing on it, in the river near the east end of the Roadside Park, near the intersection with Highway 20.

A little further east are blueberry fields and Cascadian Farm’s roadside stand. When I was a kid this whole area, or at least most of it, was in strawberries. They used to hire the local kids on summer vacation to pick the berries during the short season. I never did end up picking berries there but a lot of my friends did.

I don’t remember who originally ran the strawberry operation here. It was someone local, who lived nearby I am sure. Towards the end, Sakuma Brothers, well known for berry farming at the lower end of the valley ran the operation for a year or two.

From this area you can see spot I have heard called “Meat Mountain” because there are lots of deer there. I have known many people over the years to get their deer on Meat Mountain.

Milepost 101

At time of this writing, a human made log jam is being installed in the area of this milepost and Cascadian Farm. The main force of the Skagit River is directed at road here and this area has a tendency to wash out. I saw river during several floods, one in 1996 and one other one, I don’t remember the exact year, where it appeared that the surface of the river was even with the tops of the concrete “jersey” barriers. This was an optical illusion of course. I don’t think those little barriers could have held back the river at flood stage.

Somewhere in this spot I think my dad almost cashed in his chips when he was a teenager. Dad and a friend were going to ride with three other friends to see a movie, either in Concrete or Down Below. When the car with the other three came to pick them, there was some kind of altercation and dad and the other guy decided they would just stay home. On the way back, the car crashed in the river in the dark. All three in the car got out but the driver ended up drowning.

The driver was well known to swim the river on a regular basis. They think he got disoriented in the dark and ended up on the other side of the river because they found some of his things on a gravel bar there the next day. They think he tried to swim back and drowned in the attempt.

The car was a coupe I believe. I know that it was really hard to get into and out of the back seat so they figured that if my dad and the other guy had gone on the trip they would have been in the back seat because they were the last to get in and they probably wouldn’t have made it out of the car. I was saved from being in a bad crash west of Concrete in a similar manner when I was a teenager.

On the gravel bar across the river here lots of buddleia or butterfly bush is beginning to take hold. As nearly as I can tell, this has occurred in just the past few years. There has been a heavy infestation of butterfly bush on Jordan Creek near Marblemount for years. I have just seen it in Diobsud Creek as well. This escaped ornamental plant is pretty but it isn’t native and it is very invasive. On Jordan Creek it formed a heavy thicket which appears to be partly shaded out now. I have seen heavy thickets on open sand bars in the Chilliwack River in British Columbia as well.

Some years back I heard a prominent lepidopterist, someone who studies butterflies and moths, promoting buddleia because it is beneficial for butterflies. Maybe we will have more butterflies. And maybe the heavy growth of the butterfly bush won’t affect anything else but I wonder if we will lose anything as well. Either way I think it is here to stay.

Just past where river is directed at the Highway, if one looks up above the west bound lane you can see a flat area that is the old railroad grade and a culvert underneath it.

Mount Chaval and the Illabot Cr drainage on other side of river are visible from the open area where the river flows toward the highway. The mouth of Illabot Creek is about a quarter mile downstream from this spot, roughly across the river from Cascadian Farm. From what I understand Illabot is anglicized Salish word that means “run them around” referring to the mountain goats the Indians hunted by running them around some cirques on Illabot Peaks until they were tired enough to get within shooting range. There was also a very big longhouse on Illabot Creek near the mouth that is well recorded by anthropologists/archaeologists.

I have also heard that the name “Chaval” refers to goats as well, though when I looked it up, the definition I found indicated that chaval is a French word for horse. Mount Chaval does have a vague resemblance to a horse’s head but the resemblance is not nearly as dramatic as Whitehorse Mountain in Darrington.

My Grandpa and Great-Uncle ran trap line in Illabot Creek area and witnessed a massive landslide that filled in almost all of Illabot Lake or at least witnessed the aftermath of this slide. There are more details about this and other interesting geological features in this watershed in my blog post “Birthday Trip” of  8/7/13.

Just past the open area along the river there are some fields. This is the Hooper Place. My uncle Ezra or Ez, as everyone called him lived here for many years. I have heard that he bought this place with retro-disability money for wounds received during WWII.

Before he owned this place, maybe when Hoopers  still owned it, supposedly 40 acres were lost from it overnight in a big flood. I am guessing what happened is that the main channel of the river was further south in one of the many old river channels on the south side of the river that are now sloughs and it shifted into the channel of a slough near its present location during the flood.

I understand that this is how our streams often migrate. They abandon channels during floods, often reoccupying old abandoned channels which have become sloughs. The most recently abandoned channels in turn become sloughs, which provide a lot of important habitat for fish and wildlife. At some point, during another flood, the stream will reoccupy the old abandoned channel/slough and abandon the new channel and the process repeats itself.

Streams also migrate slowly or rapidly by cutting away at their banks. One can see this process happening in the open area along near Milepost 101. Where the river is flowing roughly north/south and directly at the highway, it is slowly cutting into the bank on its west side. You can see the trees on this bank leaning at various stages of falling into the river. The bank on its east side here is slowly growing toward the west, accumulating sediment that falls out in the slower water.

Uncle Ez claimed to have seen wolverines on two separate occasions on his place, just across the river from Illabot Creek years ago. My dad claimed to have seen wolverines on two different occasions on Illabot Creek about 20 years ago as well and I heard of someone from Darrington also claiming to have seen a wolverine in this area. I myself have seen some suspiciously wolverine-ish tracks in the snow in the Illabot area.

I hear that wolverines have recently been “discovered” or “rediscovered” in the North Cascades. I have been hearing about wolverine sightings in the Illabot area for decades. Of course, the people making these sightings weren’t scientists (a criticism I have often heard) and some of the observations were possibly misidentifications, including my own, but when you have a lot of sightings by different people in a given area, I think that would lead most reasonable people to a least suspect there might be something worth investigating there.

It seems to me that some scientists make very good use of the observations of lay people when they can get them, while others ignore these types of observations. Of course, if the scientists were to take every sighting as absolutely true, they would be flooded with a lot of useless information and end up wasting a lot of time and effort. I also know a lot of people who see some pretty rare animals or what they think are rare animals and don’t report their observations out of fear of kneejerk reactions and further land use restrictions. I sometimes wonder how wise it is to let others know about some of the things that I come across.

Milepost 102

On the north side of the westbound lane in the vicinity of this milepost there is a large flat full of Himalaya blackberries (Rubus discolor) and smaller, skinny trees. The flat is maybe a quarter mile long and there are several houses on it.

When I was in grade school the area of this flat was a helicopter landing. I remember the flat being treeless with cold decks of logs and a helicopter occasionally parked there. I vaguely remember something being special about the helicopter logging here, maybe it was the first helicopter job in the state or the county. The story goes that a guy bought some timber land up on the side of the mountain here but when he went to build a road in to get the timber, he couldn’t get a right-of-way to do it. So he had to resort to helicopter logging to get his timber out. I was recently looking at some old Metzger maps of the area that show mining claims in the area that was logged. Timber rights often go with mining rights so maybe that had something to do with the whole thing.

I seem to remember the flat near Milepost 102 being used as a helicopter landing several times. From the other side of the valley one can see the helicopter logging units from where the logs were flown to the landing in the flat at MP 102. They are quite grown up now but you can still make them out if you know what you are looking for. One of the units has grown back mostly to hardwoods and makes a distinct patch on the mountainside. The other unit has grown back mostly to conifers but, if you look closely, you can still see the cutting lines where the younger trees are much shorter. These units are much more visible when there is snow on the ground.

The flat near Milepost 102 is not actually flat. It, and the road, lay on a long, fairly gradual hill. At the top of this hill, Highway 20 crosses Rocky Creek. More on Rocky Creek in the next Lesser Known History Post.

P.S. Over the last several weeks I have noticed a lot of needle cast in Douglas-fir over a wide area. I only noticed this because I have been keeping my eye on several patches of Douglas-fir with root rot which causes chlorotic (yellowing) needles and needle cast and increased susceptibility to wind throw. I noticed a lot of trees in these patches were dying, then I noticed the needle in trees all along Highway 20.

I don’t know if this is an ordinary seasonal thing that I have just noticed (healthy western red cedar looks very bad in the fall when the old foliage turns red and dies back) or if it is something new and different. If it is not an ordinary seasonal thing, there are any number of things that could be causing this, increased spread of fungal root disease, insect damage, (hopefully not some exotic pest) or stress reaction to the kind of strange fall and winter weather we have been having to name a few. I have heard that several studies recently have shown that tree death has recently increased.

Roadside Park area, Milepost 100, circa about 1925.  D. Kinsey Collection, Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Bellingham, WA. 

Roadside Park area circa about 2008. In black and white for easier comparison. The barn appears to be about the same. The house is the same but it is hidden by poplars in this photo. The silo in this photo is made from concrete while the one in the previous photos is wooden. The view point of this photo is a little closer than the previous photo. The ridge line in the background is easily recognizable. Note how much the timber on the hillside has grown back. The hillside in 1925 was almost bare. 

Same as previous photo in color. Color is blown out because this is a scan of a poor print. The car in the foreground is a Nissan. Did Nissan even exist as a company in 1925? They definitely weren't making cars that could be exported to the U.S. and compete on the American market. 

Skagit River just upstream of Milepost 101. The river is flowing north to south in this photo and cutting into its western bank. 

Skagit River just upstream of Milepost 101. This is a closer view of the east bank here where sediment is accumulating as the river cuts and migrates west. 

Skagit River just upstream of Milepost 101. This is a closer view of the west bank here where the river is cutting and migrating. Note the cottonwood trees leaning over the river as their roots are undercut. These are all new since last fall. The previous line of leaning trees fell into the river this winter. Also note the many trees with broken tops due to increased wind exposure as the trees in front of them fell into the river. 

Skagit River across from Milepost 101. Thick growth of buddleia. These have just reached this size and covered the bar within the last several years. Later in the year, these bushes will have many bunches of lilac like flowers that attract butterflies, hence the other name for this plant, butterfly bush. The copious purple flowers are why this plant is prized as an ornamental. It is pretty invasive and will take over open areas rapidly. 

Looking downstream on the Skagit River from Milepost 101 at the artificial logjam just built this year. 

Close up of artificial log jam. 

Wolverine tracks in the Illabot area? I don't know for sure. These tracks didn't appear to be melted out too much. Melting would increase their size. The notebook is about 7 inches long. These look way too big to me to be marmot tracks but who knows? Melting snow can change tracks dramatically and maybe they were melted out more than I thought.