LIVE LAUGH LOOK AT THE RAIN

We are coming at you wet and cold from a rainforest this week.

Rivers and Roads

It has been a long-time dream to visit the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Finally made it here, and my eyeballs are just having the time of their life looking at all the big and small green growing things. The whole place lives in a drizzly cloud, but if that is what it takes to produces so many goliath trees covered head to toe in moss, then I am ok with that.

Outside of June-September, I was told that this region can be kinda depressing and gloomy. And while it has rained on us every day we have been here, and the forests grow so thick it looks like dusk at noon, there is way more sun than I expected. I was walking out of the ancient forest of Douglas fir, western cedar, and moss-strewn big-leaf maple trees to a clearing and found myself squinting as if coming out of a movie theater to daylight. The sky was still still cloud-covered. But at least it was bright. Our tent even almost dried out one time! So yeah, overall… not depressing. Quite enjoyable in fact.

At this time of year, the invasive blackberries have yet to bear fruit, and the salmon are not yet running up the streams, so it is incredibly quiet. I can see why vampires like to live here (see Twilight). Forks, the little town that plays host to the Twilight saga, was raining upside down and sideways. We closed down the library and witnessed a very cute 4-year-old birthday party, but other than that, there was not much else keeping us in that place. We did re-watch Twilight and wow. I cannot believe that movie was once a cultural phenomenon.

I also just finished a Wilderness First Responder (WFR) course in Mt. Hood, Oregon. This was the first time I took the course with people from a variety of backgrounds. I felt very safe surrounded by nurses, search and rescue volunteers, forest service folks, and many other outdoor recreationists. But it was also a unique experience to be in a class full of fully realized adults. This course was five days plus 30 hours of online learning attached in hybrid form. It is a brave thing to be in a class where you fail and learn in front of other people, especially the further from secondary school you are. While I am often baffled that I am considered an adult, I look at other adults and also forget that they don’t know stuff. So being in a class like this where there’s me and there are also doctors and helicopter pilots and lumberjacks all learning what to do when someone falls through an icy lake, hours away from civilization, is humbling and supremely gratifying at the same time. There is a wonderful camaraderie that builds as we start to get to know each other and help each other out in the stressful scenarios.

This past week, I gave a proper sling and swath to a person who broke their collar bone climbing down to a rocky lookout, I relocated a patella, and I made a makeshift leg splint for some kid who was in a snowmobile accident. We had bloody makeup dripping down our faces and had to fake getting stung by bees, causing hyperventilation (not an allergic reaction). This was the third time I have taken the WFR course. But every time, I relearn my instinctual response to stressful environments and how to effectively lend aid. The WFR course allows us to practice going through productive steps in simulated high-stress scenarios, and with practice, we get better at doing the right things. This could save someone’s life. Every time I take the WFR, I am nervous. But at the end of it, I feel empowered and equipped to help people in times of need. (Shameless plug) This feeling is so satisfying and so worth taking the course. It offers me comfort when we are camping, hiking, or in the backcountry. But just because it is for wilderness does not mean that the CPR and first aid portions are not helpful in everyday life. I understand how my body works better afterward and I think that the world is a better place with more people who know this material.

So go! Get out there, explore rainforests, watch vampires, and learn how to be a wilderness first responder! Or just learn CPR and first aid to start! Anything helps in saving lives, and we are all about life today (and every day, hopefully, but particularly today)!

Hot Topic

LIFE ON LAND

We are pretty lucky we have the life on land that we do. By some other evolutionary turn, we could very well be octopus-people right now.

But here we are, roaming around the planet on two feet and offering up our creativity, love, and destruction. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal #15, Life on Land, is a big one. It is broken down into 12 different sub-goals that address a range of things; from ending the degradation of forests, to financing sustainable forest management (a.k.a. lumber production), with poaching, invasive species, genetically modified organisms, and biodiversity in between.

This goal is so big that it seems to contradict itself. How can we manufacture lumber without degrading the forest? The cool thing about lumber is that it is a renewable resource, and it a great way of sequestering and storing carbon. But in order to bring balance to our ecosystems, we want to be growing as much as we take out. This requires tackling the problem from both ends. That means reducing our demand for wood and paper products by reclaiming old wood and being more efficient with paper products (paper towels, printer paper, toilet paper, etc.) while also preventing old growth forests (forests that have been undisturbed for a long time and therefore have a more evolved ecosystem) from being used for timber. Most old growth forests need to be protected by policy, but before that can happen we need to know where old growth forests are. The initial estimates of old-growth and mature forests across all Forest Service and BLM was published last year. We have more old growth that I thought!

But it is not just big trees that need protecting. There is a game that we sometimes play as part of a Leave No Trace workshop where each person is challenged to count how many living things they can find in a 1x1 foot square. When we are moving fast, from house to car, to business, and back, our infrastructure can completely isolate us from other forms of life besides humans. In the lodge that I am sitting in right now, there are some fake flowers in pots, there is a dead elk mounted on the wall, and I would bet you a dollar that they kill any insects they find in here.

We put in effort to kill organisms all the time and without much thought. When we use pesticides, we put toxins into the environment that might kill the intended species but often also kill species higher up on the food chain. When we step off the trail, we are trampling or compacting other vegetation or soils that make it harder for living organisms to grow there in the future. Our challenge is to reflect on our everyday actions and consider how we might simultaneously promote more biodiverse life on land and minimize the harm we pose to the lives that already exist.

Here are other great ways we can promote life on land.

Things You Didn’t Notice

EAST VS WEST

The northeast and the northwest have many parallels. They are both cold and wet during the winter, rich in shellfish, and have a Portland. But are they really so similar? How come the Pacific Northwest (PNW) can grow so many gigantic trees while the East just grows big trees? My first thought was that the giants of the west (the Sitka spruce, Douglas firs, western hemlocks, and western red cedar) only exist because the European colonists cut everything down in the East and then got tired before they got to the West. Or is it that there is more water in the PNW? And how come the Southwest and the Southeast are so different—one humid and the other dry? These were all questions I had lumbering through my mind as we hiked among the giant trees.

It turns out that it is time that allow the giants of the West to grow. Most of the east, at some point in time, was a clear cut of trees. But that is not all. The mild climate of the west coast compared to the east coast allows for a longer growing season. It rarely drops below freezing temperature in Seattle, WA, which lies further north in latitude than Portland, ME. Though there are some tall and old trees east of the Mississippi, the Western climate just grows differently.

On to the south. The simple reason the southeast is so wet is because it is so adjacent to the ocean, and there are no mountain ranges that condense all the water out of the air beforehand. In the west, Mexico’s land mass isolates the western US from the moist ocean air coming from the south, and the Peninsular and Sierra Nevada mountains in California send all the moisture coming from the west upward, condensing and falling as rain before it can get to states like Nevada and Arizona. This is what is called a rain shadow. A rain shadow is the land area behind a mountain or range that gets less precipitation because it all falls on the side facing the storm fronts. Additionally, the direction of storms tends to depend on the latitude you are at. The spin of the earth combines with the angle the sun hits the earth to create cycles of air that move across the earth. Ever heard of a Hadley Cell?

Watch this video on how our atmosphere is affected by the unique tilt and rotation speed of our planet. And, as a bonus, you might also learn why Jupiter has stripes.

While our lives depend on so many other living organisms, we can also thank the inorganic forms of our planet for molding the variety of environments that decide what can grow where. The geological diversity gives way to biological diversity, and though we humans can survive so many places on earth, we also must recognize that other living things can’t move and adapt as fast as we can. It’s in our power to protect them.

Refresh

• Household: Do you know what Umibudo, Arame, Dulce, and Kombu all have in common? They are all edible! They also happen to all be seaweed. Who knew that seaweed could be so complicated and also so yummy. A gift from the sea to the land.

  

• Transportation: How roads have transformed the natural world.

• Mentality: Where on the environmental ethics spectrum do you lie?

• Health: A cosmic apple a day keeps the aliens away. And you might not need a doctor either. Created in Washington State, the cosmic crisp apple is the recent hybridization of the honey crisp and other varieties to produce an apple supposedly better than the rest.

• Community: We are not the only ones building community out there. These two cells merged into one, for what could be the first time since chloroplasts merged into another cell and started… plants.

Mouthwatering

CHIP CHOP

While I haven’t gotten around to experimenting with all the types of foods that can be eaten in a seaweed wrap (that is coming, I promise), I have done a bit of wrapping in other forms.

The chopped sandwich fad has been going on for some time now, but though we have tried the chopped italian sando (what the cool kids are calling sandwiches), it is a little unnerving to be carrying around lukewarm deli meats in the car. So I give you, a veggie upgrade. The chopped veggie wrap. It’s a salad in a tortilla!

Ingredients:

• Bell peppers

• Red onion (bonus if they are pickled)

• Jalapeno peppers

• Cucumbers

• Tomatoes

• Peperoncini peppers

• Lettuce

• Pickles (we like the spicy bread and butter ones to mix it up)

• Hummus

• Balsamic Vinegar

• Dijon Mustard

• Tortilla or bread

Extras: Red cabbage, carrots, avocado

Directions: Chop everything up and put it in the tortilla/bread. Store out of the bread if meal prepping.

Or you can just follow this recipe:

Game Time

THE AMAZING ADVENTURE RACE

Have you ever wished you could be on the amazing race? Yeah, me too. Here is the next best thing that you actually have a shot at competing in.

The athletic bar might be a little higher than what it takes to eat a bunch of weird foods and learning a choreographed dance, but the adrenaline inducing adventure can be found in these races nonetheless.

Check out USARA for races hosted in the US.