WA Native Plant Society Event at Mt. Baker

This past weekend, my chemistry professor and I went to the WA Native Plant Society Study Weekend held at Mt. Baker. The idea of the trip is to go to an area with wildflowers, spend 2-3 days going on field trips and learning/seeing as many flowers as possible. However, although it has been about 100 degrees or more this side of the mountains, the mountain actually had such bad weather that we were warned about 2-4" of rainfall, and flash-flooding - while we were HIKING. In addition, many of the planned hikes/field trips had to be moved to lower elevations (different plants) because the trails were SNOWED in!!! The good part about this is that the weather was VERY cool. I kept my leggings, T-shirt and gortex on at all times (including my "bird nerd" hat) and stayed pleasantly cold - a refreshing change!

Anyway, we headed out Friday morning (took the day off of work) and drove to our favorite food place - the Attic Lounge at Salish Lodge which overlooks Snoqualmie Falls. We have managed to eat there about four times in our previous adventures, and we LOVE it - and the gift shop :>

After a leisurely lunch, we headed up to Mt. Baker. Unfortunately, the I-5 traffic between Seattle and Everett was INSANE! We literally took two hours to go about 20 miles. I have never been so NUTS! We had arranged to rent a condo at a place called Snowater which is about 20 miles from the Pink Salmon Lodge on Mt. Shucksan (where the Mt. Baker Skiing actually occurs.) It is the last town before the mountain, and the grounds of the condos were incredible! The building were located in dense woods, with rock boulders and lots of ferns as decor around the buildings. We had a second floor, two bedroom, with a gas fireplace, a little kitchen, and a living space with windows floor to vaulted ceiling overlooking the deck out towards the river. I got the master suite upstairs because...there were LOTS of steep stairs! It was really comfortable and relaxing though. We had gotten a little behind schedule, and so instead of stopping at the first, we headed up to the lodge to attend the evening program. Many had opted to buy catered dinners (not impressive) which were served before the talk, but we wanted to try some little hole in the walls instead, so we looked at books that were for sale while people ate, and then enjoyed a good talk about the geology of the area. We didn't get back to the lodge until about 10:00, but we hadn't eaten yet, so I made a pork tenderloin with dijon mustard and apricot jam glaze (really easy!) and a quick salad, and we went to bed!


The next morning we woke up hoping the weather had improved, because we had a field trip scheduled for 8:30am, and had to drive about 45 minutes to the location. The weather wasn't better, unfortunately, but we donned our raingear and headed out anyway. You know how you get so cold that your hand muscles don't respond immediately when your brain signals them to open or close? It was colder than that. BUT, the trail around Bagley Lakes was beautiful. The trail wasn't long (only about a mile), but some of the terrain was a little difficult (3 foot high steps on tree roots next to 20 ft drop offs into the lake...) but we managed. The fog was rolling in and out, the rain was pouring in sheets, but the flowers still were beautiful. Snow banks about a foot deep covered parts of our path, but at the bases of the snow melt were huge patches of pink heather. It was incredible. I never got to take the picture I really wanted with heather in it (rain risk to camera), but did get a lot of the countryside. On the way down the "hill" from our trail head, we stopped to take some pictures of flowers along side of the road, and we noticed a VERY wet bird perched on a limb across the road. We got out carefully to not scare it, and grabbed binoculars. I didn't recognize it immediately...until it flew down, right in front of me and landed on the car. Camp robber - little beggars! I took many pictures. It was funny to see their little feathers all sticking out from being so wet! We were good and didn't feed them - but it was tempting.

After our hike we were exhausted, so we came back to the condo and relaxed (ok, I took a four hour nap). Then we went to a little Italian place in "town" (three businesses). It was really good. However, when I went to pay for dinner, my debit card was declined. Considering Matt had JUST deposited his paycheck, this was a little alarming. Unfortunately, there was no cell phone service until about 20 miles down the road, so Karen nicely paid for it, and I decided to check into it when we headed back Sunday, and I could get a hold of Matt! After dinner we headed back up to the lodge for the second evening speech. The road up to the lodges is insanely curvy. We made many hairpin turns, and could only go about 30 miles per hour on large stretches. However, this evening we had a surprise looking at us from the middle of the road right before the lodge - a BIG black bear! A looked at us, started a little, and then meandered off of the road. We rolled down the window to take a pic - but did not get out! The second evening speaker was a employed by a group that documents rare species of flowers and makes attempts to restore areas that have been disturbed. He showed lots of pictures. It was impressive to me that he hiked about 10 miles or more during the course of an average work day! What a job.

That evening we crashed and slept in a little the next morning. We decided to check out the condo grounds more closely, and took a walk down to the RAGING river (we had seen hard core kayakers out there the day before!) and looked at the old log cabin they had preserved and use as an "adult center" - no kids allowed. The place is absolutely beautiful. I would like to have a timeshare like that some day.

After our wanderings, we headed out to look at Nookatuk Falls. We were surprised to see how huge it is! Unfortunately, there isn't a good location from which to take a picture, as the falls are 80-100 feet tall, and in a little ravine. However, I did get shots of the top, and the river down the valley that merged with the river with the falls, and the river above the falls. The picture on the roadside showed a parted waterfall that had a rock projecting out of the cliff in the middle of it. There was so much water this time, that you couldn't even see the rock. The spray was filling up the valley - it was incredible.

About 11:00 we headed back to the condo, packed up, and headed home. When we got within cell phone range, I called the bank, which said we were overdrawn, and so I called Matt to figure out what was going on! He found out that two out-of-country (Malaysia!) atm withdrawals for 300$ each had been made from our account! AHHHHHHHHHHHH! He got it straightened out and had our atm cards cancelled. But, of course, they couldn't post money to my account until Monday evening! So I had no money on the way home. Karen paid for dinner at Salish Lodge again (I paid her back on Tuesday when the bank restored my money!!), and we got into town about 10:30pm.

Instead of trying to intersperse all of the flower pics with my description of the weekend, I have added them all here at the end of the post for you to enjoy. The neatest plant we saw was called "Elephant Head," but it was raining too hard to take out the camera. These were taken when the sheets of rain dwindled to mere buckets of rain!