Thimbleberry walking

We arrive on a fine summer day, one where morning clouds were burning off and a nice breeze kept the air moving as the temperature climbed to meet the arriving sun.  My hiking partner for the day was my mother-in-law, S.  She is always interested in what I am doing and wanted to see this place where I have been spending so much time.  When we arrive there are many volunteers cleaning up after yesterday's Burning Beast BBQ festival.  It is a major fund raiser for Smoke Farm, a barbeque cook-off with 15 different types of meet for the guests to sample.  The tickets for the event sell out very very quickly every year.

We walk up river on the rough grassy road that passes through the new cottonwood forest.  The new deck on the double log bridge makes the route passable for S and we spot tiny salmon swimming in the creek below.  We stop at the Grave of Vitus Bering, which also gives S a good feel for a cedar forest.  I talk about nurse stumps.  I point out all of the different plants growing from the tops - that cedar tree, that evergreen huckleberry, those ferns.  Then we continue upriver.

There are more thimbleberries than on my last visit and they are right at their peak of flavor.  S eats as many as I can pick and they are her first thimbleberries.  It is a good place to have your first thimbleberry and I tell her where I ate my first one - on a mountain road in the Bugaboos of Canada.  I imagine that a lot of people can remember where they had their first thimbleberry. 

Berries, Frogs and a Hint of Rain

I move one of my projects out of the way of this weekends festival.  I figured it to be a 4 hour job, but it goes in one and a half.

I have been building, making or moving for what seems like a solid month and today I feel most like doing nothing.   I sit under the tin roof of the shop building until the lightest of rain showers begins to tap away.  The thought of rain raises my interest in taking a hike.  Everyone has a different idea or a different identity for what Smoke Farm is - rain is one of the strongest of markers in how I identify it.  For myself, Smoke Farm rises to its full potential when it rains.

I head up river stopping at the bridge over the creek to make sure that it is as fine a place to sit as I keep telling people.  It is.  My ears catch a purring in the tall grass behind me.  I freeze and wait.  A few moments pass and a large dragonfly rises up and heads off down river.

I walk up the river road picking thimbleberries as I find them.  The wet spring has made them unusually juicy this year.  I think that they are best eaten by using the tongue to smash them against the roof of the mouth.  This way none of the raspberry sherbert flavor is wasted, it all ends up on the taste buds.  It is a delightful burst of one of the best tasting berries ever.

There are two frogs and a dozen tadpoles in the longest of the road puddles - it is 50 yards long and thus, perfectly good frog habitat.

I see many fresh deer tracks and a few raccoon tracks as I walk the road.  But, when I get to the upper beach, I find an unexpected track, one that takes a few seconds to recognize because it is unexpected.  In the silt, up under the first edge of brush where the river lets the well rooted plants stay, is the track of a small child.  I find myself thinking that it is a very fine spot to bring a small child.

bird sign

Decking the other bridge

It was just a work day today at the farm.  O, A and M came up.  O is one of the kids from M's microcamps, which unfortunately got canceled this summer due to a shortage of available volunteers.  Since O likes to build things, and I have plenty of ideas for building things, and little time to get it all done...it's perfect.

We all take a walk out to my installation to start with.  To get there, we cross the log bridge that me and my friend A put a deck on.  All winter long I had to inch across the deck with my camera and field pack, the logs slippery with frost, or if it was warmer, just wet and slick.  The bridges have been a way to cross the creek.  They've been an obstacle themselves - only preferable to a waist deep ford in cold water.  When we finished that first deck, me and A marveled at how the bridge had now become a place to stand or sit and just enjoy the clear open view of the creek.  We got a lot of positive comments from people about the improvement.  We've noticed that snakes like to sun themselves on the new deck.

photo - May Ackerman

We return to the shop and set up a production line.  I brought a good amount of wood from home that I had saved for building doors and windows but don't need anymore.  O runs the chop saw while me and A feed and stack the decking.  We are going with a half-chevron design and we joke about people getting dizzy and falling off of the bridge.  With everything pre-cut, we head out and begin nailing the deck.  It is almost 80 degrees today and we complain about the heat never forgetting that everyone else in the country is dealing with triple digits.  But, with us not used to the heat it does sap our energy.

photo - May Ackerman

I tell O that he will be a popular guy when people find the new bridge deck.  It was a good day to sit on a bridge.

Child's play

My hiking partner for this day at the farm is B.  She is 5 years-old.  I hitched a ride with B and her mom who is busy collecting cobblestones from the river for an art project. 

B and I head up river picking the occasional ripe salmon berry or thimble berry as we go.  The thimble berries have just started to turn and I suppose that in a week one might just spend an hour picking and eating one berry at a time.  No one collects thimble berries because they are too soft and won't survive the carry back to the house.  But the tart raspberry sherbert flavor makes them worth eating when one finds them.  Only the high mountain huckleberry is better in my mind.

We stop at one of the usual spots to check for animal tracks.  But, it appears that yesterday's rain has washed all away.  So, the two of us continue up to the slough, which is running just a bit deeper than the ankles.  B splashes and walks in the water until she finds a spot to stand in that is deeper than her boots.  She doesn't complain.

Mother and Daughter #35

I don't have kids of my own and I watch how B sees the forest.  When I take adults out, they often fail to see the individual tree instead grasping the forest as a vision - which is why they often don't know where they are when we wander off trail.  I don't know if B sees the forest, but she sees the details.  A red berry steers her off route, a splash of a creek turns her left, a long muddy puddle slows her to a crawl as she inches through until she slips and falls, refilling the boots.  She doesn't complain.  Her idea of where she is does not go too much farther than her fingertips - There's so much to see and so much to do right there.

Relentless Green

I drop from my perch later than usual due to late night social activities and I find only a few of the earliest risers.  I fumble myself into organization for a morning stroll.  I decide to follow the creek up into the hills just to see how the restoration is melding with summer growth.  New vegetation is taking over the bare gravel bars of winter.   Perhaps the roots will keep the ground from shifting so much next winter.

I find one of the forest woman off to my right.  Understated, she stands somewhat hidden by boulders that have come to rest on her upstream side. The boulders are decked in moss.  Ferns and salmon berries grow from between the boulders.  A 50 or 60 year old cedar, just a toddler of a tree, grows from her top, the roots wrapped in a tight embrace.  In higher water she might be an island, but she is not alone.  (Only later when I look at my photos do I recognize this one as the same stump that has been the header for this blog.)

I don't go far before I spot a majestic on the hillside.

She stands there, eighteen or twenty feet high with her crumbling red sister above her.  The majestic grows two cedars, 15 inches and 2 feet in diameter from her top.  I'm no longer interested in following the creek but instead turn to cross the hillside to see what stands behind this tallest one.

I find wet and brush, a swamp on a 20 degree slope.  But, coming out of that tangle I find a major game trail and follow that until it until it fades away into a new tangle.  I cross two small streams that I did not know about.  I find familiar ground at the grave of Vitus Bering.  It has been awhile since I felt that I explored something.  I find myself thinking about it.  I find myself in tears as I walk back.

"A" and I put a deck on one of the double log bridges.  One more sometimes slippery as heck bridge to go.

It was kind of nice to stand comfortably in the middle of the bridge and look around.

June 2 - Work

Light comes to the tree house before 6.  I leave my perch and head to the kitchen to brew coffee.  Others have arrived although they came late last night after I was asleep.  Sharing the farm always requires an attitude adjustment on my part.  Most of the time I am here alone.  I've also noticed that I stay in a camping mode that comes to me through many years of climbing, backpacking and wandering - it is sparse.  Most of the others will be here in a "cabining" mode.  They nest, they spend time cooking great meals (which I do enjoy for sure), they just take care of business.  For me, time spent not wandering is time lost.  "Burning daylight" - I probably would've made a good cowboy.  I itch to move.

Red breasted sap sucker

This morning I am rewarded.  I find a tiny egg, alabaster white with a few brown speckles.  I place it in my compass case for safe keeping.  As I walk up river three female common mergansers take flight from the branches of an alder tree.  I had no idea that mergansers would perch in trees (they probably only do this at night).  I find the slough knee deep so I turn back not needing to start the day any wetter than necessary.  Two of the mergansers are back in the same tree when I return.

My friends are up and moving when I get to the kitchen.  One crew takes over the kitchen.  They will make the meals for everyone.  Smoke Farm is always a feeder and a good one at that.  K is cooking pork bellies for tacos.  Most of us then drop down to the barn.  It is in need of cleaning and organizing.  A few others pull blackberries farther off.  By lunch the barn looks good.  A dumpster has been filled with metal recycling.  After a great lunch people split up into groups.  Some attack the overgrown garden which seems to be retreating to a state more wild than the forest.  I lead a team up to the north fields to open up a half mile of trail, because I'm supposed to know where the trail is/was.  The five of us swing machetes for the distance.  We break on the upper beach and then head back the same way.  This is when I see how good my team was...the trail is wide and clear, blackberries, tall grass and thistles sliced away.  You could follow it in the dark.  We return for dinner and find the garden looking as if it was in a nursery.  This is how Smoke Farm survives, by the enormous heart of those that keep returning.

June 1 - Escape

A work party starts tomorrow at the farm, but I needed to escape from my recent routine of sorting, packing, sorting and fixing as we prepare to sell our house and move a couple thousand miles.


I don't know that escaping to a place is any better than escaping from a place.  For my time here at Smoke Farm, the farm has never been a place to escape to.  Rather, it has always been a place to explore.  I come here to find something new, I keep coming because I keep finding new things, sometimes about the land, often about myself.  As long as that happens in any facet of my life, I find purpose and satisfaction.


The potters are here today preparing to fire their wood burning kiln.  It will run for 50 hours, tended constantly by a few of them.  They will sleep in shifts.

 I set my tent up at the top of the tree house.  It always seemed like a good spot to spend the night, 30 feet or so up among the trees.  I would sleep in the open, but the clouds and unusual high humidity signal rain.

With my tent up, I change into the worn wool trousers that work so well when walking in the wet grass.  They dry fairly fast and they also are thick enough to fend off most thorns.  I head out to my installation to continue tying little white rocks to long strings.  My supply of cobbles is safely hidden beneath the high water of the Stillaguamish, so I can walk up river when I am done with my supply of little white rocks.