Author: lori977987136

Today was the first full day of a birding trip to California for Stephanie and I. We flew into Fresno yesterday evening, rented a car and drove to Madera, a city about 30 minutes north. That’s where we spent the night, at a La Quinta Inn.

Then early this morning we got up, got ready, and we were out the door by 6 a.m. because we planned to drive through Yosemite National Park before the crowds of visitors slowed down the drive. And we did beat the crowd. The drive through the park was beautiful and not congested. We only stopped a couple of times in the park and one of them was at Olmsted Point, where we had an awesome view of Half Dome.

Exiting Yosemite on the eastern side, we drove through Tioga Pass and then quickly descended to the small town of Lee Vining, next to Mono Lake. The elevation of Tioga Pass is more than 9,900 feet and Lee Vining is about 6,300 feet and we made that descent in about 15 minutes.

There are only about 200 residents in Lee Vining, but the town was buzzing with lots of visitors because it was the end of the Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua, an annual birding festival that attracts lots of birders. We stopped for lunch in town at Mono Cone, where we ordered burgers and milkshakes and ate outside at a picnic table. The weather was comfortable in the shade with a temperature in the high 70s.

Just outside of town is a Forest Service visitor center, where we stopped for information and for great views of Mono Lake. The water in the lake was glassy smooth and it was quite warm.

Then we drove north to the state historical park of Bodie, now a ghost town but once a bustling mining town in the 1880s. We walked around the town, looking in the windows along with quite a few other tourists.

On the way back to Lee Vining, we stopped at Virginia Lake Resort, a rustic old cafe and store set on the edge of a lake. A lady birder saw our binoculars and greeted us in the parking lot, inviting us to see some Gray-crowned Rosy Finches, which aren’t too common, and Mountain Bluebirds, at the store’s bird feeder. We saw these two species plus some red Cassin’s Finches, and several different types of squirrels and chipmunks under the feeder as we sat in the shade and drank a soda. It was a pleasant way to cool off and slow down.

After that cool interlude, we drove back into Lee Vining and checked into our hotel, the Lake View Lodge. We walked over to the lodge’s restaurant, ordered dinner, and ate outside in the shade of their trees while watching birds overhead.

After dinner, we took one more drive out for some evening birding at DeChambeau Ranch, a ways out on a gravel road neat Mono Lake. It is an old ranch, now abandoned and probably owned by the Forest Service. We were alone there as the sun set behind the mountains. But before it did, we saw and heard several kinds of birds, including a Common Nighthawk, catching flies as it flew overhead.

It was a beautiful day with lots of interesting sightseeing and good birding.

Today was the last day of our trip around the Olympic Peninsula. But before arriving at home, we had two more state parks to visit. So after breakfast at the hotel, we took off eastward, away from the Pacific beaches. Our first stop was Lake Sylvia State Park next to the town of Montesano. The lake was formed many years ago when loggers dammed Sylvia Creek to form a pond for logs and to produce power. When we visited today, the lake appeared to be quite low, but was evidently stocked with fish because we saw 9 or 10 people fishing from the shore and catching something.

We spent just a few minutes at Lake Sylvia and then drove further east to Schafer State Park that’s located on the Satsop River. We liked this park better and were greeted with a woodpecker loudly drumming on a nearby dead tree. We located it way at the top of the snag and saw it was a male Hairy Woodpecker, probably drumming to attract a mate. We walked along the River trail and into the mostly empty camping area. The Satsop River was quite beautiful and peaceful.

That was our last park of the trip. From there, we drove to the freeway heading east to Olympia and north to the Seattle area. Happily, we avoided rush hour traffic because it was still late morning. By lunchtime, we were back in Dave’s hometown and enjoying a final restaurant meal. Then I retrieved my car from his garage, we said goodbye until next time, and I returned home.

After writing yesterday’s blog entry, we decided to go to Rialto Beach in the afternoon before going to dinner. It’s not far from La Push and Forks. And a spectacular beach it was! The tide and the surf were high, which brought the ocean close. But even better were the flattened rocks under our feet, piled up driftwood thrown up on the shore by storms and tide, and the exposed trees on the shore. The rocks had been worn flat and smooth by the power of the surf and formed a thick, loose layer under our feet. They would have made great skipping rocks if the water had been calm. There were many, many driftwood logs all along the shore, inviting you to sit or explore them. The trees were aged and blown bare at the bottom, but dark green and rugged on top. It was all enchanting and, after walking a ways on the beach, we sat on a log to watch the surf, sky and birds.

Then today, we hit the road after a leisurely breakfast in Forks. Just a few miles south was Bogachiel State Park, a forested and mossy green park dedicated to camping, although it was mostly empty on this Tuesday morning in May. We parked in a very small day use area and listened to the birds singing in the forest around us.

From there it was about a 2-hour drive south, first along Highway 101 that bends inward to Lake Quinalt then returns toward the beach, then down the Moclips highway. From Moclips, the next three parks were fairly close together. First was Pacific Beach State Park, where the tide was out and the beach was long, flat and sandy. We walked out toward the water and worked to identify the various species of shorebirds we saw running on the sand and probing for food. The second was Griffith-Priday State Park, which was simply a parking lot and trails to the beach and Copalis River, with few other facilities. Finally, there was Ocean City State Park, which has nearly 180 camping sites near the beach and is located just a couple of miles north of the city of Ocean Shores. (I didn’t take any photos of these parks.)

After those visits, it was lunchtime. We drove into Ocean Shores and found a small cafe for lunch. We also found a hotel with reasonable prices with breakfast included, the Lighthouse Inn, with ocean-facing rooms. There’s a lighthouse-type observation tower on the top of the hotel that we climbed a spiral staircase to enter, after we had dropped off our bags. The tower gave us a good view over the nearby dunes, beach and ocean.

In the afternoon, we walked along a paved path that weaved through the dunes in front of the beachfront hotels. There weren’t many people out but were quite a few birds in the dunes.

We ate dinner at a fish restaurant on the main drag of Ocean Shores, both of us enjoying Cobb salads with salmon added.

Today Dave and I took off for a trip to the Olympic Peninsula. The first few days of May have enjoyed sunny and warm weather, and today continued the streak. The ride on the Edmonds to Kingston ferry was gorgeous and calm.

Our first stop on the peninsula was Anderson Lake State Park, near Chimacum, which is only open during the summer. It was pretty and somewhat birdy, but the lake was suffering from a toxic algae bloom which made the water brownish green and dangerous to come in contact with. We did a little bird watching and then moved on.

We stopped in Sequim to pick up sandwiches for lunch at a grocery store and then parked at a city park and ate in the car. Next to the parking lot there were several retired people playing pickleball in the sunshine.

As we drove west on Highway 101, we next saw beautiful Lake Crescent. Its clear, very blue water was a big contrast to Lake Anderson’s.

Our next stop was La Push on the Quileute Reservation. I had never been there before. The Quileute Tribe is in the process of moving their town, rebuilding it on higher ground, due to sea level rise from climate change. We stretched our legs in town and viewed the Pacific Ocean from our parking spot. A few Brown Pelicans flew by, as well as lots of gulls, and we saw a few Pelagic Cormorants in the water.

We’re staying in the town of Forks for the night, just inland from La Push, and famous from the Twilight vampire series. If no vampires attack tonight, we’ll move on to see more state parks further down the coast tomorrow.

On Sunday before breakfast, the ship docked at Wrangell. It was dry and overcast, but became partly sunny later in the morning. After we finished breakfast, we followed our naturalists, walking through town to the Chief Shakes house, a Tlingit long house on a small point in the harbor. After looking at the totem poles there and the harbor at low tide, we walked to the Wrangell Museum and spent a while viewing the exhibits there as well as their museum shop. A sculptor carving a totem pole was nearby outside, at work, with fragrant cedar wood shavings surrounding his work. I needed to upload a blog post, so Stephanie and I walked across town to the library, which was closed on Sunday but their wifi was still available. We sat outside on a bench while I published the post. After enjoying coffee and chai tea, respectively, at a dockside coffee place, Stephanie and I returned to the ship for lunch.

After lunch, we walked to Petroglyph Beach, a 30 minute walk. There are rocks on the beach there that have been carved with designs but nobody knows how old they are, what they mean, or who carved them. During the walk, we saw a large Alaska Ferry at a pier next to Wrangell. We walked back to our ship and it departed from Wrangell around 4:30 p.m. As we cruised to our next destination, we ate dinner and then listened to a panel of crew members talk about their background, jobs, and life on the ship.

Monday morning was sunny and still when we got up. In the still water, we watched a humpback whale feeding by coming up underneath a school of small fish with its mouth open. (But I didn’t get a picture of it.)

We ate breakfast and then went kayaking in a quiet bay that had lots of harbor seals in it. They would silently raise their heads above the water to watch us. As we kayaked along the shore, we also saw a mink running among the rocks and driftwood. The ship’s crew were offering rides on the pontoon boat, so we went out on that after returning our kayak, and were able to see more cute harbor seals.

While we ate lunch, the ship got underway to the Haida village of Kasaan on Prince Edward Island. Once docked, we walked up the pier to the shore where we were met by a young man named George, a Haida tribal member. As we walked with him through their wooded village, we stopped at several totem poles and he talked about them, as well as visiting a long house and the home of a community member who was carving a dugout canoe.

We returned to the ship and got underway to our final port, Ketchikan. But before dinner, the captain stopped the ship because he saw a humpback whale nearby that was repeatedly slapping its tail on the surface of the water. It continued tail slapping many times to the delight of our naturalists and all the passengers, who turned out on deck to watch. One of the naturalists was able to identify the whale via a photo of the tail in the Happy Whale app on her phone as a whale that had previously been spotted in Hawaii.

The final dinner of our cruise included the captain’s toast to the crew at the end, and a special dessert: a sourdough biscuit with sweet syrup topping that was a traditional food of the Allen family, the Native Alaskan owners of the cruise line, called a Buck Island donut after an island where they used to hunt.

Tuesday morning, our disembarkation day, found us in the Ketchikan harbor docked next to two enormous cruise ships. We finished packing up our belongings, put our bags outside of our cabins to be taken ashore by the crew, and then we ate our final meal aboard the ship. After breakfast, we walked up the ramp into downtown Ketchikan and walked among the crowds of passengers from the large ships. We walked through Creek Street, with shops in old buildings cantilevered over a river, and stopped in a drug store so I could buy a decongestant to battle a cold I had just come down with.

A shuttle van from Alaskan Dream Cruises picked up Stephanie and I plus two of our fellow passengers to take us to the airport ferry. It’s a funny little ferry that runs every few minutes, taking vehicles and walk-on passengers to the island where the airport is located. We took the 5-minute ride across the channel, then walked up to the airport. Our Alaska Airlines flight home was full and on time, getting us to Seattle in about 90 minutes. We returned to sunny and warm weather, happy to be home after a wonderful trip.