Orcas Island’s airport (ORS) hosts an annual fly-in every August, hosted by EAA Chapter 937.  Ann and I visited yesterday evening. These island airports are busy with smaller aircraft, as  package carriers (UPS, FedEx) fly parcels in at ORS using single engine Cessna Caravans . The largest plane I’ve seen was a Lear jet.

On any given summer weekend, you can find fly-in campers at this airfield, with tents pitched next to their aircraft in the grass tie-down area. The field is very hospitable to the backpack flyers, and has provided a restroom with a hot shower (donation encouraged). It’s charming to see one or two of these planes tied down with a colorful nylon tent pitched under the wing.

Camping year ’round is very laid back for a general aviation airport, but ORS goes one better: A few of the aircraft owners have set up their hangars as ad hoc get-away “cabins”, with the means to fix a meal, or comfortably pass a night in.

It’s a busy airport in its own right, but the annual Fly-In fills the field up with numerous beautiful and some rare birds, as well as an enthusiastic crowd of pilots and co-pilots. Tents are everywhere, and confabs of flyers gabbing in circles of folding canvas camp chairs in-between them. Four guys from an EAA chapter east of Tacoma sat in the midst of their Vans home-built project planes (three RV-4s and an RV-10), sharing salsa with tequila shots.   I traded jokes with them, and was offered a shot in turn (cheerfully declined), and bite of salsa (peppery and piquant). Strolling with Ann among the gathered pilots, it occurred to me that these people were one of my natural social tribes. I could understand and appreciate the eavesdropped conversations, and could comfortably join in on many of them.

A barbecue buffet was offered for a very reasonable donation in one of the open house hangars, and we feasted on cheese burgers, sides and salad. We hunkered down with paper plates piled high, sharing our table with a old flyer from San Juan Island . He spoke of learning to fly between these islands 50 years ago, landing and taking off from pastures more often than from runways.

All in all, I’m very glad we chanced upon the annual Fly-In for its first evening. We lucked into a warm and gracious meal among strangers who, through the common interest of planes and flying,  weren’t really strangers at all.

This is an almost 7-mile loop at Moran State Park–though my GPS registered it at 11 miles. I’m learning not to trust my GPS here. It takes about 3 hours to complete, and is rated “difficult” because it has a 1490 foot elevation loss/gain. If you start at the top, the only “unmarked” portion is at Mountain Lake–it *is* marked, but only if you look back over your shoulder after you pass the picnic area.

One of the most interesting parts of this hike is the changing ecosystem. Near the summit, much of the ground is rocky, with brush and small trees emerging from the bedrock–as if you were above the tree line, though that isn’t really the case, as some of the trees at the summit are taller than the tower itself now. On the Twin Lakes trail, trees are old, huge, and mossy, like childhood images of an enchanted forest, sunlight streaming down in sparkling rays to lead you away from the haunted witch’s house. Further down the trail, trees are younger and taller, and trails are smoother. The sky is more visible, and the view opens up to the snow on Mount Baker, over 10,000 feet high and more than 100 miles away; from the trail, you can imagine you’re looking down on it. Then after Mountain Lake, the uphill trail becomes extremely steep and rocky, the remnants of an old pathway for phone lines back when crank phones were still used.

I didn’t see any black-tailed deer on my hike (this photo came from the day before, without any telescopic enlargement), but that’s probably due more to the time of day than anything else, as they are prevalent all over the island, and blasé about humans. “Got food?” they seem to ask, though we’ve been warned not to feed them because they can be unpredictable. One night around 10 p.m. we were startled by the sound of someone shuffling through the gravel right next to the RV. It turned out to be a curious deer in search of food or company.

The trail from Twin Lakes to Mountain Lake was wide, flat, and suitable for trail running in most places. (I tried running for a short distance, but I’m too unsure of my footing. Each rock and root became a major obstacle to my peace of mind.) The path narrowed somewhat when getting to the lake, but from a distance I could hear the sounds of swimmers, boaters, and campers. The loudest shrieks came from kids on a rope swing halfway down the east side of the lake. A small boat ramp showed where kayaks and inflatables put in, and a boat of fisherpeople was loading just as I arrived. The Department of Fish and Wildlife stocks trout in the lake, and both trout and Kokanee salmon are found in Cascade Lake.

And then the hike became a serious uphill trudge. Up till now, it was all pretty much downhill–all 1500 feet of it. The next mile was so steep I found myself stopping often to catch my breath, with all sorts of “what ifs” going through my head. There is no cell phone serivce here, so–What if I fell down a ravine? What if I twisted my ankle? What if a tree fell on me? None of these was likely, so I shoved the thoughts out of my mind and concentrated on the trees and plants around me. The path parallels the road for a while, then branches off toward Little Summit, only a short three-tenths of a mile away. At that point, it might have been 300 miles, as I was too focused on getting back to the top in time to check in at the Summit Learning Center. I’ve been told the views to the west at Little Summit are unlike those at the top, which are to the east. Now, a couple of days later, I’m wishing I’d taken the time to go, but I guess that’ll be a tale for another day.

A Mission At Dawn

Yesterday, Ann and I set out on a special mission, its purpose one of compassion. We were determined to bring about a happy reunion, but I’m getting ahead of myself…

Orcas Island is one of the San Juan Islands, the largest of which are served by a state-sponsored inter-island ferry service which is free to pedestrian and bicycle traffic. It’s popular to hop the ferry over to the other islands to see their unique sights, and savor their special ambiances. All well and good for tourists, but we were not tourists! (Ok, we WERE tourists, but, hey, it’s called MULTI-TASKING!)

Up before dawn, and with but coffee for our breakfast, we drove down the summit, re-securing the night gate  behind us.  We made our way to the ferry at West Sound, where  the Orcas Hotel provided round two of coffee, with a side of muffin. Incidentally, the grill and tap room at the Orcas Hotel is just wonderful, with an old jukebox sporting a bronze plaque dedicating it to some previous managers of the hotel. The place looks like a proper Fawlty Towers sort of B&B, but without Basil Fawlty to gum up the works. The ferry arrived, and off we went, sufficiently caffeinated, into the rising sun, gliding across the inlets and channels of the San Juans.

At Friday Harbor, our mission was to find Cammille, who was waiting at (according to my memory of it) some vaguely nautical sounding coffee shop. I asked several people where to find ‘The Salty Dog’.  She was awaiting us seated, just where she should be, in a place called ‘The Crow’s Nest’.  (Ok, that worked! ) Next up: The Joyful Reunion…

The Joyful Reunion

“Are you Cammille?”, I asked.

“Yes, are you Mr. Walsh?”, said Cammille, a hopeful light in her once sad eyes.

“I am! This is Ann, and here…”, I said, “…is your wallet!”, producing the once lost object with a flourish.

Cammille had dropped her wallet at the summit of Mt. Constitution the previous day while biking up there on a day trip from San Juan Island. A kind and honest soul had turned it in to us unmolested, and we had located Cammille by searching the internet. LinkedIn yielded a business name, which in turn helped us to obtain Cammille’s cell number, and our rendezvous was thus established. It seemed like a great excuse to day trip to Friday Harbor. Ann and I smiled, mission accomplished, and prepared to take our leave, but Cammille wouldn’t hear of it, and offered to drive us around San Juan, and show us the sights. “Delighted to!,” said we.

Cammille’s stories about working, biking and vacationing on San Juan were even better that the amazing coastal trails she hiked with us. A northern Californian, she had been living there for the past few months doing body work for a spa. Time would eventually take her back to California, but in the meantime she was enjoying the beauty of these islands. Here’s a small gallery of the sights we saw yesterday:

Such an amazing place we’re living in, and with such wonderful people!

Hiking the Summit to Twin Lakes

One of the major benefits of living at Moran State Park is the abundance of hiking trails–almost 40 miles of trails in the 5252-acre state park. Some of the trails are only open to hikers, while others allow horses and still others permit mountain bikes in the wintertime. Because we’re based at the tower on top of Mount Constitution, the highest point in the San Juan Islands, all trails lead downhill.

And it’s a heck of a downhill. The shortest trail–that to Twin Lakes–is probably also the steepest. It descends 1289 feet to a pair of lakes a mile and a half away. The brochure describes it as “easy to difficult,” with the easy part being around the lakes themselves. It’s a challenging hike on the way back up.

The trails are well maintained, though deadfalls over the summer mean one has to step over a few of them. Come September, the local mountain biking group will return to clear the paths for winter biking, and then rangers will clear them again in the spring.

Most of the trees–lodgepole pine, Western red cedar, Western hemlock, and Douglas fir–are what I would call “old growth,” though compared to some of California’s sequoias they are probably just mere saplings. Many of them stand more than 100 feet tall, but there is little of the underbrush found in Eastern forests.

Elliott and I saw and heard a raven (though for a brief time I was convinced it was a bald eagle). An interesting fact from the Summit Learning Center: a circling group of flying vultures is called a kettle, because it resembles the bubbles in a kettle of boiling water. Otherwise, our only wildlife viewing was a curious chipmunk.

The trail down to Twin Lakes is variable. Some of the path is filled with loose rock and fairly narrow, while other sections are wider and easy for trail running (at least for this novice). There are only a couple of times where Mt. Baker can be seen. Still, the feeling of being “one with the wilderness” is everpresent.

The hike around the lake is through rocky trails, and hikers venture onto a part of the local YMCA’s Camp Orlika, which shares a border with the lakes. Kids were swimming in the lake, which we were later told was full of leeches. We took our first selfie here.

And then we started back up. I had to stop at nearly every switchback to catch my breath. As Elliott said, this is like going to the top of the Empire State Building on a handicapped ramp. We finished the hike in 2-1/4 hours (including going around the lake, stopping for photos, and so forth), and felt renewed, refreshed, and out of breath.

Last night I attended a sunset Bat Talk presented by young scientist and educator whose passion for her subject was utterly infectious. She is Rochelle Kelly, Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Biology, University of Washington. (I think of her this morning as the Bat Girl.)

This woman knows her subject, and wasn’t shy about presenting the cool, post-graduate level facts and bleeding edge science being done in the world of bat research.

There are ten different species of bats on Orcas Island. They are nocturnal flying mammals, of course. One of the species found on Orcas is also the only known species of bat found in the Hawaiian Islands.  And, yes, it is presumed that they flew there from both the American and Asian continents, because there are two distinct genetic sub-species found on Hawaii, one from Asia, and one from here.  But while bats do best with bodies of fresh water nearby to provide an environment lush with insects (most species of bats consume huge quantities of mosquitoes, spiders, and moths), they, in general, do NOT fly over large bodies of salt water.  Those Hawaiian bats are quite a mystery!

She brought in a very small suitcase about $30K dollars worth of high tech gadgets which are the tools of her trade. One piece was a small very high frequency omni-directional microphone, which could detect bat calls used for echolocation and navigation. Those sounds are “down-shifted” by a computer to a range where human hearing can detect them, and the signals are analysed and presented in a graphic fashion on a computer screen. Different species of bats can be distinguished by the wave forms they send, and the purpose of differing signals is being ferreted out: hunting, navigation and distress calls all showing differences.

Some bat calls are audible in the human range, but they are “social” calls, used for signaling one another, sometimes to identify their group, and sometimes to signal territory boundaries. These calls are in the very lowest registers the bats can produce, and you might think of them as “grumbling” sounds in a human context.

She also demonstrated an infrared camera capable of seeing  the dark brown bats as they streak across the night sky. They appear as “meteors”, or more properly as “ufos”, if they are changing direction in mid-flight.

A large part of Kelly’s research entails netting, identifying, assessing, banding and releasing bats. This is tricky work work, as the nets involved are exceedingly delicate, and can be quite large to set up. A large net can extend up to 60 feet (18m).  The bats can often “see” and avoid them, so there’s some craft involved to effectively trap specimens.

Another fun fact: some bat mothers carry their young with them in flight to protect and nurture them. Please remember, they are mammals. The research is interested in sexing the bats, so bat nipples are important to evaluate in the trapped animals.

I wasn’t sure as I set out to this event if it would be worth the lost sleep, but was delighted with all I saw and learned. Bats are fascinating, and the store of knowledge about them has grown exponentially with the research and genetic tools now available to study them.

Once Elliott got the mechanics of the RV figured out, it was time to discover how to live in it without stepping all over each other.

For example, the bed is up a short five-step ladder above the cab (see the bed above my head in yesterday’s post by Elliott). Whoever goes in first will have to climb over the other person if he or she needs to find the bathroom, 12 feet in the opposite direction–one reason to keep from drinking that third or fourth tea (or in my case, a second glass of wine…). We have to be fairly limber to just get INTO bed, much less crawl over someone on the way out in a space no larger than three or four stacked double mattresses, without heading head first down the ladder.

The refrigerator is slightly larger than a dorm fridge, and we discovered yesterday morning it has a tendency to freeze the fresh produce. Hopefully, the recent adjustment will take care of that without melting everything in the teensy freezer (current contents: two lbs. of coffee and a pint of ice cream). A small fridge is probably my biggest frustration so far, since we’ll be getting produce only about once a week at the farmers’ market–and I tend to go through a lot of produce in my cooking. So, for now, we’ll be having beans and rice, beans and pasta, beans and…more beans. I’m trying to think of it as practice for living on an imaginary sailboat for weeks on end! In the meantime, there’s more space for chilled beer–not a bad thing!

The shower is another place where space is constrained. Stand up and lift your elbows about three or four inches from your sides like a slightly demented robot. Now turn around. Yes, that’s how much space there is. That’s my foot in the shower, giving you a sense of relative size. I’m exaggerating slightly, because the shower curtain gives you a little more flexibility, but a telephone booth (remember those?) would have given Superman a bit more to work with. It’s not like I didn’t expect it to be cramped, and it’s worlds better than the one in our LeSharo simply because you CAN stand up and take a shower, but it’s a reminder how luxurious a standard bath is.

Cooking is…different. One large pot, one smaller pot, and a tiny fry pan mean a lot of one-pot meals are in our future. The large pot doubles as a salad bowl, and the colander doubles as a fruit basket to remind us to reach for fruit instead of chips and such. We also have a coffee maker (like I would live without one) and a small crock pot, and one of these cold evenings I’m going to set it up with oatmeal for in the morning. We turn on the hot water right before our shower or before we wash dishes, and then turn it off again when we’re done, and we turn on the propane stove as needed. By conserving gas, we hope to make it through the season without having to drive the ten very steep miles down to the propane supplier. Needless to say, it’s a one-cook kitchen.

Overhead storage bins provide plenty of room for our clothes, and the pantry has plenty of space as long as you don’t mind hunting over and under other items for whatever it is you need. The big pot is stored in the oven. (Hey, I have an oven! Alas, no oven-proof dishes or pots.)

As a test experience, I gotta say that living in a small RV is working out just fine.

There’s bound to be some interest from our readers about the “antique” motor home we’ve bought. It’s a 1976 American Clipper class C with a big block Dodge V-8. It showed up on a Craig’s List search for Bellingham, WA, which said it was located on Orcas Island, was in good running order, and was available for $4500 or best offer.  A little further research revealed that it had been listed a few months earlier for $6500, so had been marked down, and sitting on the market for a while.

After a few minutes on the phone with Randy Davis, who was , I think, handling the sale for a third party, I began to think it might be just what we needed.  Randy plainly stated that it was clean, and very well maintained, but had been sitting for quite a while. I asked him if it would safely make it to the top of Mount Constitution, a very challenging climb. He said he was pretty sure it would do that, but recommended that I have the brakes looked at. As it happens, Randy manages Gordy’s Garage at East Sound, Orcas Island, and would be glad to take care of that detail for us if we decided to buy.

I bit my lower lip, took a deep breath and offered him $4000, and asked if we could close the deal by mail.  I also asked if he would he be able to keep the camper there for us until we got there in late July, and what would that cost? He said that price was fine,  no problem, and no charge to store it. Deal done. Somewhere in there we also discussed that he couldn’t be certain that everything worked perfectly, but that at the price I was paying I was getting a very good machine, overall.

About doing business with Randy by phone, and with others on Orcas Island that I subsequently have called with questions, there’s this:  The people on Orcas, so far, are VERY friendly, intelligent, thoughtful, humorous, helpful and honest.

So, meet “The Clipper”:

It is extremely clean inside and out, with light wear on the interior furnishings. While being almost 40 years old, it looks new-ish. It’s significantly bigger inside than our little LeSharo back home, and with a much more comfortable floor plan.

Initial issues included a minor plumbing glitch which fixed with a $1 fitting. Also, and more seriously, the old Dometic fridge was not, at first, getting cold. It didn’t have any ammonia smell (a sure sign of total failure), so I was hopeful. A bit of fiddling with the control contacts, a few jouncy miles of driving, and it suddenly sprang into life, so much so that we had frozen cantaloupe this morning for breakfast. Other items on the “to fix” list include a small fuel pump ($14) to make the 3 kW generator work again, and a new coach water pump ($60), to make the boon-docked water supply flow.

The engine was, at first, very temperamental. The gas was old, likely a crappy ethanol mix, and vehicles hate to sit too long unused. Fifteen gallons of hi-test, and about 5 miles of driving, and it smoothed out just fine. I’ve learned that it’s important to warm it up. It stoutly climbed all the way to our home atop Mount Constitution without a stutter or a cough.

The Clipper is proving to have been a really great plan; both comfortable and satisfying. I’m very grateful to Randy Davis for helping us obtain and get settled in it. If you’re ever in East Sound and need something done to your vehicle, look him up at Gordy’s Garage, and tell him I sent ya.

Here’s a gallery of The Clipper: