Fidalgo Island

The first weekend of May was stunning. And well before there was any good reason to expect it would be, the NWGS scheduled its big symposium. Saturday was spent listening to geology talks in Kane Hall, while the rest of Seattle watched the boat parade in the Montlake Cut and the UW eights blow away Cornell and Dartmouth in the Windermere Cup.

Sunday, at least for a smaller group of us, was spent exploring old rocks on Fidalgo Island. Rocks deposited in the deep ocean during the Jurassic and somehow transported to Anacortes in the years since. Besides some difficult problems in regional tectonics and structural geology, the biggest challenge was finding parking for five minivans on a sunny Sunday at touristy stops like Deception Pass, Rosario Beach, and Mount Erie.


For me, it was a great refresher in bedrock geology and a nice contrast to the beach geomorphology I spend my day job (and apparently, a fair amount of my spare time) doing.  I know many of these places pretty well - I just don't pay much attention to the petrology.

Chambers Creek

I call this Chambers Creek with some reservations.  Chambers Creek itself actually empties into the Sound a little ways south of here, but the name of this new Pierce County park in University Place is Chambers Creek Properties.  The park, and the adjacent Chambers Bay golf course, are built in the space left behind after a hundred years of mining gravel along the steep bluffs of Puget Sound (Pioneer: October 2010).

The golf course is a strange landscape of dune-like hills and will be the site of the 2015 U.S. Open.  The park is a strange landscape of rolling meadow, muddy dog park, and old gravel mine archaeology.   A sweeping pedestrian bridge provides access over the busy railroad to the beach, where the gravel used to be loaded onto barges for the trip to concrete plants in Seattle and Tacoma.

Richmond Beach

Every two months or so, I head up to Edmonds for an evening geology talk.  If I'm lucky, I can get away a little early to beat the worst of the northbound traffic.  This month, I left Seattle at 4 and made it to Richmond Beach for an hour and a half of beach walking and a spectacular early March sunset, still leaving room for dinner at Dick's and a decaf latte at Starbuck's before showing up for the talk on North Cascades geology.

I walked south to Boeing Creek before turning around.  Richmond Beach is a great place to watch trains and they were going by one after another.

Elwha River

I hadn't been out to Port Angeles for a couple of years, but then made two trips within the last month.  The dams started coming out in fall of 2011, so this was my first chance to see the river since the long-awaited restoration began.  We were able to explore the beach at the river mouth, where all sorts of new sand is building out on the delta - sand that's been sitting in the reservoirs upstream for almost a century.


We also drove up and took a look at the lower dam - or at least the place where the lower dam used to be. The dam and powerhouse are all gone, the recontoured slopes have been planted, and the river is flowing through the narrow rocky canyon that used to buried by the dam.  Upstream of the lower dam, the Elwha is winding its way through the leftover reservoir.

Mount Si

I left early, prepared for a gray hike, but hoping that the clouds might break.  From North Bend, there were glimpses of the top, so I figured I stood a chance.  I hit the trail just after 8 and made it to the top two hours later. It might have been a little faster if I'd had those strap-on spiky things on my boots that everyone else had - since the last 3/4 mile was hard packed snow and a little slick.

The summit - or at least the shoulder, which is far as I went - was just barely above the cloud deck.  Mount Rainier was visible to the south, the Olympics were visible to the west, and a few of Seattle's skyscrapers poked through the clouds.  According to my little digital tracker, the four mile climb was roughly equivalent to 360 flights of stairs.

Previous Trip:  Mount Si:  June 2011

Portland

We flew home from San Francisco on Christmas Eve, in time for dinner with friends and then Christmas Day with family.  I sort of lost track of that next week, but after New Year's, D flew off for Minnesota and M flew off for St. Pete Beach.  I stayed home to work.  And to finish the new bed frame, which I barely completed in time for M's return.

On the MLK weekend, we took the Bolt Bus to Portland and spent most of the next two days eating.  And eating well, with dinners at Mother's Bistro and Andina and a breakfast at Gravy.  The cold fog lifted on Sunday and left us with some beautiful, but still very cold, blue skies.

Fort Funston

It was late Saturday afternoon and things were a little slow around the apartment, so I made the short drive out to Fort Funston.  Given the weather had taken a general turn for the worse - it was pouring earlier in the day and would really pour later that night - I was lucky to get a beautiful late afternoon sunbreak.

It was partly the aesthetics and the hang gliders, but it was also the geology that made my brief excursion compelling.  High bluffs, enormous landslides, and the San Andreas fault going out to sea just a couple miles to the south (see Gravel Beach for a more geologic interpretation of the last few days).  I probably spent less than 40 minutes at Fort Funston, before taking a circuitous drive back through Daly City, exploring the path of the fault as it cuts through residential neighborhoods and schools.

Ocean Beach

Saturday morning, the three of us took off on a driving excursion around San Francisco.  It seemed a little touristy, but I guess that was the point.  And frankly, it was a great way to spend a few hours on a nice day.

We began on the Great Highway which was basically a beach stop (okay, several of them) for me, admiring the beach, the seawall, and the rolling dunes that are now the Sunset and Richmond neighborhoods.  We worked our way towards downtown, found Chinatown, Lombard Street, North Beach, and the Embarcadero, before somehow ending up back in Noe Valley for a late lunch.

Point Reyes

M and her mom needed to go out and shop for food for Sunday, so D and I had the afternoon to explore.  Or, more accurately, I had the afternoon to explore and D was willing to tag along.  We drove north, across the Golden Gate, through Mill Valley, and along the coast up past Stimson Beach and Bolinas Lagoon.  It would have been nice to have more time to linger and to explore, but we really didn't have the time.

Point Reyes was gorgeous with no fog and almost no people, but plenty of beaches and cows (sorry, no cow pictures). The lighthouse itself was closed, but I was able to peer down at it and watch gray whales (well, I think they were gray whales) spouting offshore.  I got in as many stops as I could before the sun hit the horizon, which left just enough time to get back to the city for dinner.

Twin Peaks

Our first full day in the city was spectacular.  And making the quick drive up to the top of Twin Peaks was an easy side trip between our temporary housing in Diamond Heights and our primary objective of Park Merced.

I always find something special about visiting San Francisco - not the least of which is that it is fun thinking about what it must have been like for M to grow up and go to school here.