red alder ranch

This week I had a three day kayaking tour to take out. After many requests for more arduous and lengthy kayak trips, we scheduled a three day trip with trips of 14-20 miles per day. We got four people signed up for this trip.

The first day was a trip from Deep River out to Portuguese Point, on to Knappton cove and back again. The Onieda Road boat ramp was damaged in the big storm in early December, and is now closed for business. We launched across the river at a friend’s dock instead, and headed downstream with the tide.

Portuguese Point was called “Cape Swell” by Lewis and Clark, and they didn’t mean, “oh, this place is just swell!” They encountered the ocean swell that used to be able to roll right up the mouth of the river in the days before the jetties went in, and their men were getting seasick. We didn’t have that problem.

The next day had a forbidding weather report, and we opted to take a day off from paddling and drive out to the coast to check out the museums and the beach. We started out on the north jetty looking for birds, but the impending weather front wasn’t friendly to bird watching, so we just did a little weather watching instead before heading up to the visitor’s center.

While we were at the Lewis and Clark interpretive center, the storm front came ashore, filling the sky with huge snowflakes in an instant. Hello? It is almost the end of March, and this is the beach!

The last day, we paddled from County Line Park back to Skamokawa, and encountered almost every kind of weather that we could: snow, hail, rain, wind and sunshine.

Way back in the beginning, I promised something about shiitake mushrooms. I just ordered some new spawn and will be making up a batch of new logs this month. A couple of days ago, I went up to look at my old logs, which I had assumed were just about used up, being five years old already. I was surprised to find a whole bunch of new mushrooms growing out of the logs! Levi and I cleaned up and reorganized the logs, and picked the mushrooms that were good. I split these with Levi and put my half in the food dryer.

Well, there was no putting it off any longer, and a couple of days ago, I finally faced the task of assessing my diesel VW’s engine troubles. I was expecting the worst, and I wasn’t disappointed. I pulled the cam and the lifter in question and there was nothing wrong with the lifter at all. Uh oh!

I went ahead and pulled the head and found that one of the valve heads had broken off and fallen into the cylinder while I was zipping along on the highway. The damage was extensive! I’m guessing that the new head did not have OEM German valves in there, but some cheaper substitute.

I am now looking at a total engine rebuild, starting with another new head. In the meantime, I am looking for a Subaru wagon or a cheap Toyota to get me around while I slowly rebuild the diesel.

The next blog entry should be a cheerier one!

Last week I went to northern California to visit some friends and to install a small solar electric system for a friend of a friend. I used to live down there, in Humboldt County, about an hour south of Eureka on the coast. It was the first real road trip in the recently repaired diesel Jetta that is featured elsewhere on this blog.

I like going down there at this time of year. Everything is so green and flowers are starting to pop up everywhere. And the coastline is beautiful.

On the way into California, along highway 199, the road drops into the Smith River drainage and follows it down towards Crescent City on the coast. I have a favorite stop that I make almost every time, a little turnout where you can walk down and sit by the river.

I took this picture underwater with the little waterproof Pentax. The color of the water is just about perfect for steelhead fishing.

South of Crescent City, there are numerous places where you can see elk herds. I actually pulled off this time and took a couple of pictures of the elk and their warning sign. Do not approach on foot! Yeah, no kidding…

While waiting to meet the person who needed the solar panels installed, I took a little drive through one of the many redwood groves, and got out and hiked around a bit. This forest type is very different than what I am used to in Washington. The dominant softwood of course is Coast Redwood, and the main hardwood is Tanbark Oak, not a true oak in the Quercus genus, but it produces acorns like an oak tree. Its latin name is Lithocarpus Densiflorus. It is the only Lithocarpus outside of Asia. I used to work at a small sawmill that was focused on making lumber and especially flooring from tanoak, which is considered by the mainstream softwood industry to be a “trash tree”. We made a lot of really beautiful boards from this “trash tree”. Other hardwoods include oregon white oak, black oak, canyon live oak, bay laurel, and madrone. One of the few things I miss about living in California is the smell of woodstove smoke from all these spicy hardwoods. Lovely!

Saturday night, I was all done and headed back to Portland. The car had been running flawlessly the whole trip, and I had done my 1000 mile head gasket retorque the day before. I was zipping along south of Albany, OR when it suddenly started running ragged and quit. I got over to the shoulder and tried to get it going again, but to no avail. It took a $400 tow truck ride to get to Portland, where the car is sitting right now at a friend’s house. I will head over there tomorrow to pick it up. Once again, I curse my failure to have purchased AAA towing insurance!

Initially I was hoping it was just a plugged fuel filter, but it seems to be more serious than that; I wasn’t able to get it going again even after a new filter. I’ll tear into it again when I get it home.

Ah, the joy of owning and working on old cars!

Today is my 43rd birthday, and right on schedule, the daffodils started blooming earlier this week. When I was a child in nearby Longview, the daffodils always bloomed within a few days of my birthday. Saturday was a nice day and I spent a bunch of it outside, cleaning up the berry vines around the edge of the yard and pruning the pink flowering dogwood tree. I got a couple of daffodil pictures and found a hyacinth blooming under all the weeds.

I even got the dog to sit still for his portrait! He never likes to hold still for long and he looks a little skeptical.

Other notable birthdays include the Fort George Brewpub in Astoria, one year old last night, and my wife Shannon, 40 years old tomorrow.

Yesterday I took some of the barn cats from my friend Ginni’s farm to Longview to get spayed and neutered. The Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon sponsors a mobile spay/neuter clinic that comes to Longview several times a year. Only feral cats can be brought in and the cost is so cheap; only $30 includes all the requisite shots, worming and flea medicine.

Normally this might not be a bloggable event, except that when they got to my cats in the line, I had the 1000th cat to be fixed at the Longview clinic. The only thing that was missing was balloons and confetti. Poor kitty, she had so many pictures taken of her! Here’s a photo of the photographer taking her portrait.

I was so relieved when I took them back to the farm this morning that they still let me pet them. I was worried that they would never trust me again!

The day after WFR finished was Saturday, and I had a kayak tour to take out. Mark from Vermont comes every year around this time and we take him out somewhere on the river, depending on the tide. Amy, one of the WFR students who was still here, decided to join us for the day, too.

We set out from Skamokawa around 11 AM and headed across the shipping channel into Oregon waters, and followed the tide downstream. When we got to where we were across from Three Tree Point, we crossed back to the Washington side, above the site of old Brookfield, WA. Brookfield was a bustling salmon cannery town for many decades after the Civil War, and it had its own Post Office all the way up until 1954. When the highway was built here in 1937, it was hard on the cannery towns that the road did not connect to. Those places were reliant on the river and the steamboat traffic for their transportation connection to the outside world and when the steamboats went out of business, the little cannery towns died out. All that remains of Brookfield today is a series of burned out pilings and probably a few ghosts.

Just below “downtown” Brookfield is Jim Crow Point, predictably named for the presence of a black man during the post Civil War era who worked as a river pilot. One of these days, no doubt, someone will get a hold of this historically loaded name and get it changed to something more palatable. Anyway, the water hits this big chunk of basalt and zips around the end, sometimes creating interesting water conditions and a big swirling eddy downstream. There is a well-used beach there, complete with driftwood shacks and even a framed, blue-tarp sided “bunkhouse” that various locals built and use for camping and fishing in the summer.

The weather was all over the board. Early in the morning I had woken up to hail on the metal porch roof, then there was rain, and then sun and then rain again. Right after lunch, it was nice and sunny.

A few miles later, it was starting to get darker and a little windier. As we worked our way up from Three Tree Point, the wind chop was starting to build in the main channel and we hugged the rocks as close as we could to stay in the eddy and out of the worst of the chop.

I kept hoping that we would beat the rain front to Skamokawa, but we didn’t quite make it. As we came up to Vista Park, it started to rain and the dark gray sky behind us was looking darker and grayer.

Just as we came up to Skamokawa Creek and were crossing over the shallow sand bar, a hard gust of wind hit, and a minute later it was filled with hail. Yikes! By now though, we were only a hundred yards or so from the dock, and by the time we got out and were drying off in the paddle center, the sun was out again.

It was just under five hours from the time we left the dock and about 11 miles of distance covered. Another great day on the river!

For the last nine days, I have been knee deep in my almost-annual emergency wilderness medicine education. The Wilderness First Responder certification is something that is required of us kayak guides, and is a good idea for anyone who spends much time outside the bounds of civilization and beyond the timely reach of the 911 system. We have been sponsoring this course for four years now at Skamokawa Center, with curriculum and instructors provided by Wilderness Medical Associates.

Topics range from basic CPR to anaphylaxis, snakebites, altitude illnesses, major trauma, patient assessment systems, improvised litter carries, hypothermia, extended patient care in wilderness settings and much more. Time is divided between classroom work and lectures, drills complete with moulage and acted out problems, to several full-blown simulations that are set up nearby in an appropriate outdoor location. The simulations are designed to be as realistic as possible and the acting and stage makeup is enough to get everyone’s adrenaline pumping, and to test the limits of our “cool”.

After about eighty hours of this, everyone graduated successfully, which doesn’t always happen. I’d be willing to bet that most of my fellow students are still recuperating; I know I am. I took a lot of pictures, although I didn’t get very many good ones of the big simulations, as I was either a “patient” or a rescuer.

Here is Amy, Josh and Katie, sporting some fancy head lacerations, on day one:

Practicing litter carries:

Heading out to the second simulation in Skamokawa Vista Park:

After our successful graduation, everyone headed over to Levi and Becca’s house for the best meal of the week, prepared by Becca and Jarrod, and from there a few of us headed over to the nearby Oasis Tavern for more beer and a few games of pool. Here’s Josh at the O:

This course will be held every February/March here in Skamokawa. If this looks like fun to you (it is!), please contact me for more information.

Next up: another day kayaking on the Columbia River.