February 2008March 2008 April 2008

03/29 - Flowering Currant at Morse Creek

This is one of the coldest, latest springs in recent memory. It is at least a month behind, but we are seeing a few signs. For example, the currant bushes are finally flowering on the Morse Creek trail. (You can tell the late season is slowing us down, or we'd be doing more adventurous trails at this time of year).

At long last

Keywords: flowers, morse creek, spring, trails

03/25 - Llamas By The Sea

You never know what you'll see when you are walking along the waterfront trail between downtown Port Angeles and Morse Creek. We happened across a pair of llama powered carts. The riders were from the Port Townsend area and out slumming in Port Angeles, at least according to the Peninsula Daily News.

Lllama power has its advantages, but we also met them on their return trip, and only one rider was riding. Apparently, llama carts can get flat tires, and one can only push a llama so far.

Keywords: animals, morse creek, port angeles

03/19 - Tamarind Tree Reviewed

We really liked Tamarind Tree, a great Vietnamese place in Seattle. We haven't explored the International District all that much, and we have been disappointed in Vietnamese food in the past. Now that we've found Tamarind Tree, we are planning to do a bit more international exploring and to eat a bit more Vietnamese food. For more details, read our review.

Keywords: restaurants, seattle

03/18 - The Little Oven Reviewed

We finally reviewed The Little Oven, and, wow, we were impressed. Port Angeles has a great bakery again. We tried a croissant; that's all they had left, and a whole bunch of their sandwiches. We never even got to try the cinnamon danish. They had sold out at 7:30AM. We can hardly wait for the high country hiking season so we can load up for our on the trail picnic.

It isn't much to look at

Keywords: port angeles, restaurants


Courtesy of the National Atlas

03/18 - Precipitation Map

People tend to assume that if you are on the North Olympic Peninsula, then it is raining. This isn't actually true. If you look at the map, you can see the well known Sequim rain shadow, and you can also see that Port Angeles, towards the west is not all that much wetter. In fact, unless you are actually in the mountains, in which case all bets are off, it doesn't really start to rain until you get west of Lake Crescent.

Each color gradation represents a difference of ten inches of rainfall per year, so it can be quite dry around Port Angeles, even when Forks and the West End are getting soaked.

Keywords: science, atmosphere


Courtesy of Google Trends

03/13 - Signs of Global Warming?

We did a Google Trends lookup of "olympic national park" to see what peaks and valleys the great search engine has found. You can see the graph to the right. The peaks aren't as high as they used to be, but the valleys aren't as deep either. Is this increasing year round interest a sign of global warming, or are people just getting the message that Olympic National Park is open all year?
By the way, the second most popular language for queries about the park is German.

Keywords: science

03/02 - Lake Crescent Rainbow

This little rainbow was visible during a rain squall at Lake Crescent. You can really see the bright colors and the relative brightness of the region under the arc.

Keywords: atmosphere, lake crescent

03/02 - Back To Second Beach - Driftwood Report

We were back at Second Beach yesterday for the low tide around two o'clock. The trail through the rain forest hasn't changed, but the first thing we noticed when we got down to the beach was driftwood. There is always a fair bit of driftwood near the base of the trail, but this winter a lot more big logs have piled up there.

The beach itself was rather wet, with flat sheets of water running over much of it. Still, it was good walking, as long as we kept an eye on the waves. Second Beach is a broad, flat beach, so a little breaker can run a long way.

That bald eagle below actually did look a bit ratty. He, or she, was molting, so the classic profile wasn't quite what one would find on a postage stamp.

Lots of driftwood

Even more driftwood, and a peek at the hole in the wall

The weather cleared up a bit

A molting bald eagle

Lots of water

Keywords: second beach, winter

February 2008March 2008 April 2008