Rained Wednesday night and into Thursday, a strange rain coming and going with high winds. Stepped outside in the morning to find pollen all over the trailer despite the rain. More rain, some thunderous claps, decided to take the day off before heading out to Hayden to check out the Mad Bomber Brewing Company, a busy place for veterans and after-work. The people were very friendly and he beer was great. I started with the Booby Trap Blond, and then sampled the 1605 Rye, which I liked better. The Rye Beers appear to work for me, masking the bitterness for higher IBU beers.
Hey to the bartender, Travis, and Jimmy the Handyman and former helicopter mechanic, who recommended that I head out to Bayview while I was here, so I did.
In the morning, at Bayview, I drove by the Naval acoustic research center. Later, I watched the launching a vessel with a lot of equipment all around. I decided not to take a picture, just in case. Hi to Teenie, who served coffee while I enjoyed the view of the lake, before heading over to Farragut State Park.
Farragut State Park is the former site of a naval training base during 30 months of WWII. 300,000 sailors were trained there -initially, 13 weeks of training, later reduced to 6 weeks, provided you passed your swimming test, at peak, 50,000 in residence. The six families living there were given 2 weeks to move out. 270 buildings were constructed in two months. Think of how long that would take today, just for the environmental impact statement. Yet, 70 years later, you would never know if not for the six oblong training “villages” being converted to six campsites. The brig was retained as a museum.
When I approached the brig, my first thought was, “a while lot of misbehaving going on here.” Inside, the guide informed me of the number of trainees passing through, with average age of 17, and I thought “kind of small.”
I went down to do the shore walk and ran into “Rusty,” originally from Rhodesia who was working on the trail. He gave me a quick lesson on taxonomy of plants, pointing out that chemicals in the soil can change the color of wild flowers, as with hydrangeas, thereby confirming my suspicion that several of the different flowers that I have seen were likely the same plant, whether of different hue genetically or chemically induced.
Afterwards, I ran into Bruce and Karen transplanted, and Tatianna visiting from Sacramento. Bruce had been to Alaska 11 times, perhaps more. He made me laugh, when I told him that my first real hike had been the Chilkoot Trail, he said, “Well, you paid the price,” which was true: I had crawled up the pass more than hiked over.
The trails merged seamlessly so I ended doing 6 miles round trip, seeing perhaps as many different flowers. I took pictures every time I thought it might be a new flower. Below are pictures of 20. I count another 5 of which the pictures are not as good, sometimes the flower is wilted, or too far away….That makes 25, thanks Rusty for helping me out.
Living in a Tunnel 