All Posts Written by "ken"
Overused words, Part 1
sus·tain·a·ble [suh-stey-nuh-buh l] adjective 1. pertaining to a system that maintains its own viability by using techniques that allow for continual reuse. 2. able to be maintained or kept going, as an action or process. If this one isn’t on your list of words that has been neutered by overuse, then you haven’t been paying […]
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A Fine Line
In matters of creative non-fiction, it is often hard to quantify which is the dominant factor: “Creative” or “Non-fiction.” There are those who say that the more a topic is personalized and garnished with the observer’s point of view, the less it can be seen as objective. There is an agenda here, they say, and […]
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The Nook Backcountry Tent by MSR
I am always looking for a new tent. I had one that I really liked but it’s been in need of some repair for a while now and I’ve been using others that I had out in storage, remembering the specific reasons that I no longer favor them. None of them are terrible, exactly; it’s […]
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New Year’s Day, 2014
I don’t know what happened to the past 12 months… it hardly seems possible that they would be already gone. But here we are again, ready to do it all over one more time. One more turn of the calendar, one more trip around the sun. Exactly the same, yet completely different. It’s been almost […]
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In the Wake of the Jomon
Ten or twelve millennia ago, give or take a few weekends, a great and momentous migration took place. From the temperate rainforests of what is present-day Japan, a group of intrepid travelers set out to find a new land. In dugout canoes that had been painstakingly carved with primitive stone tools they braved the storms and icy waters of the north Pacific and traversed the wild, glaciated coasts of Russia and Alaska. They ended up on the west coast of North America and, although positive proof of their progress from that time on is hazy, the fact that they made the trip is almost undeniable.
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Secrets of Augustine
Last year’s Roadless Coast expedition took the Ikkatsu Project team along Washington’s Olympic coastline where we surveyed remote beaches for marine debris. We had barely finished that trip when we decided to do another, this time to south-central Alaska, to see what might have washed up on some of the least-visited and wildest shorelines in Cook Inlet.
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Roll On, Columbia
It is doubtful that when Woody Guthrie wrote his quintessential salute to moving water, he had any idea of the effect that the years would have on his beloved Columbia river. Rapids have been submerged, huge hydroelectric dams have formed lakes in the desert, and the legendary salmon runs of yesteryear seem more myth than fact.
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A Winter Tale
“It is easy to make plans in this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote oceans it is noticeable that a cat’s plans and a man’s are worth about the same.” Mark Twain As I lay in my sleeping bag somewhere on the shores of Johnstone Strait, […]
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Breathing space
It’s the spring of the year here in western Washington. I doesn’t seem like that long ago that it was snowing on the passes and raining bullets here along the shores of the Salish Sea… I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of the foul weather yet, but the future is looking a bit more […]
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A story of sea kayaking and science on the rugged coast of Alaska. Coming – Spring 2014.
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