Something's missing in Washington state this year. More specifically, lots of fish are missing.
Historically low numbers of coho salmon and wild steelhead have returned to Washington's coastal streams in 2023. The Quinault Indian Nation reported low catch numbers for coho salmon in October. Then, on November 27, officials with Olympic National Park announced low numbers of wild steelhead in their rivers.
These numbers point to serious problems for both fish and people. As the runs of these fish continue to decline, they face the possibility of collapsing. At the very least, the low numbers from rivers that once teamed with salmon and steelhead indicate a distressed ecosystem. Such distress will impact people who depend on the fish for sustenance and their livelihoods.
In response to the troubling numbers, the Quinault Indian Nation closed its fisheries in Grays Harbor and on the Queets River. Olympic National Park took a similar step by closing the Queets, Salmon, and Quinault rivers to steelhead fishing.
With so many fish missing from Washington's rivers, something's definitely wrong in the Pacific Northwest.
The United States National Parks Service (NPS) has proposed a massive entrance-fee hike that carries a cost far greater than its $70 price tag.
According to this news release from NPS, the peak rate at 17 heavily visited parks, including Washington state's Mount Rainier and Olympic, would jump from about $25 to $70 in 2018. NPS argues that the rate hike helps address maintenance costs for the parks.
Without a doubt, we must fully fund and maintain our parks. However, the approach taken by NPS exacts a much heavier toll than the money for an entrance pass. I would pay the $70 because I love these places and because I can afford it, but for many, the price will turn them away, and that's where the real cost emerges.
Are we willing to pay the price for losing our connection
to places like Paradise in Mount Rainier National Park?
We preserved national parks as part of a social, cultural, and environmental trust. They were and continue to be places where we can go and connect with nature and other people more closely. Instituting a prohibitive entrance fee destroys that connection, cutting people off from important human and environmental relationships. Once severed, those bonds wither and fade, leaving our planet and ourselves at risk and opening the door for the possibility of privatized national parks (a great and devastating oxymoron). Violating a sacred trust like our national parks with a privatization scheme would threaten our deepest values.
As I said above, the national parks need full funding, but satisfying their budgets calls for more collective commitment, not less. Consequently, we must reexamine our priorities. Do we want tax cuts, particularly for the richest individuals, at any price, or do we want to have a society that makes us proud and nourishes us by returning the investment we make in it?
Whatever we choose, we'll pay something, but I doubt we can afford the first option.
The right move can take us to the ends of the Earth.
Last Tuesday, as record-setting heat settled into the Pacific Northwest, my mom and I drove to Kalaloch on the coast of the Olympic Peninsula. The trip gave me aneeded escape from the oppressive temperatures and smoky air.
Although we'd scheduled the outing before forecasts began predicting the extreme heat, I couldn't help thinking on the drive up the peninsula how nice the ocean air would feel instead of 95 degrees. With each mile, we left further behind the temperatures escalating inland. When we reached Kalaloch, which resides on the western boundary of Olympic National Park, the temperature stood in the 60s. On the beach, a fresh breeze blew light fog from the water, and the tide washed cool waves over our feet.
Driftwood on the beach at Kalaloch.
Walking near the surf, I found myself surrounded by shorebirds, including a semipalmated plover, which represented my very first sighting of that species. We left the beach for lunch, climbing the cliff at the edge of North America. When we reached the top, a group of people informed us that they saw gray whales just offshore. Putting off lunch, we stayed to watch the whales, which ventured inside the breakers, flipped on their sides, and occasionally spouted into the air. It had taken a long drive, but looking at the whales forage at the end of the world's greatest ocean, I knew I'd come to the right spot on what otherwise might have been an uncomfortably hot day.
After watching the whales, my mom and I enjoyed a wonderful lunch in the cool restaurant at the Kalaloch Lodge. Next, we explored the Kalaloch Creek Nature Trail. A little warmer than the beach, the forest through which the trail wound nevertheless provided abundant shade, and its quiet confines completed the satisfaction of escaping the less favorable conditions to the east.
As we returned home to find temperatures still in the 90s and smoke filtering in from wildfires in British Columbia, the lesson of the day shone clearly through the haze: Know what place is right for you, and go wherever that may be even if it's the very end of the line.
My hike near Mount St. Helens 11 days ago began last summer, and it's not over yet.
On a Father's Day trip to the mountain in 2015, my dad and I found some information about the trails in the area. After last year's successful hikes at Mount Rainier, Olympic National Park, and the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, I spent part of the winter planning excursions in the Pacific Northwest for this summer. The details about the Mount St. Helens trails provided a number of great options.
The hike from the hummocks northwest of the mountain to Johnston Ridge seemed particularly interesting, and I quickly settled on it. By Christmas, my mom and my cousin were on board for the hike.
As it moved from the Toutle River Valley up Johnston Ridge, the Boundary-Hummocks Trail displayed a surprising range of features and ecosystem types. The hummocks, formed by deposits left from the massive lahars (mudflows) triggered by the volcano's 1980 eruption, contained lush ponds shaded by alder. The ponds provided homes for beavers and birds and fed thriving thickets of ferns, cattails, and horsetails. Below the hummocks, the Toutle River continued its task of cutting through the sediment deposits.
Johnston Ridge, which received much of the 1980 blast, featured different terrain. A few trees had returned, but much of the land was open, giving us a great view to watch the day's clouds shuffle around the mountain. The clouds became the stars of the hike. They began to clear at about 9:30 a.m. Around noon, they re-formed near the mountain's middle like a Hula-Hoop. By the late afternoon, they covered the summit. Rather than taking away from the view though, the clouds seemed to enhance it with various personalities. Last year, during the hot, dry summer, we saw no clouds around the mountain. The clear view was fantastic, but this year's clouds made for many unique perspectives not possible without them.
When the hiked ended, I felt like I knew Mount St. Helens more intimately. I'd walked in two very different environments in the span of just a few miles, and they had revealed a lot about what has been happening around the mountain in the last 36 years.
In truth, this one trail represents just the tip of the iceberg with regard to the network of paths around the mountain, so an adventure that began in 2015 and continued this year has plenty of next steps.
Outdoor adventures can have unintended destinations, and going places can take us back.
For Father's Day 2015, my dad, my grandma, and I drove to Mount St. Helens. The trip went so well that we decided to replicate the experience with a new destination this year. We considered a drive to Mount Rainier, but my dad settled on Donkey Creek in the Olympic Peninsula. This wasn't a random decision. He'd spent time there with his parents on hunting trips when he was younger, and he wanted to see the area again. Going there would be a new experience for me, so his suggestion sounded good.
Instead of taking the trip on Father's Day, we made the drive on June 4, which allowed us to take advantage of the peninsula's cooler temperatures on a hot day; and rather than taking Highway 101 up the peninsula, we cut through the Wynoochee River Valley for a more leisurely and scenic route. Dad had plenty of time to observe and discuss how the area had changed over the years. The day was clear, and we caught glimpses of the Olympic Mountains.
Turning onto the Donkey Creek road brought together different points in time. I'd never seen the area, so it all should have been new. However, the time Dad and Grandma had spent there in the past came back as they talked about places they'd camped and hunted, so I felt a surprising familiarity with these fresh surroundings. While they noted the changes to the area, I began to think about how we were there both in the present and back in an earlier time simultaneously. The two periods meshed for a powerful experience.
Emerging at the Newberry Creek entrance, we realized how close we were to Lake Quinault and made the quick decision to take the loop around the lake. Coincidently, on June 4, 2015, my mom and I had hiked the Willaby Creek Trail on the lake's south side, so the return exactly one year later made for a nice bookend journey. On the drive around the lake, we found great views of the Olympics and the cool, blue Quinault River. We also saw a cow elk and her calf and stopped to take in the sight and sound of a waterfall.
It's great to know where you want to go, but leaving some room for the unexpected can take you just about anywhere in time and space.
The saying holds that people who keep their heads while everyone else loses theirs don't understand the situation. My experiences this summer taught me that the people who don't lose their heads might just understand the situation as fully as possible.
I spent the summer amid the sound of First Aid Kit, a Swedish folk band with a flair for Americana, and the fury of a Pacific Northwest burning in the face of global warming. We typically overcome the kind of sadness and fear associated with watching a beloved place shrivel up and incinerate by turning away from the most terrifying details. As much as I might have liked to do that at the beginning of the summer, by the end, I realized that this time (and from now on), I would, as First Aid Kit's song says, "Walk unafraid."
I bought the song, which comes from the soundtrack of Wild, along with the band's Stay Gold album in early May before I returned home for summer vacation. The music became the soundtrack of a summer that contained equal parts devastation and empowerment. I listened to very little else, but the songs never faded. They played in my head through adventures that filled my heart and events that broke it.
I saw Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and Olympic National Park with lyrics like those from My Silver Lining echoing in the vastness of the extraordinary scenery. I watched the overwhelming heat of July bring a usually vibrant ecosystem to its knees and August's wildfires and their accompanying smoke finish the job with merciless suffocation. By that time, Fleeting One, the eighth track on Stay Gold seemed all too appropriate.
Still, I never turned away or tuned out. I took it all in. I reached a point where I knew and could feel everything that was happening. I could tell how close the land and plants were to breaking. Several times, I just had to cry. Then, a strange thing happened: Out of the chaos came the confidence of clarity. I'd played Walk Unafraid so many times in those three months, but suddenly, I was doing what the song said. I understood the situation fully, and I met it head on.
Trees had already started dying on my parents' property by August 2 when I turned on the sprinkler for the first time. We haven't watered our yard for years, but we still have a good sprinkler and some long hoses. During the next two weeks, I used them to get water to the native trees and plants on the property. At first, I wasn't sure if I was having any positive effect or merely tilting at windmills. I didn't even know how to feel when I read that Olympic National Park was also using sprinklers on its forests. Suddenly and unexpectedly though, the weather shifted in the slightest of ways. A bit of rain fell, and the temperatures cooled a little. Combined with my efforts, these changes helped the local plants revive. I felt the satisfaction of knowing a situation, responding to it, and making a contribution.
Although the last images I saw of the Pacific Northwest as I drove east for the school year were shrouded in smoke, I looked upon them without flinching. Those scenes would have torn me apart before. This time, they hurt, but I also knew nothing could break my connection to that place or my commitment to helping it as we face global warming together.
It's the same effect that occurs when music puts people in sync, and it's only possible when everything (joy, sadness, fear) is fully experienced.
Recession of the Nisqually Glacier at Mount Rainier
When I came home to Washington state this summer, I said goodbye.
Early in the spring semester while working at the University of South Dakota, I started making plans for my summer in Washington. I wanted to go back to Olympic National Park and Mount St. Helens. Also, I wanted to visit Mount Rainier for the first time. That mountain had watched over so much of my life, but I had never been up to it.
Accompanied by my family, I was able to keep all my plans, and I had a great time doing it. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was losing old friends and the state where I grew up.
Global warming is tearing apart my home state this summer with drought and heat. Two weeks after I visited Olympic National Park, one of the wettest places in the world, a massive fire started there. Days before I visited Mount St. Helens, the state Department of Ecology declared that Washington's snowpack was at zero percent of normal levels. Sure enough, the only snow I saw on that trip was at the top of St. Helens and in the volcano's shaded crater. Then, days before I went to Mount Rainier, a news story ran about the mountain's disappearing Nisqually Glacier. I was sure to take pictures of the glacier and its recession on my trip because I wasn't sure how many more chances I'll get to see it.
I was glad about my choice to visit these icons of Washington this summer. Global warming is changing them, and I needed something of the way they were to keep as a last memory. That's what we must do when we say goodbye.
Rain, moderate temperatures, snow: The band has broken up in Washington, and in the words of singer Michelle Branch, "Goodbye to you. Goodbye to everything that I knew. You were the one I loved, the one thing I tried to hold onto."
In documenting how our national parks represent America's best idea, filmmaker Ken Burns also gave us a glimpse of what our thinking looks like at its worst, and another example of this poor thinking has arisen at Olympic National Park in Washington state.
The United States Navy seeks to turn the park into a venue for its war games. This plan threatens the park's ecosystem, wildlife, and human visitors with noise and electromagnetic weapons (click here for a more detailed news story about it). It also puts at risk the cherished idea that our national parks represent.
Six years ago, in The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Burns demonstrated how the creation of the parks brought to the world a new combination of democracy, environmental protection, and civic duty. The parks came from public land, helped protect species and ecosystems, and gave generations of Americans something to pass down to those that followed them.
Burns' documentary also captured the constant threat facing the parks. From the start, people have looked for ways to exploit the national parks for personal gain. This self-centered approach to a social institution and an environmental cornerstone has placed several of the parks, including the Grand Canyon, on the verge of destruction at various times in the past. Through a simple application of logic, it is our worst idea, and the Navy's war-games plan is the latest incarnation of it.
One of the biggest lessons from the Burns documentary is that the idea of the national parks as well as the parks themselves must constantly be defended. In this spirit, a petition has been created to challenge the Navy's proposal for using Olympic National Park. To sign it, click here.
When it comes to our national parks, we deserve the best.
I've found that being an environmentalist can be addictive.
This addiction stems from a desire to help protect something I see as immeasurably special. I felt that protective urge very early in life, and it grew until I wanted to protect every single mechanism of nature.
The story of the West Coast fisher provides a great example of my addiction. As I blogged about here, after being virtually wiped out from much of its original range, the fisher has started to make a comeback with the help of reintroduction projects. I first got excited about their return when a population was reestablished in the Olympic National Park. That success led to reintroduction programs in Washington's Cascade Mountains.
Success stories certainly add to the addictive nature of environmentalism, but nothing feeds the addiction more than success that is threatened. And now, all the work that has gone into bringing the fisher back is at risk because of the illegal use of rodenticide (much of which is used to protect illegal marijuana planting) and other factors. As a result, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing listing the West Coast fisher as threatened. Check out a video explaining the proposal below:
This proposal to protect fishers and support the previous work to keep them around further triggered my protective instincts. I submitted my comments in support of the proposed listing and would like to share the opportunity with others. For more information about the proposal and how to comment on it, click here. The deadline is February 4.
Yes, I'm addicted, and I see no end to my desire to protect nature from thoughtless destruction.
If you think going wild means a loss of reason, you haven't been to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.
The people of the peninsula are passionate about keeping their area wild, and they've got their reasons for supporting the proposed Wild Olympics legislation. Next month, they'll share those reasons on the PBS television series, This American Land. Check out a trailer for the episode below:
We often hear that reason clashes with emotions and what is wild, but the video suggests otherwise. The various individuals who talk about the importance of protecting the Olympic Peninsula build their arguments upon the emotional connection they have to the area's wild places. Doing so gives their messages a firm foundation in personal values.
The statements made by the people in the video also highlight the logic of a mutually beneficial relationship between humans and nature. Although the Olympic Peninsula remains fairly pristine, human activity has impacted it in the past and continues to do so. At the same time, the area has helped shape the people that live there. (A little of the wild has become part of them.) That's why the Wild Olympics bill benefits both humans and nature.
Supporters of the Wild Olympics campaign are wild about it, and it's pretty easy to see why.
Although it's an awesome place, the Pacific Northwest isn't complete.
Several species were either entirely or partially wiped out from the area in the 19th and 20th centuries. These included the wolf and the fisher.
Those missing pieces have started a comeback, and people can help them take a next step. In 2008, fishers were returned to the Olympic National Park through a successful reintroduction program. Now, the National Park Service is proposing to reintroduce this member of the weasel family to the Cascade Mountains, and the agency will be taking comments on the plan until September 30. To voice your support for this next phase of reintroduction, visit this page from Conservation Northwest.
By bringing fishers back to another part of the Pacific Northwest, we help restore the full promise of this great area.
