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Week Thirty-five, November 12-18
Sunday, November 18, 2001
It may be out of place, and it caught my eye because it was out of place. Natalie and I found the cherry blossom in the photo above on one of the trees outside the library building in the Proctor shopping district, about a mile from home. It's likely that the these trees bloom every fall, but even so, it is odd to see them blooming this late in the season. We have had a couple of good frosts, wind, record rain, and yet there are the fresh blooms emerging on one of the only days with sunshine this week.
While we were in Proctor, we stopped by a local shop to pick up bird feeding supplies. In December we will take part in Project Feederwatch, an annual feeder watch program run by the Cornell Ornithology Lab. We have done the project in years past, but over the last year we haven't kept our birdfeeders full because at this time last year we were just too busy with wrapping up the writing and research for two books. I set up a new feeder, placed a taller feeder pole and hung the suet feeder, and I would expect there will be a wealth of birds in the yard tomorrow.
Saturday, November 17, 2001
If I hadn't glanced at a calendar today, there is no way that I could have guessed it was November. The sun was shining, there was a light north breeze, and birds were active in the clear skies. It was cold though...and it will remain brisk tonight as Natalie and I spend time out in the yard, watching the skies for the peak of the Leonid meteor shower. Hopefully it will turn out to be the show of a lifetime that some astronomers have predicted.
I took today's photo of Mt. Rainier poking out of a blanket of low clouds from inside the downtown branch of the Tacoma Public Library. We went to the library to see what new books were around as well as to grab some research materials. It's time to get busy again, because, although the contract isn't signed yet, we are on our way to writing at least one new book now - a guide to bird watching locations in Washington that will be called "Birding Washington." This should be a fun project, with Natalie and I both working on a book about something that interests us. And the research and travel in the months ahead hold a lot of promise!
Friday, November 16, 2001
I wandered back down to the creek today to do my check for salmon in the steam, and once again, no luck. But the secondary reason that I went to the creek was to get a photo for the comparison above. The side-by-side shots of the lower part of Puget Creek were both taken from the same location. The shot on the left shows how high the water was running on Wednesday, when the rush of water draining out of the gulch during our record rains was at its peak. The shot on the right was taken today, with the creek running once again at its normal fall levels.
Thursday, November 15, 2001
After all the rain from the last two days, it is only fitting that the mushrooms are showing up all over Puget Gulch. I found the mushroom in the photo above in one of the gulches that forks off to the side of the main trail, in an area I walked to with Scott Hansen after running into him at the creek.
It did rain a little bit more today, but just the normal, spitting kind of rain rather than the endless downpour that we had yesterday.
Wednesday, November 14, 2001
If the skies opened up yesterday, then today was something beyond that metaphor. This may have been the wettest day I have ever seen since moving to Tacoma in 1985. Between midnight last night when I went to bed and 6:30 a.m. this morning when I got up, an inch of rain fell. But that was just the start. Then between 6:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. another 1.58 inches of rain fell, for a grand 24- or 25-hour total of more than 3.8 inches of rain.
The inch totals cannot illustrate just how much fell though. To see the rain's excess in person, I went for a soaking walk at the creek around noon. As I drove down 36th Street to the parking spot at the bottom of the gulch, water was running so hard down the hill that the ditch and sewer drains couldn't hold the flow. Instead, water gushed around the sharp corner descending to Puget Creek, and it rushed over the road to the other side. At the bottom of the gulch, there was water everywhere. I stepped out of the pickup and into water running on the road nearly as deep as the top of my boots.
Puget Creek held the rushing water pretty well. The photo above shows how the creek was running with at least twice as much volume as normal. It pushed up to the very edges of the bank, as can be seen in the photo above, and ran chocolate brown, but it still wasn't nearly as muddy as this summer when Natalie and I walked along the creek during a thunderstorm. In this storm, one reason that there was so much mud and silt in the creek was that someone had directed water that was running down the trail toward the creek, trying to stem the volume of water that was spilling uncontrolled toward Alder Street at the end of the gulch.
After walking at the creek, I decided to drive along Ruston Way and to take the road up Ferdinand Street back up the hill to home, but the road was blocked. I drove around and parked at the top of the closed road, then walked down Ferdinand to see what the water had done. The slide-prone hillside had given way in a small area and swept mud and debris across the road, and city road crew workers were cleaning up the mess.
Later in the afternoon, around 3:30 p.m., Natalie came home and rushed me back out the door for a walk along Ruston Way. The tide was high, floating many of the big logs along the beach at Dickman Mill Park, as can be seen in the photo below.
There is no way around it...for a weather buff like me, this was a special day. It is one for the record books, and I hope that this wealth of rain now is a sign of a wet winter ahead. And while I am ordering up the weather, throw in some cold and snowy weather too.
Tuesday, November 13, 2001
And then the skies opened up, and the kind of rainstorm that local weather forecasters often refer to as a Pineapple Express pushed into Puget Sound, dropping more than an inch of rain since it really started falling around 2 p.m. this afternoon. Signs of the real turn to winter wetness were apparent last night, when I noticed that the barometer had taken a dive to 29.60. Yet there was no wind.Now, as the clock clicks toward the turnover to another day, the rain is still pouring down. If only we were looking forward to some serious wind, then this would be the perfect storm to celebrate the turn to real winter weather, Pacific Northwest style.
Monday, November 12, 2001
I ventured to the middle of Puget Creek this afternoon to get my closeup picture of a bright yellow mushroom growing on the side of a rotting log along the upper section of the creek. I admit I am getting tired of checking the creek daily for returning salmon, only to find water running downhill, just as gravity dictates. So today I returned to playing, beckoning back to my childhood as I floated sticks down the stream and tried to follow them, and watched the paths of leaves dropped into the creek. But there are benefits from getting down to the creek level and playing. If I hadn't been kneeling down at the creek level, I would have missed the mushrooms growing out of the log.
Although there are no salmon to be seen just yet, I have definitely enjoyed watching Puget Gulch as it makes the transition from fall to winter. Millions of leaves have fallen over the last week or so, opening up the gulch to light from above and making it easier to see the pileated woodpeckers and hawks and other birds that still hang out along the creek.
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