Susanne and I founded an active travel company in Cape Town, South Africa in 2007. They are on the forefront of a remarkable effort.
We wish to give back, grateful for all the wonderful opportunities we've received over the years, and the Ecomiles Program is one way to do so. To mark the one year anniversary of the killing of Cecil the lion on the 1st of July 2016, Ride For Big Life is a 4000miles+ cycle between Portland Oregon and Portland Maine (US) that aims to generate awareness and funding for Big Life Foundation. Big Life
08/18/2026
We recently took up housesitting, discovering it's a great way to take a break from time on the road and to truly experience life as a local for a few days. Lots of fun too! Up to now we looked after dogs, cats, chickens and ducks, guinea pigs, gold fish and Koi! Lots of animal love, walks and golden memories! TrustedHousesitters
08/18/2026
Today's hike up to the Skyline Trail here at Mt Rainier National Park. Perfect weather all the way. Started a bit late, but worth the effort! https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/washington/dead-horse-creek-and-golden-gate-trail-loop.
08/17/2026
This is the Nisqually Glacier seen from the Paradise/Skyline area, shot today, late summer, with the ice heavily exposed.
Glacier ice, generally:
Glacier ice forms when accumulated snow compresses over years, squeezing out air and recrystallizing into dense, blue-tinted ice — air bubbles scatter red wavelengths of light, leaving blue to dominate. Ice deforms plastically under its own weight, flowing slowly downhill (a few centimeters to meters per day) while the brittle surface layer fractures into crevasses where the flow accelerates over uneven bedrock. Glaciers are also powerful erosive agents, plucking and grinding rock into the fine “rock flour” that gives glacial meltwater its milky-turquoise color, and carrying debris on their surface (supraglacial moraine) and within the ice.
Nisqually Glacier, Rainier’s south-west flank:
What the footage shows is classic late-season ablation-zone ice — the lower glacier stripped of its winter snow cover, exposing gray, debris-streaked, heavily crevassed ice riddled with rockfall from the surrounding cliffs. Nisqually is one of Rainier’s more actively monitored glaciers (studied continuously since the 1930s) and, like most of the mountain’s 25 glaciers, has retreated substantially over the past century, its terminus climbing higher up the valley. The heavy rock cover you see insulates the ice below, so debris-covered sections often melt slower than clean ice nearby — part of why the surface looks so jumbled and uneven rather than smooth. The braided, sediment-choked meltwater emerging at its base is the same rock-flour process described above, feeding the Nisqually River
08/17/2026
Mount Rainier National Park, camping and hiking for a few days.
Established in 1899, Mount Rainier became the fifth national park in the United States, created to protect the massive stratovolcano that dominates the Cascade Range in Washington State. Indigenous peoples, including the Puyallup, Nisqually, and Yakama, have long held the mountain as sacred, knowing it by names like “Tahoma” or “Tacoma,” meaning roughly “mother of waters.”
Geography: The park spans about 236,000 acres surrounding the 14,411-foot peak, the most topographically prominent mountain in the contiguous U.S. Its flanks hold the largest single-mountain glacier system in the lower 48 states — 25 major glaciers feeding rivers that carve deep valleys radiating outward from the summit.
Geology: Mount Rainier is an active stratovolcano, built up over roughly 500,000 years through repeated eruptions of andesite lava, ash, and pyroclastic flows. It’s considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the U.S. due to the risk of lahars — volcanic mudflows that could threaten populated valleys below, particularly toward Tacoma and Seattle.
This is a Douglas squirrel (Tamiasciurus douglasii), also known as the chickaree — a small tree squirrel native to Pacific Northwest conifer forests and the most common tree squirrel in Olympic National Park’s rainforest valleys like the Queets.
The ID is clear from the coloring: dark grayish-brown back, a rich rusty-orange belly and underside, black-edged tail, and small tufted ears — classic markings for this species (distinct from the larger, paler Douglas’s cousin, the red squirrel, which doesn’t range this far west, and from the introduced Eastern gray squirrel, which lacks the orange belly).
In the clip, the squirrel is doing what Douglas squirrels do most of the day: actively foraging on a massive moss-draped conifer trunk, likely a Sitka spruce or western hemlock typical of the Queets rainforest. It moves in quick, jerky bursts — pausing to scan with wide, alert eyes, sniffing at clumps of hanging moss and bark crevices, then darting a short distance vertically. Douglas squirrels are primarily granivores, feeding heavily on conifer seeds pried from cones, but they’ll also eat fungi, buds, and (as it may be doing here) forage in mossy pockets for insects or cached food. Their vertical, almost fearless movement straight up and down tree trunks — rather than the ground-to-branch hopping typical of gray squirrels — is a signature behavior, aided by very sharp claws.
While hiking through the temperate rainforest of the Queets River valley, on the southwestern edge of Olympic National Park, we spotted a Barred Owl (Strix varia) perched quietly in the forest canopy. The bird sat motionless on a mossy branch, roughly twenty feet up, partially obscured by a dense curtain of big-leaf maple leaves backlit by the overcast sky.
Seen from behind, the owl displayed the field marks that make this species so distinctive: a round, tuftless head, and dense, chocolate-brown barring across the upper back and shoulders that transitions into vertical streaking down the belly — the pattern responsible for its common name. Its stocky build and mottled brown-and-cream plumage blended remarkably well with the moss-draped bark and dappled light of the old-growth understory.
Barred Owls are primarily nocturnal, so a daytime sighting like this — likely at a favored roost site — offers a rare, unhurried look at a bird more often heard than seen. Their calls, the classic “who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all,” are a familiar sound in this region.
These are harbor seals (Phoca vitulina). They have small, rounded heads with no visible external ear flaps, short flippers, and move by undulating their bodies; in contrast, sea lions have visible ear flaps and can rotate their hind flippers to “walk” on land. The mottled, spotted grey-brown coats and low-profile swimming visible here in the video are classic harbor seal traits.
Harbor seals are the most widespread pinniped in the Northern Hemisphere and are especially common throughout Puget Sound. They favor sheltered bays, river mouths, and rocky haul-out sites like the breakwater seen here, rarely venturing far offshore. Puget Sound’s cold, nutrient-rich waters support herring, salmon smolt, flounder, and squid — their primary prey — making harbors and marinas reliable hunting grounds.
Harbor seals (family Phocidae), are built for efficient diving rather than land mobility. They can dive up to 500 meters and hold their breath for 30+ minutes, though most foraging dives are much shorter. Pups can swim within hours of birth. Unlike sea lions, harbor seals are largely solitary or loosely social, often seen in pairs or small groups rather than large colonies — consistent with the four individuals here. Their population in Puget Sound has rebounded strongly since the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, making sightings like this increasingly common near docks and jetties.
08/05/2026
Beautiful footage of Port Townsend, a Victorian seaport at the northeastern tip of the Olympic Peninsula, looking out over Port Townsend Bay toward the ferry dock and Whidbey Island in the distance.
The tower we're standing near is the historic Fire Bell Tower, a 75-foot wooden structure built in 1890 to hold a 1,500-pound brass bell and the city’s $900 fire engine. The bell also did double duty sounding fog warnings for the ferry dock below, right up until the early 1960s. It sits at the corner of Jefferson and Tyler Street in Uptown Port Townsend, and remarkably, it’s the last remaining wooden fire bell tower in the United States — saved by repeated community fundraising campaigns over the decades, most recently a full restoration in the early 2000s that earned it a state historic preservation award.
As for our visitor: it’s a black-tailed deer (a coastal subspecies of mule deer), and the spotted coat on the smaller one marks it as a fawn — August is exactly the season when this year’s fawns, born in late spring, are still carrying their spotted camouflage before it fades in fall. Port Townsend’s bluffs, hedges, and untended lots make it a favorite urban range for deer, and locals are well used to finding them grazing on hillside gardens with a ferry gliding past in the background — pretty much the town’s unofficial mascot. A lovely, quintessentially Port Townsend scene: history, harbor, and wildlife all in one frame.
08/03/2026
The tree trunks in these photos show the deeply furrowed, plated bark typical of a mature conifer, likely Douglas fir or western hemlock, thickly draped in pale green-gray lichen (old man’s beard) and cushions of bright moss. One cropped log reveals warm, reddish-orange heartwood at its cut face, ringed by dark, weathered bark and fringed with hanging lichen, a clear sign of an old, slow-grown tree with dense, resinous wood.
The fungi are the real showpiece here. Several images capture bracket fungi (likely a Fomitopsis-type polypore, possibly red-belted conk) fruiting directly from the bark and old wounds in the trunk, their caps ranging from creamy white to burnt orange and deep maroon-black, with rounded, knobby, almost sculptural forms glistening with moisture and resin droplets. Younger specimens appear smooth and pale, while older ones darken and crust over, showing the fungus’s growth stages. These are wood-decay fungi, quietly breaking down cellulose and lignin in living or dying trees, a key part of the old-growth nutrient cycle.
08/03/2026
The Thornton Lakes Trail, in the western reaches of North Cascades National Park, climbs through one of the finest remaining stands of old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest. The lower and middle sections of the trail wind beneath a canopy of Douglas fir, western red cedar, and western hemlock, many of these trees centuries old, their trunks thick with moss and their crowns rising well over 150 feet. Sunlight filters down in scattered shafts, illuminating a understory thick with sword fern, oxalis, and huckleberry, while decaying nurse logs host new seedlings, an emblem of the forest’s slow, self-renewing cycle.
As the trail gains elevation toward Trapper Peak, the ancient conifers gradually give way to subalpine fir and mountain hemlock, and the dense, shaded corridors open into rockier, more exposed terrain with sweeping views of the Picket Range and the turquoise waters of the Thornton Lakes below. The transition from deep old growth to alpine scrub happens over just a few miles, making the hike a compressed tour through several distinct ecological zones.
This old-growth forest matters ecologically as habitat for species like the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet, both of which depend on structurally complex, multi-layered canopies rarely found outside protected old growth. The immense biomass, snags, downed logs, and multi-aged tree cohorts also store significant carbon and buffer the watershed, helping regulate stream flow into the Skagit River system below.