An abundance of blessings

A quick update on our work as a hostel/WWOOF hosts:

Dad stayed an extra week, then left on Thursday, the 16th. Chaach and Nathan showed up early for our birthday camping trip and stayed an extra night after the weekend, nicely filling that time. As they headed out Monday, the 20th I got about cleaning the house and getting all the camping gear put away again until Mike and Holly called saying they were passing through on their way moving from Montana to Port Angeles and would come by for the night. As they were finishing up lunch and ready to hit the road, our friend Zac called and I sent Tim out the door at the same time as Mike and Holly to fetch our next house guest. Zac should be staying for a while, most likely until his mom, Nancy, gets back to the island on the 5th of May. Zac is also our new crew member for the f/v Whiskey Creek for this season in Bristol Bay.

Mines, Planes, and Hot Springs

Now that I'm done with my MAT program and it is not so much winter any more (April is warm!), we've decided to try to go camping every weekend we can. This weekend we decided on a shorter drive to our neighboring woods, the Olympic Peninsula. After our journey to the east in search of mining history, I thought I could do one better and try to find the things that appeal to Tim as close to home as possible. I planned a surprise camping adventure for Tim and Chaach and Nathan and unveiled where we were going as we waited for the ferry to Port Townsend. 

Though there were some doubters, we made it to the Tubal Cabin Mine trail head before it was totally dark and just down the trail from our car, we quickly came to an excellent camping area complete with fire circle, shelter structure with shelves to keep our food out of Tilly's reach, great flat tent spots and nice trees for Nathan's hammock. It was a bit chilly up there around 3,000 feet, but nothing a bunch of tough Alaskan's couldn't handle for a night! (Yes, Tilly got to sleep in the sleeping bag again. She kept me warm. :)  

In the morning, for some reason we thought camping at 5,000ft would be even more appealing and brought all our heavy gear and packs with us rather than leaving them in the conveniently close car and heading out with only day-packs. What were we thinking?! Up 2,000 feet we went, fully loaded with not-ultralight gear. After scrambling up the last few hundred feet, we found the mine adit we came here to see! Other visitors were snapping pictures at the entrance and heading back down but we were not satisfied with only that and headed in to the long, dark, wet tunnel. Instead of a trail, we were walking up a shallow creek bed into the hillside. I counted my paces for the first two hundred then gave up and kept following our fearless de facto leader. After a while we came to a place where water was showering down from above in a curtain across the adit and I figured that was as good a reason as any to beg to turn around and head back towards the light. Though it felt like eternity going into the dark, after only a minute I could see the small point of light marking the entrance again and felt relieved.

It was well into lunch time when we emerged and so we though we had better head for someplace warm, dry, sunny to set up camp for at least lunch and maybe the night. Why not head another half mile or mile back down the trail than climb up that steep hillside for a half mile or mile and see if we can get to the 1952 B-17 plane crash for lunch? That seems reasonable! So we strapped on our packs and kept on trekking. The hillside seemed to get steeper with every step, but eventually we reached the remains as day-hikers whizzed past us without packs. We found a fire circle and the remains of an old cabin to sit around and enjoy our lunches, then watched shadows getting longer and thought about the still-snow-speckled ground. Maybe not sleeping at an even higher elevation than last night? Maybe... maybe we could head down the mountain and head to the hot springs! My exhaustion melted away as new enthusiasm filled my legs with the promise of relaxing hot springs to come. Tilly didn't know what was up and, with her own heavy-ish pack, was actually looking tired and dragging at the back for once. 

We debated the hike-in campground and hot springs or drive-up? I took the extra leg of driving and we headed for the drive-up springs. When we arrived, they were closed for the night. Closed?! How can nature be closed!? So we set up our tents and tried again in the morning. Again we were too early and they wanted buckets of money, so we stuck our feet in the warm runoff and got back in the car. On we went to the hike-in springs. Two miles without packs flew by and we found ourselves stretched out in our own private pool. So nice. I felt I could float home. 

On the way home, we spent 4.5+ hours waiting to catch a ferry as all the reservations for the day were taken by early morning. At least our extra travel time was spent making sand castles on the beach and eating ice cream instead of developing blisters by gripping the steering wheel through blizzards. 

Summer and wet, winter and dry

Mom left Monday, Rhoda left Thursday, but Dad has decided to stay an extra week to get all his projects done before going back to work his job in Alaska. Projects such as power washing the house, building a second fence to keep the goats a little away from the house and give Tilly her own mini yard, installing an electric fence inside the entire existing fence for those darn goats, fixing the doors on the laundry, and building benches for the 12 flights of stairs to the beach.

While Dad was being so productive, Tilly and I headed to the beach.
Tilly found a great spot to lay down and chew her stick - on top of a barnacle covered rock?

I found a healthy colony of sand dollars happily living in the low tide of our beach while going to retrieve Tilly's ball after another one of her "science experiments". (She intentionally brings her ball out about chest deep in the water and sets it in. It floats! She pushes it down and it pops back up - floats again! She pushes it down, it pops back up! Down and up! Down and - oh. No more ball. Why isn't it popping back up? Paw at sunken ball now filled with water. Be frustrated that the science is broken. Stand guard over sunken spot until Ariel comes to save the ball. Be happy and really really want to try it again! Ariel will not be so silly as to give you the good ball near the beach for the rest of the day. Find a stick instead and be happy with that. Happy puppy.)

But I went barefoot to retrieve said ball and remembered how wonderful it is. How can people live in a place away from the ocean? Away from nature and the feeling of connection with the earth? Lovely, beautiful, warm days on the beach.

On our property, flowers are blooming, the asparagus and potatoes are coming up, it's t-shirt weather and wonderful.

But we decided to take advantage of having my dad here to watch the animals and headed east for some exploring of Washington. As we came to the foot of the Cascade mountains, we came into the catch for all extra rain and trees heavy with moss. 

As we climbed over the pass, rain turned to snow and we found ourselves in a wonderland. 

A really really cold wonderland.

A bit of road at the highest point of the pass had been plowed into a channel and was closed off to road traffic.

Aside from the half an inch we had here on Whidbey for a day or two in the winter, Tilly's never really seen snow, and after waiting for me to pack all day then riding in the car for hours, she was thrilled to get out and run in the white.

As we came down the east side of the mountains, the snow let up and we found a camping spot. Maybe the first campgrounds we came to after the pass wasn't the best idea, but starting out on our trip after work on Friday night, the light was dimming fast and we didn't want to miss out on any of the views of our adventure.

In the morning, we drove a few hundred feet down the road and saw signs for "snow machine recreation area" and "winter recreation" and "skiing". ... maybe next time we'll drive a little farther off the mountain before stopping.

Acres of cherry trees covered in a gauzy net.

After a short, cold night of fitting all three of us (Tilly, Tim, Ariel) into one sleeping bag for warmth and wishing we'd brought more sleeping pads, a smaller warmer tent, a bigger warmer sleeping bag... we got up around 6 with the sun and resumed driving Northeast. 

The view in the morning was vastly different from what we went to sleep with. Vastly different from what we've grown up with and how we're used to living.

But also beautiful and stunning in it's own way. With apprehension, the dry east started growing on me.

We drove all the way up highway 20 to Tonasket, then north on highway 95 to the Canadian boarder. 

From there we veered off on every side road, dirt road, and forest service road we saw on our map, trying never to repeat our path to see as much of the land as possible. Every where we went there was sage brush or apple trees; so many acres of Gold Digger apples! 

"There were at least 13 fruit warehouses in Oroville alone. Gold Digger Apples eventually merged and/or acquired all of those warehouses, leaving it as the sole fruit packing, storing  and shipping facility in Oroville. To this day, Gold Digger remains the only fruit warehouse in  the Oroville area. ... Gold Digger remains a viable fruit co-op, the last grower owned co-op in Okanogan County and the only co-op  with an organic program. Gold Digger has numerous members and non-members that bring their fruit to be stored, packed and shipped at our facilities."

Rivers and lakes snaked through the dry land bringing life and a diverse abundance of plants and animals, though different from the Sitka spruce and nettles we're used to in the West.

Though in the dry East from what we're used to, this land is a bit more of the "wild West" with large ranches, cattle guards, and small towns made up in the old-time way.  

Like Whidbey, property was for sale all over the place, and being dry and far from I-5, land seems to go for $1k-3k per acre, depending on amenities for everything but the secret mansions in the hills. 

Tim's eager curiosity for our trip to the land of snakes and ticks was the mining history. Names like "Oroville" are give-aways into that history.

We found a small start of a mine adit, with hints something bigger might be nearby.

We also found the remains of a larger, possibly more recent operation with bunkhouses and a shaft still rigged up with equipment. 

After 6 hours or more of driving with short sight seeing stops, we grabbed some lunch and headed up to what I was most looking forward to, Turtle Lake.

We had looked on the internet and found a dream property for sale with people seeming to live the sort of life we think we might like. I was skeptical from the Google Earth view, but going up the hill above the sweet town of Tonasket to Turtle Lake, I found a place that reminds me of Peterson Lake Cabin in Juneau, the first cabin I ever went to as a few-week-old baby and one of my favorite places. We got out for a short walk on unmarked property and imagined what it might be like to live in a place like that. The lake is a bit of an oasis in the desert and a place of serenity and beauty.

We headed off our hill to continue the exploration and found the small tourist community of Conconully at far to high an elevation for comfortable camping, continued down the road and found ourselves heading through the cowboy community of Winthrop on our way out of town back over the hills. 

After a brief consideration, we decided another night of sleeping in a ski area and waking up to frozen water in Tilly's bowl could be replaced with a warm night in our own bed and all of Sunday to recover from the adventures. 

We braved the blizard back over the pass, this time skipping the stop at the top. I tried hard to stay awake and keep Tim company but the battery of snow had me closing my eyes and drifting off until we got back towards I-5 and the world of cities and traffic and dense population zones. 

Oh, what's this? Just the blisters on Tim's hands from driving all day at work Friday, then hopping in the car for another 5 hours or so after work, then topping it off with a 6am to midnight 18-hour shift at the wheel. Our whirlwind driving tour of Eastern Washington!

Rooster Removal

My hens are starting to have bare spots on their backs and heads from too many juvenile roosters trying to work out the nitty-gritty of mating. Monday evening, I segregated all the hens and my one good Big Red Rooster into the hen-house for the night and the 4 undesirable excess roosters locked in the small sandy yard with only water. (I used my excellent Jedi powers to separate them while they were in the big yard by pointing my arm between the birds I wanted to separate and slowly moving forward, splitting the flock until only the roosters remained.) Tuesday morning, it was a bit of an adventure getting all the hens out of the hen house and into the big yard without going through their sandy run, especially as they had never gone out the hen house door before, and once out they were loose on the wrong side of the big fence. The last few hens and baby chicks, I caught and carried one or two or three at a time to the yard.

Hen on left without rooster abuse, hen on right with back feathers missing from those young rascals

Side view of two hens with missing feathers hiding next to their favorite rooster (my favorite, and now only, too)

Next steps:
- Set up stations for bleeding, plucking, cleaning, packaging
     - Chair and knife and apron and head bucket for bleeding
     - Leg loops and scalding pot and fuel and feather bucket and tweezers or pliers for plucking
     - Knives and cutting boards and water and gut bucket for cleaning
     - Vacuum packer and scissors and marker and bowl for packaging meat
     - Dehydrator for Tilly treats
- Lots of lights and the processing table

Killing: Lidded bucket for heads, knife for bleeding cutting off heads, chair to sit on, apron. Not pictured: towel, which proved to be much better for swaddling the rooster in to hold them while butchering. Also blood bucket, separate from head bucket 'cause no one wants those looking up at you while you bleed out.

Scalding: Pot of water, compost thermometer for monitoring that it really is between 160f and 170f, burner. Not pictured: propane tank and long handled lighter. Scalding loosens the feathers for plucking.

Plucking: Foot ties for holding up chicken, garbage bag for catching feathers. Next time we will do this on a Friday so the garbage cans are empty and we can put it directly under instead of having to get those feathers into a deflated bag! Also a pair of pliers for stubborn feathers and a propane torch for searing off weird left over hair-like feathers.

Gutting: Bowl for Tilly treats, tray for carcasses, cutting board, knives. Not pictured: rag or water for wiping up yucky spills. Intestines, gallbladders, tiny unusable wing tips, and feet go in the bury bucket which will be combined with the heads in a deep hole on the beach. We haven't opened the package of feet from last time so we probably don't need eight more. Note the excellent light and table.

Packaging: Bowls and tray for parts, vacuum sealer,  cutting boards and knives, dehydrator for Tilly treats. We start after dark when the chickens are sleeping. The bugs are out and atracted to our light. Last time we were working until 4:30am, this time 1am. I decided doing the finer detailed work in the comfort of our own home was a better idea. Also working on the counter with less bending over proved to be much better. 

Two tiny 4-month old birds, a large sized 6-month old bird, and our dearly loved big white rooster who would have turned 1-years old next week.

Tray of delicious goodies for Tilly's Search and Rescue rewards, ready to be dehydrated. Of note: trachea, hearts, gizzards, lungs, livers, and I believe male reproductive organs.

Look at the size of that! This is ONE drum-stick, packaged for freezing with my tiny fingers poking out from behind and a pair of wings wrapping around my arm!

This is one half-breast piece, much bigger than my hand!

Petunia thinks chickens are boring, so we will end on a non-chicken note with some flashy exciting pictures.

 OCTOGENARIANS ON MOTORCYCLES!!! 

Dad took Grandpa (above) and Great-Aunt Rhoda (below) each out for a spin on his bike.