Dam party? No so fast

“Do you want to go to a party?” my fancy friend asked.

Of course, I want to rock ‘n‘ roll all night and party every day.

That's a job description for a wilderness gossip columnist.

Then I found out it was the dam removal party put on by the National Park Service.

Bummer.

In the course of my work I have been kicked out of Olympic National Park so many times I have a permanent stain on my trousers.

It's a bum rap.

In my own defense I can only say that no Olympic marmots have ever been harmed, electro-shocked or molested in the writing of this column. I’ve never transported Canadian fishers equipped with radio collars across county lines just to mess with the biologists tracking them. 

I have never been charged or convicted of impersonating an endangered species. 

I am a sensitive woodland creature trying to share my love of nature and the knowledge gained from 50 years of fishing. That is a blink of an eye in the life of a river but in that short amount of time, our rivers have been subjected to an environmental genocide that makes it seem unlikely the fish will survive another 50 years.

The Elwha dam removal project may be the biggest thing to hit Port Angeles since the coming of the railroad. Those were the good old days, when Port Angeles had a salmon fishing industry and a yearly salmon derby.

These days the salmon fishing industry has been replaced by the salmon restoration industry.

The dam removal celebrations will bring together celebrities, politicians and the best scientists money can buy in an attempt to restore the most pristine ecosystem in the continental United States. This is a risky undertaking where to quote another great American, former Vice President Dan Quayle, “If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.”

We are told that taking the dams out of the Elwha is a grand experiment since no one really knows what is going to happen to the sediments behind the dams or if the fish can still make it up the river.

The lower Elwha dam had a blowout shortly after it was built in 1913. They blasted 40,000 cubic yards of rock into the channel to plug the hole. It's still there. 

In the early '70s there was a landslide that blocked the Elwha up in Convolution Canyon. This is also called the Grand Canyon of the Elwha, located upstream from Hume's Ranch. The slide blocked the river and formed a small lake that was fantastic fishing until it was washed out by a flood.  Unfortunately this slide occurred deep within the National Park so there were no loggers to blame and it can happen again at any time.

The Elwha dam removal project is an experiment, like one of those old black and white horror movies where the scientists are out to lunch while the monster they created slowly comes back to life. 

It is a double blind study that will measure the unintended consequences of the placebo effect. It will test a theory that contends taking the dams out of the Elwha will bring the salmon back when rivers without dams don't have salmon either. I hope so.

We sincerely hope that the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe can do what no others have accomplished on the Olympic Peninsula, restore an historic run of fish on just one of our rivers.

We hope that despite the best efforts of scientists and politicians, salmon will be able to return to the Elwha anyway.

Until that happens it's too soon to party.

A losing elk season

I hope your elk season is going better than mine has so far.

Things started out bad and got worse after that. 

The first thing I did to get ready for elk season was to stick a fish hook into my trigger finger. Of course sticking chunks of metal in your body is considered fashionable these days but, piercing with fishhooks will never catch on.  Once you set the hook on yourself, the phrase catch and release takes on a whole new meaning.

Rain and wind are good.  The cold has a numbing effect that can come in handy later. 

People who claim you should push a fish hook right on through your flesh until the barb sticks out and then you can cut it off, work with smaller hooks than I do. Pushing a hook through your hand is a job I would leave to professionals. It’s much faster and easier to yank the hook out with a pair of pliers in a grinding circular motion while chewing on a bullet.

Just my luck it was elk season.  

Even if I saw an elk I wasn’t sure I could get any trigger time with a bunged-up finger.  It was a shame since I had spent a lot of time getting ready for elk season this year.  

The best way to prepare for elk season would be to get a job in the woods. Loggers make the clear cuts that the elk love. Elk like to stand around and watch loggers work. Loggers always know where the elk are.

Logging keeps you in shape. Once hunting season starts the loggers hunt the elk so hard they run the hair off their bellies. It’s almost not fair if they have a gun. 

I wanted to get an elk but not enough to go logging. I had an empty freezer not a death wish. 

So instead of going logging I watched a lot of elk-hunting videos. They all stressed the importance of set up and execution, whatever that means. I think it meant you had to hunt on a private ranch somewhere in the Rockies where tame elk stroll around like dairy cows just waiting to get blasted after a word from our sponsor.

The videos impressed me with the importance of waiting for the right trophy. You don’t want to ruin your season by shooting the first cookie-cutter six-point bull elk that walks along. No, you want a real trophy. Something that reflects your own virility and shames your friends into thinking they are watching the wrong videos. 

Opening day found us driving up a road on the West End. There were loggers nearby so we knew we were in the right area. Our plan was to locate the loggers, bait them with beer and smoked salmon, then mingle.

You want to be very careful while hunting around loggers. Firearm safety is extremely important. If you accidently shoot a logger and they find out about it they can become very agitated.   

We came upon a log-truck driver tightening his load. We asked him if he’d seen any really big elk, with seven points or more.  He said no but he was probably just saving them for himself. 

We drove away with a sense of failure and frustration that only got worse when we spotted the game warden.  

We thought we were in for it. There was a day when the game wardens would have ripped us apart for looking for … game.  

He kept on driving without even flashing his lights. 

One look must have told him we were losers.

Thanks God for rain

Say what you want about all the rain we have had lately but we need it. High water in the rivers cleans the gravel where the salmon spawn.  A flood washes more gravel down the river in soft beds that are easy digging for the salmon to build their nests in. 

The rain acts like a filter in the atmosphere giving us some of the purest air on the planet.  Living on the Olympic Peninsula, we tend to take clean air and water for granted, that is until it’s gone.

 You can go without water for a few days but we will not last long without air.

The American Lung Association says that 64,000 Americans die prematurely every year from breathing polluted air. That might be just another meaningless national statistic until you watch it happen to a friend firsthand.

He had kicked cancer but, as the old saying goes, “You should have seen his foot.” Beating cancer gave him pneumonia. Things did not look good.   He wanted to go fishing. Maybe it was part of what they call the bucket list since he was due to kick it at any time.

He traveled with a van load of oxygen bottles but he said he didn’t need one that morning. The air was clean and he was breathing fine. We were going fishing.

We launched on the Hoh River on one of those fall mornings when the sky was blue and crystal clear.

We caught a big bright silver right off the bat.  I was taking a picture of my friend with his fish when I noticed a small white cloud on a distant ridgetop. It was no big deal at the time but along about noon the cloud had turned brown and ugly.

It sank into the valley and turned the air into a blue haze. We found ourselves under a thick blanket of a toxic fog of burning stumps, plastic and earth that soon had my friend choking to near death.

We got off the river. He never came back.

Within a day the smoke of this and many other fires had traveled east to cover the high Olympics. Standing on a peak on the upper Dungeness you could get a hazy view of Seattle, swathed in a brown cloud of smoke that a temperature inversion had trapped in the Puget Sound Basin. 

Seattle was suffering from air pollution. It was just lucky they had no idea where it came from. They would have blamed the loggers.

Before you blame loggers for air pollution remember, you are reading this in a newspaper made of wood in a house made of wood. We need wood and besides, our forests have been catching on fire ever since they started growing, sometime after the last Ice Age. 

Once we started logging the slash or leftovers of the operation would catch on fire and burn entire watersheds.  Controlled slash burns are part of an effort to keep the rest of the woods from catching on fire. Large piles of wood waste are routinely covered with plastic to keep them dry, then ignited with a variety of fossil fuels.

Fires are an inevitable part of the forest ecology whether there are loggers involved. 

Would you like the fires out in the open where they pollute an entire region? Or in a biomass facility that filters the pollution out of the atmosphere?

It is not a perfect solution but this is not a perfect world. It is a choice that we can make.

Until then, thank God for the rain.

Meat fever

Pat's 50-pound king

’Tis the season, when salmon run up river in waves so thick grandma could catch one with her trout rod.  That’s when the meat fever hits. 

It’s a common affliction that is often brought on by the sight of many large silver fish rolling and splashing their way up the river. This can trigger a psychotic reaction in individuals with a genetic predisposition to fish. 

I am one of them. This is my story.

I was just another freelance wilderness gossip columnist late for a deadline on a story about … well I had no idea so I thought I might as well be fishing since I was on the river anyway.

Writing is a lot like fishing. You need a good line, a sharp hook and the right bait or lure. You throw the whole mess into a medium where you cannot see beneath the surface and wait for something to bite.

Then you set the hook, drag it in and beat it over the head with a club. 

Or not.

Sometimes you can catch and release and they’ll get caught all over again, or read the column every week.

All I know is I was minding my own business, trying to write a column about fishing.  I saw a salmon jump out of the river with a plug in its mouth. It was on the end of my line.  

By the time I got the fish on to the shore there were four other guys, casting like demons where I had hooked the fish. They all had one thing in common they had drifted from the evil cities across the water to fish in the solitude of the Olympic Peninsula.

One look told me they were suffering from meat fever too. Each had his own way to cope.

One of the anglers was flossing. This is a sophisticated and effective form of snagging where the fish take the line in their mouths as they swim upriver. As the fish reaches the end of the line it is snagged in the mouth and it’s fish on!

Another fisherman was using bait. Bait fishermen look down upon the flossers but they should talk. Bait fishing is a dead end road to nowhere since fish eggs are the best bait.

You have to catch fish with fish eggs to get more eggs so you can catch fish.  Meanwhile, you and everything you own becomes covered with the sludge of rotting fish eggs that make you smell like the dumpster behind the fish market.

One of the guys was using spinners. Spin fishers look down upon the flosser and the bait fisher and why not. 

Spinners are technological wonders made of shiny metal alloys and flashing paint colors that can have a hypnotic effect on someone shopping for lures.

Like the kid in the candy shop the spinner fisher in a tackle store will fill up a basket with shiny trinkets designed to catch the angler’s eye. The spinners are then thrown into trees along the river’s edge, one after the other until the place looks like it was decorated for Christmas.

Then there was a fly fisherman, casting his heart out at the head of the hole. Fly fishers shun the flosser, bait and spinner fishers for good reason.  They made a movie of Brad Pitt fly fishing. 

Many fly fishermen suffer the delusion that they are Brad Pitt.

I fish plugs, a method despised by other anglers who say it’s just a couple of dummies, one on each end of the line.

I’m sure that’s just the meat fever talking.

A sad salmon situation

It was daylight on the water. A pair of lines cut through the surface of the Strait of Juan de Fuca near where a Spanish explorer bought some salmon “of a hundred pounds weight” from the Indians back in 1790.

People have been coming to the North Olympic Peninsula to catch salmon ever since. While the rest of the country is sweltering through a hot summer, people fishing in the Straits these days have no problem staying cool in the fog and wind of the salt chuck.

King salmon tend to bite at daylight so these murky mornings where dawn seems delayed are ideal for fishing. It is however, an activity that is not for everyone.

The breaking waves make sitting in a boat like riding a mechanical bull while holding a fishing pole. A grease fried breakfast sits in your gut like a bucket of bubbling lead.

You breathe a heady mixture of outboard exhaust, rotting herring and seaweed while shivering in foul weather gear you might usually wear in November. After a few minutes or a few hours, time does not matter in this misery you forget what possessed you to ever want to catch a king salmon in the first place.  

Mutinous eyes search the empty horizon. You want to suggest turning back before you miss your soap opera. You remember all of the things you should be doing today like going to the job you took a day off from, while you still have one.

Then you get a bite. Do you set the hook immediately? And risk pulling the hooks out or let the fish munch awhile and let go. This is an age old question that there is no time to answer.

The fish is headed to Canada with what’s left of your line. You chase the fish and reel in as fast as you can. Before you know it the fish is at the boat. You want to net the prize but this is where things get crazy.

The law says that “wild” fish caught with hook and line have to be released. In theory you are supposed to be able to tell a “wild” fish from one of hatchery origin by the presence of an adipose fin.

Unfortunately, many hatcheries still don’t clip the fins of the fish they release. After 100 years of fish hatcheries where billions of salmon have been released in almost every body of water in Washington, the line between hatchery and wild fish has been blurred beyond recognition. Is a salmon with an adipose fin a wild fish, an unclipped hatchery fish or the offspring of naturally spawning hatchery fish? There is no way to be sure.

It’s just your luck that the king salmon you reeled in has an adipose fin. It is hooked deeply. A cloud of blood issues from the ruptured gills. The fish sinks tired and sick beneath the surface. You sit and watch in the funk of failure.

There is a splash. A sea lion rolls near the boat. She just ate your salmon.

You stop at the store on the way home thinking if you bought a fish for the going rate of $15 a pound or so, people might think you caught it.

Unfortunately the fish at the store have adipose fins. While you are required to release your so-called “wild” fish, the non-selective commercial fisheries are allowed to kill and sell the “wild” fish legally.

You get so upset over the wasteful and corrupt management of our fisheries that you forget the salmon and buy a package of hot dogs instead.

Bull trout bull

A sharp eyed reader suggested a correction to my column about the Dungeness Valley Creamery. It’s one of two remaining dairies in the Sequim Dungeness Valley.

The future operation of the dairy is being threatened by Clallam County’s plan to move the flood control dikes from along the Dungeness River to restore the habitat of the endangered bull trout.

Oops, I did it again, called the bull trout endangered. The fact is the bull trout is not endangered. 
It has been federally listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. “Threatened,” according to the government definition means the species is likely to become “endangered.” An “endangered” species means it’s likely to become extinct.

Please excuse my confusion. I only know what I read in the fishing laws, where it says it is illegal to lift a bull trout out of the water. 
Forget about eating a bull trout for dinner. You could lose your fishing license for that.

Not that anyone ever bragged about eating a bull trout in the old days. They can be soft and mushy with bland white-meat. 
Who wouldn’t rather catch a fat, red-meated steelhead or a salmon than a bull trout? They were seen as scavengers that ate the eggs and spawn of the salmon and steelhead.

Nobody really ever cared about catching a bull trout, until there weren’t any salmon or steelhead and there was nothing but bull trout left.

The idea that anyone would call the bull trout threatened or endangered is a joke to anyone who has ever fished the Dungeness, where on any given day you could catch four bull trout for every rainbow.  

That was until the Dungeness, a river with two fish hatcheries on it, was closed to fishing for most of the year.  This seemed to confirm the old saying, when fishing is outlawed, only outlaws will fish. There were so many poachers on the Dungeness last summer they did not get an adequate return of spring Chinook back to the hatchery.

The Dungeness spring chinook is a run of salmon worth saving. These are the “first salmon” of the Northwest.

That means they run up the river in early spring when the salmonberry blossoms. These fish don’t spawn until August. The spring chinook don’t feed in the river, they survive and develop into spawners on their body fat. This makes the spring chinook the richest of the salmon.

There used to be an awesome chinook fishery right out in Dungeness Bay every spring when the dogwoods bloomed. Many of these fish were produced at the Dungeness Fish hatchery.

Hatchery fish have been getting a bad rap for failing in recent years. Runs of hatchery fish always fail after you lay off the hatchery workers and stop feeding the fish.

Sping chinook are the key to restoring the Dungeness-Greywolf ecosystem. Their migration up into the mountains was an exchange of nutrients from the ocean to the land that endured since the last Ice Age.

Everything from the trees to the bugs fed on the carcasses of spawned out salmon.

The fact that we have interrupted this cycle is an intolerable ecological disaster. Our salmon are overharvest throughout the extent of their range. There is just too much nylon fishing gear in the water. We need a responsible hatchery program to mitigate this nylon pollution.

So you can take out all the dikes on the lower Dungeness and it won’t matter to the fish. There have never been any dikes on the upper Dungeness and the fish up there are just as endangered.

Oops, I mean threatened. 

  

Lost in a tourist summit

A summit recently took place to discuss ways to stimulate the North Olympic Peninsula’s economy.

A $24,000 consultant was hired to facilitate a discussion with a committee of anonymous “stakeholders” and a panel of “community leaders” in a series of four-hour meetings. The final meeting was at John Wayne Marina in Sequim. The public was allowed to sit at the back of the room during the meeting and given 10 minutes to comment at the end. 

A Peninsula Daily News article described the meeting saying, “In looking at the future the (summit) group decided to borrow from the past.”

We had better hope not.

The rivalries between the various communities on the Peninsula go back to the days of the railroad, when every town dreamed of being the terminus of the transcontinental, from sea to shining sea.

The fact that we were a rugged, uninhabited peninsula, surrounded by treacherous bodies of water, did not deter our visionary pioneer forefathers, such as Victor Smith of Port Angeles. He stole the customs house from Port Townsend at gunpoint and convinced “Honest Abe” Lincoln to declare Port Angeles a Second National City. 

That’s in case Washington, D.C. was destroyed there would be a brand new capitol, all ready and waiting just a continent away. This made a lot of sense to Smith and his real estate cronies at the time.

It gave Port Angeles a sense of community pride. That, with an illegal election and a gang of vigilantes, allowed Port Angeles to steal the county seat from Whiskey Flats near Sequim, before the now extinct Port Crescent, near Joyce, could beat them to it.

Whiskey Flats, whose only industry was selling liquor to the Indians, had fallen on hard times once the Indians died off. They surrendered the county seat without a struggle.      

The coming of the Industrial Age allowed us to exploit our inexhaustible forests and fisheries. After a century of plunder these resources are locked up, endangered or just plain gone. All we got left are tourists.

One proposal to stimulate tourism called for a waterfront museum for the artifacts of Tse-Whit-sen in Port Angeles. The remains of this pre-historic village were discovered during the construction of a graving yard for the Hood Canal Bridge pontoons.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of $90 million was spent before the Elwha S’Klallam convinced the Department of Transportation to stop the destruction of this unique cultural resource. Tse-Whit-Sen is the largest known Native American burial in the Pacific Northwest. A museum of the artifacts of this site would represent a world-class tourist and cultural destination that would benefit both the tribe and the city.

Instead, Port Angeles continues to pursue its’ dreams of industry by hiring another consultant with another panel of community leaders who want to “develop” another archaeological site at Y’ennis, just east on the harborfront from Tse-Whit-Sen.

Those who ignore history seem to run things around here.     

The latest summit concluded that we need more year-round tourists. Just how we are going to fit more tourists into our narrow roads and inadequate facilities is a mystery.

An idea under way is building a walking, bicycling and horse-riding trail on the old railroad beds from Port Townsend to LaPush, which would confirm my theory of history as a process of decay.  It is in a historical sense, like abandoning the airport and turning it into landing field for hot air balloons or using telephone poles to hold coops of carrier pigeons.

I’m OK with that. Get cyclists off our narrow, crowded highways and roads an on to Olympic Discovery Trail. It is a good idea that’s been around since the ‘70s. Let me give an example of how much it will stimulate the economy.

Tourists are a hassle. That’s why we put a season on them, but they are human beings.

They deserve our honesty, compassion and respect. If you can fake that, you may have a future in the tourist industry.

When I saw a pair of soggy Canadian cyclists stranded down Oil City Road, I pretended not to laugh and that I cared. I tried to rescue them.

Just lucky I speak Canadian, eh. You just about have to since the exchange rate between Canadian and American currencies flattened out. The Canucks are headed “south of the border” to party in record numbers.

I even saw some Canucks fishing for steelhead on the Hoh River last winter. That was a shock. They were from British Columbia, eh. I thought B.C. had the best steelhead fishing in the world but, no way. The only steelhead left in B.C. are in the northern rivers, the Kispiox, Babine and Bulkley. They are summer fish.

Winter-run steelhead are rare in B.C. The reason: Fish farms. Pens full of Atlantic salmon produce sea-lice which kill baby fish.

This makes the Olympic Peninsula the last refuge of the winter steelhead. People come here from all over the world for the opportunity to see one of these rare fish.

The environmental, economic and cultural value of steelhead has been ignored. Meanwhile, the rivers these fish depend upon for their survival are being commercially gill-netted and logged right down to the water.

Those who ignore history also manage our fisheries.

When I first saw the Canadian cyclists, I thought there was something funny about them. They weren’t fishing. They were headed for Tierra del Fuego.   

They had gotten some bad advice from one of the locals who sent them down Oil City Road.

Giving wrong directions to tourists is a proud tradition on the Olympic Peninsula. It goes back to when the Indians misled explorers as a form of amusement. There is no better way to trash talk the neighbors and keep the newbies out of your hunting country than to tell them it’s inhabited by a tribe of giant cannibals.

Whoever told the cheeseheads to bicycle down Oil City Road to get to Tierra Del Fuego had a good sense of humor. Oil City Road dead-ends at the Pacific Ocean, which is mighty tough for bike riding, especially without a fishing pole. 

I felt it was my duty as a guide and representative of the tourist industry to warn those hosers about Oil City. I told them it was worse than Sodom and Gomorrah with a hangover.

If they insisted on going to Oil City, they should put their money in their shoes, not talk to strangers and stay off the streets after dark. The Canucks quickly threw their bikes in my truck. We went to the Hoh Store for supplies. They bought a gallon of water. We said goodbye, eh.

John Speerin’s blog @ www.crazyguyonabike.com describes this epic journey. Continuing south, Speerin almost bought a T-shirt in Florence, Oregon, but decided it was too much extra weight to pedal.

Then I met some “425ers.” It is a dirty little secret of the industry, that we profile tourists by area code. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it can give you a clue about what kind of foreigner you’re dealing with. “425” means Bellevue. “206” is Seattle. Any other area code we just assume is a Californian.

The “425ers” stopped at the store to get supplies for a fishing trip. Several hundred dollars later they came out of the store and went to dinner, the liquor store and the motel. The next morning they bought breakfast and a box lunch and stopped at another store for more beer, smokes, doughnuts, chew, bait, gas, ice, herring, personal products, and everything they forgot to buy the day before.

One of the “425ers” got a call from the war department. She was in Victoria. As a fishing guide and relationship counselor I have noticed in my practice a correlation between men who fish and women who go to Victoria. It’s part of a give and take in a relationship. Give her a chance to go fishing. She’ll take a trip to Victoria to get even. 

Victoria is a beautiful city, but I won’t go there. Victoria dumps 40 million liters of raw sewage into the Strait of Juan de Fuca every day. Their city motto is, “Flush twice, it’s got to make it to Port Angeles, eh.” 

So there’s no real need to go to Victoria. Sooner or later it will come here.

Going through Canadian Customs is another good reason not to go to Victoria. You may be asked a series of skill-testing questions like, “Why did you come to Canada?” 

Chances are you’ll ask yourself the same question once the drug sniffing dog sticks its’ nose up your kiester. Why would anyone try to smuggle drugs into Canada? It’s where the drugs come from. Just outside the Canadian Customs office, sidewalk vendors openly sell drugs and paraphernalia to mobs of stoner tourists and nobody seems to notice. 

Meanwhile back on the Peninsula, the “425er” was in trouble.

Since he was fishing instead of visiting her mother, his wife was in Victoria grudge shopping for some retail therapy. That’s until her plastic didn’t work.

Let’s review. All tourists are created equal and yet each is as individual as a snowflake.

Like the snowflake, we need tourists for the health of our economy and to ensure we’ll always have something to complain about. What kind of tourist has the greatest impact on the economy?

The cyclist who bought a gallon of water or the fisherman spent money like a drunken sailor, before his wife could.

Someone really should do a study on the economic benefits of sport fishing but I think they already did. It’s probably filed with all the other studies.

Someone should study the studies or, have a summit.  I think it’s the least we can do.