The annual weekend workshop to teach women the basics of outdoors skills, including those needed for fishing and hunting, will be held Sept. 14-16 in Carnation.
It’s led by state Department of Fish and Wildlife experts and coordinated by the nonprofit group Washington Outdoor Women.
About 20 classes will be offered, including archery, canoeing, kayaking, cooking fish and shellfish, big-game hunting, backpacking basics, map and compass reading, wildlife identification and photography, and survival skills.
Participants must be 18 years old or older. Registration (deadline Aug. 31) fee is $225, including lodging, meals and equipment. Go to www.washingtonoutdoorwomen.org, or call 425-455-1986.
Bikers win: The Cascade Bicycle Club won a victory before the Central Puget Sound Growth Management Hearings Board July 23, favoring its challenge to Lake Forest Park’s January’s Ordinance 951 and having the Burke-Gilman Trail declared an “essential public facility.”
The board agreed with the club that the ordinance would have impeded the upgrade of the trail in one of its oldest areas and that the ordinance violated the Growth Management Act. The ruling will allow King County to redevelop the trail through Lake Forest Park and meet current safety standards, a plan that the Lake Forest Park council had tried to block.
Those standards could mean a wider path (from the current 10 feet to 18 feet) and a smoother surface along a section acknowledged as the most unsafe section or the Burke-Gilman Trail.
Landslide cuts trail: Anyone who has challenged the 41-mile Timberline Trail around Mount Hood in Oregon now has a memory that might not be replicated. A huge landslide has cut the trail and U.S. Forest Service officials don’t know whether they can, or can afford to, repair it.
The slide, which probably occurred during the November rainstorms, turned the trail area into a drop-off hundreds of feet deep below where the trail crossed below the Eliot Glacier and left an unstable slope, probably too unstable to rebuild the trail.
Moratorium stands: The Washington State Forest Practice Board has extended a moratorium on decertifying any more northern spotted owl sites so that members can review rules that protect the owls’ habitat. Since the owl population is declining, the board will consider whether strengthening protection rules is an option.
The moratorium lasts until December 2008, giving the board time to investigate competition from barred owls, habitat destroyed by fire and timber practices.
Wildlife viewing: After weeks without a reported sighting, a few gray whales have been seen in the Saratoga Passage area. Most grays head to their summer feeding grounds in the Arctic Ocean but a few linger here … Check out the salmon passing the fish ladder viewing windows at the Ballard Locks (206-783-7059). Several hundred sockeye pass daily; Chinooks could start showing up in the next couple of weeks … July 30 is a full moon, which pulls tides to their highest and lowest points. Extreme low tides mean great tide pool explorations for limpets, crab, black turban snails, mussels, barnacles, sea stars, hermit crabs, sea anemones, sea urchins, chitons and sea slugs, so visit a tide pool near you … Between 3,000 and 4,000 summer steelhead are passing by the Bonneville Dam viewing windows each day, the highest volume all year. Look out for about 1,000 shad and 200-300 lamprey, too.
On the bookshelf: “The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific” ($25, Houghton Mifflin) quickly won me over with Julia Whitty’s experiences and writing abilities.
She already had created more than 70 documentaries for PBS, National Geographic, the Discovery Channel and others. Now she reverently describes the watery world in with a sense of responsibility for education and sustaining the coral reefs.
Whitty delivers science, stories, philosophy, poetry and the dangers to ocean life from human ignorance and lack of responsibility.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
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