a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Here’s the Norwegian Bliss just leaving the pier in Seattle and setting sail for Sitka, Alaska, shortly after 5 pm this afternoon.
She will go as far as Juneau and then to Icy Straight Point 30 miles across the Alaskan Inside Passage, before turning back to Seattle.
Happy Friday.
Oktoberfest commences tomorrow (in Munich, Germany, of course).
The price of a beer* is expected to be between €12.60 and €14.90 ($13.45 and $15.90), an average of 6.12 percent more than last year.
*One liter of beer! (34 US fluid ounces or about two pints).
I made a final run out to Mt Rainier National Park today, to pick up the Wonderland Trail hikers where they had started eight days ago: the campground at Mowich Lake.
The leadwort (or plumbago, Ceratostigma plumbaginoides) on my back porch is blooming.
I made another run to Sunrise Visitor Center on the slopes of Mount Rainier on Monday morning. (My hiking party needed me to help them retrieve their food for the next four days. It was in a cache down by the White River Campground, an arduous trek by foot from where they were on the mountainside).
I took the opportunity to walk up to the Sourdough Ridge Trail to the north of the visitor center. The summit of Rainier is then to the west.
There was a little drizzle on the mountain early in the morning.
It took a while for the clouds and fog to clear, and for the snow-capped summit to reveal itself for a picture through the trees.
The US Open tennis tournament is a wrap*— and I believe this coat with a green sheen, on a Tesla Model Y, is a wrap as well.
*Novak Djokovic (Serbia, 36) beat Danill Medvedev (27) in straight sets in today’s Men’s Singles final. I pay my respects to Djokovic begrudgingly. I am not a fan of his.
Coco Gauff (19) is the first American teenager to win the US Open since Serena Williams won the tournament in 1999 at 17.
Happy Friday.
The cosmos flowers are from 18th Avenue here on Capitol Hill in Seattle.
Located in the northeast corner of the park at an elevation of 6,400 ft (1 950 m), Sunrise is Mount Rainier National Park’s highest visitor center.
It is only open from early July to early September.
The butterfly is a mariposa copper (Lycaena mariposa), and on the log is a Clark’s nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) and a Townsend’s chipmunk (Tamias townsendii).
This morning, I dropped off the hiking party of two (my friends visiting from South Africa) at the Mowich Lake campground on the slopes of Mount Rainier.
Mowich Lake is where they will start out on Thursday morning, on the Wonderland Trail/ Northern Loop Trail for an eight-day hike.
Blue diamonds, strike ’em anywhere
First we caffeinate then incinerate
We’ll get you
And sparks will fly in the summer air
Did you pull out of your stall
Maybe I’ll see you after all
[Chorus: Stephan Jenkins]
Hold me down, I want to find out
We say no ’cause I live my life like a burning man
Like a burning man, a burning man
Like a burning man
And I won’t get enough until my legs are broken
– Lyrics from ‘Burning Man’ by Third Eye Blind, 1997
It’s nice to see the stranded— stranded in mud, in the desert!— festivalgoers to this year’s Burning Man are able to finally make an exodus from the muddy grounds there.
Happy Labor Day.
My friends and I made a round trip across Puget Sound today:
crossing with the Seattle-Bainbridge Island ferry, driving to Silverdale REI* to pick up a tent, and returning on the Bremerton-Seattle ferry.
*Outdoor recreation gear and equipment store
My friends are gearing up for hiking on Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail— and so a visit the the flagship REI store in Seattle’s South Lake Union was in order for today.
Some of the purchases: water bag and microfilter system, powdered eggs, shredded beef with beef broth in a pouch, energy bars, Mount Rainier Wonderland Trail map, waterproof compression bag (keeps clothes dry), pressure-regulated pocket-sized gas stove, isobutane fuel cartridges.
Happy Friday.
This weekend is the last hurrah of summer travel for many families.
Kids in California are back in school already, and kids in Washington State go back next Wednesday.
A fire that had started in the early hours of Thursday morning in an illegally occupied apartment building in the inner city of Johannesburg, South Africa, led to the death of 74 people.
The building had long been ‘hijacked’ from the city by a crime syndicate, and illegally rented out to vulnerable people.
As far as historians can tell, it’s the worst mass casualty in the storied history of Johannesburg. The metropolis of 5.6 million was founded in 1886 with the Witwatersrand Gold Rush.
In 2011, scientists imaging M51 with Hubble hoped to capture the galaxy with the James Webb Space Telescope one day. That day has arrived.
– Monisha Ravisetti writing for space.com
Hurricane Idalia is about to make landfall in the the Big Bend area of Florida as a Category 3 or 4 hurricane.
The US Open tennis tournament is under way, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, New York City.
It is— amazingly— the 50th anniversary of the US Open becoming the first sporting event to offer equal prize money to female and male competitors, promising never to stop fighting to maintain that hard-won progress. (It would take 34 years before all the other Grand Slam events followed suit. This year, the US Open winners will each receive $3 million, with total player compensation rising to $65 million).
– James Martinez reporting for the Associated Press
Here is the reflection pool in the Bloedel Reserve forest garden on Bainbridge Island. (I took the photo on Saturday.)
