Hike: Interlaken Trail

Hike: Interlaken Trail (WA)
By Arlene

*****

Feeling a bit nostalgic for the forests of my childhood, I have been reading books by Robert Michael Pyle, a naturalist, who chose to live near and write about the Willapa Hills. At the end of his most recent book, he admonishes any reader who would be so inspired by his book as to move to Gray’s River, and instead encourages all of us to find “the heart of [our] own home, which lies in the lives and the skies of everyplace.” (Sky Time in Gray’s River).

 That is what I did today, as I hiked very close to home on the Interlaken Trail and was rewarded with some great shots of fern life on this old Olmstead Park just south of the University of Washington.

The classic signs of spring in the Pacific Northwest were prominent today. The beautiful to view (but not to smell) skunk cabbage was in its prime. Skunk cabbage grew in abundance in the gulley behind my childhood home, and they provided the first yellow flowers of the year, to be followed closely by daffodils now naturalized from the yard of our long-ago neighbors across the gulley.

As we hiked on the mile or so of trail, we saw emerging horsetail ferns, a very old species, and another harbinger of the longer, warmer days of our future. Horsetails grew everywhere, or so it seemed, in the woods around our house and maybe, “in the heart of [my rural childhood] home” as well as my current urban home.

Here’s to sky time on the Interlaken Trail.