Category: walking

  • Splash, smooth, silver: A thousand words in pictures

    Ready for the year to turn and the light to return, I took a walk today–after the downpour, in the drizzle break between showers–and watched the full creek rushing muddy and slick through my end of town, and the raindrops poised on the rosehips and unknown (to me) berries, lone splash of color against the green…

  • Rebuilt wetlands: noise and surprises

    The Delta Ponds are former gravel pits, strung between a freeway and a shopping mall, a band of apartments and retirement homes, a batch of car dealerships. It’s a made place, and also a natural one. Reclaimed, reconstructed. It’s an attempt to re-complicate just slightly the once braided, now restricted course of the Willamette River. …

  • Your Vacation Starts Here

    It’s raining today–sure sign of fall–but this was one of my favorite signs this summer: Read the sign’s two parts together, you might think the job’s so great, it’s practically a vacation. Or squint your eyes and read only one or the other. After all, a great vacation doesn’t exactly start with an understaffed hotel.…

  • Frozen

    After it snowed and before it really started raining this morning, I went for a walk. More of a crunch-tromp-glide-stumble-crunch; the ice crust on the snow was brittle, and the snow was deep. Here where it isn’t supposed to snow–or not snow much–we are frozen on the verge of spring. The ice is clarifying, isolating,…

  • Night Herons on the Dock

    Around 7:00 p.m. last Saturday, full dark solstice evening, we were on the dock in Newport–nicely sated on roasted garlic and Dungeness crab soup, smoked salmon salad, and Prosecco–wanting to stretch our legs and look at the fishing boats before heading back to the inn. The water was full of tiny fish: two inches long,…

  • Whale Watching

    By great good fortune (and a little planning) we visited Puerto Madryn and Península Valdés for a second time in August; this latest trip happened near the beginning of the Southern Right Whales’ season there, rather than the end. And it was spectacular. We walked out on the long pier in Puerto Madryn, and the…

  • Lily Pad

    For eight years now, we’ve been taking the same hike on my birthday. Some years we’ve pushed the calendar a little, but most years, it’s been on the day itself. And it doesn’t get old–not for me, anyway. Much as I love to take new hikes, this one, I could do over and over. As…

  • Ice

    There generally isn’t a lot of ice where I live now. Enough to skid out in the dark, but not much to photograph–or to describe, since black ice seems to demand an absence of description. It’s an unseeable hazard, or a cold mirage, flip side to the illusory oasis all those cartoon desert stragglers seem…