Some pix I took at today’s Fremont Solstice Parade are located here.
It’s often hard to tell who’s supposed to be in the parade proper, and who isn’t. Of course, the word ‘proper’ never really applied anyway.
Oh, and here’s a link to a celebration in France, which has been making the rounds. It’s quite the impressive undertaking. A new miracle on each page. Go look.
Hiking in the North Cascades complex today. It’s a ‘complex’ because there are a number of regulatory jurisdictions there. A national park, a national recreation area, the national forest, a national scenic highway, and so forth.
Right in the heart of the North Cascades complex is a man-made lake called Ross Lake. The level of Ross Lake fluctuates with the previous seasons’ rainfall and the draw down needed to power the turbines. It’s a beautiful place, if you’re into man-made lakes with power lines running around it. I can only imagine how impressive it used to be, back before it was full of water. Then again, it’s also nice to have power to run my computer right now; Ross Lake Dam and the two other hydroelectric dams up there power Seattle.
Stretching south of Ross Lake is the Thunder Arm. It’s a section of the lake that used to be Thunder Creek, before it flooded. There is also a Thunder Thumb (I’m not making this up) which is a thumb-like chunk of land that, well, I dunno what it’s about. I just know there’s a nature trail there.
But I didn’t hike that nature trail. I didn’t hike it because I read about a really cool trail that heads south along Thunder Creek. For six miles it’s flat, with no abrupt elevation gain, following the creek through the bottom of the valley. Various other valleys head off to the sides, each with their own pass into some other valley on the other side of the watershed. But Thunder is the real downspout of the North Cascades, bigger than the other creeks, and a big part of why the place is a national park to begin with.
At slightly higher altitudes, the valley takes on the characteristic glacial U-shape, and hosts an amazing diversity of wildlife. All of this happens beyond the six easy miles, but just the thought of it made the hike seem attractive. Maybe catch a glimpse. Peek around the corners and see all those other trails in all those other valleys. Take a moment and consider this valley as a transitway, a place where you could, with relative ease, hike to the lodge at Stehekin on Lake Chelan, in only a few days.
But here’s the catch: My guidebooks are old. I buy them at the thrift store because they’re $.49. In 2003, the bridge over Thunder creek washed out, leaving only the first mile accessible without, well.. swimming.
I didn’t want to swim. I’m certain someone has blazed an unofficial trail on the far side, but I didn’t want to find it.
A nice hike nonetheless, but a little short. So with some time left in the day, I headed towards a place I’ve wanted to go, but which I never thought would justify the effort: Rainy Lake.
Rainy Lake is the easiest hike in the Cascades, and it’s designed that way. It’s accessible to wheelchairs and moms with strollers. It’s paved with asphalt. It’s a mile in, with interpretive plaques here and there to teach you all there is to know about the wonders of nature. It’s a pleasant enough path, crossing rushing streams and alpine seeps, through old growth and nice flowers, and finally reaching a tiny lake in a cirque. There’s a waterfall at the far end. But the end of the trail is the end of the line — you reach a sort of viewing area that’s paved, and has some benches, and is bordered by a foot-high stack of railroad ties, presumably there so people in wheelchairs won’t roll off into the water.
Accessibility is always an interesting topic to me. I’m sure this lake was chosen as the accessible trail since it’s pretty enough, and there’s no elevation gain. But really: This little lake doesn’t begin to give a sense of what’s out there. So does it really make the complex accessible?
The Seattle skyline from Gasworks park. Click for a larger version.
It’s a stitched panorama, 1×6 images. The finished image file is a 140 megabyte TIFF. Stitched using hugin, assembled and retouched in Photoshop. The Photoshop file, with layer masks, is 1.25 gigabytes.
I took 20 pictures to stitch together, just to see if I could, but 6 seems to be the limit of my paltry little 4-year-old computer. Or, more accurately, the limit of my paltry little attention span, which suffered while the 4-year-old computer chugged away as well as it could.
Here’s a 1:1 detail, admittedly not very sharp:
Anyway. A Kodachrome kind of day.
I was reading over on Eschaton about the problem of getting people interested in the fact that their president lied to them about the war in Iraq.
Now, at this point it’s not an opinion; it’s a fact. The administration lied repeatedly. Not only about the various items that make up their justification for war, but about their plans for waging war in the first place.
See, I have a hard time understanding why Bush isn’t seriously facing impeachment right now. Even if it only means putting Cheney in charge, it’s still important to go through the motions. Ideally, there’d be a dual impeachment, where both Prez and Veep would be defending their asses. Or maybe just impeach Cheney. That’d be amusing… Cut out the middle man.
Regardless. The issue before us is: How can the people and the political machines of this country be presented with a bumper sticker’s-worth of wisdom about why this is important? What would that bumper sticker say?
‘Bush lied – people died’ is, it turns out, too vague. It doesn’t convey the fact that the administration had a plan underway in early 2002 for the war they told you they didn’t want to fight.
‘Bush lied – soldiers died’ pulls at the patriotic heartstrings of all red-white-and-blue-blooded Americans, but is also more than a little bit xenophobic and ignores, for instance, those contractors who were beheaded.
‘Iraq is empire’ …just too tinfoil hat, despite being the most factually correct.
‘Bush lied – currency was saved!’ is also factually correct (from some points of view), but leaves out about a zillion points of context, and will only be understood by people who know that Iraq was going to abandon the petro-dollar for the petro-euro. And it’s too optimistic, in and of itself.
‘If you voted for Bush, you should be impeached, too.’ Not bad, and gets to the real heart of the matter as to why the public, and the press especially, are slow to come around. No one likes to admit they were wrong, especially if they nodded sleepily when Ann Coulter said Bush’s critics were traitors. I mean, I feel for all you poor fools out there who bought it, but you’re just going to have to face facts. Burn your voter registration card and don’t vote again for six years. After that, you might have learned your lesson. Think of it as giving up democracy for Lent. Except you’re probably evangelical, not Catholic. Ah well.
‘Do you feel safer after five years of lies and illegal invasions?’ Certainly a good question to be asking yourself.
Please, folx… Add your own.
You know why I like boingboing? Other than Xeni, of course…
Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because, from time to time, they hit on something so completely surreal it makes me laugh out loud and thank the universe for such delightful stories as the one about the fortune cookie writer who’s had writer’s block for ten years.
The preceeding images of St. John’s Wort were brought to you by a) a walk I took down to Matthew’s Beach, and 2) shooting in RAW (actually ORF on my Oympus, the camera I was carrying).
I’ve never really appreciated how much more information is stored in a RAW file until today, specifically with that closeup of the St. John’s Wort.
Here’s another example – a 100% crop of a crow I could never have managed if I were shooting JPEG (or even TIFF):
Now to get the 400mm lens… 
