Last Look at the River

Here are some last-look photos of the Nooksack River log pile near Hovander Park in Ferndale, taken Saturday morning, the day before the Ski to Sea race.

From the Main Street Bridge

From the east side by the Carnation Building

From the west side by the car wash

  . . . and this year's petunias.

Ski to Sea

Whatcom County's annual Ski to Sea race will be held as usual on Sunday on Memorial Day weekend. The race is a team relay consisting of skiing, running, mountain biking, road biking, river canoeing and sea kayaking legs. Probably not in that order, and maybe one other event, too, I forget. As a plodding commuter and leisurely tourist I avoid such competitive events. I've heard it's one of those things everyone who lives here should do once, but no one's been eager to draft me.

The canoe event on the Nooksack River ends at Hovander Park, about a mile from my home, and just a little down river from Ferndale's Main Street bridge. Last week some news stories reported a log jam in the river near the start in Everson. There is also a potentially dangerous log jam piled up against the railroad bridge in Ferndale (photos below). Water levels are low now, but can change quickly in case of heavy rain or a warm spell that melts snow in the mountains. Over the winter the water rose almost two-thirds of the way up the blue paint streak in the photo below.

A week or two before last year's race, a work crew (possibly Burlington Northern?) was out on the river in three small boats, using cables to pull logs loose from the pile. They let some of the logs drift down the river, a few others were anchored to the bank with cables, to prevent erosion, I guess. The pile was smaller and more compact last summer. This year it seems larger, and more raggedy and uneven.

The Nooksack River looks fairly calm in this part of the county, but it is fast, murky and deep, there is a lot of debris and sand bars, and conditions can change fast. A few years ago a woman drowned during the race when she became trapped underwater in a log pile.

The photos above were taken last Monday, the 14th. This week we're having a rainy spell, and apparently the spring thaw hasn't come to the mountains yet, because the river is a bit lower today (Monday the 21st). Below is a new photo of the Ferndale woodpile:

Tuesday afternoon, May 22 - A warm spell must have come to the mountains. Today the water level in the river is several feet higher. The sandbar and much of the log pile is submerged like the bottom of an iceberg.

More debris is coming from upstream, including logs and old tree trunks with bare roots attached. Some flows around the pile, taking small branches and brush with it, but some of it sticks.

The large tree trunk sticking up diagonally in the photos below bobs up and down in the current, with water backing up behind, then welling up around it.

May Day

Suddenly this week the trees and brush along the roadside are dense with new green leaves and thick, lush grass.

The weather has been wet and windy, but I usually get in a 20-30 mile ride on one of my days off, in addition to four days a week of a 16-mile round-trip commute.

No new tulip photos this year. That's all right, I'm not a good enough photographer to do anything new with that subject. I do have a collection of unusual livestock photos, though - cows, bulls, llamas, alpacas, beefalo and pygmy goats. They're all looking very shaggy and molty in the spring.

Twisted Tale

This is the sort of adventure cycling leads me to on rainy days.

A while back I read a blog by a couple who were bike touring in Switzerland. The woman mentioned being served a braided milk bread called zupfe or zopf. I've always wanted to know how to make a braided bread loaf, so I Googled up a recipe, and here is the result. It's not quite regular or symmetrical, but pretty good for a first try, I thought. I made sure to knead it for at least five minutes, until my hands ached a bit, so the texture is smooth and elastic. Tastes good, too.

I may miss the Skagit Tulip Festival this year. Monday was sunny, but I had a list of boring chores, appointments and errands to run. Tuesday and Wednesday both look stormy, and Thursday through Sunday it's back to work.

My blog stats tell me that recently people have been searching the Bellingham Fire Department Pipe Band (three people, or possibly more). I posted pix of the BFD band on "My Birthday Photos" tab, and also the "Bohemian Coast" post back in October, in case you're looking. I may skip the Highland Games this summer, since they will fall on a work day, unless I get lively enough to get out to Hovander Park early in the morning.

Eat, Sleep, Ride

It was back around May of 2005 that I found my Univega at Goodwill, almost seven years since I junked my car, and I've been reminiscing about my early days.

At first I just rode around the parking lots of the Civic Athletic Complex near my apartment, then I dared the steep downhill on Puget Street to some office parks on Fraser Street, where I could practice making turns, riding over speed bumps and through gravel, and signaling, which requires letting go of the handlebar with one hand (I still feel uneasy taking my right hand off the bars). After practicing on parking lots and side streets I ventured on to Bellingham High School, then up Cornwall Avenue to Cornwall Park, which has beautiful flat, winding paths among old cedars and firs. It's also popular with joggers, dog-walkers, horse-shoe clubs, frisbee-golfers and medieval boffers from the Society for Creative Anachronism. With all these hazards I had to learn not to stare at my front wheel all the time.

My old bike at Elizabeth Park

The ride when I crossed Meridian Street to Squalicum Boulevard was the one that made me a bicycle-junkie, craving longer and longer rides. Squalicum has wide, straight, almost flat bike lanes leading to the marinas and waterfront parks on Roeder Avenue, where you can circle around the paths enjoying views of the bay, boats and big old houses on the bluff above the harbor.

A loop from my old neighborhood, through Cornwall Park, to the waterfront and back is about a ten-mile ride.

Soon after that I tried heading inland, riding the Mount Baker Highway as far as the Nooksack Casino. I didn't have an odometer then, but I estimated it was about a 12-15 mile ride one-way. The highway has bike lanes, but car traffic is fast and there can be a lot of big trucks. I once saw several emus by the road side at an animal rescue farm, but they're not permanent residents. Small farms with horses, alpacas or llamas are more common.

When my range extended to rides of thirty miles or so, I discovered the pleasure of sleep. Often when I got home from a ride, I'd sit down to have a snack and fall asleep in my chair, then wake up an hour later feeling refreshed, energetic, ready to get on with my usual boring weekend chores. At night I had an easy, restful sleep very different from the anxious, twitchy nights I was used to.

I confess to often using bike-riding as an excuse to indulge in the pleasure of food - a little too much sometimes. The summer I rode with a fund-raising team from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, training for the Seattle-to-Portland, I could eat pretty much whatever I wanted. By June I was waking up hungry at 4am, and needed to eat about every two hours. Some weeks I finished off more than two quarts of ice cream and still lost weight. I can't get away with that now.

These days I get $69 a month on an EBT card, supposedly for fresh fruits and vegetables, but I mostly use it to stock up on rice, beans, pasta and canned or frozen fruit and veggies. Then I pay cash for sauces and stuff to supplement the staples throughout the month. This is handy for shopping by bike, since I can shop around for better prices and only buy a few easy-to-carry items at a time.

My EBT card should be re-loaded soon, and then I can feature a shop-by-bike tour of Bellingham and Ferndale.

Not Yet

Although the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival officially began April 1, we've been having a series of windstorms that last twenty-four hours or more, with winds ranging from twenty-five to fifty miles per hour, and some heavy rain - no more snow here at sea level, to my relief. I'll wait a few weeks before trying a tulip tour.

On March 15 the only coin-op laundromat in Ferndale shut down. Since then I've had to carry my dirty clothes on the bus into Bellingham, killing most of an afternoon. There isn't even a direct bus, you have to make at least one transfer to get to a neighborhood with a laundromat.

Last week, which was particularly cold and rainy on my days off, I got myself into such a stew about it that I couldn't stand to make the trip, and ended up hand-washing some socks, underwear and work clothes at home instead. We have uniform shirts for work so I can get by without a lot of clothes, but four cotton t-shirts took two days to dry.

It takes so little to throw my life off balance. This week I made myself not think about it so much, and was able to get the noxious errand out of the way early on Monday. But this wastes too much time for the long-term.

The Promise of Spring

When I left work at seven this evening it was still daylight. By the time I got to Ferndale the sun had set but the sky was still light. For the first time this year I left off my rain jacket on the ride home, though I still wore two layers of long sleeves and pants. All the way home I was remembering back in grade school, when it first got warm enough in spring to go without a coat at recess, how shy I felt at first, being outside with bare arms.

After the first mowing of the moss in the outfield . . . 

. . . the beginning of Little League . . . 

. . . and Slo-Pitch

I'm pondering a political joke