Making a Living in the North Cascades Part II

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Summer 2004.

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Fall 2005. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Summer 2006. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Summer 2006. 

I received my degree in Environmental Conservation Technology in the spring of 1997. For several years afterwards I spent my summers working seasonally with no benefits for North Cascades National Park. One thousand and thirty nine (1039) hours or, basically 6 months, was all that I was allowed to work before a mandatory lay off. I worked the winters for a small logging outfit. There were no benefits there either but I was making nearly twice the wages and commuting 20 fewer miles.

I plugged away at my high lake project and the schedule I worked during the summer helped with that. I had a lot of hopes that the photo business would eventually pick up the slack for the off season and ultimately I would be able to make a living running around in the mountains taking pictures. I was going to a lot of places that were in designated Wilderness areas, far from roads and quite often far off trail. Not a lot of people went to the places I was going to and I figured that photos of these rarely visited places would probably be pretty rare and, therefore, quite valuable.

I expanded my photo subjects to native wildflowers, hoping to draw more attention to them, encourage their appreciation and conservation and augment my portfolio as well. The photography was expensive but I justified it by the logic that I was building a portfolio that would be worth quite a bit of money some day. I saw all the money I was spending as an investment. If I had been relying solely on the seasonal wages I was making at the park, I would have gone broke but the logging wages picked up the slack during my time off.  

In 1999, I finally wore out my welcome with the logging outfit I had been working for during the off season. Times were getting tighter and I think they were tired of hiring me, knowing that I would leave in the spring, especially when they had a couple of people wanting jobs that were likely to stay around longer.

I decided to try to get unemployment insurance for the first time since I had finished my retraining. But, because my summer wages were so low, my benefits were dismal, less than $200 a week. I needed a job badly. Fortunately there were several outfits logging a recently burned area on private land right above Marblemount. I went up on the hill and asked for a job. The guy had me come out in the brush the next day to set chokers and see if I could hack it. In a few hours I had a job for the winter paying $14.00 an hour. He offered me $17.00 an hour to stay on when I told him I was going back to work for the Park in the spring of 2000.

Around 2001 I was able to get a term job at the Park with the aquatics crew. This job had health insurance and retirement benefits. My status as a veteran helped me get hired and, for a couple of years, there was enough money in different budgets to keep me working year round. I had worked into a job at the greenhouse in Marblemount that filled in for some of the slack time at aquatics. This helped a lot in keeping me consistently employed. The Park was also flush with soft money from a recent FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) settlement with Seattle City Light and that helped a lot too.

Term jobs like the one I was in are temporary jobs meant for long term projects when managers, for the sake of consistency, want to keep the same crew working. To encourage people to stay at these temporary jobs, a number of benefits are offered, retirement and health insurance were the two big ones. These jobs last for several years before they end.

Because North Cascades National Park was never properly funded at inception or afterwards, there has always been a chronic shortage of permanent jobs there. Many managers used term positions to hire people for work that was ongoing for years. The managers could use “soft money” i.e. grants or other outside sources rather than the base budget to fund these positions. It was a very effective way to get things done in an organization that is strapped for hard money from the base budget.

For the worker in this situation, term jobs are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you get benefits along with your paycheck, on the other, you don’t know how long you will be working throughout the year. Sometimes you work all year and sometimes only 6 to 9 months, and you can be terminated at any time.

When your term is up at the end of several years, if money can be found to continue funding your work, you can put in for another term job. This means that, quite often, you are effectively applying for your own job with no guarantees that you will get it. As messed up as this might seem, it was still quite preferable to the alternative, a seasonal job with no benefits, usually limited to 6 months or 1039 hours.

I kept working on my high lake project and tried to get my photography business on its feet. I spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours and a good chunk of money converting my photos, which were on film, to digital and cleaning the digital images. The plan was to sell fine art prints and digital images online.  

My mom and I started going to arts and craft shows and bazaars. None of these shows paid very well for the time we invested, a few hundred bucks at most for many, many hours invested in making products, travel time, set up time and staffing a booth. My mom was retired so she handled most of the shows.

One of the worst experiences we had at a show was the year we did the Northwest Flower and Garden Show in Seattle. It involved traveling over one hundred miles one way, a complicated and time consuming set up and about a week’s time to staff the booth. My native wildflower photos and products were the focus of our booth along with some scenic photographs. For all the time we invested, we, mostly meaning my mom, never even made the $1200 dollar booth fee back, not to mention the expenses of meals and the hotel room where my mom stayed. She staffed the booth for the whole show for free.

At about this time I was also discovering a problem with my plan to sell digital images online. Some big players in the digital photography business with enough volume to sell their images for next to nothing flooded the market with cheap products that people like me couldn’t compete with. I might still have been able to do something with digital sales online but I wasn’t tech savvy enough and I didn’t have access to reliable, high speed internet, which was crucial for dealing with large photo files.

As to the fine art prints, I finally I realized that I needed to do other products like notecards and postcards but I experienced problems and setbacks there as well. It was hard to get the quality I wanted at an affordable price. I could get some nice postcards or notecards but would have to spend several thousand dollars for a run and, if they didn’t sell, which often they didn’t because there is no accounting for what people will like, I would end up eating the cost.

Another major problem I discovered was that most of my scenic photos were of Wilderness areas in the North Cascades. Very few people were familiar with them because so few people go to such places. People seemed to want photos of places that they were familiar with. I found much more demand for photos of Mount Baker and Mount Shuksan than the hundreds of photos of remote wilderness spots that few people have ever seen. Both Baker and Shuksan are readily visible from a number of easily accessed areas. What I had thought would be an asset and selling point of these photos, their rarity, was actually a drawback. Remoteness of my subjects seemed to create more indifference to my photos than demand for them.

At the end of 2006 I got my first winter lay off in several years at the Park due to lack of work. Actually there was plenty of work to do, there just wasn’t a budget to pay for it. I did a little logging job on some land my mom owned to fill in the gap in employment. I cut a bunch of alder, which was at its peak value at that time, and did pretty well. It filled an employment gap for me though it wasn’t anything like a permanent job.

In 2007, aquatics, the division I worked for at the park, started moving to more helicopter based work. This wasn’t as flexible as the previous work regimes and I had some serious concerns about this conflicting with other things I was doing, mostly being able to take care of the farm and continue with my high lake project. I should point out here that my high lake project was done all on my own time and, most of the time, my working for the Park during intense summer field seasons when my supervisors were reluctant to give me time off actually interfered with my project. We did fly into some places but this didn't count for the rules I had set for the project so I also walked into each place on my list on my own time even if we had flown into it previously. 

I was still entertaining hopes that I was on the verge of breaking through with the photography so I decided to give that an all out effort. I quit my job with aquatics that fall when I was laid off at the end of the season and invested several thousand dollars out of my own pocket in a scanner and computer equipment for my photography business. This turned out to be a colossal flop.

While at this point I had given several presentations that seemed to be well attended and rather successful and I had gotten many photos into a book or two, the expected revenue stream never materialized. I think part of the problem was that I was expecting my photos to sell themselves. I didn’t realize it would require someone to go out and hustle and hard sell the photos, just like so many other things in this world that need a vigorous, active effort in order to be sold. This was something me and my mom, who was handling a lot of the selling end of things, were not well suited to doing. We were simply not the type to go in for the kill time after time to make sales.

Another issue I ran up against time after time was keeping up with the technology to create or maintain the quality I wanted in my photos, cards and other products and to distribute these products. Again, the isolation of our location seemed to play a big factor in this.

The winter of 2007 and 2008 didn’t help either. The power was out frequently, along with the internet and we got buried by one snow storm after another. I ended up spending a lot of time shoveling snow just so we could get out of the driveway. It is hard to get anything done in an electronic, online world when you are far away from population centers and the power is out and you can’t use your internet, which is very slow when it does work.

Between the regular chores and shoveling snow, we had identified a number of businesses that might be interested in selling our cards and photos. We were planning on going out and making cold call sales pitches but this never got off the ground. Almost all of these businesses were an hour’s drive or more away and getting around to all of them would have required many long days, an hour down and an hour back and hours of running around in traffic. And, if many of these businesses were interested in our products, the logistics of keeping up with orders and stocking from our location would be a nightmare. Mom had gotten involved in a gallery in Concrete that took up a lot of her time and I was too busy trying to keep up with the day to day chores, keep the driveway open and making photo products.

There was a little revenue coming in, mostly from note cards with my photos on them but this was a pittance compared to the expenses of the business. I couldn’t afford better equipment, facilities or marketing products. I was running a huge deficit and it was being funded straight out of my pocket and my bank account was running dangerously low.

To make matters worse, since I quit my job, I wasn’t eligible for unemployment benefits. I had quit the job in the fall for altruistic reasons. There were some other people the aquatics crew that were qualified for my job and I figured that I would do the crew managers a favor and let them know ahead of time that I was leaving. That way they could get the paperwork done to get someone hired on at the start of the following field season rather than having to wait several months after the field season started when time is usually critical. In hindsight, this was a foolish move.

The experience of trying to make it on the photography alone forced me to take a good hard look at my photography business. With the model I was using and with my non-salesman temperament, relative isolation from large population centers and lack of access to reliable high speed internet, I was looking into the abyss of bankruptcy. 

In the spring of 2008, my bank account was nearly drained. I got a seasonal job with maintenance at the Park that summer that allowed me to work 1039 hours with no benefits. Fortunately I was involved with a job that allowed me to get extended another month. I was glad to have the work but I was also glad when it ended. The morning after the last day of the job for the year, I woke up with my entire right arm heavy and useless and in excruciating pain, the result of a carpal tunnel flare up. I had a pretty bare bones health insurance plan since I was paying for it out of my own pocket and it would have been a big financial hit for me if I needed to get any medical care. Fortunately, the problem with my arm seemed to clear up in a few days.

Later that winter, in order to make ends meet, I did another small logging job on some timbered property that I owned with my mom and sister. I did a select harvest which made me enough money to get by for the rest of the winter while retaining a lot of trees and wildlife habitat on the property.   

In 2009, I got a term job in the Maintenance Division at the Park. With that little added bit of stability in my life, I decided to do one last ditch effort at making the photography work. I decided to do a book that would tell the story of my high lake project. This seemed like my best shot at making the photography at least pay for itself. Over the years, I had had a lot of people tell me how interesting and intriguing they found my project and story. So I hoped that this story, a guy attempting to walk into every high lake that drains to the Skagit River, 3000 square miles of some of the most rugged terrain on earth, all without using advanced navigational tools like GPS, in Converse All Star Chuck Taylor tennis shoes no less, might spark some wider interest. The photographic study of sorts that I was creating of the Skagit River watershed that would be included in the book would be a bonus.

Though I thought this might be my best shot at making a go of the business, at this point I figured it was a long shot.  But wanted to exhaust every possibility so I wouldn’t have to wonder rest of life if I hadn’t tried hard enough.

I pulled out all the stops that I could afford. I hired a graphic designer and invested many hours of time and over $4000 putting together a book proposal. It was flop, rejected by the dozen or so publishers I sent it to. This wasn’t at all a surprise. Books are rejected much more often than they are accepted. And tight budgets in the publishing industry weren’t helping this trend. But now I knew for sure. I suppose I could have continued sending the proposal out until absolutely every possibility was exhausted or even self-publish but, at this point, I was tired of it all and had lost the will to carry on to the bitter end.  

Things for me kind of settled into a regular routine for a bit. I was lucky enough to get on a job that had a budget that allowed me to work through the winter of 2009 and 2010. But I was again laid off in the winter of 2010 and 2011.

I did another little logging job on our forest land while I was laid off during the winter of 2010 and 2011. It was again, a select logging show. I removed about 50 percent of the trees over part of the logging area and maybe 10 to 20 percent in the remaining area, and replanted the openings that were created.

That year I took another look at the photography business. This time I looked at the numbers for this small logging job and compared them with my photography business. It really opened my eyes.

For a total investment of 74 hours of work on the logging job, I grossed $8,245, of which $1400 went for rental and operation of logging equipment, $2250 went to pay to haul the logs to the mill, $1100 went to the State of Washington in the form of taxes and insurance, $1400 went to wages (me), leaving a net profit to us (mom, my sister and me), the land owners, of about 2,000 dollars. The rental and hauling money went directly to local business owners who lived 11 to 25 miles from where the trees were harvested. And at least part of the forest excise tax benefited the local school. In addition, once the logs had been hauled to the mill in the lower Skagit Valley, more people there were paid living wages to saw them into lumber.

That same year I lost $6,400 on my photography business, much of which came directly from my own pocket. And that year should have been a good year. I got a small contract worth $2300 dollars early in the year to create a presentation. This was actually the only instance in the history of my business where I was paid a competitive wage for my time. So, for that year, I had a $2300 advantage that I did not have any other year.

My photography business suffered the losses in 2010 despite what I would conservatively estimate to be about 1220 hours invested into the endeavor, about 800 hours of which were spent by my mom, at no charge to me or my business, operating the gallery and going to art shows to sell my photographic prints and products featuring my photos. The gallery where my mom worked would have closed long before 2010 but for the fact that the people who staffed it, like my mom were retired and didn’t charge wages. So it could get by as long as they made enough revenue for rent.

Significantly, most of the money I lost, or spent if you will, since we are talking about what could only be characterized as a hobby, went to businesses 70 to 100 miles away and even as far away as Texas, well outside of the local community. Most of the tax dollars generated by my “business” went with the money I spent outside the community.

In the almost 16 years to that point, since I had been trying to sell my art, I had never made money. My yearly losses ranged from several thousand dollars to $10,000. Early on, I was only able to sustain these losses by working during my seasonal lay offs from the Park in one of the only other well paid jobs available to me locally: logging.

I had, at one point during this period, begun making preparations to build a house, but this was abandoned when these funds were shifted into the photography. The thought was that all of the photos I was taking were an investment that would pay off when I finally got my break. I now have several closets full of plastic laden with images of some of the most remote areas of the North Cascades. For all intents and purposes, these photographs are worthless in that I can’t buy a house or a more reliable piece of farm equipment with them.

With some analysis and thinking about my failure to make my photography a paying proposition, some things became obvious. You need a customer base for your products. I was running an operation from a sparsely populated area, Marblemount, in the North Cascades, so I was mostly trying to appeal to people who are not from the area.

Therefore, my potential customers first had to know where the North Cascades and Marblemount or Concrete (the location of the gallery mom operated) are located. This is a relatively out of the way place and not well known. Then these potential customers had to have the time, funds and reason to come here. They probably didn’t come if the weather was bad and were even less likely to come once the pass closed and Highway 20 became a dead end.

When they did come up here, we then had to somehow get them to stop. Then we had to somehow have to convince them to buy something that they didn’t really need, that represented a place completely unfamiliar to them and that they had the expendable cash to buy. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the marketing savvy and personality to get people to first, stop and then get them to buy something.

Over the years many of the sales we have made are to local people who either know the area and want a particular photo or who know me or my mom personally. Unfortunately, there are not enough people living here to base this type of business on local customers alone.

The Wilderness areas where most of my photos are taken require a huge investment in time and gear and advanced outdoor skills to access. This apparently makes them less meaningful and appealing to the average person because that person probably has not gone, and never will go, to those places. When I was overseas in the U.S. Navy and we visited a place, I usually wanted a souvenir that represented something I had seen. I assume most other people have that tendency as well.

During most presentations of my work featuring the places I have been, which are all within the watershed of the Skagit River or nearby areas, roughly a 40-mile radius as the crow flies from Marblemount, I am often greeted with blank stares and many questions about where all these places are located. These questions come from local and non-local people alike.

As far as trying to do an online business, the dialup, slow speed internet infrastructure we had didn’t support that very well or at least we couldn’t figure out how to make it work. And the power was out a lot. Our internet service is much better now but it is a little late in the game for me.

The relative success of the little logging jobs I did also made sense. I was producing something that had worldwide demand and therefore gave me access to world markets. When someone needed furniture or some lumber to fix or build their house or any of the wide variety of things made from wood products that people all over the world use every day, they went to the store and bought it. They didn’t need to know where Marblemount or the North Cascades are and it didn’t matter what the weather was like here. This created the demand for the wood products, logs, that I provided. And because there was a demand for wood products, I didn’t have to engage in any salesmanship to sell the logs. There was a standing offer for logs at several mills in the area and I could pick and choose whom to sell to.   

By mid 2011, storm clouds were brewing at the Park Service. Several people had lost their term jobs with benefits due to some restructuring in the organization and there was a lot of talk about across the board federal budget cuts. Even though the National Park Service is a miniscule part of the federal budget, it is considered non-essential for the proper operation of the federal government and therefore, at the top of the list for cuts.

Things were looking pretty bleak for me at that time as well. My term position at North Cascades National Park was just about up and it was most likely to be completely cut (it was, and many more with it). My photography, my fantasy job of getting paid to explore the North Cascades in reality was, at best, a hobby, a deficit, steadily draining our dwindling supply of cash. And Sacha and I had a baby on the way.

There was always timber to fall back on though most of the logging activity was on private land and I think the profit margins wouldn’t support the wages of the old days. Still it would be a living wage job. The only problem with that was that I was quite a bit older and would have had a hard time keeping up with guys 20 years younger than myself.

If I had stayed with the logging back in the ‘90’s a natural progression would have probably allowed me to build enough skills to get work operating a machine which would be much less labor intensive. As it was, the way my work history went, only working part time in the woods between stints at the Park, I hadn’t had a chance to build many of those skills. There were also a lot fewer logging outfits around though I am sure I could have found work logging or in one of the few remaining lumber mills.

I could have also cut more timber on land I owned or had a share in but this would require cutting more heavily than I wanted to and I would have run out of timber pretty quickly. If I had access to more timber acreage, I could have plugged away doing light cuts and probably made a decent living at it for as long as I wanted, years even, until I could retire. As it was, the timber land I had access to was a nice income supplement but would fail as a primary source of income. The same held true with the cows. They were a supplement to our food supply paid for by the sales of our excess beef. But they weren’t a stand alone source of income.  

Other options for work involved me commuting long distances. I see people here do this every day and it was certainly an option. But it would also mean that I would have to give a lot of things up. As it was, I was already so busy that I couldn’t be as involved as I would have liked to be in my community. Spending two or three hours on the road every day would probably mean that I wouldn’t really be involved at all any more.

Then I got a lucky break in applying for a laborer’s job at Seattle City Light to work on the hydroelectric project in the Upper Skagit. This job had very good pay and excellent benefits and, more importantly, it was a steady, year round job.

I hadn’t had a job like this for almost 20 years, when the effects of the Northwest Forest Plan had cost me a good, steady logging job. Getting this new job was a huge psychological relief. I felt like someone drowning who has finally been cast up on shore. It makes a big difference knowing that there is a paycheck coming every two weeks all year round. You feel much more secure and you can make plans that you can’t when you don’t know how long that paycheck will be coming or if you will even have a job the next year.

Of course, nothing is for sure in this world. I know people who have been laid off at City Light too and I might be one bad snow year away from such a fate. But, being part of a utility, producing something that almost everyone in our society uses without a second thought and that, in our age, is really a basic need for most people creates a high level of job security.

Society needs me and my coworkers to keep the lights on where it doesn’t need my photographs or North Cascades National Park to fulfill any of its basic needs no matter how romantically and eloquently some might state the “need” for Wilderness and nature. Don’t get me wrong. Wild places are important to me but I don’t need them to have my basic needs fulfilled and they have never paid the bills that allow me to live my day to day life.

Where our society places its values was illustrated to me quite well in 2010/2011 in the differences in income between my small logging job and my photography business. And it was again brought home to me recently when I was working near Diablo Lake. A co-worker and I saw some plants floating in the water. My co-worker thought they were aquarium plants that someone had thrown away in the lake.

She wasn’t too far off. The plants were Elodea, an aquatic plant, the South American species of which is, or used to be, used extensively in aquariums. This South American species is often thrown away in our lakes and ponds and naturalizes there. The plants we were looking at this day though were Elodea canadensis, which is native to our waters. These plants are basically long stems with whorls of leaves around them every 12mm (1/2 inch) or so. The South American Elodea has four leaves per whorl while our native E. canadensis only has three.

I explained this to her, pointing out the leaf whorls, and a few other things about Elodea. Then I told her that if she could acquire a head full of knowledge like this she might be able to get a job that lasts for half a year or so, making something in the low $20 per hour range or less, probably with no benefits. She laughed. We make about $29 per hour, year round with excellent benefits.  

So there it is, my work history and how I have managed to make a living in the North Cascades up to this point. I certainly haven’t always made the wisest career decisions. I don’t think everybody does all the time. But you also have to take chances sometimes. I do think I gave every job avenue I tried an honest attempt. Things could be much worse for me now because of the chances I took but, more out of luck than any particular action on my part or skill of mine, I ended up with a really good, relatively secure, job. I hope to retire from Seattle City Light. And, one should never say never, but I can’t imagine ever going back to work for the National Park Service by choice.

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Summer 2003. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Summer 2003.

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Summer 2003. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Summer 2003. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Summer 2003. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Fall 2004. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Fall 2004. 

Somewhere in North Cascades National Park, Fall 2005. 

Making a Living in the North Cascades Part I

I don’t actually know how one would go about making a living in the North Cascades, especially not these days. All I can provide is my working history here and some of my ideas about the economy in eastern Skagit County, much of which I know about through my experience of making a living here for just about my entire life.  

The following is the story of how I have managed to make a living in the North Cascades over the last 30 years or so to this point. Some might find it long and rather tedious for which I apologize. I know I tend to be overly wordy but you can’t cover 30 years very well in a few paragraphs. I will break the story up into several different posts.

First though, and a bit off topic, an update on the Christmas calves and the rest of the herd. The Christmas calves seem to be doing just fine. Though the calf shed didn’t work for its intended use when the second calf was born on Christmas Eve, it has worked quite well afterward.

I have been giving Grapeleaf, the calve's mother grain to help supplement her diet because she has two calves to nurse. Grapeleaf isn’t the dominant cow in the herd so, if I just set the grain out in the open, the dominant cows would run Grapeleaf off and she wouldn’t get any. I use the calf shed to feed Grapeleaf. It didn’t take much to coax her in with the grain the first time and now she almost runs me over on the way in. Once she is in and eating, I can close the doors and keep the other cows away.

Gigi has had a solid black calf and Racer has had a solid red calf. Both are doing just fine. We have been lucky with the weather this year in that it is mild. Having calves at this time of year when their survival could be jeopardized isn’t really how I would like to do things and it is a sign of poor animal husbandry on my part. At some point in the future I hope to build a pen for the bull to keep him out of the herd until the time is right and start having calves in the early spring when there is a better guarantee on calf survival. Calf pics at the end of this post.

Back to the story at hand: I was born in Sedro-Woolley but I have lived my entire life, except for six years in the U.S. Navy, in the Marblemount/Rockport area. My very first memories are of this place and it was literally my world until I left for the Navy at the age of eighteen, just out of high school. I had read a lot about other places and I had access to a television so I wasn’t completely ignorant about the world but I hadn’t traveled much. To the north I had been to Vancouver, B.C., to the south, Northern California and the farthest east I had ever been was Idaho Falls, Idaho.

A friend of mine talked me into joining the United States Navy right out of high school. He thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. At that age, I was still extremely prone to homesickness. Boot camp drummed that out of me but it didn’t kill my sense of attachment to Marblemount and the North Cascades. Mentally I learned to make home wherever I hung my hat and wasn’t homesick after the first couple weeks of boot camp but no matter where I was, it always felt like I was marking time until I could get back home to Marblemount.

I was in Hawaii on Oahu the first three years of my enlistment. “Paradise” everyone on the mainland called it but I wasn’t there on vacation. I was working, often long hours, and all that nice tropical heat just made me sweat profusely when I was working. I was also scrimping and saving my money the first nine months there so I didn’t get out much when I had some time off.

Hawaii certainly was pretty but there was a lot going on under the surface that you didn’t pick up until you had been there a while. There was a lot of poverty among the native Hawaiians and local people (local referring to someone born and raised there but not of original Hawaiian stock). The whole time I was there, there was a steady stream of local people who would have loved to stay in Hawaii where they were born but they were leaving for the mainland because they couldn’t get adequate work. Tourism, a huge employer in Hawaii, provided many jobs but it didn’t seem to be enough to help a lot of the local people I saw heading for the mainland for better economic opportunities.

I finished the active duty part of my enlistment and headed home. When I got home, I spent about a month unemployed but there was a lot going on. There were lots of logging outfits and mills operating and it wasn’t too hard to find a job. The first job I had was helping to build a shake mill, employing some of the metal working skills I had learned in the navy. The pay was something around $7.00 and hour, which was decent for 1987.

When the job building the mill petered out, I got a logging job as a chokerman, setting chokers (if that wasn’t obvious from the title). This work was hard and very dangerous. Growing up in the area, I had known a lot of people who had been hurt or killed in the woods so I wasn’t exactly ignorant of what I was in for. I am named after an uncle who was killed in the woods.

My very first day we were working off a road that a man had been killed on the previous year and the crew talked about it all the way to the job site. It felt like I was going to my doom. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, while we were working, one of the guys accidentally stepped on my hand. He weighed over two hundred pounds and was wearing cork boots with soles studded with spikes to add traction for walking on logs. My eyes watered from the pain but I didn’t yell or cry even though I wanted to. You are under intense scrutiny when you are the new guy and it isn’t a good thing to look like a wimp.  

I stuck it out. The starting pay was about $7.50 and, in a couple of months, I got a raise to over $10.00 and hour. A couple more months and I was making $12.00 an hour. This was a very comfortable income for the time and, this, coupled with the savings I had from my time in the navy, allowed me to buy my property, or at least get a huge head start on buying it. The work was fairly steady, only a few short layoffs for fire season, snow and road frost. And the communities in the area, while not wealthy, were at least robust and vibrant.  

It was at about this time that I got the kernel of the notion of my high lake project, to systematically go to every high lake from the Canadian border south to the Suiattle River and from the east side of Baker Lake to the crest of the Cascades. I started to systematically plan trips to lakes that I thought might have fish and walk into them.

But my time in the navy had seeded in me a curiosity to see more of the world, the Pacific, in particular. I had been on shore duty in Hawaii but had heard a lot of stories from people and had been exposed to a lot of different Asia/Pacific cultures. So I re-enlisted and, after a short time in Florida, was sent to Guam for three years.

From late 1988 to late 1991 I was on the USS Proteus, a submarine tender. I improved my metal working skills quite a bit and did three WestPac (Western Pacific) cruises, visiting Hong Kong, Thailand, Korea, Japan and the Phillipines. Ironically, Guam, where my ship was stationed, is considered a WestPac stop for ships stationed on the west coast and in Hawaii.

So I saw quite a few places in the Pacific. I also saw places where people were truly impoverished. The Phillipines and Thailand stand out in my mind. I didn’t see a lot of malnourished people in those places but nobody seemed to have much beyond their basic needs. There were poor people in the other places we went but they weren’t as visible as in the Phillipines and Thailand where the majority of people were in this situation. When I came back to the states in late 1991, I had a completely different perspective on what it was to be poor.

I had planned on getting out of the navy in late 1990 but about that time Operation Desert Storm happened. It seemed kind of cowardly to me to get out of the service right when there was a war going on so I stayed in for another year. My ship wasn’t really involved in the operation other than playing some minor support roles. We did participate in the relief effort in the Phillipines after Mount Pinatubo erupted later in the year.

I entertained the thought of joining the Merchant Marine and sailing part of the year while spending my time off at home working on my high lake project. I took some steps toward that goal while I was still in the navy but it didn’t come to anything.

I also briefly entertained making a career of the navy but quickly abandoned that. Fresh out of the navy again in late 1991, I got the idea that I would write a book and make a living as a writer. I spent a couple months cranking out a fiction novel about sasquatch, a subject that had fascinated me since I was ten. Not surprisingly, that didn’t come to anything either. So I went back to work in the woods logging.

The second time around in the woods was about the same as the first, hard and dangerous. The wages were good, $14.00 to about $18.00 an hour in 1992, and the work was steady. There were interruptions like a week or two off for fire season, but I didn’t get hassled about unemployment benefits because I still had a job, it was just stopped momentarily. There was almost always work that needed to be done and there were always funds available to pay me and my work mates to do it. I paid off my place and started making plans to build a house.

I still entertained ideas of doing something other than logging, selling photographs of all the beautiful places I was going to in the mountains was high on the list, but it also seemed like I was traveling path I had seen a lot of others go down in the timber industry, work on the ground until I got too worn out, then work into a machine of some kind.

You could still get killed on a machine and the work was still hard on the body but it wasn’t as physically demanding as working on the ground. I had known of many others who had taken this career path. They weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination but most appeared to lead a comfortable existence as long as they had been wise with their money. I was also fortunate enough to work for an outfit that was big enough to have health insurance, retirement and two weeks paid vacation, almost unheard of in the world of mom-and-pop, also known as gyppo, logging outfits that were the norm in those days. The gyppos didn’t have the benefits but they often paid better wages.

Then the Northwest Forest Plan happened. Bill Clinton, who enacted it had been elected in 1992 but nothing happened right away. The company I worked for had several year’s worth of federal timber sales and was doing a lot of contract logging on private land. But by the end of 1994, the federal sales were running out. I wouldn’t pretend to know about the finances of my particular outfit but I suspect the margins weren’t good enough on the private land for them to keep operating. They quit logging and I lost my job.

I evaluated my options. The remaining logging outfits around all paid living wages but most didn’t have any benefits. I figured this was as good a time as any to pursue my idea of making a living from photography of my high lake project. One of the provisions of the Northwest Forest Plan was to provide some education for displaced timber workers, Timber Retraining Benefits or TRB. I signed up for it.

The choices for TRB were somewhat limited and I didn’t have a choice for photography classes alone. Since Marblemount was surrounded by a lot of federal land, and the government seemed to be going to place less emphasis on resource extraction, I decided to go for a degree in environmental science. I was only allowed two years training but there was a two year program, Environmental Conservation Technology (ENVCT) at Skagit Valley College, a local community college, which trained people to work as technicians in the field of environmental science. This seemed to be a perfect fit and I also managed to get into a couple of photography classes.

The ENVCT program was one of the hardest at Skagit Valley College at that time. I learned about geology, geomorphology, biology, ecology and ecosystems and forestry among other things, along with plant and animal identification.

I did pretty well in the program. And, while I learned a lot, I was also familiar with a lot of the subject matter, having spent almost my entire life running around hunting and fishing and exploring and observing. This made the learning process a lot easier. I remember learning in wildlife biology, one of the tougher classes, that ungulates like deer and cattle have all sorts of adaptations to deal with the toxins found in the plants they eat. I recalled, long before ever taking this class, seeing a deer scarf down a bunch of elderberry leaves which I had learned, as a child, were poisonous. At that time I wondered why the deer didn’t die. The ungulate class provided the answer and it was easy to remember for a test.

I was also introduced to the concept of a watershed and decided to expand my high lake project to include the entire Skagit River watershed. Along with this, I developed an interest in amphibians and started making observations and taking notes on what I saw during my travels.

I earned my Associate’s Degree in 1997 and got a job with the Aquatics crew at North Cascades National Park. I had actually worked a couple months for the park during my summer break from school the previous year and this made it easier for me to get rehired.

We worked in the park surveying high lakes and streams and also did a lot of contract work surveying streams for the U.S. Forest Service. The work was fun but it didn’t pay very well. I think I started at about $8.00 an hour. And it was seasonal. I only worked about four or five months that year. On top of that, even though I lived near Marblemount, right at the edge of the park, I often had to drive to headquarters in Sedro-Woolley, nearly 50 miles away, in my own vehicle and at my own expense because that was my duty station. Historically low gas prices helped but this was still a big expense.

Over the years I had known a lot of folks who worked for the Park and Forest Service on trail crews and in other areas but I had never tried to get any of this work myself because it was so seasonal. Ironically I now found myself doing work that I had spurned before.

At the end of the summer I was laid off from the Park. To make ends meet during the time I was laid off, I got a logging job. It paid $14.00 and hour and was only 28 miles from where I lived. I stayed at it until the following summer when I went back to work for the Park.

 

Racer and her new calf. 

Gigi and her calf. 

 

Grapeleaf and the Christmas calves. Gigi's calf in the background. 

Taking a break.