Hiking to Cedar Creek Falls

North Cascades Travelog #8
Mazama, WA - Sun, 3 Sep 2023, 1pm.

What do you do when the trails you wanted to hike are on fire? You find somewhere safer to hike! Fortunately we'd already made a list of several trails we wanted to hike in the area, so after crossing off the top few there were still 3-4 left. Tops on this list is the Cedar Creek Trail to Cedar Falls.



We started the hike under graying skies. Partly it's because there's cloud cover building over the North Cascades (it would rain lightly late in the afternoon) and partly it's because there's wildfire smoke lingering high in the sky. Still, rays of sunlight would occasionally break through.



While fires are still burning (or at least smoldering) higher up in the mountains west of here, this area shows fire damage— from a fire that burned 2 or 3 years ago. Some of the bigger trees survived the fire. The smaller ones were reduced to charred husks, if they weren't burned entirely as the undergrowth was. But one aspect of fire is that it's part of a natural regrowth cycle. With the old forest canopy mostly gone, wildflowers and bushes have regrown rapidly.

There's one particular wildflower we're seeing a lot on the trail today that I haven't been able to identify. It's got small, purple flowers late in the season and plentiful wisps that have turned into cottony, dandelion-like puffs. Hawk said it's Russian thistle weed, but none of the pictures I've found online match what this plant looks like. (Among other things, Russian thistle seems to grow in ground-hugging clumps, while this wildflower grows in stems 3-4 feet high.)

As pleasurable as it was to walk among the wildflowers, our main reason for the hike was to see Cedar Creek Falls. Oddly it's not marked on the trail! But after about 2 miles of hiking we could hear the din of water falling not far off the trail, so we followed a use trail to explore it.



This is what I'll call Middle Falls on Cedar Creek. As I've explored around the rocky perches above the creek I've spotted a cascade and a smaller falls upstream, and another, larger-seeming falls downstream. It's time to do some more exploring to see if we can get to them— stay tuned!

Update: pictures of falls galore in my next blog!

A New Covid Surge?

For weeks now I've seen scattered articles in my newsfeed about how Covid cases are on the rise. What's happening? Well, it's hard to tell because so much of the tracking infrastructure we (the US) built up in 2020 and 2021 has been dismantled. And it's not just in the states run by governors and legislatures who mock and dismiss Covid out of hand as a political hoax. Even responsible states, NGOs, and our federal government have accepted Covid as just another part of the background radiation of life. The case counting websites I used to check, sponsored by reputable organizations, are gone. Health organizations are reduced to reading the proverbial tea leaves now... which includes reading literal poop trails, as analyzing the virus content in sewage is sadly one of the better barometers we have left.

Tracking the spread of the virus in this new reality is tough. News articles call attention to outbreaks— a school system in one city here, a hospital in another city over there, a waste treatment plant somewhere else. We've devolved from comprehensive statistics to, basically, anecdotes.

In a world where anecdotes are all we seem to have anymore it's hard to tell how concerned I should be. My own anecdote, based on the people around me, is that there's nothing to worry about. I'm not sick. My partner's not sick. Very few, if any, of our friends have gotten Covid or Covid-like symptoms in the past two months. Of course, we're all on the responsible end of the spectrum. I haven't bothered talking much with relatives or colleagues who refused to get vaccinated. Though last I heard most of them were on their second or third round of having Covid, anyway, so at least they've built up some antibodies the hard way.

The surge we may or may not be having right now is caused by a new strain that has a name. Actually it has multiple names. I've seen it designated EG-5 and Eris; those are the same. I've also seen references to BA.2.86, a subvariant of Omicron, and XBB; these are apparently not the same. The plethora of names being tossed around in anecdotal news articles makes it even harder to determine whether I should start taking additional precautions.

Maybe I should give up like virtually everybody else and simply accept Covid as part of the background radiation of life.