Study: Contaminent Levels High in Parks

  Before I get too depressed I want to know how this study was conducted.

There is no refuge: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gvaclXwi7v4uC7UtJIMVeY9uJqnwD8V2D8S81

Walker Mountain and Secret Falls

Rating (out of five possible mushrooms)
Hike:

Difficulty:

With so much snow in the mountains I decided Mount Walker would be a good choice. The Mount Walker trail head is at 101 so I knew I would not have to drive in the snow to reach it.

I’m still ill and was not really excited about hiking but did not want to go three weeks in a row without a hike. The hike up was hard because I was dizzy and feverish. When I got to the top I settled down at the viewpoint bench to boil water and eat my lunch. Three camp robber birds came to beg and it was starting to feel like a magical moment when a big slobbery oaf of a dog came running up. The dog scared the birds away, almost knocked over my cook pot and then ate the food I put out for the birds. The moment was ruined. Eventually the dog owner arrived but she did not stay long. After she left her dumb dog came back and scared the birds away again. I think it ran back up the trail just to look for more food. I gave the dog a gentle kick and that caused it to go away for good. I like dogs but my peaceful moment on the mountain top was totally destroyed by this off leash dog.

On the way home I stopped by a secret waterfall. I had not seen this waterfall before and I was impressed! The locals don’t want to share their waterfall with tourists so I’m not going to name it here.

There is a lot of snow in the Skokomish Valley this week and snowshoes are still needed on the lower trail. A local geocacher got his truck stuck at the turn off to the Upper trail head and had to had to spend the night there and then hike out for help. He has 32” swampers but he still got stuck.


4 miles RT with 2,000 feet elevation gain
8 miles on my new shoes

Olympic Park and Forest Trailhead Coordinates

Ill

Way too ill to hike, almost too ill to read. If I don't start feeling better soon I don't know how I am going to be able to get all my required reading done. When I try to read my vision goes blurry. I should be sleeping but I've got kids to deal with and my husband as usual is not much help.

Getting anymore studying done today is hopeless. As I type my youngest is screaming in my right ear "Give me ice cream or I'm going to be sick". Nice try! I give up I'm going to partake of some of my homemade blackberry wine.

This is three weekends without hiking now so I'm probably gaining weight.

My oldest daughter came of age this week so to celebrate I took her to the Vagina Monologues. It was the first time for both of us. What a blast that was! I had a great time and I think my daughter enjoyed it too but she won't admit it.

They had a race riot (insurrection?) at my college on Valentines day. The details are a bit sketchy right now. I'm doing some Media analysis on this event. I look forward to hearing my professor's interpretation of all of this on Monday.

I'm getting burned out on the reading, and I'm started to feel the crunch. I have papers due and so many books to read. I'm having trouble getting one of the books I need because I just plain forgot to get it at the beginning of the quarter. It got lost with all the other books I needed. I hope I can get it by Monday because I'm supposed to have half of it read by Tuesday!

Snowy not so Rosey Mosey Dose

I wanted to stay in bed but I decided that I needed to hike to stay in shape since I was too ill to hike last week. I should have known better, when I am not totally gung ho to go hiking it means I am sick. I felt groggy as I drove to the Dosewallips washout but I figured that hiking would wake me up.

Snow on the road started about 2 miles before the tunnel creek trail but I was in my Jeep with its new snow tires so the snow was no problem. At that point snow was not my problem, my problem was my intestines. I had to stop near tunnel creek and run into the woods. I won't go into the details other then to say that it was a gruesome experience. I was glad to get that out of my system and hoped it would make me feel better.

The washout before the washout has been repaired so I was able to drive to the main washout. I've never been able to hike any of the trails in the Dosewallips Basin. It is 11 miles round trip just to walk to the trail heads. I like to backpack but my youngest is still too young to take backpacking. Well actually she's too old to take. I took her when she was a newborn but now she is too little to walk and too heavy to carry. I am limited to day hiking. Maybe someday I will be able to hike the trails beyond the washout.

I saw two bald Eagles at the washout one was mature and one was immature. The washout has grown a little bit and it is not all underwater anymore. It would have been easy enough to walk in the washout and thus avoid the bypass trail if not for the steep bank climbing back up to the road. There was a lot of snow on the road and I had to walk in snowshoe tracks. After about 1.25 miles I realized that I was just not having fun, I was too ill and there was no chance of me being able to hike 11 miles in the ever deepening snow while ill. I also knew that I would have to turn around where ever the snowshoe tracks ended because the snow was too deep to walk in outside of the snowshoe trail.

I turned around and went back to have my tea at Elkhorn Campground. There was more snow at Elkhorn then I normally see in the National Park campground 4.9 miles down the road. I'm sure that there is an impressive amount of snow at Dose falls today.

On the way home I stopped to grab a geocache at Dosewallips Park. As I was leaving the park I got a real treat, the local elk herd was in the picnic area on the water side of 101. I stopped and got out and took pictures until some moron parked her huge white pick up truck in front of where I was standing. A bald eagle flew over head grasping a fish in its talons. I counted up to 50 elk in the heard. It is nice to live near the Olympic Peninsula!

I'm home now and feeling sicker by the minute, I hope I am well enough to go to class in the morning.

RT Mileage 3

XP drivers for Acer Aspire 5601Z

My laptop came with Vista but I don't like Vista so I nuked it and installed XP. It took me a while to find all the XP hardware drivers I needed but I have suceeded at last.

If you want to downgrade from Vista here are the drivers you need to run XP on your 5601Z.

The Ethernet driver for my Acer Aspire 5610Z was the last one I found you can get it here:
http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/4401.php

Most of the other drivers for XP are here ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/notebook/aspire_5610/driver/

My computer has the Broadcom wireless adaptor and it can be found here
ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/notebook/aspire_5610/driver/Wireless%20Lan%20Driver%20802bg%20Broadcom%20Ver.4.2.2.7.zip

Some models have the atheros card and it's drivers are here ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com/notebook/aspire_5610/driver/Wireless%20Lan%20Driver%20802bg%20Atheros%20Ver.4.10.40.0.zip

Both of the links for the wireless driver came from :
http://itreviewer.blogspot.com/2007/04/acer-aspire-5610z-wireless-drivers.html


How does my machine run with XP? Super fast! No more waiting forever just to boot the OS! Sure it took all day to round up the drivers but it was worth it.

Northwest Loggers net

That might be a better name for it. I called a timber industry shill a timber industry shill. The truth hurts. Do you know how the old growth logging in this region was stopped? It was stopped by people in the Mid-west. The timber interests here in the Northwest were too entrenched in the system for change to ever occur. Some things have not changed, local shills abound. The neocons have been trained to have the loudest mouths to drown everyone else out.

I'm not well enough to hike this week but I'm not too upset about it because I know that I am still in good shape after going up South Mountain last week.

I have a lot of reading to do for my class and I'm starting to feel a bit overwhelmed, being ill did not help. I'm learning a lot, it's not science but it might help me to learn how to protect what is left of our forests.

Last quarter I took a class that may as well have been called "How to Log the Northwest Temperate Rainforests” so now I can speak the language of the enemy anyway.

Back to my reading.