Green Lake

This is one of a series of posts from local landmarks that accumulated over the holidays.

Green Lake is close by and a great place to go for some exercise or simply to get away the house. Walking briskly, I can walk around the lake from our house in just under an hour.  Rain or shine, night or day.  The Aquatheater offers some vertical to offset the relentless flat of the loop around the lake.  And will probably be the subject of a post itself sometime in the next few months -- too much history to go unremarked.

The lake is urban - and I think I've read that this the most visited park in Washington - although that counts neighbors like me and a thousand young families with jogging strollers for whom the lake is a routine.  At the same time, the Olmsted legacy creates a natural feel and the City has done a nice job of preserving segments of ecologically intact shoreline. Occasionally, a bald eagle adds some excitement to the dull domesticated lives of the ducks and squirrels.

Green Lake

Early Monday morning (Labor Day), I swung by Green Lake on my way to the coffee shop. It's nice to be so close - I should come down more often.

I just did a quick search of the blog for Green Lake and three posts come up. From January 2014, January 2017, and January 2018. You'd think I never came down here in warmer weather.

Green Lake

It's been a cold week, at least by Seattle standards. And several days of weather in the 20s is all it takes for the lakes to begin to respond. It's been a while since I've seen Green Lake with this much ice on it (although I still recall the whole lake safely frozen over in 1983 and/or 1984, when I first arrived in this neighborhood).

The ice was pretty thick here at the south end so it probably wasn't too crazy for folks to be walking on it. At least those who had some idea of what to they were doing. But some of the people checking it out were treating it the way that some people tromp around in the snow for the first time. I'm not sure they had any clue of the consequences of getting it wrong!

Green Lake

Seattle only gets snow rarely, and when it does, it often occurs right around freezing and either falls through warm air onto warm ground, or it turns to rain before amounting to very much. But this year, it had been cold (by Seattle standards) for a few days and then it began snowing late afternoon on Christmas Eve. We didn't get a lot, but at least it stuck and didn't just turn to slush when it hit sidewalks. It flurried off and on into the next morning and provided a rare white Christmas. It varied from spot to spot, but I guess we had 2-3" in our neighborhood.

We walked down to the lake and back through Woodland Park, swung by my usual coffee shop, and then headed home and packed up gifts to take to Mom's.

Seattle saw the introduction of wide spread bike sharing this year - and the colorful bikes are scattered everywhere. Nice in the summer, sort of ragged in the wind and rain, and a little surreal after the holiday snow flurry.

Lake McDonald

We were stuck in a fairly line of cars coming down the west side of the Going-to-the-Sun Road, thanks to the construction, but things thinned out as we got down to the lake.  We considered stopping at the lodge, but it was too early for dinner and we were sort of anxious to get on to Whitefish.  I stopped along the lake to take pictures of beaches -- clear water, red and green gravel -- but not for long.  We made it to Whitefish and, with TripAdvisor as our guide, had dinner at Ciao Mamba's.  The first of several excellent meals in Whitefish.

St Mary Lake

Green Acres remains much the same - which is good. The predictability is one of the things we enjoy most. This year the week began gray but ended sunny and warm, but that didn't affect what we did too much one way or the other, although we were glad we'd brought the fan by the end of the week.

Every year, we alternate cabins with C and A - this year we were in #1 and they had the log cabin.

The lake was warm this year, although there were rumors of swimmer's itch. It was also noisy, but now instead of our kids, it is a whole new batch of kids who we don't recognize (and are not responsible for).

St. Mary Lake: Previous Years

Green Acres

We're back on St. Mary Lake, staying at Green Acres for the twelfth? year in a row. The kids are growing up - to the extent that every year now we wonder if the routine has to come to an end. Our 5-year olds are soon to be heading off to college, but have been replaced by a whole new crop of younger kids (not ours, fortunately). Green Acres stays pretty much the same, which is probably one of the big draws.

The week began cool and damp, but cleared Tuesday and just kept getting warmer all week.

Salt Spring Island

This year, we stayed closer to Green Acres.  A sore back discouraged me from taking kayak out to salt water, nice weather gave us little reason to wander from the lake, and a concerted effort to save money reduced the number of trips to town for expensive meals.

In addition, I found myself taking far fewer pictures. Maybe it was an intentional retreat from the excess of previous years.  Maybe it was that some of the subjects seemed fairly similar and not worthy of more shots.  But regardless, I came back with relatively few shots from which to choose for this post.

The island was as wonderfully pleasant as it always is - and with this week's weather, maybe even more so.  Other than the visit to Windsor Plywood for a fan and the standup paddle boards at the lake, I don't think we did a single thing new this year!

Tukwila

Last Saturday was too nice to pass up and by the time I got the kayak off the car, Michele and I were talking about a bike ride. We loaded the bikes onto the car (today would have made a good promotion for Yakima car racks) and headed for the Duwamish River. We started at North Winds Weir (Cecil Moses Park) and rode the path south along the river (upstream), eventually ending up at South Center (a million people at the mall, but only two who who arrived on their bikes).

We found cold snacks and drinks, bathrooms, and even the Apple Store, where we investigated provisions for D's upcoming four-year expedition to the upper midwest.

Not for the first time today, I found myself following waterways beneath interstate highways (I-90 and I-405 by kayak earlier this morning, I-5 in Allentown and I-405 in Tukwila by bike this afternoon).

One of the pictures shows the mouth of what remains of the Black River. It's hard to imagine that a century ago (more or less), the entire Cedar River watershed, including Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish, drained into the Green (thus Duwamish) River at this point. That means the ancestors of the fish that now swim through the Ballard Locks. I guess that also includes the rain that once fell on our small lot in Wallingford.

Canyonlands

I've somewhat arbitrarily broken up my photos from my brief trip to the northern unit of Canyonlands (Island in the Sky) into two posts.  They're all from the same general area. This is just one portion of Canyonlands National Park, upstream and between the confluence of the Green (drains western Wyoming) and Colorado (drains western Colorado) Rivers.  On the way in, you pass the turnoff for Dead Horse Point (a state park and where Thelma and Louise finished their movie).

Canyonlands isn't as deep as the Grand Canyon, and really describes a landscape of canyons more than a single river valley. South of I-70, it spreads out to cover much of southeastern Utah, including Lake Powell, the houseboat-friendly version of Glen Canyon (we visited the plug at its southern end a few years ago: Page 2009).

St. Mary Lake

Another week at Green Acres, this one unfortunately marked by the passing of one of our big extended Salt Spring family and for me, the loss of friend George back in Laramie.

As usual, much reading, much game playing (though not necessarily by everyone), and much time watching the teenage gang hang out, some of whom weren't even born when we started doing this back in 1998.

D joined us this year. He was painting houses last year and couldn't get away, despite his best efforts. As much as we relish the similarity of the experience every year, we also realize that some things simply don't stay the same!