It’s Salmon Spawning Time!

 

Way back in the 1990s, Seattle realized it had a problem. Potentially, a very big problem.

The city was growing fast, but our drinking water was also needed by salmon. And not just any salmon…potentially endangered salmon. How would we make sure there was enough water for both people and fish?

Chinook, also known as King salmon, are the largest of Puget Sound’s five native salmon species, shown in watercolor.

 

Seattle began work on a 50-year Habitat Conservation Plan, which encompasses the entire Cedar River Watershed—the main source of our drinking water. The HCP is a large-scale plan to protect and preserve fish and wildlife habitat.

I just finished a three-sign project that interprets a few aspects of the plan. It’s on a small parcel on the lower part of the watershed where Seattle and its partners are restoring habitat and building a small public access trail.

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Seattle is unique in America in that it owns the entire watershed of its main drinking water source: the Cedar River. That means every inch of land that sheds water into the Cedar and that ultimately reaches our faucets is owned and controlled by us. Our water is protected from human-caused ickiness from the moment it falls from the sky until it enters the water pipe at Landsburg Dam. After that, it flows into the transmission and distribution pipeline system—1800 miles of underground pipelines until it reaches your tap. (For the whole very interesting story, watch the official video).

We don’t own the watershed below Landsburg Dam, but none of that water is used for drinking, so it’s not a problem…at least not for us. For fish and wildlife, though, it’s another story. In many places, wildlife habitat has been impacted by development. Things like levees or bank-hardening, invasive plants, and pollutants have impacted habitat in many places.

The lower watershed was once one of the richest salmon spawning habitats in the world, and Seattle and its partners are working to preserve and restore it to good condition. I did the watercolor on the sign below to highlight some of the main features of good salmon habitat.

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The sign below shows the upper watershed—the area that is off-limits to unsupervised access. That glowing lake in the center? That’s your drinking water—as clean as it can be!

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Want to see salmon spawn in the Cedar River?

NOW is the time to go! At Landsburg, you can see the best show, but there are other sites and also volunteer naturalists on hand.

To find out where and when to go, check the Cedar River Salmon Journey Website.

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Happy Birthday, Wilderness Act!

Fifty years ago today, the Wilderness Preservation Act was signed by President Johnson.

Below is a recycled post from last winter about two of the people who helped get the Act passed.

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The Wilderness Preservation Act

This year the Wilderness Preservation Act turns 50. It’s worth remembering that Wilderness Areas were not a given—they were hard-won by a few passionate and determined people.

 

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Mardy and Olaus Murie – Voices for Wilderness

This week’s post is about two people, Margaret (Mardy) Murie and her husband Olaus Murie. Their love of nature—especially the arctic wilderness—drew them together to share a life of adventure and activism. And they both played key roles in the passage of the Wilderness Preservation Act and the establishment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The main source for this story is the book “Arctic Dance”, The Mardy Murie Story.” 

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I did this watercolor of the Northern Lights from imagination.

 

Love and Adventure

It all started in the wilds of Alaska nearly a century ago…

In 1916, In the frontier town of Fairbanks, Alaska, a fourteen year-old girl was saying goodbye to her mother. She was excited and a bit nervous to be taking her first journey on her own, a trip on the Valdez Trail to her father’s home in Southeast Alaska.

Mardy and her fellow travelers were bundled into enormous wolfskin robes for the trip across the Alaska Range in an open, horse-drawn sleigh. Mostly, they traveled at night when the snow was easier, and they stopped to rest in roadhouses along the way.

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Horse and Sleigh on the Valdez – Fairbanks Trail, 1911-1920. Photo Library of Congress.

 

After what seemed like weeks in the sleigh, she transferred to a wagon, then train and steamship, finally arriving at her father’s island home in Southeast Alaska.

It was there, during a summer of exploration and outdoor life in the remote inlets, bays, and forested islands, that Mardy’s love of wilderness was born.

To most fourteen year-olds today, spending a summer roaming free in the wild would probably be the adventure of a lifetime. But for Mardy, it was just the beginning. While still in college, she met an arctic biologist, Olaus Murie, a tall, handsome blue-eyed arctic biologist who worked for the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey (now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). He was doing research on caribou and other wildlife.

Olaus was a strong and gentle man who had spent most of his life in wilderness and was an expert in arctic survival, wildlife, and the native language. His interests were scientific, but he was a gifted artist as well, and spent much of his free time in the backcountry drawing and painting his observations of nature.

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Olaus Murie. Photo U.S.F.W.S

 

While they were becoming acquainted, Mardy and her mother went to visit Olaus near Mount KcKinley where he was working. It was there that their friendship deepened into love as they spent five days “tramping about in a rosy haze in those enchanted mountains.” The two of them realized they were perfectly matched: a shared love of adventure and wilderness life.

Mardy completed her business degree and was the first woman graduate of the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines (now the University of Alaska Fairbanks). She and Olaus married in 1924 in a log chapel in Anvik, a remote village on the Yukon River. Mardy’s mother and the rest of the wedding party arrived to the wedding by sternwheeler.

 

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Mardy and Olaus shortly after their wedding in August 1924. Photo U.S.F.W.S

 

For their honeymoon, the two of them set out on a three-month, 550-mile riverboat and dogsled trip up the Koyukuk River to the Brooks Range, above the Arctic Circle. Mardy, dressed in furs and skins from head to toe, had to learn how to mush her own sled pulled by seven Siberian Huskies.

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Olaus and Mardy wearing their trail furs. Photo U.S.F.W.S

 

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Mardy and her dog-team mushing on the trail. Photo U.S.F.W.S.

 

They camped in a canvas tent warmed with elk hides or stayed in shelter cabins. Olaus conducted caribou research and did sketches and paintings, and Mardy wrote in her dairy and fell in love with the arctic wilderness.

Mardy wrote of a day on the trail as they approached a shelter cabin:

“…the sky is midnight blue and fully spangled with stars, and the moon is rising brighter and brighter behind the pointed trees. In the north, a flicker of green and yellow; then an unfurled bolt of rainbow ribbon shivering and shimmering across the stars—the Aurora. The dogs begin to speed up; we must be nearing a cabin; yes, there it is, a little black blotch on the creek bank. The air is cold and tingling, fingers are numb…

 

A little later, when warmth and light and food and our few possessions had made the tiny cabin our home for another night, we listen to that ‘whoo, hoo, hoo-hoo’ from the forest; it makes a day on the arctic trail complete.”

 

Margaret (Mardy) Murie, “Two in the far North”

 

As their epic honeymoon ended, they each felt they had found their perfect life. From then on, they spent as much time as possible together in the wilderness. The next year, Olaus was sent back to the Arctic to explore the remote headwaters of the Old Crow River. By this time they had their first son, Martin, who was just ten months old. But Mardy had no intention of being left behind, so she packed up the baby and the three of them went on another wilderness adventure.

This time it was summer, a season that can be even tougher on arctic travelers than winter, with hordes of mosquitoes, and the warming weather turning the ground to a soggy sponge-like mess below their feet. Instead of mushing a dog-team for transport, they poled up the river in a tiny scow—their crankshaft having broken on the third day of their trip. Mardy made a little tent on the deck of the boat for the baby, where he was tucked securely into a wooden box.

In “Arctic Dance”, Mardy is quoted describing her daily routine in their camp:

“I used empty five-gallon gasoline cans for the dishes and for clothes, where the cans would be cut down through the center and the sides rolled back to make a handle. You can put in on the fire and warm some water for the diapers. And the diapers you just hang over the willow bushes. And in the other tin you prepared food and did all of the next day’s preparations.”

 

But the little family was undaunted by the hardships and challenges of the wilderness. They sang, grew closer, and reveled in the expansive, unspoiled world that teemed with wildlife.

“At my back…stretched the limitless tundra, mile upon mile, clear to the Arctic Ocean…we threw off our headnets, gloves, and heavy shirts, and stood with the breeze blowing through our hair…We could see, far out over miles of green tundra, blue hills in the distance, on the Arctic Coast, no doubt. This was the high point; we had reached the headwaters of the Old Crow. After we had lived with it in all its moods, been down in the depths with it for weeks, it was good to know that the river began in beauty and flowed through miles of clean gravel and airy open space.”

 

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Mardy in camp. Photo U.S.F.W.S.

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Olaus in later years, sketching on the deck of a boat. Photo U.S.F.W.S

 

At the end of their second trip together, Mardy felt as comfortable with wilderness life as Olaus, and they continued to travel and have adventures—something they would do their whole lives.

In 1927, Olaus was offered a position in Wyoming, and the growing family moved to Jackson Hole. Olaus continued his work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and he and Mardy became key players in the early conservation movement. Among other things, they helped found the Wilderness Society, and had a hand in the passage of the Wilderness Act and the establishment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They both authored books and won prestigious professional and environmental awards.

 

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Olaus and Mardy in later years. Photo U.S.F.W.S

 

 

Olaus died in 1963, but Mardy continued to be active in the wilderness preservation movement until her death at age 101 in 2003. She wrote articles, gave speeches, testified before Congress, and was invited to the White House when President Johnson signed the Wilderness Act in 1964. She worked until late in her life, and was dubbed the “grandmother of the conservation movement” by the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society.

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Mardy Murie, left, as President Johnson signs the Wilderness Act. Photo U.S.F.W.S

 

Today, the Murie ranch in Wyoming operates as an Environmental Center.

Without the passion of committed people like Mardy and Olaus, today our Wilderness Areas might be developed, asphalted, and choked with traffic.

The fight for Wilderness is not over. Today, our federal lands are under increasing pressure for oil and gas development, as well as other high-impact uses such as motorized recreation.

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Do you have any thoughts about wilderness, adventure or preservation? Please leave any thoughts or comments. I love hearing from you!

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References and Links

Olaus and Mardy Murie: Alaska’s Passionate Protectors

Arctic Dance, the Mardy Murie Story, by Charles Craighead and Bonnie Kreps

The Wilderness Society

The Murie Center

The Wilderness Act and the Preservation Movement

The Wilderness Act turning 50

Two in the Far North, by Mardy Murie

Eat Prey, Love – the Sequel

There has been an update since I originally posted “Eat Prey, Love” in the fall of 2012! Journey not only has a mate, but a new family!

Read about it here.

 

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A Lone Wolf called Journey

Journey was a lone wolf that crossed into California in 2011. He was the only one left from the scattered—or poached—Imnaha pack in eastern Oregon, and the first wild wolf in California in nearly a century. Since then, he’s probably been looking for a mate and scouting out his territory. Being alone for so long, he probably had a harder time hunting larger prey like elk and lived mainly on smaller animals like beaver or rabbits.

I hope Journey has found his mate and gets his family. Most of all, I hope he learns to hunt wild prey, rather than sheep or cattle—a sure death sentence.

I hope we can learn to respect wildlife for being themselves rather than as trophies, entertainment, or pseudo-pets. I hope we will make a place for wildness.

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From Eat Prey, Love, originally posted October 25, 2012

 

Can we make a place for wildness?

A lone wolf called Journey was California’s first wild wolf in nearly a century. Now, he’s back in Oregon, possibly with his new mate.

 

Wild or Captive? It makes a difference

Many wildlife biologists no longer favor the term “Alpha” in describing wolf behavior. Even the idea of a “pack” is somewhat outmoded. These old ideas were originally made popular by biologist L. David Mech in 1970. As he explains on his website, his original research was done on captive wolves, and has since been updated with field research on wolves in the wild—with quite different results.

While captive wolves do behave in the alpha-dominance model, it is not common in the wild. I’ve heard it likened to how humans behave when forced into captivity, like prisons or concentration camps. Social norms break down. Things get savage.

In contrast, wild wolves live in family groups of related individuals: the parents, called the breeding pair, and their offspring, which include the current years’ pups and possibly older siblings from one or two previous seasons. The breeding pair are the leaders, not because they fought their way into their high status position through force and dominance, but simply because they are the parents. Parents know best, right?

It makes a subtle but important difference in how we view wolves. Their social behavior is not centered on dominance, but on family. Wolves live and work together cooperatively based on age and experience, with the older ones teaching the younger ones how to be wolves. When they’re ready, the youths leave the family to find a mate, establish a territory, and make a family—their own pack.

 

What does it mean to be wild?

I flip open my ipad and check my Google alert on wolves (October, 2012). The top article is from Wisconsin, where the first wolf hunting season in 38 years started a few days ago. A father-son team of trophy hunters snared the first wolf, a young female, in a legtrap. They had seen her struggling as they approached with their rifles, finally shooting her in the head to complete the hunt. Her pelt would be their trophy, hanging on their wall to remind them of their proud accomplishment. They get to be the alpha dudes, the true top predators, thanks to superior hunting skills—and a little help from modern technology.

The next article tells of a college girl who takes her wolfdog (85-90% wolf, 10-15% dog) to campus with her. The photo shows her and the muzzled wolfdog gazing into each others’ eyes, and the girl receiving a huge juicy-looking tongue kiss. The caption says she majors in wildlife science and occasionally sleeps with the wolfdog.

These two cases really run the gamut. The first is about dominance through violence, and the second, well, it is a form of trophy-ism, too, just on the other extreme. A little too Fifty Shades of Graywolf, from the look of it.

I wonder why we need to treat wild animals in these ways, either to prove our own supremacy, or as proxies for decent relationship-material? (Or worse, for cheap entertainment, as in some circuses and creepy You-Tube videos.) I’m not saying that trophy hunters—or college girls who love wolves—should be kicked out of America. But what about simply appreciating wildness? Do we have a place for that, as well?

It’s only recently we’ve learned how important top predators—like wolves—are in natural ecosystems. When they are gone, they are missed—not just by us tree-huggers, but by other living things like trees and plants and pollinating insects, and birds and even the prey species, eventually. Living with wildness is messy and complicated and will take serious cooperation and effort and money from all of us, but it will be worth it in the long run… if we want to leave something decent behind us when we are gone. A habitable planet, for example.

 

To learn more about wolves and conservation in the Northwest: http://www.conservationnw.org/

To keep on Journey and his latest doings: http://www.oregonwild.org/fish_wildlife/bringing_wolves_back/the-journey-of-or7

To read an article about top predators and their effect on ecosystems: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203630604578072693046060834.html

Nature is a Puppy

 

Finding meaningful connection with nature is difficult for the average urban dweller. Some of us simply don’t know how—without a prescribed activity, we are at a loss. Others are bored unless nature offers something tangible, like something to speed through, climb up, jump over, or zip past.

But, in a world where the population keeps growing and nature keeps shrinking, natural areas will eventually become overwhelmed by hard, active use. Wild nature should be valued for its own sake, not only for its Use Potential.

We need a more mindful approach.

Why not approach nature as a fellow living being?

 This is a watercolor I did for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Colorado.


This is a watercolor I did for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Colorado.

 

A Barrel of Puppies

Of course, nature is not always fluffy and cute. Even if you’ve never felt the sharp edges of wilderness survival, you’ve probably seen enough on the Nature Channel to know that true Wild Nature can be downright horrifying.

Mostly, it’s Eat or be Eaten.

But, the nature most of us will encounter in daily life is tamer. Our urban parks, our greenspaces and natural areas close to population centers are not places where you need to fear for your life. On the contrary, nature has far more to fear from you.

We have no problem treating puppies and kittens with tender care, why can’t we treat birds, and small mammals, or even insects and worms with the same consideration? Most wild animals and wild plants in cities—even ones we are taught to think of as “bad”—are simply trying to survive.

Try this sometime: when you visit a natural area, try approaching it as you would a living creature you wish to get to know. Everything—the plants, the trees, the animals, and everything in between—is Life. Treat it with some tender care.

You will feel truly connected to nature.

Happy Earth Day!

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Wild River

Last year, I wrote about a proposal to build a dam on the South Fork of the Skykomish River—one of the last wild rivers in Washington. Today, there was an announcement of a decision to modify the project. Read the about the new developments here.

The original post from last year:

Rivers Are Us

If you want to study a single topic to help you understand history, the environment, politics and the economy…choose rivers.

From: Rivers Are Us

A watercolor I did of the Skykomish River

 

What other topic is so intertwined with everything on earth? Rivers sculpt landforms; living beings depend on rivers for food, shelter, transportation, and water; people struggle to control rivers for their own purposes. It’s all there.

Rivers are dynamic—moving and changing constantly. They meander, they rise and fall, flood, dry up, erode here, deposit there. Like a caged animal, rivers often do not respond well to confinement.

Many of my interpretive projects have been about river restoration. After a century of large-scale damming, diking and diverting, we have figured out that we’ve been too heavy-handed in how we treat rivers—people and wildlife have suffered as a result. Many agencies and organizations are hard at work to restore some of the natural ways rivers work.

What is a wild river worth?

There aren’t many rivers left in Washington State that are free-flowing—unrestricted by dams. One of the last major wild rivers, the South Fork of the Skykomish, may be losing its wild status. As of spring 2012 there is a plan underway to give the Skykomish its first dam. The project is hugely controversial, and has resulted in the river being added to the List of America’s Most Endangered Rivers by the organization American Rivers.

In any dam project, there are winners and losers. When the Elwha Dam on the Olympic Peninsula was completed in 1913, many people prospered from the access to cheap electricity. But, the Klallam Indians saw the wild river and salmon they depended on virtually disappear. And now the Elwha is the site of an enormous, unprecedented restoration project: removing the dams and restoring the habitat for salmon, wildlife and people.

In Snohomish County, many people want access to affordable energy, and some see damming the Skykomish as an efficient way to achieve it. The area is growing fast, and the economy is always slower than we would like. And, since there are no salmon in the upper reaches of the Skykomish anyway—they are prevented from moving upstream past the waterfalls—it seems to many like the perfect place for a dam.

But, what is lost when we use up the last bit of something? If there is only a tiny fraction of something left…old growth forest, or tall-grass prairie, or peat bogs, or wild rivers, shouldn’t that loss be figured into the cost/benefit of using it up? Do we have a responsibility to future generation to leave some wild things? What is wildness worth?

What do you think?

I’d love to hear your comments! Just click on the light gray “thought bubble” next to the title of this post.

For more on the Skykomish Dam:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018315558_skykomish30m.html 

For more on the Elwha Dam:

http://www.nps.gov/olym/naturescience/elwha-ecosystem-restoration.htm

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/flatpages/specialreports/elwha/

For more on the Skykomish River as one of America’s Most Endangered Rivers:

http://www.americanrivers.org/newsroom/press-releases/2012/south-fork-skykomish-river-among-americas-most-endangered-rivers-2012.html

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