Sorry for the awful camera phone pic, but I just had to do it. It’s snowing today. Snow on all the mountains and foothills around our house and snow falling, just not sticking.

Spring where are you????????

Honestly, I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for 2 1/2 years now, and not once have I been across the mountains. (We live in a bit of a bubble over here.) So it was high time that we take a trip–and we need another one. I had jury duty the next day, so we could only go over for the afternoon.

Land is cheap out there, skies are big, and vistas are huge. It’s a place that lends itself to exploring. And it feels like the old West–cowboys on hillsides would not be out of place. Roaming cattle, log cabins, ranches… someday I will run a working farm out there, fingers crossed.

This is the view on the drive through the mountains:

And another:

Evan took this one. Mushrooms had taken over the forest–they were everywhere!

He took this one too. I love the colors & the perspective w/the fence in the foreground.

An awful picture to take because of the sun, but I had to get one of the road and the spires.

We ate dinner in Twisp, a turn-of-the-century mining-turned-tourist town. I love all the old fonts on the signs.

“Sandals should be okay,” he said. Famous last words.

We parked off Chuckanut Drive and started into the woods, crossed train tracks, and kept hiking down to the water. The tide was going out, so much of the sculptured sandstone rock-face was exposed. The area is perfect for bouldering, lots of handholds in the rock, and like it or not, bouldering we did. All of us. In sandals. There was no other place to go except into the big drink.

The first time I visited Bellingham 4 years ago, Evan and I did the exact same hike. I was amazed at the Dungeness crabs creeping along the sea floor, giant purple and orange starfish piled in groups, and small jellyfish floating with the current. Colonies of sand dollars and clams are buried in the mud flats south of the cliffs, and geoducks are not an uncommon sight.

But not all that glitters is gold. Sadly, the crab population didn’t look so healthy this time. You can’t go crabbing or collect clams from Clayton Beach because of pollution, and while there are still places where you can do these things, they’ve become increasingly few and far between. Or you have to go out into the San Juan Islands for healthier waters. The Puget Sound is such a thoroughfare for large ships, oil tankers, fishing vessels, and barges that the ecosystem has been really affected by it. Bellingham is lucky because of it’s being situated at the northernmost tip of the Sound (the air is fresher up here, not as much pollution as farther south), but it still has its problems.

In other news, we are still searching for our rent-a-farm. Of course, those idyllic spots out in the county are the hardest to come by, but we’re staying positive.