Adventures in Paddling the Pacific Northwest

Paddlers on the famous Bowron Lakes in British Columbia, Canada often make a trip to visit nearby Barkerville which figured prominently in the 1861 Cariboo gold rush. My visit to the area in 1972 made me aware of the historic nature of the area and when I moved, much later, to the

The Cariboo Trail

desert of central Washington state I noticed a few of the historic markers which marked the Cariboo Trail.

There was more than one Cariboo Trail but the one that begins near Vancouver, B.C. is more correctly referred to as the Cariboo Road. A tributary to that road began in Walula, Washington near Walla Walla and ran up to Moses Lake and then along what are now known as the Sun Lakes up to Coulee City and thence north into the Okanogan and onwards to Canada. There are remnants of this trail scattered along the way and it’s been an interesting project for me to look for these remnants and hike and/or mountain bike them. Continue reading Ancient Pathways – the Cariboo Trail

I have enjoyed as much as I can stand of Windows. I can’t afford a Macintosh. My Dell laptop has disintegrated and is in pieces held together by rubber bands. My options are limited. But there are options.

Linux has been around since the early 1990s but has not made any real inroads into the public

My new Linux Desktop

consciousness despite it being secure, robust and versatile. This has been mostly due to the perception that Linux is difficult to install and even more difficult to configure; especially when it comes to printers, network cards, wireless networking (wifi), monitors, sound cards, etc. Indeed, for many years it really was a chore to set a Linux desktop up and use it. Continue reading Moving Back to Linux

This morning, as I was pouring my first cup of coffee, the bubbles and sound of the liquid flowing into my cup reminded me of an incident a few years back that involved a much greater volume of water dropping into the Yakima River near Ellensburg, Washington.  This portion of the Yakima is mostly Class 1 and 2 and attracts many Puget Sound river rafters who rent their inflatables in the tiny hamlet of Thorpe and then ferry up to Cle Elum twelve miles or so up the river and float back down to where their their cars are parked alongside the road.

No Place to be Playing Once This Starts to Melt!

It’s not a difficult float  but there is one well-marked hazard on the trip where an irrigation canal dumps its water into a fairly narrow section of the river from a height of about twenty feet. The canal doesn’t have water all the time so there are two large billboards about 1/2-mile upstream that can be opened to advise all boaters to exit their boats river-left due to extreme danger ahead. The roar of the water dropping into the river underscores the capital letters: DANGER AHEAD!

You would think that anyone in a raft who is unfamiliar with these waters would eddy out and walk down the bank to take a look. You would be wrong.

Continue reading Impervious to Harm

I’ve been involved in photography for 40 years. I have a Nikon in a closet somewhere to prove it, too. At one time I was a professional photographer using Nikons and Hasselblads (and an SWC) and even owned a Linhof Teknika for a time. I grew bored with the whole thing when I felt I was spending more time taking photos than engaging in the activity I wanted to document.

A few months back I bought a digital Olympus Stylus Tough 6000 waterproof digital point-and-shoot camera and have enjoyed using it. It’s the first digital camera I’ve owned with enough resolution to be useful but its video capabilities have been disappointing. Fun, but still disappointing.

So for Christmas my wife asked me if I wanted a GoPro Hero video cam I

The GoPro Hero - taken with the Olympus

jumped at the chance to get involved more in making videos. Maybe I’ll decide that it’s not as much fun as I think it will be. Maybe not. At any rate it’s something new and it’s applicable to almost everything I do outdoors including cross-country skiing, mountain biking and kayaking.

And the fact that she found it used on Amazon and could use a coupon to buy it was even nicer. Under $100 investment. How could we go wrong?

Possibly in many, many ways. But it seems like a good idea.

It’s been a long time since I’ve published anything new in this blog. This is mostly due to a complete knee replacement I had done on my left leg in June, 2010. Most of the summer of 2010 was dedicated to recovering from the surgery and regaining motion lost some 22 years ago in an industrial accident. Part of that recovery was done using mountain bicycles. At one time in my life bicycling played an important role. Last summer a Trek 4500 mountain bike played a big part in my physical therapy.

My Carbon Fiber Trek (OCLV) (Successor to the 4500)

As I slowly regained the ability to ride a bike I progressed from short rides to longer rides and by the end of August I was riding alone on rough paths into remote desert canyons. At this point I realized that if new kayakers were approaching paddling the same way they might have approached mountain biking they were vastly underestimating the potential danger. And people who are teaching kayaking to new paddlers need to understand that the complex nature of the sport is subtle and not readily apparent to new participants. Continue reading The Complexities of Sea Kayaking

On the western edge of North America there is one small kayak which has become almost legendary. First produced commercially by Matt and Cam Broze of Mariner Kayaks in Seattle, the Mariner Coaster has achieved this status not because it has been used on expeditions but because it was, for many years, virtually the only sea kayak playboat suitable for rock gardens and surf as well as being fast enough to carry a kayaker and some gear to suitable spots to play in.

The Mariner Coaster as pictured in a review by Sea Kayaker Magazine, Summer of 1994

The genesis for the Coaster was a little boat designed and built by Robert Livingston. As Matt Broze says in his history of Mariner Kayaks (www.marinerkayaks.com) Robert brought his little Ursa Micro along on a trip to Cape Flattery (the most NW’ly

Robert Livingston's wife in his Ursa Micro, the inspiration for the Mariner Coaster. Note the spiffy PFD.

point of mainland USA) back in the middle 1980s.  Back then a 13.5-foot sea kayak was unusual to say the least (even white water kayaks tended to be 11-feet long or longer) but the Ursa Micro was surprisingly fast (due to low wetted surface) and incredibly maneuverable. Matt and Cam were so taken with the boat that they asked Robert if they could use his design in a production boat.

Robert had designed the Ursa Micro using his new design program “BearboatSP” for a trip along the coast of Portugal. Back then you could not rent kayaks so his idea was to make a boat that could be taken apart into three pieces and transported with his luggage. (Robert is still designing, building and paddling boats and his tastes still runs towards smaller kayaks; except that he still likes his Mariner I.) Continue reading In Praise of the Coaster

It’s been over a month since I updated this blog and, frankly, nothing much has happened.  While the east coast of North America is suffering under record snowfall and cold those of us in the Pacific Northwest portion of North America are experiencing record warmth. Normally temperatures here in January and February barely reach freezing and lows from 10 to 15 (F) are common. Not in 2010. Nearly every day for a month our temperatures have reached into the 40s and we’ve had several days with high temps in the low 50s (F). And it often doesn’t even get down to freezing at night. Moses Lake, where the lake house is located, normally is frozen from about November 15th to March 15th. Last year it was a week late to freeze and a week early to thaw. This year it was a month late to freeze and it thawed completely February 7th!!!

Our normal winter activity is cross-country skiing but the warm temperatures

Hailey, 8, giving the camera her standard greeting at the Moses Lake Ice Rink

translated into more rain than snow in the mountains where our usual favorite areas are about 3000 feet in elevation and are suffering from a lack of snow. You have to go up to 4000 feet to find enough snow for decent skiing; and even then it can be problematic. Nothing less fun than skiing in the rain.  Or driving 2 hours each way to ski in the rain. This left me with a problem. I don’t walk well and can’t bicycle so I had to cast around for winter action. Luckily a friend suggested regular ice skating parties and we remembered that while we were involved with Boy Scouts we collected ice skates whenever we found them at yard sales and thrift stores. We dusted off the box of about 8 pair of skates and invited a bunch of kids to meet after school on Wednesdays.

This escalated into skating whenever we had nothing else to do. The rink is free and covered but not heated so we bundled up well during the cold periods but now that we’re in these early spring-like conditions dressing warmly is not as important. So we now go skating on a whim and since the rink is only about 8 blocks from the lake house it’s easy to run over and skate for a while.

We could have skated on the lake until the end of January but the ice, which was thick enough to support a pickup truck, started thinning rapidly with the warm weather and rain. Besides, the lake doesn’t have a snack bar and a recreation center with batting cages, computer games, ping pong and pool tables. A nice hot cup of chocolate with whipped cream and sprinkles has become the thing to do after skating. And no long ride home.

Hopefully the warm weather won’t make it difficult to keep ice on the rink. When there is a wind at temperatures over 40F it’s difficult to keep parts of the ice frozen solid. Anyway, now that the lake is water again we can go back to kayaking once the water and air temps get comfy. Next weekend it’s predicted to be nearly 60F and sunny so I expect that to be it.

I also expect an update on the new shop next week when the roof trusses arrive.

It’s hard to believe that a week ago we were camping on the beach just 50 miles north of San Diego (Dana Point) in the Princess with two sea kayaks on the truck roof and sunshine (mostly) outside. On December 19th we loaded up the truck and trailer and headed south for some escape from

Our 1970 Streamline Princess (21-foot) at Doheny Beach State Park

the snow and ice. At 5pm the next day we rolled into Doheny Beach State Park in Dana Point, California for a 5-day visit. Our schedule included sightseeing at Disneyland, a visit to the restored mission at San Juan Capistrano, a wonderful morning at San Onofre State Beach (about 11 miles south) with the California Kayak Friends gang (www.ckf.org) and (on the way home) a paddle in the bull kelp off Monterey, CA with sea otters. Continue reading Doheny Beach, CA in the Princess

Often the spring and the fall months irritate me because it’s too cold to kayak and too warm for cross-country skiing. Other avenues of exercise are pretty much closed to me unless it’s in a gym setting (and our gym burned down last February) so it was exciting when the weather seemed to cooperate to provide one of those rare weekends when

White Pass Nordic Center

you can cross-country ski one day and kayak the next. Without, at least, long drives for both.

I had thought that it would be the previous weekend but the track-cat at White Pass (west of Yakima, Washington) had broken down. I pretty much need tracks nowadays. Some people find it unusual that a guy who can’t walk very well can cross-country ski but there is really no mystery. The sport of X/C skiing in tracks on groomed trails is almost zero impact and you get two poles to lean on. There would probably be more disabled people doing it but it never occurs to the sport’s organizers that it’s possible and so sometimes just getting access can be an almost insurmountable hurdle (huge snow berms to clamber over, long walks from parking lots, etc.) Of course for kayaking it’s a cinch for someone who can’t walk. I often need help getting into and (especially) back out of my cockpit but in general I find that I can sit flat on my ass just as well now as I could when I was in my twenties. Continue reading Double-Header Weekend

Ok, maybe it’s not “global” but it’s certainly local. At one time, not too long ago, I could count on having solid ice in front of my lake house from November 15th to March 15th every winter. This is no longer the case. Last year, for instance, there was over 2 weeks less ice. This year the ice I expected to thicken actually disappeared and temperatures, at least this year, are much warmer than usual. So today, just before Thanksgiving and about a week to December, the air temperature at 51F, the water temp at 35F, and the

Instead of a convenient dock, at winter water levels I get a rocky beach!

sunshine all conspired to lure me out of the house and into a kayak and out onto the lake.

Moses Lake, where I live in Washington state, is part of several reservoirs involved in the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project. These include the waters impounded behind Grand Coulee Dam (Lake Roosevelt), Banks Lake, the Potholes Reservoir, and more. Almost all of these make superb desert paddling with public and private campgrounds numerous and attractive and launch points spread throughout the area. In fact, if you enjoy paddling big fresh water lakes you’d be hard-pressed to find better water anywhere in North America. At least for three quarters of the year. Maybe now more than that. Continue reading Thank You Global Warming