September-October, 2021
Flowing water is so wonderful to watch. Waterfalls are exquisite! Let me show you the waterfall we saw today. Yum.
Fire, on the other hand, can be scary. The results of a forest fire are not pleasant for us to see, even a naturally occurring forest fire. But … I’m going to show you some of the results of fires that we saw today. Hang in there with me. This is all part of where and how we live on this planet. And, remember, fire is sometimes good for the forest, necessary even! I’ll end this blog post with some lovely photos so you can breathe easy. 🙂
Ok, let’s go! (Click on photos to enlarge them.)
First off, I got up this morning to find a little Casita trailer had pulled into the campsite right in front of me late last night. They were quiet as field mice. 🙂 They stayed there a couple of nights/days and were the nicest folks. Of course, since both of our trailers were fiberglass, we chatted quite a bit. Excellent neighbors.
After breakfast, the Escape-trailer-owning friends of mine (Finn’s family) and I decided to jump into one of our vehicles and drive out into the country (without our trailers) to see what we could see. We had found a small campground online and wanted to check it out. Gosh, this country is so different from western Washington … and so beautiful, just in a different way.
We walked through this small campground. It was right on a small river, really pretty. But you could not make reservations so we probably would not be back here with our trailers … just too far to go to risk not finding an available campsite.
When we arrived at this campground, we saw signs on the other side of the road pointing to a short walk to a waterfall. We looked at each other for just a fraction of a micro-second and then we headed over to the waterfall. It was magnificent.
Here are two videos of the waterfall …
And the second video here below …
Look at the rocks in the water in this video … they are here naturally … put here by the earth we live on.
Pretty cool, huh?
We talked about walking over that log “bridge” in the photo above, but not one of us was brave enough to do that.
On the way back to the road, we took a little different route and ended up walking through the area below. The fire damage seemed relatively small and contained … at least in comparison to most of the wildfires that we’ve had here on the west coast of the USA in recent years. And yet, I noticed that all three of us were silent as we walked through this area.
As mentioned, forests truly do need fire at times. But still it hurts to see the damage.
So then we headed a bit south and west of town to see Sun Mountain Lodge that we’d heard lots of great things about. We got to the bottom of the road that led up to Sun Mountain Lodge, only to find that the road was closed because the Lodge was closed because of the smoke damage from the forest fires. They were in the process of cleaning every nook and cranny of the Lodge and the cabins and all other buildings. So we parked and looked around for something else to do here.
It was gorgeous here! The trees were stunning … the sky so blue … let’s find a trail to follow.
And so we did. It was a marked trail, advertising a beaver pond and other stuff. It took off to the right through some trees and along a very nice, wide path.
But … it soon turned into another location where there had been a fire. Still, we continued on, wanting to see and learn even though it was hard to do that.
Notice that the fire is mostly on only the lower few feet of each tree. The upper portions of trees are still intact. But not for long will the upper parts of these trees be intact. Look at the photo below. Only the bottom three feet or so was burned, but look what that did to the entire tree … it kills the tree.
Further along the trail, we found holes in the ground (see photo below). When I looked online later that evening, I found out that there are underground fires in forests that burn using “ground fuel” or roots and such, under the dirt. Fire can travel from tree to tree through the roots.
We had found a large tree that had burned completely … and the roots had too. There were many holes and they were deep.
Ah, but enough about forest fires and the science of them.
Further on down this same trail, heading back towards where we had parked, we passed through this one particular area of graceful, peaceful, delightful woodland. How refreshing it felt to walk through this greenery. Please DO click to enlarge the photo below so the beauty can wrap around you.
A little further on we found the beaver pond (mentioned above). We were so glad that the forest around the pond had not been damaged by the fire. We didn’t see any beavers, but we wished them well.
We saw and learned about lots of things today … a gorgeous waterfall and forest fires and a wonderful, peaceful beaver pond. Who knows what you will find on your next walk? Keep your eyes open. 🙂