walk log
been taking walks in my rural neighborhood. using the voice dictation feature on my phone to record little logs. abbreviating names of roads and people for privacy. (seems like this writing has a different style, an immediacy from being recorded as i walk, not recalled later)
9/18/2025
4:45pm parked on b. road. walked up side road to road below grassy, over to the clearcut. huge trees in the valley.
light wind. vine maples turning. smoky views to the south, scott said it is from fires on the olympic peninsula. Smells smoky here and it is 71°. no rain. walked 2 hrs. (picked up) 1 gallon ziplock of trash
9/19/25 Friday
tried the road after county line but got creeped out by truck, so came back to county line road. 6pm. noticing steep slope with vine maples, sword ferns, moss and salal. possible solution for populating my bare bank. feels warm today 78. i have been sick, but somehow getting exercise makes me feel better. timber harvest markings are all over these woods. Considering the millions of clear cut acres east of here, it's devastating that these last stands of big trees are slated to be aggressively thinned.
9/21 Sunday
it rained this morning, so the plants are wet. I walked from my house to the end of b. road and back taking about two hours. saw a water dog and some mushrooms peeking out, took some pictures of raindrops on the stem of a Queen Anne's lace.
marvelled at the iridescent colors on thimbleberry leaves.
the vine maples at the edges of clearcuts are turning red. some of the princess ferns are brown now as well. my shoes are wet. i'd really like to trim the brush on the trail that connects my place to b. road.
9/25/26
walking towards tom's place and over to b. road. 1230 start time. noticing tiny, five petal pink flowers blooming. warm and dry.
walked to the top of the b. road second side road. was checking to see if there was any new trash because I saw a truck drive up here earlier. 1350 feet elevation there which means about 500 feet elevation gain, and i'm breaking a sweat
9/26 Friday 5 pm
what I didn't tell you yesterday is that earlier this week I picked up beer cans and there were three or four of the same style in different places, and I arranged them all together in a group, visible from the road. I think that was on Thursday and on Friday when I walked by they were gone. maybe I made a point to someone.
ultimately, my plan is to walk through this with a scythe, and clear the brush so that when it's wet, I don't get soaked walking through here. but a lot of this is salal, and I don't know if my scythe will be able to cut the tough stems.
so I got to the clear cut at the end of b. road and there's a red truck, and a guy with binoculars scanning the clear cut (for deer, he says). his name is pat s. He lives on h. road. he talked to me for about a half hour all about his childhood near Klamath Falls, growing up on a dairy farm hunting, growing up poor, that they hunted to eat meat and never ate beef. he bemoans the shortage of deer in these parts says it's gone down a lot, but there used to be lots of deer and elk through here. he has some neighbors who hunt at night which is not legal because the deer need to be able to relax at night and he thinks there's poaching. i asked him if when I see bones on blm it's poaching, and he said yes it's likely poaching. deer season starts next week. this guy was a bow hunter. i saw arrows in the cab of his truck, or do people do both? I'll have to check and see if it's gun deer hunting or bow deer hunting.
the yellow grasses and the daisy heads are so beautiful.
there's teasel and there's ocean spray and sword ferns and horse tail and self heal. it's really a wonderful pallet of colors. this is on the side of the road in a clear cut.
a little further down on the left, a tiny stream trickles melodiously down a narrow strip of trees that have been left as a buffer. there's a few vine maples and some big leaf maples, and one scrawny cottonwood. but it's just a beautiful beautiful trickle. i can't wait to see it running strong after the rains.
i need to start wearing gaiters on these walks, i keep having to stop and pull burrs out of my socks.