eub | pics, 2010-09-10 Shi Shi

2010-09-09 Shi Shi

2010-09-09 Shi Shi (extra photos)

Thursday:

The WIC ranger and I were talking, don't be alarmed if you see someone with a firearm, recent rule change added as a rider to the credit-card reform act, he'd rather spend the pack weight on single-malt Scotch himself. He's been told that when you add water to Scotch it should best be from where the Scotch is made, which sounds a little esoteric, but he drank water from by a stand of nettles, and it tasted like nettle tea.

Into Sekiu (fish-girl!) and Neah Bay, looking for any other non-trucks on the road. What with the Makah permit and the parking back 0.6 miles, 2:00 by the time we got on the trail.

We would have said the trail was muddy, except we'd seen it when it was far muddier. Many black ground beetles, and I counted them and slugs, neck-and-neck for a while but slugs made a late surge and won 13 to 8.

We headed down Shi Shi, and both this and the trail in seemed much shorter than last time. Petroleum Creek was just a hop to cross.

Note: the Custom Correct map shows an overland trail at the south end of the beach. I think it lies. I looked into several possible trails, but all were definite streams, and did not look like any trail we wanted -- particularly since an overland trail across that point wouldn't get you past the next one (where you pass through an arch) anyway.

Our neighbors a quarter mile down the beach turn out to live about three-quarter miles from us in Seattle.

Friday:

We ate a fairly early breakfast, and walked to the south end of the beach, to make it through the morning tide window around the point. We planned on being tide-trapped into the next cove for the day, until 5:30 p.m. or so.

We met our neighbors on their way out, right at some tracks they pointed out -- weasel-type tracks, by the diagonal "sidewinding" prints, and river otter by context (sea otters don't walk), and that mud gully in the bank looks like an otter slide. Three otters down the slide and ran to the sea.

So much seaweed salad lying on the beach. We should totally learn to identify and eat it. Look, if this one is edible, I would love to eat its texture (wiggly-channeled nubbliness). A curved cliff wall that seemed to image the wave sound coming from behind, forming a phantom sea inside the hill.

Ihe isopods(?) that dig in the sand and eat seaweed, and commence jumping when you near, a perfect army of them was hurrying up the beach, scores walking up a head-sized rock: when they reached the top they would jump in a random direction and 50-50 jump backwards and hurry up the rock again.

We had scoped out high perches on the beach on our walk down, and as the tide rose we holed up in our chosen one behind a big log, sat on the log and ate lunch and watched the waves coming up, and the travels of a "tadpole" of bull kelp.

After dinner and washing up, the sun came out below the cloud deck, hidden behind an island but I ran out on the beach to where it touched, pouring through a cleft in the island and lighting the sea-haze rose and orange.

We went for a walk on the beach's south point after sunset during the evening low. Looked into a sea cave cleft on the big rock mass there -- wasn't that a bat flitting from one side to the other? We watched, and saw more flitting-across, and then some definite flights from the cave.

A new sliver-crescent moon, following the sun. We watched it set into the sea.

Saturday:

A walk out on the south point in the morning low. We looked into the bat cave, did not see any bats, they are probably way up in those crevices? Big masses of mussels, kt requests that I label some photo "major mussel groups". An isopod that swam by humping its body like a sea monster, over the surface until it broke through, and then underwater to the bottom.

Tracks like a dog, but no claw marks, even in excellent impressions. about an 18-inch stride. Bobcat, we think. Katy tracked the cat tracks all up and down the beach near our camp, and possibly into the camp. (We saw more of the same tracks on our walk back up the beach, and a single clear print in the mud on the trail out.)

Seagulls often stand on one leg, but this one seemed persistent at it, we wondered if it was one-legged. Would it be immoral to move closer to it to see if it uses two legs in running? Don't think so. And yes it did do its run-up to takeoff speed by hopping, awkward-looking but seemed to work.

The white blubbery hand of something very large, is a walrus that big or would it be a whale?

On the trail back, this time the slugs lost, yay, 5 - 8 to the black beetles. For the last bit I was really hoping not to see any more so all the slug-beetle numbers would stay Fibonacci.

Rain on the trail back too. As rain goes, good timing.

In the Hoh Humm Ranch, I dipped into the section of books that reference John Huelsdonk -- a book of poetry and a memoir of an early Olympic settler. In several places, the story of a man who met John carrying a #2 cast iron cookstove up trail to his homestead, those weigh a hundred pounds: isn't that a heavy load? I can manage it, but it's the fifty-pound bag of sugar shifting around in it that gets to me. Also a book for kids about science experiments, big into "minibeasts" i.e. small crawly things.