A Peek At The Cascades
We’ve made it to the Cascades!
Great campsite in Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest just below Hart’s Pass – Slate Peak (see photos of what it looks like up top!).
Bouy is still hanging in there, but almost completely unable to use his back legs.
Curiously, unlike all the western streams and rivers flowing high with record snowmelt, the stream (offshoot of the Methow River) that kept us alive during the 117 degree extreme weather 2 years ago is not flowing at all. Bone dry. Check out how that stream looked in August 2021.
I thought that maybe it was dammed up to stop the diversion off the river and walked upstream a few hundred yards. Nope. The river is just flowing very low. I have no idea why – maybe this eastern side of the Cascades didn’t get the record snowfall, or maybe it’s all melted and runoff (there is no snow on the peaks I can see right now).
We’ll ask around and find out what’s up – curious that the stream would be flowing strong in mid August 2021 but bone dry in early June this year.
[Update: I spoke with several folks. I’m told that there was a very early and very warm spell, resulting in unusually rapid snowmelt that caused flooding. The snow is all gone more than a month early and river flows are way down as a result. There also was an unusually large number of slides. Concerns that drying out the forest this early will exacerbate wildfire risk later this summer.]
[End Note: The headline of this post is intentional snark.
In listening to various BBC or NPR news reports, I just learned that in addition to my (old) white, male, cis, hetero-normative privileges, I apparently enjoy other important privileges and suffer additional guilts.
These now include “thin body” privilege and the fact that I speak and write in “institutional language”. [Update: just heard I enjoy another privilege: “safety privilege”!]
I am so sick of the identity politics and culture wars. My goodness, I learned about the terms “cis” and “trans” 50 years ago in high school chemistry, terms that defined chemical bond structures.
