Thanks Gregg

Thanks Gregg…………

We have a friend who is a licensed pilot; he has a plane and a hanger at the airport, about three miles from here. He loves to fly, fortunately for us he likes to have company.

To fully appreciate the beauty of the Olympic Peninsula, one must fly over it in a private airplane. The expanse of green forests gives way to the deep blue sea; both blanketed by blue sky and the occasional white puffy cloud. There are never any grey skies because only an idiot would fly in that kind of weather.

We flew over Sequim, Port Angeles and thru the Olympic Mountain range past Hurricane Ridge, where the road ends and the endless Olympic wilderness begins.

The strong swimming salmon find their way up the  River and deposit eggs for another generation before giving themselves to the hungry bear or fertilize the area with nutrients from their bodies. Salmon always return after three or four years at sea, and they always return to the place of their birth.

The Elwha River is one exception; salmon were forever blocked by man’s intervention. Two dams were constructed a century ago without fish ladders; where once 400,000 salmon thrived, barely 3,000 are left. Man does, however, have the ability to learn from past mistakes. As we flew over we could see that both dams have been breached to allow the river to return to its natural flow; this is the largest river restoration ever done. Now the Elwha river salmon that have been blocked from 90 percent of their habitat will restart the natural cycle. In four or five years there will be much celebration as we watch the flash of several thousand silvery bodies; a century of our misdeeds erased.  

 

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 That being said, I gotta get out my fishing pole; yummmm!