POST 1215; JANUARY 15, 2015, KALALOCH, WASHINGTON

Once again, we have skipped one day of blogging.  The following images were taken during my walk from Forks to the village of Kalaloch, which is located directly on the shore of the Pacific Ocean.

Please say HELLO to HEIDI.  Heidi has the early morning shift at the Forks Thriftway Supermarket drinks department...my first port of call after twisting myself out of the back of the van.  A Ham and Egg sandwich chased with one of Heidi's hot Mocca keeps me going well into the afternoon.

We had a nearly full moon last night...making it very cold in the morning...just the thing for a nice hot chocolate coffee drink.

A Thriftway wall mural.  A couple different specie of salmon are depicted in this school.

There is a river near my 10 acre farm which is a salmon spawning river to rival any spawning river I have ever seen.  Flowing through the town of Maple Valley, the river is the final resting place for literally thousands of fish; I have seen that river - about 100 feet wide - packed so tight with fish struggling to jump over a man-made dam about 8 feet high, that no water was to be seen...solid fish...I mean chock full was that river of fish, leaping Salmon falling back onto a solid mass of fish below also trying to leap through the air to reach the water above the dam.

Pacific Ocean Beach with a tiny flow of fresh water reaching out into the rising tide.  Daily tides in this part of the world can change height up to 12 feet twice a day, following the moon as it circles Earth.  The tidal flow on the above beach may well find the beach void of any water - twice a day - for as far away from the beach as 1/4 mile or more...not a place to be caught when the tide water starts flowing back up the beach...one must plan ahead or be possibly caught in deepening waters.  In some places on Earth, the tidal flow is so severe that a running horse cannot out run the oncoming waters...France, for example.

In the above image, tidal flow is away from the beach; i.e., the water is receding away from land...noticeable by the water still lying on the recently exposed beach sands.

Roadway crossing over a narrow bridge.  Not a place to be caught with two logging trucks pass over the bridge at the same moment as a walker...no berm at all !

This forested region is in the midst of the Rain Forest.  Many plants, such as the fern imaged above, reach incredible size.  Some local Cedar trees are still available to visit in the Olympic National Forest...so large, it takes many full grown men to hold hands while reaching the circumference around them.

A hundred or so miles off shore lies the "Ring Of  Fire"...the earthquake prone region that circles the entire Pacific - and part of the Indian - Ocean.  Large sea-bottom quakes can...and have...caused Tidal Waves of enormous height....note recent such waves destroying cities and people miles inland from a quake generated Tsunami - Japan, Indonesia, and South America.

This interesting image is a Pacific Ocean Beach Scene of a rather large fresh water stream crossing the expanse of a rather FLAT beach.  The Ocean Waves reach all the way to the shoreline , flooding the fresh water stream;...as the wave recedes, it leaves ripples along the stream bed...looking much like the washboard Grammy used to wash my clothes way back when.

Many folks wonder why these short white painted lines are seen crossing the continuous roadside lines.

Unlike most states, Washington State Roadways paint that short white line to depict where, some many feet below the roadway, is found a water pipe to control the flow of a mountain stream as it crosses under the roadway.  The angle of the short white line gives the exact location and direction the stream flows as it makes it way to the sea.

The Kalaloch River as it enters the Pacific Ocean.

At the peak of the upward tidal flow, the salt water is strong enough to actually reverse the flow of the river water, sending really big logs flowing UPSTREAM on the ocean tidal flow.

The large knot is a BURL - or sometimes referred to as CANCER - which afflicts the huge trees which grow along the shore of the Pacific Ocean.  Cut from the tree, the Burl growth rings can form exotic patterns which wood carvers find excellent material for their creations.  It is said that human Kidney Stones nearly replicate the grain structure of Burl.

Burls are rather common.  Today I walked past a number of standing growing live trees with rather large burls.

Common to the Pacific Northwest is the above plant:  SALAL.  Often harvested for the flower industry, Salal adds a pleasant embellishment to any bouquet. 

Attempting to create this blog last night in the meeting room upstairs in the Kalaloch Lodge, this poor tired old laptop computer gave up the ghost.  Upon selecting various programs, the computer took on a life of it's own...giving out with crazy and incomprehensible jumble.  I was tired; I was cold; I was hungry; and not prepared to fight the computer too.  So, I shut it down and climbed into the covers in the back of SPIA-2, where I instantly went to sleep.

At 0200 hours (2:00 am - midnight), I awoke knowing I could not fritter away my night...so, lying under my toasty covers, I decided I had to get the computer fixed...and could do that only in Bellingham, some 200 miles away.  It was around 0300 hours that I twisted my way out of the bed, slipped into my shoes (always sleep in my clothes in this cold and damp place), slid into the driver's seat, and 6 hours later, pulled into my computer guru's office.  Took him 15 minutes to identify the problem...a new camera CD download maxed out my tiny laptop computer memory bank, designed by Panasonic to run 7 / 24, leaving no memory for the job I had to perform with the other 4 or 5 programs to produce this blog.

So, I spent the last of my precious $$ to return to Bellingham to fix something which a knowledgeable computer operator - which I am not - should have identified and repaired in 30 minutes.

I am pleased my tiny computer once again performs like new.  I also took the opportunity to do something I may come to regret...I put SAM - my cart - into the storage unit.  I now have lots of room in the Mazda MPV..., but the SAM of SAM and ME is no longer for this walk.

I also stopped in at my bank of many years, begging for a small (a couple hundred $$) line of credit to help me through the present and yet to come spots of dirth.  By noon tomorrow, I should have the bank's answer as to whether they feel I am trustworthy ... an old man with no job and only $1,175.00 per month total income to find my way into even older age...

We shall see...in any event, I will find a way to return to Kalaloch and continue with our walk and our daily blog(s).   (KALALOCH = Ka-lay-lock).

Tonight I am at WAL MART, Bellingham, where they kindly have computer stations for customer use and welcome travelers to park the night - without getting hassled by local police...a VERY serious element challenging travelers in such as California or Florida.

...and, "Tomorrow is another day". = Gone With The Wind !