The rain seemed to follow me where ever I went! Though the San Juan Islands are more than 230 miles north of Mount Saint Helens, I spent another day in the rain! The San Juan Islands encompasses about 450 islands, rocks and pinnacles in the northern reaches of Washington’s Puget Sound, with approximately 1,000 acres of land spread across many…

The morning Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980 I was in Wichita, Kansas, helping plan my grandmother’s funeral. I don’t remember much about the day it erupted, but I do remember seeing the photos of a vast gray ocean of ash with tree trunks stripped of their branches and greens strewn about. It looked like someone dropped a box of…

The Trail of Ten Falls. Just seeing the intriguing name in a blip on the internet put the trail on my “Want-to-See” list. Do you have one of those lists? A part of me is pulled, like a magnet to metal, with the desire to experience and see everything, so when I run across something interesting, it goes on my…

Seeing the world under our feet has always been intriguing to me! Venturing into caves, mostly through tours, is something I have done since before my children were born. In fact, I went into premature labor with my third child after slinking down a hole my large pregnant belly barely fit through into a huge round cathedral of a cave…

Though fossil records show these giants once grew naturally in many areas of the Northern Hemisphere, through climate and environmental changes they now only grow naturally in a 40-mile-wide-by-450-mile-long swath from southern Oregon to southern Monterey County, California. They are so immense, they live in three climatic zones – the base in one set of conditions, the stem in another,…

Did you know there is a Highway 1 that follows the Pacific coastline all the way from Southern California to Northern California? And you can continue driving the coast all the way to the Olympic Peninsula in northern Washington by transitioning onto 101? And that there is a Highway 1 that follows the Atlantic coast from the tip of Key…