Carved a pumpkin yet?
Views of Port Angeles
We had better than usual view of Port Angeles last Friday when we took the morning ferry to Victoria, B.C. Before the clouds settled on the city it was possible to see it as it climbs upward from Port Angeles Harbor. Port Angeles is about 15 miles west of Sequim.
This is a view of a more easterly residential area of Port Angeles that rests on a bluff above the Strait of Juan de Fuca. As you can see, the snowcap has returned. Our weather is gradually getting cold and wet enough that it looks as if the snow will stick around.
Preferred view
I like to see animals when I’m out and about. I much prefer a scene like this to side-by-side or tall buildings. Or a mall…even if I need a pair of shoes.
Cattails in the sunset
The cattails at Dungeness Recreation Area grew taller this summer than any year since we’ve been here, helped, I think, by flooding from a nearby irrigation canal. The “dusk” setting on my new little (lightweight!) camera gave me the first passable silhouette in the past two months I’ve tried to photograph them.
The gourd people
I discovered these characters in an old railroad luggage wagon at the Old Mill Cafe in Carlsborg earlier this month, dressed up for an evening on the town.
The Elwah Klallam Heritage Center
One of our local Klallam Native American tribes is the Elwah, a group that lived for centuries in the Port Angeles area. This is their Port Angeles heritage center, a center for local tribal and community events. Since last summer it has also been home to a small collection of artifacts from an ancient Klallam village called Tse-whit-zen.
The artifacts were discovered in 2003 during construction in the Port Angeles Harbor area. In addition to remains of over 300 people, archaeologists and tribal members exhumed 80,000 artifacts, including items with fine carvings and functional pieces such as bone hooks, harpoon points, and a spindle whorl. Fourteen of these items are on display in the Heritage Center in six display cases on each side of the main gallery. The public is welcome to view the displays although the tribe respectfully requests they not be photographed.
The community center space is very attractive and now enhanced by the return of ancestral items from a village that was occupied for at least 2,700 years. The Tse-whit-zen site has been called one of the largest and most important archaeological sites in Washington state.
Trees are us
Washington is “The Evergreen State.” Some time ago I heard on the radio that Washington state has an average of 250 trees per resident. I like that. Kind of feels like Mother Earth’s got my back.