Hike, Bike and the Rest of It

Tuesday the weather finally cleared.  After many days of the onshore flow, it cleared.  There was still a fairly cool airmass, but there was sun!  Yay!  We rode out in Carnation Valley.  We’re seeing a distressing increase in the number of people passing bicycles on blind corners.  We were going in one direction, and an oncoming truck towing a trailer passed a bicycle on an inside corner.  He then saw us, jerked his steering wheel to the right, and almost hit the bike.  Could he had not waited 30 seconds so he could see around the corner and not endanger anyone’s life?  I can not tell you how much this annoys me.

Jubilee is a farmer’s co-op.  People bring stuff they’ve grown and trade it with other people who grew stuff. 



During the week, there was, of course, hiking.  One day we intended to do the Cable Line trail.  It was not always signed, but now it is.



We went up it for awhile.  Unlike all the other trails, it’s not switch backed.  It goes straight up Tiger Mountain to the summit.  After a bit we decided that we were not that enthralled with coming down such a steep grade on a slick muddy surface, so we bailed.  Next we tried the Tiger Mountain Trail.  It was supremely uninteresting, just another tunnel through the trees.  There were large swaths of these plants.



The UK Guardian wrote an excellent article asking if Amazon is holding Seattle hostage, which you can find here.  Since Amazon arrived, the population has increased by 40%.  If you look at a map of the area, Seattle is bordered by Puget Sound and Lake Washington.  There’s only so much dirt to build on. 

“It’s incredibly difficult to find housing in Seattle now,” said Nicole Keenan-Lai, executive director of Puget Sound Sage, a Seattle thinktank focused on low-income and minority communities. “Two years ago a study came out that said 35% of Seattle’s homeless population has some college or a college degree.”

John Burbank of the Economic Opportunity Institute said there is a a direct link between the surge in highly paid jobs and the numbers of people forced on to the street.

“There’s an incredible correlation between the increase in homelessness and the increase in the number of people who have incomes in excess of $250,000,” he said. “That has grown by almost 50% between 2011 and 2017. The population of homeless kids in the Seattle public schools has grown from 1,300 kids to 4,200.”

In other cities, rising salaries would be a boon to public coffers, but Seattle is burdened with one of the most regressive tax systems in the country.

With no income tax, the financing of public works falls more heavily on the less well off through sales and property taxes. “We have a tax system in which if you’re making less than $25,000, you’re paying about 18% of your income in state and local taxes. If you’re above $250,000 you’re paying about 4% of your income in state and local taxes,” said Burbank.

The Seattle City Council did pass a employee headcount tax for large companies, but they backed down and repealed it.  It’s a good article, that outlines the problems this area faces due to all of the tech company money.

I’ve been thinking about the blog and why I write it.  The reason I always come back to, is so that we can remember what we were doing at a given point in time.  We frequently discover fairly significant chunks of our history that we don’t recall.  If it hadn’t been written down, it would be gone.  Awhile ago I made an effort to quit talking about politics, and I think it was not a good decision.  There are some events that I want to remember after they fall out of the 24 hour news cycle.  I do know that some people quit reading me when I was so vociferous about my dismay over the current administration.  So, I’ve decided to keep it within reason, but there’s some stuff I need to remember.  So there you go.

Tuesday, the Attorney General announced that asylum seekers would no longer be able to work in the US.  Prior to this announcement, asylum seekers could get social security numbers and legally work while awaiting decisions on their requests.  These cases can take years.  Without an income, how are people supposed to live?  That article is here.

Most of the children separated from their parents at the border are still not returned.  The PBS News Hour reported Monday that in order for a mother to see her child again, she would have to buy a round trip airline ticket for an HHS employee to accompany the child back to her mother.  These people have no money!  The government took the children away for free, why don’t they return them?  This is infuriating.  The road blocks being thrown up by the government are just unbelievable.

Seven GOP congress people spent July 3 in Russia.  They had very cordial conversations about would Russia please stop hacking our elections.  They were assured that Russia would never do such a thing, that would be wrong.  The GOP also asked that Russia withdraw from Ukraine; there was limited enthusiasm for that on Russia’s part.  WAPO had an article about their trip, which can be found here.  Coincidentally, this meeting was the same day the the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee released their findings that Russia did interfere with the 2016 elections.

The sun is out, and the first rule of being in the GPNW is that when the sun is out, you must be out as well.

More Dismal Days

First, let me say I’m not actually complaining about the weather, I’m just whining.  We’ve had some more days of dense clouds.  It’s just dismal.  However, we could be somewhere else in the continental US where it’s really hot and really humid.

Given Jim’s recent heart history, we thought maybe it would be good to have a local cardiologist, since we’re here for months at a whack.  We picked one close to the RV park, hoping he’d be good.  He wasn’t.  Rude, arrogant, condescending and WRONG. Yes, I dare contradict a cardiologist.  One of Jim’s drugs has a well known side effect of shortness of breath. This guy professed never to have heard of it, and he didn’t believe it.  I guess he’s not keeping up with the journals.  So, the search continues.  Next time we’re going to look for a woman. 

After wasting time with the doctor we decided to drive into West Seattle and get lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant we’ve enjoyed in the past.  No more.  They’ve changed their banh mi, and they’re not good.  Very disappointing.

It was just a dismal and dreary day.

This is a court yard for one of the apartment buildings.  It’s nice.

This was taken on southbound I5.  That’s Mt. Rainier.  The mountain was sort of out.  On a sunny day, this view of the mountain is just stunning.  It’s like a movie back drop – it doesn’t look real.

Today it was back to the deep piney woods.  We saw what I think is a moth on the ground.  Moths are underappreciated for their beauty.

See the holes in the trees?  They’re huge. 

This is a Pileated Woodpecker.  He did that damage.

There’s an opinion piece in The Irish Times that is well worth reading.  It’s always interesting to see what other countries are thinking about the current state of the US.  It’s a chilling piece about us and other nations.  These are, indeed, dismal days.

The Big Tree Trail

It was back to the deep piney woods today.  It rained overnight, we got up and it was cool and the streets were wet.  We hiked up the Tradition Plateau trail to the Big Tree trail.  It’s an astonishingly beautiful part of the woods.  Once you get to the head of the trail, it’s fairly flat.

Here is one of the big trees.  Look at the moss on the tree truck.

More moss.

It is so pretty in there!  Look at the water.  There are mosquitoes in there.

This is the Big Tree.  It’s a Fir, it’s at least 200 years old.  One wonders how it escaped the loggers.

More trail.

We did Big Tree, and then part of the Brink trail, and it was enough.  The Brink trail is right on the edge of a huge drop off – hence the name, Brink.

Motorcycling Doggoes

Today was good!  We had sun and it was warm.  We enjoyed it on our bicycles.  The motorcyclist were out in droves.

Look at the dog on the back of the motorcycle.  He’s wearing goggles.

Tomorrow the rain returns.  Sigh……

Into the Deep Piney Woods

There has been much hiking this past week.  Except for today – the cloud cover from the marine push is really thick and it’s cold and gloomy.  It’s forecast to hang around all day.  Apparently it is asking too much for a day in the mid-70s with some sun. 
This tree has some amazing roots.   They make a nice set of steps on a steep section of the trail up.


We saw this for the first time the other day.  It’s an old pulley.  There used to be a lot of logging in the area, and we wonder if it was used to skid the logs down the side of the hill.


This was not here the last time we were here!  The tree was really sick – there was a lot of internal rot.  There are huge wood peckers here, and they make big holes in the trees.  So maybe that’s letting insects in to the trees, or maybe they’re just really old.


I like this section – isn’t this pretty?


A culvert for the creek.  We saw this the day we walked the High School Trail to the Bonneville Power Line Trail, which was really unpleasant.  It’s very rocky and we were not wearing our Tucson boots. 


There are mosquitoes.  That’s my wrist swelling up from a bite.  One also got me on the head through my hat.  I hate those buggers.  For some reason, I am delicious to them and Jim is not.


I copied this off Twitter.  After all the sadness about the kids being detained in the camps, it was good to see a happy Mom picture. 


He used to brag about his Time magazine covers.  Do you think he liked this one?

A Single Photograph Speaks

I think by now, everybody in the country has seen this picture.  It's just heart breaking - she's two.

The Washington Post published an article about how this photograph was taken.  I think if Border Patrol had anticipated the outrage that would be sparked by this image they would not have allowed the photographer to ride along.  Until I read this article, I did not understand why parents would come to the US if they knew their children would be seized.  The fact is, they did not know.  This policy changed while they were in route from South America.  The "he" in the first paragraph is John Moore, the photographer.

He knew that when loners crossed the river by day, they tended to run or hide from Border Patrol. But the large groups that crossed at night often surrendered themselves to the first U.S. agents they found.

The night-crossers were often families, exhausted and terrified from their journeys, seeking asylum from whatever terror had driven them from home.

While they had been evacuating their homes and traveling — some for weeks — the United States had changed the rules. Pleas for asylum that had been accepted for years might now be rejected. Mothers and fathers, who would have been released to await court hearings, would now be jailed. Their children would be seized and held from them by a foreign government.

The American public had only just learned this. Moore and the Border Patrol agents who hid with him on the banks of the Rio Grande knew it. But the people on the rafts . . . “These people had no way to know that,” Moore said.

Yesterday Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen denied that children were being taken from their parents.  Today she said DHS would not apologize for doing their jobs.  Which is it?  Not taking the kids or we're not apologizing for taking the kids?   Those are two mutually exclusive positions.  This administration is just beyond venal, as is every Republican member of Congress.  Jeff Flake or Bob Corker (neither of whom are running for re-election) could walk across the aisle and vote with the Democrats to end this.  But nooooooo, it's too difficult to grow a pair.

I could go on, but I will spare you my despair over what is happening in this country.