06/27 - Marmot City

06/23 - The Pacific Dogwood is in Bloom

06/20 - Dungeness Spit - Good for Walking

First, you have to get the tides right. At high tide, all you have to walk on is a narrow strip of sand, rocks and driftwood. This gets tiring after two or three miles, and the lighthouse is about four and a half miles away. That's why we use Tidefinder to figure out the promising tides, during the daytime and under three feet.

Second, even when the tides are low, the going can be very rough when the beach is mainly small stones rather than sand. Usually, the sand is washed out in the winter and builds up through the summer. Some years, the beach stays rocky, but this year the sands have returned, and at low tide, there is usually a sweet strip one can walk on. It's hard work, but it's much easier than it could be.

Things look good this year, so tide and sand permitting we'll be making our way out to the lighthouse this summer.

06/19 - Hurricane Hill

The hard part was really that we weren't used to the altitude, but the blue sky and amazing vista pulled us upwards. Marmot Rock, a rock that looks like a marmot, had survived the winter, but we also saw a real marmot chittering and playing sentinel now that we humans have returned to the high country. There was some phlox in bloom along with a bit of Indian paintbrush, some yarrow and a lupine or two, but otherwise the landscape had just melted. It took us a fair bit longer than usual, but we made our way up to the summit and admired the views of the Olympic Mountains, the San Juans, Vancouver Island and the great white meringue of Mt. Baker.

06/18 - We Answer Questions - Operation Twist

1) Bonds are just loans. If someone, usually a company or government entity, wants to borrow money, they can write down promises to repay in the form of bonds which are legal documents, contracts, that state:

• a) A certain sum must be paid on a certain future date
• b) Certain sums of interest must be paid at certain intervals
• c) The borrower may repay the loan early, but not before a certain date, the call date
• d) This is a contract since a, b & c are because the borrower received a certain amount when the bond was issued.

A lot of financial instruments use the same structure. If you buy a CD at your bank, you get a certificate of deposit which is basically a bond saying you'll get your money, your principal, back on a certain date, and you'll get interest at various intervals up until then. If you borrow money and sign a promissory note, you promise to repay and to pay interest. A mortgage is just a promissory note wrapped up with land and a house as collateral. A treasury note is just a bond issued by the federal government. Corporate bonds are just bonds issued by corporations.

You'll notice that most of finance is about money now and money later, so it's mainly about how money travels through time.

Also, there are a lot of names for the same thing. The distinctions are usually historical. On the sidewalk it might be an IOU; 20 floors up it's a bond; if there's real estate as collateral, it's a mortgage. (The real in real estate comes from the same root as royal, not realize.)

2) Operation Twist is based on the segmentation of the market for treasury notes and the fact that the US government cannot go broke.

Despite what the deficit scare mongerers say, the US government cannot go broke. It can always print more money. This means that federal debt is the safest game in town. (Look at what happened when one of the rating agencies cut the US credit rating; interest rates went down making it even easier to borrow.) Since interest rates are based on the level of risk of repayment, the treasury pays the lowest rates at every time scale. All other interest rates are based on these. A lender always has the choice to lend to the government or to some riskier party, but they expect higher interest payments as a premium for accepting the risk of losing their money.

The federal government borrows money at many different time scales, so one can buy government bonds with periods ranging from 30 days to 30 years. The short term notes, for a year or shorter, are mainly used for parking big lots of money safely. Large bank accounts are not FDIC insured, so if you have a million dollars you might need at any time, you'd constantly be buying and selling, 30 or 90 day notes. If you are a pension fund and are trying to meet your 2040 obligations, you might buy 20 or 30 year bonds. Most business lending is in the 10 year range so the interest rates on business loans are roughly tied to the 10 year government rate.

The goal of Operation Twist, also called quantitative easing, is to lower the 10 year government rate by manipulating the market for government bonds. The idea is that the Federal Reserve owns trillions of dollars of treasury bonds, more than anybody else, so they are big enough to influence rates across the board. Operation Twist has the Federal Reserve selling their 10 year bonds and buying 30 year bonds. This should lower the rates on 10 year notes and raise them on 30 year notes. Lower rates on 10 year treasury bonds should mean lower rates for loans across the board. Lower rates should stimulate the economy.

This would usually be the case, except that interest rates are already very low, and the economy has lots of other problems. If you account for inflation, federal interest rates are negative, meaning that the lender is paying the government to hold his or her money. It isn't clear they can go a lot lower or that this would have much effect. Also, businesses consider other factors when deciding whether to borrow money or not, for example, many of them are worried about their customers, and their customers are worried about their jobs and the size of their paychecks. It doesn't make sense to expand if no one is buying now.

06/13 - Port Angeles Farmers Market

06/12 - Mount St. Helens from the Johnston Ridge Observatory

We saw glimpses of the volcano from along the road, but what impressed us even more was the land between us and the mountain. It was hard not to see that the topography had been recently altered by volcanic floes and ash, and that material had been carved by rivers and was only recently being recolonized by grasses, shrubs and trees. This was not a long settled landscape, but a new one.

We climbed the final hillside to the observatory proper and enjoyed the exhibit, but we were drawn again and again to the view. The building had great glass windows, but we had to go outside with the wind and rain and snow. (Just flurries, but snow nonetheless.) We explored the landscape of burned tree stumps and fallen trunks and gazed in awe at the fresh land in the river valley between us and the volcano. We were never really that close, and the clouds hid the upper reaches for most of our visit, but now and then the winds would blow, cold and hard, and we could see a bit more of the mountain that had blasted and charred the trees on Johnston Ridge and reformed the land.

06/11 - Wolf Haven

Wolf Haven gives regular tours, so we were able to see some of these fantastic animals, mostly those who will be spending the rest of their lives there. The wolves being prepared to return to the wild are kept away from most human contact, so they are kept in another part of the haven.

Some of the wolves were front and center curious about us. Some were pacers and explorers. Others just slept or stayed hidden during our visit, but most of the wolves made an appearance. They also howled. This was the high point of our visit, and actually rather unusual at Wolf Haven. We were watching one pair of wolves when we heard a distant, rising howl, and soon the wolves in the next enclosure joined in, and then the ones we were watching. We recorded some of the long howl as a video.

06/09 - Restaurant Update

06/08 - It's Going to Take a Lot of Melting

06/04 - The John Day Fossil Beds - Clarno

We took a side trip off the road to the Clarno unit of the John Day Fossil Beds, the smallest of the three parts of the beds. We crossed the John Day River and were soon greeted by a little picnic area and a handful of interpretive signs. We were surrounded by castles of stone, the eroding rock layers visible.

The fossil trail was short and led towards the base of the castle wall which rocks had fallen over the ages. They were mottled and marred by age. The little signs insisted that they were full of fossils. We looked, and we looked. Was that dark mark a leaf? Was that indentation a branch? It was hard to tell, but we soon realized that it was not the color of rock or its markings, but rather the texture that revealed ancient leaves and twigs and branches.

Once we had made this cognitive jump, we could see other fossils more quickly, and our walk grew more interesting. We almost brushed away one fossil leaf save that it was now part of the stone. We probably missed more fossils than we saw, but after the replicas at Sheeprock, seeing actual fossils in the living rock was quite a treat.

06/03 - Benham Falls

We crossed the river and followed the trail through the forest, following the river. Then we heard the falls. The peaceful river had turned into a violent torrent passing through a canyon of volcanic rock. It was quite a sight, and it is worth clicking on the image to see the video.

On our way back to sisters we had a nice lunch in Bend, a town with a good share of brew pubs and trendy shops. We enjoyed our meal at the Deschutes Brewery and even tried a couple of the brewery only beers. They were great, but extremely rich and really went with the chicken wings and ribs.

06/02 - The Newberry National Volcano Monument

We were pondering plan B when a ranger popped out, apparently during a break in a training session, and suggested we try following the red road up the Lava Butte. We had noticed the butte towering darkly against a gray sky behind its wall of jagged and crumbled black lava. The red road was indeed red and while it was closed to cars, it was open to hikers, so up we went.

First, we crossed the lava fields, black masses of stone, once molten, and now hardened into lumps and clusters and sheets, then folded and crumpled. Here and there were lava bubbles and tubes, now broken. We climbed the butte, spiraling around it and rising with increasingly spectacular views of the lava fields and the more distant country side. We made our way to the parking lot at the top and enjoyed the vista.

On our way down, the sun emerged. Had the visitor center been open, we would not have been able to hike to the top of the lava butte safely. It was only our bad planning that had given us the opportunity and what a treat it was.

06/01 - The John Day Fossil Beds - Sheeprock

The trail followed a small stream which had carved the basin, so we crossed on steel bridges and saw all sorts of erosion patterns. It is this erosion that reveals the fossils. While we saw signs of fresh erosion, we didn't see any new fossils here. The park service people, we were told, gather them. There were, however, a number of replicas of fossils of an ancient turtle and a sabertooth tiger. To be honest, some of them did indeed look like ancient bones or turtle shell, but others we would have mistaken for mud and rock.

There was a longer trail around the Blue Basin, which supposedly has spectacular views, but we didn't have time to explore it. The John Day Fossil Beds were quite amazing, but also amazingly remote.