CLALLUM BAY, SEIKU, FISHING PARADISE.

We are camped at Clallum Bay. The weather was beautiful and we walked out on what the locals call an agate beach. From this sand spit we could see nearby Sekiu, pronounced see-Q, across the bay.
The waves bring up piles of polished stones. You could pick them up by the handful. It is very pretty and an excellent place to kayak. But, we found no place to rent a kayak.

We walk over a bridge to get to the beach. A channel of clean, shallow water flows on the land side of the sand spit, which is where I had hoped to kayak.

We drove the short distance to Sekiu and looked down on their fishing fleet.

Each one of these long plank piers has a fish cleaning station.

The gulls wait for any little morsel the cleaners drop or throw to them.

Then they bring it to the water’s edge and fight over it.

Most of the campers come here to fish. They bring in King Salmon and we saw it at a fish house for $6 a lb. Unbelievable. Unfortunately, they were closed. A note on the door explained:  Closed “Dale is gone… ” couldn’t read where he was gone from the car window. Hope to get salmon today.

Right in the marina parking lot are three huge “stacks.” The sea eroded the land around them. This harder block of rock, didn’t wash away. But it tells you how deep the soil was and how much of it washed into the water.

On the road here, multiple logging trucks, whiz by loaded with what looks like toothpicks. The locals say they haul them to Port Townsend to be shipped to China. It seems wrong to me, and one guy we talked to, that we ship our natural resources to China and leave the locals looking at clear cuts for such skinny trees.

This clear-cut, taken from the moving M.Home is much uglier than shown. I didn’t get the  huge mounds of graying cut slash. It seems stupid to let China have our wood to make stuff and sell it back to us, when we are threatened by forest fires and cutting down our carbon sink. Right now it is the freshest, cleanest air you can breathe. Hope it stays that way.
I don’t vote in Washington, but it seems to me a serious enough issue to rate National Curbs on cut size and method. My rant for the day, I guess.

LOGGING TRUCKS ARE ROLLIN'

At one time, gigantic logging trucks like this one rumbled right through downtown Murphys. Officially rerouted in the 1990′s,  they can no longer do that. They roll down the mountain and keep to Highway 4 on their way to the mill. Loggers can still plow right through  downtown  Angels Camp on Highway 49.  I must admit to a bit of joy at seeing them. In the 80′s I rode with a logger to the woods and photographed  the complete operation from cutting, skidding,  loading, chaining up and delivering them to the mill. In fact, the driver pulled over to tighten his chains once we left  the rugged logging road and I got out  to take the big behemoth’s picture.  A guy backing out of his driveway, without looking, backed into me with his pick-up. I was unhurt, thankfully.  I wish I had those pictures in digital format.

Today’s logs, compared to logging in the seventies and eighties look like toothpicks. I’ve seen two or three or four logs fill one of these trucks. A tree trunk riding high half above the cab made you fear a slipping chain would allow a log to  smash through the cab and kill anybody inside.  The weight of the load was especially noticeable on Murphys Grade from Forest Meadows to Murphys with the driver managing the winding road, his jake brake scudding.  The memories, the sights and smells are great and I’m glad for the truck owners and loggers who have work again. Standard recently opened their mill in Sonora and I followed three trucks down to the river, and across the other side over Parrots Ferry Bridge on my way to the dentist. I returned by way of Stevenot Bridge on 49 through Angels Camp. I counted, coming toward me, four logging trucks which means a full truck was moving through town every five minutes on both highways.  As I did some errands,  I saw two more pass. Sure enough, I waited and caught this one moving through town.  While the jobs are great, they are most likely clear cutting for Sierra Pacific. SP refuses to compromise and do select cuts. They clear huge swaths of land and destroy the beauty and ecology of our area in the Sierra Nevadas. SP owns over a million acres above us, and young trees are falling to the axe.  A local group, Forest Watch, has photographed and protested their business practices, but the best way to make them accountable to the local community is to refuse to buy Sierra Pacific Lumber. I recommend you  buy certified lumber that is sustainably cut. It is stamped on the end of each board. It is possible to log without desecrating the land and habitat, but the bottom line for corporations  is people, nature, and animals last and money first. When I saw that logging had resumed, I speculated on the recent appearance of bear and feral pigs at our elevation and wonder if clear cutting could be upsetting the balance?