June 19-24, 2022
This is the third camping trip of 2022 and a brand new destination for me. I can’t wait! 🙂 Let’s go!!
In the photo below, the state park of Birch Bay is off to the right, in the woods … and Birch Bay itself is off to the left. It is beautiful.
So, here’s where I went (below). I still haven’t hardly gotten out of the State of Washington for a camping trip … once to BC, Canada, and once to Oregon, USA.
Birch Bay and the state park is where the RED DOT is in the image below. It’s about 10-15 minutes south of Canada.
Here’s a closer image below. I left the YELLOW zig-zag boundary line between Canada and the USA in the image. The islands to the left (Galiano, Salt Spring, Mayne, Pender, etc) are in Canada. The islands to the right of the YELLOW zig-zag line are in the USA (Orcas, San Juan, Lopez, etc). Not surprisingly, there is a LOT of recreational boating going on in this area and, not surprisingly, all manner of folks from the USA and from Canada spend their vacation time in these waters and on all of those islands.
[By the way, Orcas Island is pronounced or-cuss (emphasis on “or”) … it is not pronounced like the plural of Orca is pronounced, one orca two orcas. The way Orcas Island is pronounced is or-cuss, like the verb to cuss … or-cuss island.]
So, onward, up I-5 from home, a long slog, but well worth the drive. Birch Bay State Park is a gorgeous campground.
Notice my solar panel in the photo above. The Pacific Northwest is known for its luscious green trees which are truly luscious and wonderful, but they aren’t very good if you want solar power. When I’m in a campsite that does not have electricity provided, sometimes my trailer (with its roof-top solar panel) is parked in the shade under the trees. So I wired in a remote solar panel that I could move around depending on the position of the sun, the time of day, and the location of nearby trees. This has worked exceptionally well.
The trailer is leveled side-to-side and forward-and-back. The two wires/cables in the photo above are the + and – cables that run to/from that remote solar panel.
I took the photo above, and then I stood there awhile. And then I saw the monster in the tree to the right of the trailer. Yikes. Two huge eyes, and fangs that wouldn’t stop!
Maybe you can see it in the photo below. It’s hanging off the right side of that tree trunk. Look at those huge eyeballs!
That felt a bit weird, so I walked around to the other side of that tree/trunk, maybe to get a nicer view point. No! Not another monster!
Indeed, look at all of the creatures on that tree trunk in the photo below.
Here (below) is yet another angle, another view of that tree/trunk, and yet more folks seem to be hanging out there.
I finally made peace with all of those monsters (in fact, they were very friendly monsters once I got to know them). I then walked around to the back side of that tree/trunk to find that the majority of the tree had been uprooted at some point in the past. Look at those old root systems.
But also, look on the ground … under where that tree would have sat, when it sat, before it was cut and uprooted and started to fall over. I brushed off a good deal of the leaves, and a bit of dirt under there. I found a nurse log!
The nurse log was at least four feet in diameter, probably more if I had dug down around it. You can see in the photo above (the black wood at the bottom on the right) where that nurse log is rotting. It was fascinating to me to think that the original nurse log (the tree that had fallen how many, many decades ago) was still there, at least in part, and that one of the trees that had grown out from it … that “new” tree was also decades old and was rotting. It seems that this “new” tree had started to fall, and so was cut by state park employees so it wouldn’t endanger this specific campsite. But the trunk of that “new” tree is still there (with all of its friendly monsters), and it will decompose and help grow yet more new trees.
In the end, I felt exceptionally comfortable with all of these monsters all around me. In fact, I felt safe and very well protected.
Tomorrow I’ll go exploring. Tonight, I’ll sleep safe and happy.