canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
If you haven't been paying much attention to international news you might not have noticed that civil war in Syria took a sudden turn over the past 2 weeks. The conflict, which launched as part of the Arab Spring protests in 2011, had been at a stalemate for years. Syrian dictator Bashar Assad quickly regained control of most of his country with the help of allies Russia and Iran. Assad was utterly brutal in his punishment of those who defied him, killing more than half a million including with banned weapons such as poison gas and displacing millions of residents who fled to other countries as refugees. But in the past 10 days a new rebel alliance began capturing cities one by one across the country. This weekend rebels entered Damascus seemingly unopposed. Assad had already fled to Russia.

The rebels' timing was shrewd... or incredibly lucky. Russia, which had provided military troops, equipment, and funding to prop up Assad in years past, is stretched thin by its incredibly costly invasion of Ukraine. Iran is stretched thin by fighting Israel through its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah.

Who are the victorious rebels? The alliance seems to consist of Islamic Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and various Kurdish rebel groups that held parts of the country in the 13 year long stalemate. HTS is led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who was previously an al Qaeda leader. He says they're more inclusive now. We'll see what happens next. Sadly it's not high bar for the next Syrian government to be better than the last.
canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
Since I wrote about NATO and international politics yesterday with Sweden's bid to join NATO moving forward, a few months after Finland's bid to join moved forward, it's been in the news that Ukraine is pressing its case again to join NATO. During the NATO summit in Vilnius this week world leaders have paid lots of lip service to supporting Ukraine's defense. Some, like the US, have already put action behind their words with billions of dollars of material support, while other nations have talked big but then found bureaucratic excuses not to follow through. When it comes to NATO membership, all the talk remains positive— but as a future thing, not now. Why later?

Well, under the principle that you can't insure a burning building, NATO is a mutual-defense alliance, and Ukraine is currently in an active state of war with Russia. To admit Ukraine to NATO now would be to commit all 31 of the current NATO members to a military conflict with Russia. That sure seems unwise, doesn't it?

The thing is, maybe not. Imagine what Russia would do if suddenly 31 other countries, with significant armies and massive economies, said, "Hey, you want a piece of Ukraine? You've got to come through all of us." They would stop the war. ...Well, if they were rational, and concerned with self preservation, they would stop. Like when Khrushchev backed off during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. But it took real guts on Kennedy's part to force that confrontation. It's not clear than any NATO member country today has such guts. So instead we'll wait until Russia is finishing wrecking as much of Ukraine as it can, and then consider admitting whatever's left. If anything is left.

canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
In recent news about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Turkey dropped its opposition to Sweden joining NATO.

"LOLWUT?" you might ask. "How is Turkey's opposition to Sweden joining an alliance a matter of Russia's war on Ukraine?"

The fact is, Sweden's effort to join NATO is entirely about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Sweden, like its neighbor Finland, was happy to remain politically neutral outside of NATO for decades. Russia's (second) incursion, which started early last year, set alarm bells ringing, swinging enough popular support behind joining the Western alliance. Finland gained a clear path to join NATO in March.

Permission to join NATO requires unanimous approval from its member countries. Turkey was the last to grant approval for Finland's bid earlier this year. They demanded, and got, concessions to classify rebels opposing the autocratic rule of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as terrorists. Turkey demanded similar concessions of Sweden, which just recently granted them.... But then, in the past week, Turkey added to its demands. It wants EU membership, too.

Diplomatic negotiations managed to unblock Sweden's bid to join NATO from waiting for EU membership for Turkey. Sweden did promise to support it, it seems. Frankly I'm opposed to Turkey joining the EU. The EU is not just about geography or free trade but about shared political bedrock values. Turkey has become a sham democracy. Yes, there's voting, yes there's a parliament and a judiciary, but President Erdogan has refashioned all of them, plus the country's laws, to support his authoritarian rule.

canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
Turkey today ratified Finland's petition to join NATO. The vote in Turkish parliament, which was hardly a sure thing, now goes to president Tayyip Erdogan, who has signaled he will sign it. Erdogan's approval was also hardly a sure thing. He demanded, and won, a few concessions from Finland as a condition of the vote. Turkey is the last of 30 NATO member countries to approve Finland's petition. Finland may officially be inducted at the next NATO member meeting in July. Example news coverage: Reuters article 30 Mar 2023.

This may sound like wonky, unimportant international news, so let me put it in context. It's about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.


  1. One of Russia's stated goals for invading Ukraine was to prevent a country on its border (i.e., Ukraine) from joining NATO.

  2. Russia's invasion prompted more countries to want to join Russia; principally Sweden and Finland.

  3. Finland joining NATO greatly increases the Russia's border with NATO members. See map below.

  4. Own goal: Russia.


Russia's Invasion of Ukraine Pushes More Nations to Join NATO (map adapted from BBC image)

Prior to Russia's invasion in 2022 the country had very little border with NATO states. There was a bit with Estonia and Latvia. Counting in Kaliningrad, it shares a bit of border with Lithuania and Poland. And if you consider Belarus basically part of Russia (it has basically a sock-puppet government) it has more border with Lithuania and Poland.

One of Russia's stated goals/justifications for invading Ukraine in 2022 was to limit its border with NATO. Russia contended (i) Ukraine was going to join NATO, (ii) NATO represents a military threat to Russia, and therefore (iii) it had to annex Ukraine to keep NATO further away.

Claim (i) was false. Ukraine did not want to join NATO— though it started talking about it more seriously as Russia built up for the invasion. Claim (iii) is ridiculous logic as if Russia did annex Ukraine it would add borders with NATO member states Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland.

...Not that any of this would justify invasion even if it were true, but it didn't even make sense. And now Russia has achieved the opposite of its stated goal. Finland and Sweden, which were content being outside of NATO prior to 2022, petitioned to join. Now with Finland's membership imminent (Sweden's is still blocked on approval from Turkey) there soon will be hundreds of new miles of NATO member countries on Russia's border. Russia's aggression provoked the opposite of one of its stated goals.



canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
Today marks the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The war, still ongoing, began on 24 Feb 2022 when Russia rolled tanks and soldiers across the border with the intent to crush Ukraine's government and annex the country's land.

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. It's evident now that Russia made two enormous miscalculations in invading Ukraine.

— First, Russia massively underestimated the resolve of the Ukrainian people. Far from welcoming the Russians— though the argument that the Ukrainians would do so was part of Russian propaganda— Ukrainians fought back, tenaciously. The Russian military, which prepared and moved as if it anticipated being able to sack the capital, Kyiv, within days, instead got bogged down in the country's east. Supplies ran out and supply lines fell apart. Even as Russia switched from a classic military campaign to essentially a terrorist campaign deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, Ukrainians have not been cowed.

— Second, Russia massively underestimated the will of the international community to push back against them. The US led EU member countries and a few other western-style democracies in enacting punishing sanctions against Russia. That happened, too, after Russia's annexation of Crimea (a part of Ukraine) in 2014... but what's different this time is that the sanctions have stuck. In 2014 EU members abandoned sanctions after a few months and resumed trade with Russia. Not only are the sanctions sticking this time but countries are also pouring military aid into Ukraine to help it defend its sovereignty in the face of this naked, unprovoked aggression.



canyonwalker: Malign spirits in TV attempt to kill viewer (tv)
In my previous blog about the HBO series Chernobyl I wrote about "The Cost of Lies, The Futility of Truth". Scientist Valery Legasov led the Soviet delegation at a UN IAEA conference held in Vienna in August 1986. As I noted previously Legasov shaded the truth. He not only left out of his report the fact of design flaws in the design of the Soviet RBMK 1000 reactor, of which there were at least a dozen other copies still running, but denied it repeatedly when asked by international scientists and journalists. When the facts of this came out a few years later the IAEA rewrote its report, holding design flaws rather than operator error the chief cause of the explosion. Yet despite his dishonesty he was lauded as a hero at the time by the world.

How was it that he was praised so much while misleading the world?

Valery Legasov presenting a report on Chernobyl to the IAEA in Vienna, Aug 1986 (file photo)
Valery Legasov— the real Legasov, not the actor in the 2019 HBO miniseries— at the UN IAEA conference on Chernobyl in Austria in August 1986


Understand that expectations for honesty from the USSR were low. Remember, the Soviets weren't even going to admit the reactor blew up in the first place. It was spewing as much radiation as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki every 12 hours, and they didn't want to tell anyone. They only admitted it 2½ days later after a nuclear power plant in Sweden over 600 miles away detected the radiation.

Interesting aside: As I understand it, an alarm at the Swedish Forsmark plant was triggered when radiation was detected on a plant employee's shoe. The employee was arriving at the plant, though; so authorities knew the radiation source was outside the plant.

And even once the Soviets admitted something happened at Chernobyl they downplayed it. They said only that "an accident occurred" that "damaged" one of the reactors. The rest of the world only understood how bad it was from measuring the radioactive fallout across Western and Northern Europe and from observing the site & activity around it through spy satellites and other forms of secret intelligence.

Plus, when the Soviets did acknowledge a problem at Chernobyl, they followed their brief & vague description with a whataboutism screed criticizing Three Mile Island and other nuclear accidents in Western countries. This approach of deny, distract, counterattack was a standard technique of Soviet propaganda. Back in the late '80s and early 90s books on communication styles referred to them as "Soviet-style negotiation". If these techniques seem familiar now it's because Donald Trump has used them publicly pretty much every day since he announced his first run for the presidency in 2015.

So yeah, Legasov was more forthcoming than expected at Vienna— but still didn't say anything other countries hadn't already figured out. Western European nations were measuring radiation in their own countries. Scientists could extrapolate from that how bad the situation must be. And spy satellites confirmed additional details. Legasov's presentation was remarkable primarily that he didn't deny the obvious facts. But still it made him unpopular with many of his peers & many government officials back home.

People who remember that era in Soviet relations might say, "Well, wasn't there Glasnost going on?" Although General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev mentioned glasnost (literally, "openness") when he became chief executive in 1985 it wasn't until 1986— specifically after August 1986— that he spoke of it as actual policy direction. It's believed that it was through seeing the handling of the Chernobyl cleanup and communication with the world community that Gorbachev recognized it was crucial to do to preserve the country's remaining power.



canyonwalker: Malign spirits in TV attempt to kill viewer (tv)
The fourth episode of HBO's miniseries Chernobyl (2019) is entitled "The Happiness of All Mankind". It's a slogan from a propaganda banner left hanging at a civic center in one of the towns in the exclusion zone near Chernobyl that were evacuated after the nuclear reactor explosion. Showrunner Craig Mazin notes that the banner is described in first-hand accounts from liquidators as described in Svetlana Alexievich's book, Voices from Chernobyl.

"Liquidators" are what the hundreds of thousands of men sent to Chernobyl in the weeks and months after the explosion called themselves. If "liquidators" sounds more ominous than "cleanup crew"... well, it is. I'll get to that in a subsequent blog.

First I want to write about the opening scene of episode 4. Soldiers are evacuating people from the 30km exclusion zone. Not everyone wants to go.

An old woman refuses to evacuate in "Chernobyl" (2019)In this scene one soldier confronts a babushka who doesn't want to leave. Babushka, BTW, is a transliteration of the Russian word for grandmother. It appears in Polish, too, as a borrowed word. It's used in both languages more loosely than in English as a term for any older woman.

Babushka doesn't want to leave. The soldier tells she must and explains it's for her own safety. She refuses again, giving a litany of all the deadly hardships she's lived through on this land: the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin, the Holodomor, World War II, etc.

While she's arguing with the soldier she continues milking her cow. The soldier grabs the milk pail from her, steps outside the barn, and pours it out on the ground. BTW, the soldier is not doing this to punish her for disobedience. The reality is cows in this region are eating irradiated grass, and their milk is dangerously irradiated. It's poisonous to drink. That's why people have to be evacuated.

But the babushka is undeterred. She picks up the empty bucket, sets it back under the cow, and starts milking again.

The soldier, seemingly in a fit of anger and her stubborn disobedience, pulls out his pistol. We hear the BANG! of a shot— followed by WHUMPF! as the body hits the ground.

Spoiler! (Open to read more...) )

It's worth calling out a word the babushka used in this scene. A single word. Holodomor. The miniseries doesn't explain it but instead leaves it there like a clue, an easter egg for curious people to use as the starting point for further research. And OMG, what a terrible easter egg. Holodomor was a genocide Stalin perpetrated against the people of Ukraine in the early 1930s by starving them. It's estimated that up to 5 million people died.

For this episode, for this scene, that background puts into better context why a person who lived through that isn't afraid of invisible radiation or a soldier with a pistol.

Next: Find out what else they shoot in Our Goal is the Happiness of All Mankind



canyonwalker: Malign spirits in TV attempt to kill viewer (tv)
1:23:45 is not just a series of consecutive numbers. It is a time that will live in infamy. It is the hour (and minute and second) of the morning on April 26, 1986 when reactor #4 at the Chernobyl power plant in the former USSR exploded. It is also the title of episode 1 of Chernobyl, a 5-part HBO miniseries we binged last Friday.

Chernobyl, an HBO miniseries (2019)

Episode 1 begins with the main character of docudrama, scientist Valery Legasov, who had been appointed to lead scientific aspects of the cleanup and containment of the nuclear accident. It is 2 years after the explosion. Legasov is recording memoirs on audio tape about the true culprits of the disaster. "What is the cost of lies?" he asks rhetorically. He rails against the culture of lying, and knowingly repeating lies, when it's more politically expedient than acknowledging hard truths.

Though this opening scene takes place in 1988 there's an obvious parable for today, 34 years later. Lies, and whole political regimes that depend on constant lying, are very much a part of 2022, from modern day Russia with its absurd propaganda attempting to justify its invasion of Ukraine, to the US itself, where former president Donald Trump, other Republican leaders, and propagandist personalities on Fox News promote conspiracy theories daily.

Just over a week ago Merriam-Webster named gaslighting its Word of the Year. Gaslighting very much describes how Soviet officials began suppressing facts about Chernobyl beginning seconds after it occurred. It also describes what's happening politically in the US for several years. When Trump says things like, "Don't believe what the media is telling you; they're 'fake news'" that's gaslighting.

So, what is the cost of lies? As concerns Chernobyl, it was the explosion that blew up reactor #4, spewing radiation and radioactive material in greater quantities than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was an accident that killed untold thousands, injured possibly hundreds of thousands, and put literal millions at risk.

As concerns the US, one cost of lies in the insurrection on January 6, 2021. It's chilling to note, though, that the miniseries wasn't talking specifically about that. The show aired in 2019, over a year before the insurrection. The show's opening soliloquy warns us about what could happen. Now some of it already has.

Update: keep reading: 1:23:45. Lies & Heroic Sacrifice.


Chernobyl

Dec. 3rd, 2022 06:10 pm
canyonwalker: Malign spirits in TV attempt to kill viewer (tv)
Last night Hawk and I watched the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. It's about about the 1986 nuclear accident at the Soviet power plant Chernobyl near the city of Pripyat in what is today Ukraine.

Chernobyl, an HBO miniseries (2019)

The miniseries aired in 2019. It's been on my watch list basically since then. As a scientifically educated person I've always been curious to learn more about what happened there. I knew from cursory reading years ago that the gist of it was that operators disabled or ignored multiple safety systems and protocols while running a horribly misconceived "experiment". I looked forward to learning more about it through this series critically acclaimed for its accuracy and depth of research.

Chernobyl spans five episodes, each about an hour long. We surprised ourselves by bingeing all five in one sitting Friday night, staying up until 2am Saturday. I'll post thoughts episode by episode soon.

Update: keep reading: 1:23:45. The Cost of Lies.

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
When I arrived in Las Vegas yesterday I went to my hotel before the afternoon portion of the trade show. This trip I'm staying at the Conrad hotel, in the ResortsWorld casino complex. It's on the Strip. Surprisingly I found a really good for it when I booked several weeks ago. Usually all the big Strip hotels are $500/night during this trade show.

Conrad is part of Hilton Hotels, so I actually checked in electronically while at the airport waiting for my flight. I picked out a room on the 57th floor.

My room at the Conrad in Las Vegas (Nov 2022)

This is the highest room I've ever had in a hotel. Most hotels don't build above about 40 floors, even in dense super-cities like New York and Tokyo. And this one has 66 floors.

I picked such a high room for the views. "Will I be able to see all the way to Los Angeles?" I mused as I headed to Vegas. "Will I be able to see Russia from my window?"

Alas, the views on Monday afternoon were gross, with the sun in the south shining through my window, washing everything out in a winter afternoon haze. The dirt on the outside of the window didn't help, either.

I did enjoy a nicer view in the evening after getting back from the show and dinner with my team:

Nighttime view from my room at the Conrad in Las Vegas (Nov 2022)

Also this morning, when I (ugh) woke up before dawn and got to enjoy the sunrise from the 57th floor:

Morning view from my room at the Conrad in Las Vegas (Nov 2022)

One drawback to the 57th floor— other than that the elevators take a while— is that it's too high. I'm higher than just about everything. Those 1980s era Strip mega-hotels, the Mirage and Caesar's Palace, look small from up here.

Also, no, the 57th floor isn't high enough to see Russia from my window. Nor even Los Angeles.


canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
Mihkail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died today. He was 91.

For those of us who were kids of the 80s, or already adults in the 80s, Gorbachev was a household name. He became the Soviet leader in 1985, at the height of the Cold War. Turn on TV news any night and you'd see news involving the USSR and/or Gorbachev.

From a Western perspective, Gorbachev brought stability to the fraught US-USSR relationship of the Cold War. At age 54 he was the youngest Soviet premier, rising to the position after 3 predecessors in 3 years had died in office under circumstances deliberately obfuscated by the ruling party. Even with the USSR being the US's sworn enemy, it felt marginally more reassuring to see that it was at least led by an actual, living person instead of a secret committee publishing obtuse communiques in someone else's name.

Gorbachev soon became a darling of the West as he introduced the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). With the USSR more willing to sit down for nuclear negotiations with the West, and with sporadic humanitarian progress such as the release of political prisoners and allowing some religious liberties. BTW I say sporadic because the progress was not steady. There were backslides, including times Gorbachev sent troops to crush rebellions. I see this through the lens of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous observation, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

From the birds-eye view of history I see Gorbachev as a wise but flawed reformist. He knew that the Soviet Union, as it was structured coming out of the 1970s, was doomed. Although it held a lead in certain areas of manufacturing it was losing ground to the US and Western Europe in every economic area because of the inherent inefficiencies of its command-and-control system. Ronald Reagan's foreign policy that leaned in from containment to something more resembling rollback would hasten its demise. Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall and strove to reformulate the USSR to survive. He misjudged things, though— perhaps, most notably, that all the USSR's satellite states hated the USSR— and lost control of the broad changes he set in motion. Mikhail Gorbachev ended his term as premier with his announcement of the dissolution of the USSR on December 25, 1991.

In the 30 years since then and now, Gorbachev has been remembered more fondly in the West than in Russia. To the West, he's the leader who helped "end the Cold War without firing a shot." To many Russians, he's the horribly failed leader who destroyed their country's position as a glorious and powerful world leader. ...The latter view, of course, has been seeded by Vladimir Putin, Russia's autocratic leader of the past 20 years, who repeatedly boasts of the glory of the USSR and czarist Russia.

RIP, Mikhail Gorbachev. You were far from perfect, but right now we could sure use another leader like you.

Update: comments will be screened. I will not be giving a platform to strangers peddling drive-by disinformation.

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
Gas prices are rising as Russia's war in Ukraine has raised concerns about supply problems. Many nations have responded with sanctions on Russia, and some oil companies are suspending operations in/with Russia. In just one week oil increased from $96.xx per barrel to $115. Closer to my own pocketbook, when I went to fill up gas in my car today I found that prices at the pump had increased $0.70/gallon since Monday. That's more than a 15% increase. I wish I'd gassed up Thursday when the increase was only $.30.

UPDATE: Gas prices rose 5 cents later in the day Saturday and another 5 cents Sunday morning. As of Sunday they're now 80 cents/gallon higher than 6 days earlier.

UPDATE 2: No, I'm not driving to the gas station twice a day just to check prices. All comparisons here are for the nearest Costco gas station. Gas prices are displayed in Costco's app. I've been checking the app periodically out of curiosity.

UPDATE 3: Prices rose yet again on Monday afternoon, though this time by only 4 cents. Still, that's 84 cents/gallon in 7 days, an increase of 20% in one week.

canyonwalker: Cheers! (wine tasting)
People are reacting in ways big and small to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. One of them is throwing out vodka. Several states have banned the sale of Russian vodka, and various bar owners have posted video of themselves pouring bottles of vodka down the drain. Should you throw away your vodka, too, in solidarity? Probably not, because your vodka's probably not Russian.

Many prominent brands of vodka in the US have never been Russian. For example, Absolut and Svedka are from Sweden. Ketel One is from Netherlands. Grey Goose is French. Belvedere is from Poland. Tito's and Skyy are American.

Even popular vodkas with Russian-sounding names are not actually Russian. Smirnoff is made in America now. Stolichnaya, the brand my Russian-native friends in college always bought— Shtoly, as they called it— moved production in 2000 to Latvia, a NATO member country. Years ago these brands were Russian. Consolidation in the beverage industry into a small number of multinational giants changed that.

canyonwalker: I'm holding a 3-foot-tall giant cheese grater - Let's make America grate again! (politics)
President Biden today is catching a lot of heat for, basically, speaking plainly about the situation with Russia massing troops on Ukraine's border.

He made apparently two missteps in public comments. One, that he thinks it likely Russia will invade Ukraine. Two, that the US and EU will respond strongly to a "major" incursion— implying, by omission, that a minor incursion would be tolerated.

(1) is a statement that I think anybody who's paying attention to the situation would have to agree is true. Putin has been building toward this for years with actions out in the open— including, not least of all, actually invading Ukraine in 2014 and annexing Crimea, which Russia still holds. In recent months he's set up all the same conditions all over again, plus has apparently attacked Ukraine's civilian infrastructure via information warfare. Sadly this is a situation where plain talk freaks people out because only vapid happy talk, like "We're going to stop Putin," is deemed palatable.

(2) is an accurate statement of realpolitik. Again, not the vapid happy talk people have become conditioned to expect, but a sober assessment of what likely what will happen if/when (1) comes to pass. I mean, again, Russia annexing Crimea already happened 7 years ago. We've got experience to draw from, here. Western democracies deplored the military attack and enacted a bunch of sanctions, initially. In the ensuring months and years most removed those sanctions and resumed doing business with Russia whenever there was a nontrivial benefit to them in doing so. Plus, outside North America and the EU few nations if any cared enough even to impose ineffectual sanctions. People need to understand that currently there's no meaningful deterrent to Russian aggression.

canyonwalker: My other car is a pair of hiking boots (in beauty I walk)
Olympic Peninsula Travelog #10
Olympic National Park, WA - Sat, 4 Sep 2021. 1pm.

The weird thing about climbing a mountain is that one you get to the top the views are all missing something.... You can't see the mountain. You're accustomed to seeing it dominate the skyline, and all of a sudden... nope. It's under your feet now. Fortunately the flip side of being on top of a mountain is you can see everything else.

Unicorn Peak and beyond from Hurricane Hill, Olympic National Park (Sep 2021)

Looking north from Hurricane Hill I see down across the twin spires of Unicorn Peak and Unicorn Horn to the Straight of Juan de Fuca. With Hurricane Hill at elev. 5,757' this is more than a vertical mile. The town on the near shore is Port Angeles, where we're staying for 3 nights. Across the straight, on the left, is Vancouver Island. The city on its shore is Victoria, Canada, the capital of the province of British Columbia. The large island on the right farther away is San Juan Island, part of Washington, US. The dead trees on the near ridge are left from a fire that burned in 2008.

View of Mt. Angeles from atop Hurricane Hill, Olympic National Park (Sep 2021)

Turning slightly to the right I see Mt. Angeles. It's been there, over my right shoulder, pretty much the whole hike up to this point.

From the top of Hurricane Hill we explored out a bit further on the ridge. It descends gently for a bit before dropping off steeply. We went to the edge of the steep area to take a look around.

View back up to Hurricane Hill with the Elwha Valley and Pacific Ocean beyond (Olympic National Park, Sep 2021)

Here the trail back to the west shows the summit of Hurricane Hill. Beyond it is the Elwha Valley, a steep drop of more than a vertical mile. Beyond the ridges on the far side of Elwha Valley is the Pacific Ocean.

So, having show view to the north, east, and west, what's left is... the south. And you know what's there. Right? It's been there the whole time. Mt. Olympus.

Homo Sapiens frolic atop Hurricane Hill in Olympic National Park (Sep 2021)

And speaking of things that have been here the whole time, fellow Homo Sapiens have been constant companions on this trek, as well. Some outdoors writers I've had the misfortune of buying books from consider people a pest and bad-mouth any hiking trail that's too popular. Many hikes are popular precisely because they are so beautiful. I don't begrudge my fellow hikers the beauty in which we walk. Plus, it's fun seeing other people enjoy themselves, like the hikers checking their watch to learn "It's Mountain Time!" or these folks, above, posing for their own picture. In beauty we walk. Together.

Update: This hike is over but the adventure continues! Read about Obstruction Point in my next blog.

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