Those of us in Washington who love waterfalls are fortunate to live in one of
the premier corners of the planet for these lacy ribbons of crashing
white -- there might be more than 10,000 of them -- and thanks to a big
winter snowpack, this year is one of the best to search them out and
listen to their thunderous roar.
June 19, 2008
If you let a kid in the forest be a kid, he or she will take to
hiking like moss takes to a streamside boulder during a damp spring.
That means letting your little ones get a bit dirty and wet, letting
them pick up bugs and worms and letting them stop along the trail to,
say, get a pungent whiff of skunk cabbage. And you just might find yourself growing an active and healthy young
hiker with a sense of connection to what makes the Northwest the
Northwest.
June 5, 2008
The rustic Paradise Inn in Mount Rainier National Park, a national historic landmark built in 1916, will reopen Friday after a two-year, $22.5 million spruce-up.
May 15, 2008
From the wide waters of the mighty Columbia River to the top of the
blue and gold wildflower buttes above, Columbia Hills State Park is all
about the past, the present and the future.
May 15, 2008
Blanchard Mountain towers more than 2,200 feet above Samish Bay -- along with adjacent Chuckanut Mountain it's the only place where the Cascade Range touches the briny tidelands.
May 8, 2008
Down on South Lake Union's Waterway No. 4, a friendly group of salty dogs is carrying on a tradition that anyone who ever floated a log on a pond as a kid can appreciate -- and keeping alive Seattle's rich history of wooden boat building.
Their collection of small wooden vessels includes sloops, sprits, longboats, yawls, knockabouts, gillnetters, coracles, skiffs, dinghies, dories, steam launches, dugout canoes, umiaks, Eskimo kayaks and pedal boats. And they want you to come and sail, row or paddle them. Or just come down and mess about these boats.
May 1, 2008
You can't really know Canada's vibrant and diverse western metropolis, home to 2 million busy souls including the surrounding communities, without first taking a walk through the city's forest and down by its shores. Vancouver cannot be considered -- in a larger sense -- without also thinking of Stanley Park, the 1,000-acre sylvan sanctuary at its doorstep that this year is 120 years old.
April 17, 2008
It might strike you as curious that the Olympic Peninsula, noted for its natural wild settings, also is jammed with recent history. Though Spaniards explored the peninsula by sea starting in the late 1700s, this is one of the last places in the continental United States to be settled. Just 150 years ago, the entire Olympic Peninsula was wilderness. Perhaps that's why history here seems so tangible.
April 10, 2008
Some time about 10 or 12 years ago, the sport of mountain biking evolved -- seemingly overnight -- from a fast and easy activity in which the rider simply carved sweetly along flowing dirt trails to one involving fearsomely precipitous descents through heinous two-wheeled hell.
Riders began hucking themselves off rock ledges that a flying squirrel might avoid.
Helmets advanced from simple brain bonnets to the wrap-around tops of Vader-like full-body armor.
March 6, 2008
To some people, Port Susan Bay looks like just another muddy, marshy tidal backwater, one of dozens across the great inland sea that splinters the northwest corner of Washington into a briny labyrinth of straits, bays, canals, passes and inlets.
February 7, 2008
RSS for Greg Johnston
