Darcy And The Sea

We are in the midst of a great holiday weekend. We started with a parade in neighboring Brookings, OR, and associated festivities tied to the Azalea Festival on Saturday. We all had a good time and then Michael went to softball practice. Today, it was warm right from the get-go, so Darcy and I walked to a playground while Michael slept in. Then we packed up a picnic and headed inland where it got as warm as 77 with glorious sun. We hiked a short loop trail to see the Darlingtonia (pitcher plants) in all their wild glory and then hit another botanical trail along the Rough and Ready River. There's a picnic table at the end of the trail overlooking the river and that's where we ate. Then we drove home, with a detour towards Happy Camp. Darcy fell asleep and one minute later, we were in snow! Lots of snow! When we got home, Michael went off to another softball practice and Darcy and I went to the beach. Where she ran and ran and ran and ran and ran and ran and ... you get the idea. For an hour.

The ocean was incredibly calm, almost flat, so it was a much less anxious visit to the beach than it often is. Darcy chased the seagulls and the waves, and I chased her.

As you can see, especially in the first picture, she had a lot of fun. I did, too, in part because of the lack of waves. I picked up pretty rocks with a plan to make them into a craft project for our family reunion in July. There are such gorgeous stones on our beaches, but I feel like I need a reason to collect them.

And just in case you didn't notice, we were in the ocean, the redwoods, the serpentine fens (where the pitcher plants live), and the snowy mountains of the Siskiyou National Forest, all in about seven hours.

Please Help Me!

As many of you know, I started a new job in February. It's humming along quite nicely so far and I even got one of the grants I applied for already. One of my favorite projects I'm working with is a new community garden that's starting in Klamath Glen, a very small community in the southern part of our county. Klamath Glen is part of the Yurok Indian Reservation and is more than 25 miles from the nearest store selling fresh produce -- they need this garden!!

Nature's Path Organics is sponsoring a contest for the best new organic garden idea and I've submitted the Klamath Community Garden for consideration. The women running this garden are amazing and they are bringing together their community from the ground up.

The contest works like this: from now until June 15th, people vote on the ideas that have been submitted. The top five vote-getters will be the finalists and Nature's Path will choose two winners. Each winning garden will receive $10,000 in cash, $5,000 in technical assistance from Organic Gardening magazine, and $10,000 for a fundraising community breakfast. Their community will also get up to $100,000 in Nature's Path food products for a local food bank -- and the non-profit I work for runs a food bank. This would be huge for our community. We have the worst health outcomes of any county in California, with mortality rates almost double the state average. We need all the healthy food and activities we can get.

This is important to me and my community! Please go to the website and vote now! It does require a very brief registration in order to vote, but it's worth it. If you have a Facebook account or a blog or a Twitter account or any other method of urging other people to vote: please do so! We are late getting on the board here, so we have some catching up to do. I think we can do it -- one of the garden founders has 1000 followers on Twitter and she'll be tweeting soon, too.

THANK YOU!!

The World Of Fish

Yes, I'm aware that this is a bird's egg, not a fish egg, but in Darcy's world these days, it's all about fish, so I felt I could include another picture of the murrelet egg that shows it's beautiful color better.

Darcy briefly returned to her obsession with the Wright brothers last month, but then quickly moved on to fish and all thing ocean. Finding Nemo was part of the inspiration, but I think the bigger culprit is Crescent City's aquarium, Ocean World. We've been three times now and, as an adult I can tell you that it is exciting three times only for a small child. It is a very small aquarium.

Yesterday, we drove south to hit a sporting goods store for Michael, who has joined a men's softball team for the county's organized league. He had his first practice late in the day and hasn't owned cleats for a decade. We also went to Arcata's art festival, which was a bit of a bust. Darcy insisted that we go back to the phenomenal ice cream shop as we walked past it to get to the car. I had a half-scoop of the almond rose vanilla that was outstanding. Last time, I had lemon poppyseed. Also a revelation in a bowl.

The point of this is that we were in the car heading south and Darcy asked if we were going to Fish Town. For her, the only answer is yes. After deciding that Eureka is Fish Town, she then dubbed Arcata, Octopus Town. So we asked what Crescent City is, and she informed us that it's Shark City.

There was a short pause and then she started naming other places she's lived or visited a lot. "And Las Vegas is, um, um, um, um.....Sea Urchin Town!" Even Primm -- PRIMM -- got renamed as Sea Anemone Town. What I loved best was the um-um-um in between naming the town and deciding on its new moniker.

A mere two and a half weeks ago, I was stopping tears about the thought of moving by promising airplanes on the walls of her new room. Now, we're planning an undersea fantasy.

But we're not stupid. The walls will be a nice neutral blue and we will be using wall stickers for the fantasy. I'm sure we'll be replacing them with the next obsession in a few months.

Tall Trees Trail And False Klamath Cove

We live in an amazing part of the world. Sometimes we pine for more services that don't require an hour and a half drive, but then we have days like this. A couple weeks ago, we had a beautiful day and we drove down to Orick to get a permit to hike the Tall Trees Trail. It is a crazy-steep trail that leads, as the name suggests, to a grove of particularly tall redwoods, including the tree that was measured by National Geographic for the article that eventually led to Redwoods National Park. The hike led down to the Redwood Creek drainage and the trees at the bottom were, indeed, very, very tall!!

We had a great day. We put our feet in the creek, saw frogs and dragonfly nymphs, hiked a gorgeous trail and stopped at the beach on the way home to satisfy Darcy's ocean fetish.

We also became famous! Once you get down to the actual Tall Trees Grove, the trail makes a mile-long loop. As we were getting back to the start of the loop, I happened to look down and saw an eggshell. It was from a marbled murrelet -- an endangered bird that nests only in the tallest redwoods.

We were very excited to see it and spent quite a bit of time admiring it and debating whether (as I prefer to believe) it was cleaned out of the nest after the baby had hatched or if it was an unfortunate example of predation by a raven or other murrelet-eater. But once Michael started mentioning it to other park staff, the excitement grew exponentially. All the marbled murrelet experts have been chiming in opinions about hatchling vs. predation and one of them thinks he's identified the branch the nest's on in this tree:

It was a very special experience and one that we've been assured is probably a once in a lifetime occurrence. Apparently, it's almost never happened before. Luckily, the rest of the hike can be recreated whenever we want, although never quite the same.

This view, for instance, isn't going anywhere any time soon unless there's a very serious storm. We spent quite a lot of time on this gravel bar, playing with rocks and water and eating lunch. That's Michael with Darcy in the backpack in the foreground. It's hard to get a photo that does justice to the massive size of the redwoods. This one comes close, but it's still a little short of the mark.

Once we returned to the trail after our gravel bank rest, we went through a section that captivated me. Throughout this area, there are trees that are completely covered with moss, lichens, ferns, and various other hangers-on. There's a short section of 101 near Klamath that is a tunnel of these green trees. I love them. I can't believe they can live with all the extra vegetation covering their trunks and branches, but apparently, they do. The trail guide claims that all the vegetation is made up of true epiphytes that don't take nutrients from the tree itself at all. I guess I should believe it, because the trees are leafing out these days! They are really magical.

When we were leaving the gravel bar, Darcy didn't want to leave the water. And we convinced her to leave by promising that we could stop at a beach on the way home. We stopped at False Klamath Cove, which is a beautiful stretch of beach across the "highway" from the now-closed youth hostel. For those of you who think that 101 is a six to eight lane monster, this is our version of 101: hugging the thin strip of flat space between the rocky edge of the beach and that steep hill.

We always think that we'll be able to keep Darcy from going in past her ankles. Or we think it will be too cold for her. Or something. She started this beach adventure fully dressed with her pants rolled up to her knees. By this picture, the pants were already soaked and the shirt was getting there, too.

Michael was her shadow for most of this beach visit, making sure that she didn't just walk straight in, which is what she seems to want to do. He got maybe just a little bit wet.

Or maybe a lot! Darcy's down to just panties at this point. She ended up "wearing" my shirt for the ride home because there was nothing dry of hers. She had fun, though, and once again, we had to take her up to the car screaming that she wanted to stay. Somehow, the fact that she's so cold her lips are turning blue and she has lobster-red legs doesn't make her want to get out of the water AT ALL.

All in all, it was a good day.