Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

I'm making only one promise about this trip report: it's going to take a while to get to the end, because I'm heading out for more adventures and have no expectation of getting all the photos edited, let alone posts created, before I leave. August 9-14 (actually 8-15 counting the trip up and back), two friends and I joined a small group kayaking adventure out of Port McNeill, BC, to the Broughton Archipelago. The trip started, for me, with a rendezvous at my house at 7:30 a.m. to drive to the ferry in Canada. We gave ourselves tons of time for the border crossing, which in fact took only about 5 minutes. I wasn't taking chances--we had a ferry to catch. I don't take a lot of photos of ferries, but this line in the water was particularly striking. It's the flow from the Fraser River refusing to mingle with the waters of the Salish Sea. After the 2 hour ferry ride, we had another 4 hour drive to Pt. McNeill--it really is a long way from anywhere! In the evening th...

Before I start, I want to share this quote from  Wintering,  by Katherine May. I think it applies to our creative dry spells as much as to anything.  “We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”  We all have our winters. Go ahead and rest and retreat for a time. My big time of retreat from my work is not the actual winter season, but the summer/fall hiking season. I'm not sure I can claim it as quite the same sort of thing, but my time in the mountains and desert is healing and rejuvenating to my creative self as well as the rest of me (as if they were separate things!). So I have been learning to accept that my work gets put aside, and that's okay, though I could manage the timing better (only I don't seem able to, so...).  Okay, so what have I been doing, to make my Wednesday post so late?  1. Writing. Which, in this case, is revising, editing, and polishing. The book i...

Last weekend I shared pictures from a 24-hour backpacking trip to Island Lake. Today, I have a few from a dayhike and another overnight near the same area. Next week, look for a few teasers from a week of kayaking in the Broughtons (Canada, near the north end of Vancouver Island). In late June I took a friend out for a hike to Mason Lake, which actually is very close to Island Lake (the trail is one of the options for reaching it).  You spend a long time climbing through the forest.   Bear grass along the trail.   Eventually the trail breaks out into a clear area as you approach the ridgeline--and Mt. Rainier begins to appear over the hills! Columbine near the lake.   Mason Lake. Even on a weekday this one is busy, with people swimming and having a good time. I was kind of sorry I hadn't come prepared to swim (I mean, I am always prepared to swim, but there were too many people around to make skinny-dipping a good option).   About a month later, I loaded my pack...

Maybe due to indolence, maybe to spending most of my weekends selling books, or to my protracted struggle to get my new WIP (Work In Progress) to cooperate, I haven't gotten up to the local mountains as much as I intended this summer. To be precise, I've done one dayhike and two quick overnighters. In this post, and maybe one for next weekend, I'm sharing some of the photos from those trips. Today I'm featuring an overnight hike to Island and Rainbow Lakes, just off of I90. The I90 corridor is hugely popular with Seattlites for the obvious reason that it's a super-short drive. I worked all morning, left my house about 1 p.m., and was on the trail by 2:15. It's hard to beat that. There are several ways to get to Island Lake; I chose the one with the least elevation gain and maybe the least crowded TH. Starting that late in the day meant I had no trouble getting parking, as the early hikers were already leaving. It helped that it was a Wednesday, not a weekend. Ab...