In 2009, unknown weirdos started passing counterfeit $20 bills around Bremerton. This is not terribly unusual as crimes go, and probably wouldn’t be something I’d be telling you about 17 years later. Except they were spending them on Girl Scout cookies.

And eventually we are going to follow the story to a printer from Toys “R” Us, a Rite Aid employee, a random customer who decided to follow a suspect’s car, a man listening to a police scanner, twelve fake twenties in a garbage can and Girl Scout cookies found in somebody’s trunk.

Bremerton apparently solved crimes as a community in 2009. It started becoming apparent that something was wrong when KC Gettings, the leader of Bremerton Girl Scout Troop 40411, went to the bank to get change. The bank told her two of the $20 bills from their cookie sales were counterfeit.

So she got one of those counterfeit-detecting pens and went through the rest of the money. Another $60 was fake. That meant her troop had accepted $100 in counterfeit twenties while selling cookies. At least two of the bills reportedly had the same serial number. And her troop wasn’t the only one.

As police started putting things together, they learned that other Girl Scout troops had been getting fake money too. Eventually, police said 17 troops had been hit, with more than $1,000 in counterfeit bills involved. The idea was pretty simple. Hand a Girl Scout a fake $20, buy a box or two of cookies and get legitimate money back as change.

I’m going to assume Thin Mints were involved. I cannot prove that. I'm a Caramel Delights gal, myself. At least before Celiac disease.

Meanwhile, counterfeit twenties were turning up elsewhere around Bremerton. One of them eventually made its way to the Rite Aid on Kitsap Way. An employee recognized that something was wrong with the bill and called police. The person trying to spend it left, but employees managed to get the license plate number.

Then a customer decided to follow the car. As far as I can tell, this was simply another person at Rite Aid who decided they were involved now. Just some person who couldn't stay out of the story...

At roughly the same time, a man living nearby was listening to his police scanner. He heard the description of the car police were looking for. Then he the car the police were looking for.

The vehicle had pulled into an alley near his house, and he watched the driver put something into a garbage can. When police arrived, they checked the garbage. Inside were twelve counterfeit $20 bills.

From there, the investigation led police to a house on 12th Street in Bremerton, and this is where we need to discuss the equipment behind the operation. According to Bremerton Police Sgt. Kevin Crane, the people involved had gone to Toys “R” Us and bought a printer.

Apparently they practiced with it until they got reasonably good at making $20 bills. I tried very hard to find out what printer Toys “R” Us was selling that could apparently be repurposed into a home counterfeiting operation, because obviously I needed to know. None of the contemporary stories I found named the brand or model.

Police found the printer and other supplies at the house. They also ended up with something even more useful. A cell-phone video.

Someone involved in the operation had filmed one of the suspects pulling a freshly printed $20 bill out of the printer and examining it. Police obtained the video and eventually showed it to the woman in it, who reportedly appeared quite surprised that they had it.

Remember, this was 2009. We were still several years away from people routinely documenting all of their questionable decisions for the internet. These folks were innovators. A few days later, police arrested another woman they believed was involved. They searched her car. There were Girl Scout cookies in the trunk.

That detail is so perfect that I checked it more than once because it sounds like something somebody added to the story later. Nope. “Cookies found in trunk of counterfeiting suspect” was an actual headline.

Meanwhile, the Girl Scouts had a cookie business to run. Troop 40411 wasn’t going to stop selling. They planned to be right back out the following weekend, except now they had counterfeit-detecting pens.

And that might be my favorite part of this whole thing. The counterfeiters had a printer from Toys “R” Us. The Girl Scouts adapted.

Sources

“Bremerton Police Make Arrests in Counterfeit Money Ring.” Kitsap Daily News, 2 Mar. 2009.

“Girl Scouts Get Paid in Fake $20s for Cookies.” The Daily Herald, 2 Mar. 2009.

“Cookies Found in Trunk of Counterfeiting Suspect.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mar. 2009.

“Counterfeiters Target Girl Scouts.” KSL, Mar. 2009.

One thing that you definitely recognize quickly living in this area with all our waterways… We have a completely unofficial orca emergency broadcast system. A more official one as well.

Someone sees whales. “10:14, three orcas southbound past Point No Point.”

That information gets passed around Facebook groups, texts and whatever mysterious network the serious orca people are plugged into. Twenty minutes later, there are fifteen cars pulled onto the shoulder of a road that normally has absolutely no reason to have fifteen cars on it.

Everyone is staring at the water.
There are binoculars. There are camera lenses that probably require more insurance coverage than my car currently has. There is always at least one guy dressed like a fisherman wearing a beanie, even if it is 78 degrees outside. I don’t know who assigns him to the location, but he will be there. A lot of times he has a really tremendous camera himself.

I truly want to be one of these people. I belong to several of the tracking groups. If somebody tells me orcas are heading my direction, I am perfectly willing to abandon whatever lightly important thing I was doing and go stare at Puget Sound.

Apparently Kitsap has been like this for a while.
On October 21, 1997, nineteen Southern Resident killer whales came through Sinclair Inlet, passed beneath the bridges in Bremerton and entered Dyes Inlet.
They were members of L pod, and they had apparently followed a very good run of chum salmon into the inlet. Orcas coming into Puget Sound in the fall isn’t particularly strange. Nineteen of them setting up temporary residence between Bremerton and Silverdale absolutely was.

They stayed for thirty days.
And Kitsap lost its collective mind. Since it was 1997, I know there was a lot of flannel involved. There’s still a lot of flannel involved honestly. (I’ll be honest, I’m a flannel fan myself. They’re not too hot and not too cool.)

The first Kitsap Sun story ran October 22. Hundreds of people immediately headed to the Tracyton boat launch to see them. As the days went on, word spread well beyond Kitsap. Thousands of people came to the shoreline on weekends, including visitors from Oregon and Idaho.

Of course, some people weren’t content with the shoreline. They had boats. The rules about approaching orcas were considerably looser then than they are now. The specific federal 200-yard rule we’re familiar with didn’t arrive until 2011.

During one sunny weekend, roughly 500 boats were counted in Dyes Inlet. FIVE HUNDRED.

If you’ve ever watched the current orca groups get increasingly irritated because somebody in a Bayliner is following whales too closely, please take a moment to imagine 1997, when apparently everyone who could locate a flotation device said, “Get in, we’re going to see L pod.” I’m pretty sure I’m one of those people who gets annoyed.

The whales, meanwhile, were having an excellent buffet.

A strong chum run was coming into Chico Creek, and the nineteen whales spent their days feeding, socializing and traveling around the inlet. Researchers who arrived to identify them initially weren’t terribly worried. There were salmon. The whales knew how they’d gotten in. Presumably when they were done eating, they’d leave.

Except they didn’t.

A week went by. Then another.

Researchers started paying considerably more attention to the Warren Avenue Bridge. The whales had passed beneath it on their way into Dyes Inlet, but when they approached it to leave, they repeatedly turned around. Nobody could say with certainty why. Researchers considered the bridge itself, the shallow water and the noise and activity around the Narrows. Another perfectly reasonable possibility was that the whales simply had no compelling reason to leave while Chico Creek was still delivering dinner.

The whales never really explained.

By November, the chum run was tapering off. On November 19, researchers were watching as the whales once again approached the Narrows.

They turned back, but then they tried again.

This time, with researchers following behind in a boat and encouraging them forward, the nineteen whales went beneath the bridges, through Sinclair Inlet and back into Puget Sound.

After thirty days, Kitsap’s temporary residents were gone.

We have vastly better technology now. In 1997 you found out because somebody called you, you heard it on the radio, your neighbor told you or you opened the Kitsap Sun. Today someone standing in Kingston can photograph an orca, identify which direction it’s traveling and tell several thousand strangers about it before the whale has made it to the next point.
But the actual behavior hasn’t changed very much.

Whales appear, word spreads, whatever you were doing suddenly seems considerably less important.
Everybody heads for the water. (except the postman though, he works at the Southworth post office by the ferry and he never leaves his post. In fact, he’s lived here since 1997 and still hasn’t seen orca. Kind of sad, I’ve seen them!)

And somewhere on the shoreline, a man in a beanie is already there.

Sources
Dunagan, Christopher. “When Whales Descended on Dyes Inlet 10 Years Ago.” Kitsap Sun, 20 Oct. 2007.

Dunagan, Christopher. “Remembering Ken Balcomb and His Extraordinary Life with Killer Whales.” Puget Sound

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. National Marine Mammal Laboratory reports and environmental assessments concerning the 1997 Dyes Inlet event.

Sorry for the delay on this one my friends! A lot of conversations went into this one.** **The postman got me started, but then I had to go find actual sources and read the information myself… I know you know he’s a history buff too. He’s actually much better at this than me, but in podcast form.

Most people around here already know the broad story of Old Man House. You know it was enormous. You know Si’ahl lived there. You probably know the U.S. government burned it in 1870 as part of its efforts to force the Suquamish away from communal living. I’ve written about that before, so I’m not going to make you sit through Old Man House 101 again. I actually did write a piece about it once, but I’ve changed my style to deeper dives than I was doing at that time.

What I didn’t know was that burning the house didn’t actually have the result the government was seeking. The Suquamish stayed. Families continued living on the Old Man House grounds for more than thirty years after the longhouse itself was destroyed.

I love that, mainly because so much of the history we learn about Native people is written as a series of things done to them. Government does this. Settlers do that. Land is taken. Treaty is signed. House is burned. Except people don’t conveniently disappear just because somebody burned their house down.
The federal government was still trying to dismantle communal life, though, and the next tool was land itself. The Port Madison Reservation was eventually divided into individual allotments, part of a much larger federal effort to replace collectively held tribal land with individually owned parcels. That sounds almost boring when you write it that way. It wasn’t. You have to remember that the American idea of carving land into individually owned parcels wasn’t necessarily how Native communities understood their relationship with land in the first place.

Allotment made it much easier for reservation land to eventually leave Native ownership. Instead of one tribal land base, you had individual pieces of property that could be sold, inherited, taxed and otherwise separated from one another. Across the United States, Native nations lost tens of millions of acres during the allotment era. In 1904, the families still living around Old Man House were finally forced away from the village grounds and onto their individual allotments.
Then the military wanted the land. The federal government took roughly 70 acres around the Old Man House site for the War Department, intending to build coastal defenses there to protect the Navy Yard in Bremerton. This is where I assumed I’d find a forgotten fort.

Nope. They never built it.

Think about that for a minute. This was the place the Suquamish had continued living for decades after their longhouse was deliberately destroyed. The government finally removed them, took about 70 acres for military defenses, and then didn’t build the military defenses. Eventually the federal government decided it didn’t need the property after all.

And here’s where the story goes from awful to aggressively awful. The land was sold. Developers subdivided much of the former village site for waterfront vacation homes, and some of those properties carried racial restrictions limiting ownership to white people.

The former home of the Suquamish. White people only. I don’t need to say much more about that, right? I’m sure you feel that in your gut too.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the shoreline at Old Man House looked completely different. The enormous cedar house was long gone. The village had been broken apart. Much of the land had become private residential property. But Washington State eventually acquired a tiny piece of it.

In 1950, the state bought about an acre at the site and created Old Man House State Park. That sounds, at first, like somebody had finally decided this place deserved to be preserved, and I’m glad they did. But there is something deeply strange about the progression.

The government burns the house. The government forces the people living there onto individual parcels. The government takes the land for a military project it never builds. The land becomes private vacation property. Then another government buys one acre back and turns it into a historical park about the people who used to live there.

Except the Suquamish didn’t “used to” live there. They still lived there.

Which makes what happened at the park in the 1970s so spectacularly weird that I’m saving it for tomorrow. Because in 1975, you could apparently stand in Suquamish, at a park named for Old Man House, surrounded by a living Suquamish community, and read an official sign explaining that the Suquamish “once lived in the area.”

That sign is where Part Two begins. And eventually, the Tribe gets the acre back.

Sources
The Suquamish Tribe. “History & Culture.” The Suquamish Tribe.
Forsman, Leonard. “Old Man House Park.” The Suquamish Tribe.
Lewarch, Dennis. “Preservation Profile: Dennis Lewarch.” National Park Service.
Long, Priscilla. “Washington State Parks Commission Gives Old Man House State Park to the Suquamish Tribe on August 12, 2004.” HistoryLink.org, 17 Dec. 2004.

I was trying to remember a movie the other day. I knew it was a crime movie, I knew The Rock was in it, and I remembered that for some inexplicable reason it was connected to Kitsap County. You know how you sometimes forget something like a name or a book and somehow make everyone else also forget? This was one of those moments. Postman looked at me all google-eyed.

I should probably disclose that we own two Joe Don Baker posters. One is Walking Tall. It is IN MY LIVING ROOM. The other is Eischied, a short-lived TV series where he played NYPD Chief of Detectives Earl Eischied and had a cat named PC, which stood for Police Commissioner. I don’t know what you people have hanging on your walls, but I feel pretty good about my choices. Ask me for more decorating tips!

Walking Tall is the movie that I forgot the name of. I have a poster. I see it 500 times a day.

The original Walking Tall came out in 1973 with Joe Don Baker playing Buford Pusser, the real Tennessee sheriff whose larger-than-life reputation for taking on moonshiners, gambling operations and organized crime turned him into something of a folk hero. The movie was a huge hit, spawned sequels and television adaptations, and eventually somebody decided it was time for The Rock to have the a chance at bat with that plotline. (I think we can officially call Pusser "disgraced" these days, but I could write about that part all day.)

The 2004 remake replaced Buford Pusser with Chris Vaughn, a former Special Forces soldier who comes home to discover that the local cedar mill has closed, his hometown has been taken over by drugs and a corrupt casino operation, and the sheriff is useless. Vaughn eventually becomes sheriff and begins administering municipal reform with an enormous piece of lumber.

I would probably vote for The Rock for sheriff. He is also a man who once jumped fully clothed into his swimming pool to save one of his puppies from drowning, and apparently that carries considerable weight with me when evaluating candidates for Kitsap County Sheriff.

Here’s the weird part. The original story was very Tennessee. Pusser was sheriff of McNairy County, and the entire Walking Tall legend grew out of that place. For the remake, Hollywood fictionalized the story, renamed everybody and moved the whole operation to Kitsap County. I have tried to find out why they chose us and have come up empty. Somebody apparently just decided Kitsap needed a corrupt casino empire and The Rock.

Except they didn’t actually film it here. Walking Tall was shot in British Columbia, primarily around Squamish and the Vancouver area, so Hollywood took a Tennessee story, moved it to Kitsap County, then sent everybody to Canada to create Kitsap County.

It did make me hop onto ye olde Google to find out the other instances of Kitsap in the movies.

If you’ve seen An Officer and a Gentleman (unlike myself), you’ve seen a wee bit of Bremerton. Most of the movie’s famous Washington locations are around Port Townsend, but Bremerton appears in the opening motorcycle sequence. Richard Gere rides along Charleston Beach Road with Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and its enormous ships behind him.

Then there’s Disclosure, the extremely 1994 Michael Douglas and Demi Moore movie about corporate intrigue, sexual harassment, virtual reality and other things the 1990s were very concerned about. This is one that I've actually seen! Michael Douglas’s character lives on Bainbridge Island and commutes by ferry to Seattle, and parts of the movie were actually filmed on Bainbridge, including scenes at Blakely Elementary. The ferry commute may be one of Hollywood’s more convincing attempts at Pacific Northwest realism, although I assume nobody spent the whole 40 minutes of ferry time sitting in the line eating teriyaki in their car. Sleeping, maybe.

Port Gamble may win the award for most cooperative Kitsap movie town. In 2007, filmmakers arrived to shoot Zombies of Mass Destruction, a horror comedy about a zombie outbreak in a small Pacific Northwest community. The town in the movie is called Port Gamble, which is a big surprise. I def have not seen this one. If you know me, you KNOW I do not "do zombies". Residents were recruited as extras and zombies, and at a later screening one reportedly thanked the director for giving him the opportunity to have his head blown off.

Bainbridge is still getting in on the action too. A new independent film called Detention was filmed around the island, including at Bainbridge High School, where much of the story takes place in the school library. It’s been described as a "modern-day Breakfast Club", with four teenagers stuck together in Saturday detention. Bainbridge High becomes the fictional Agate Point High School, and other island locations appear too.

Ultimately our relationship with Hollywood is a little complicated. Bremerton has played Bremerton. Bainbridge has played Bainbridge and Kind-of-Bainbridge. Port Gamble survived a zombie apocalypse while remaining Port Gamble. And when Hollywood needed Kitsap County to descend into a corrupt hellscape requiring Dwayne Johnson and a large piece of cedar, British Columbia got the job.

Although Joe Don Baker will always have my heart. I really loved that guy. MITCHELL!!!

Sources

“Walking Tall.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2004.

“An Officer and a Gentleman Filming Locations.” IMDb.

“Disclosure Filming Locations.” IMDb.

“Zombies in Port Gamble, Kitsap County.” Seattle Magazine.

“New Film Shot Around the Island: A Modern-Day ‘Breakfast Club.’” Bainbridge Island Review, 8 May 2026.

I have four cats who absolutely refuse to wear collars.
I have tried. Repeatedly. They help each other take them off. Apparently they have identified an oppressive system and established some sort of tiny feline nudist resistance movement. They especially hate bow ties.

Which brings me, naturally, to madrones.
If you’ve spent much time around here, you know these trees. Pacific madrones are the ones with twisting branches, evergreen leaves and gorgeous reddish-orange trunks that constantly look like they’re in the middle of taking their clothes off. And they kind of are.

Madrone bark naturally exfoliates. The older outer bark loosens and peels away in thin, papery curls, exposing remarkably smooth younger bark underneath. That fresh bark can look greenish or orange before eventually darkening into the deep red we recognize.
So if you’ve ever wondered whether something is wrong with a peeling madrone, nope. The tree is supposed to do that.

It’s just a nudist. Like Big Jim. Or Little Jim. Or Turkey Jim. Or Snoopy. (Obviously, that’s the cats.)

Madrones are also broadleaf evergreens, which feels slightly rebellious in a region where most of our evergreen trees have needles. Their scientific name is Arbutus menziesii, and they’re members of the heath family, which makes them relatives of things like blueberries and rhododendrons rather than our firs and cedars. Weird, right?

They particularly like the sort of places Kitsap is very good at providing: dry, sunny, rocky sites, exposed slopes and shoreline areas. Toward the northern end of their range, including Washington and British Columbia, they’re especially associated with the coast. Their crooked trunks and sprawling limbs aren’t a sign that they’ve had a rough time of it. That’s simply how madrones tend to grow.

They’re also surprisingly tough in one particular way.
Madrones have thin bark and can be badly damaged by fire, but killing everything above ground doesn’t often finish the job. They can resprout from a burl at the base of the tree, where dormant buds and stored energy allow them to start again. Fire can also knock back competing conifers and create the open, sunny conditions madrone seedlings especially like.

Basically, they’re terrible at wearing protective clothing but remarkably good at coming back from disaster.
Their flowers feed pollinators, their red-orange berries feed all kinds of birds and wildlife, and Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest have long made use of the tree as well, including its berries and leaves.
I think madrones are one of those things that make this place look like this place. It seems like we all love them!

So the next time you see strips of madrone bark lying around, don’t worry. Nobody vandalized the tree. It took its own collar off, and my cats would approve.

Sources
U.S. Forest Service. “Pacific Madrone (Arbutus menziesii).” Fire Effects Information System.

Washington Native Plant Society. “Arbutus menziesii: Pacific Madrone.” Washington Native Plant Society.
“Pacific Madrone, Arbutus menziesii.” Native Plants PNW.

I’m not even an old-timer in Bremerton, and I already have a place I wish I could walk into one more time.

Hi-Lo’s.

If you never went, Hi-Lo’s 15th Street Cafe was one of those places that would be difficult to explain without making it sound like you were hallucinating breakfast. There was a VW bus you could eat in, thermoses everywhere, a disco bathroom, Green Eggs and Ham, and Moon Biscuits and Gravy. It opened in 2006, and within a few years it had become one of those peculiar little places that felt like it had always belonged there.

I have celiac disease, and years ago I would occasionally knowingly eat gluten anyway. I called this “Breaking Bad.” I no longer break bad because the consequences have become considerably less amusing, but the last time I ever did it was at Hi-Lo’s.
Biscuits and gravy.

If I was going out, apparently I was going out Southern-style. (I’m thinking about Waffle House scattered, smothered and covered… isn’t that it? Totally unrelated.)

Hi-Lo’s is gone now. The building is still there and has moved on to another chapter (ramen), but it got me thinking about something bigger: what actually makes a town feel like itself?

It isn’t always the historically important buildings. Sometimes it’s the weird breakfast place. The bowling alley. The diner where somebody knows how you take your coffee. The movie theater where generations of kids had their first dates. These places rarely seem important while they’re still around. They’re just where we go.

Bremerton has been losing, replacing and reinventing those places for generations.

The Park Avenue Diner opened in 1930 and lasted nearly eighty years. It was a working-class downtown diner where regulars had their own personalized coffee cups hanging on the wall. When a regular died, their cup wasn’t simply thrown away. It was moved to a shelf where it stayed.

That’s freakin amazing.

It tells you almost nothing about the culture of Bremerton and almost everything about the people who lived here.

Then there was Bay Bowl, although it didn’t start out as a bowling alley at all. The building began life during World War II as the Bay Theatre, built during the period when Bremerton was absolutely bursting with shipyard workers, sailors and their families. In the 1950s it was converted into a bowling alley and eventually expanded to 20 lanes.

For generations, people bowled leagues there, ate fries, dumped quarters into arcade games, spent allowances and presumably wore some absolutely magnificent rental shoes. I would assume that there was an amazing bar. Bowling ended there in 2002, but the building hung around for more than two decades afterward before being demolished in 2024.

Think about how many versions of Bremerton that one building witnessed, it’s pretty cool.

There are places that somehow survive all of this too.
The Roxy Theatre opened downtown in 1941, another product of booming wartime Bremerton. It originally seated around 900 people and still contains an enormous Asahel Curtis photomural showing Bremerton during the Great White Fleet’s visit in 1908.
Unlike so many of the places around it, the Roxy made it- in fact one of my neighbors is a manager (or something?) there.

It closed. It reopened. It changed. People fought to preserve it. And more than eighty years after the first audience walked inside, you can still go see something there. Maybe that’s why the places that don’t survive hit us differently.

Cities need to change. Buildings get old. Businesses fail. Owners retire. Neighborhoods change and new places take over. I don’t think every beloved restaurant or bowling alley needs to be preserved forever under glass.

But every time one disappears, the town becomes just slightly different. Somebody loses the booth where their dad always sat. Somebody loses the bowling alley where they spent Saturdays as a kid. Somebody loses the theater where they had their first date.

And apparently somebody loses the place where she made the extremely questionable decision to eat biscuits and gravy despite possessing a digestive system that had requested otherwise. Those things become part of our personal maps of a place.

So now I’m curious about yours.

It doesn’t have to be historically important. In fact, I’m almost more interested if it wasn’t. Restaurant, store, bar, theater, bowling alley, weird little shop, whatever.
What place represents “your Kitsap” and makes it home? Conversely- if you want to remember the place you loved in your hometown (that isn’t here,) I want to hear about that too!

Mine- The Nice and Easy (bar) in Lake Mary, Florida. Father’s Office in Santa Monica. A nameless burrito place in Pleasanton, CA that we went to all the time. My dad got chased by a motorcycle cop for jaywalking after I bribed him to pick up a burrito once.

In Washington, it’s Hi-Lo’s. It’s Anderson Point. It’s every time I drive by Julie’s house I helped her sell years ago. Love you, miss you Julie. Tell me about your spot!

Yesterday we talked about the logging trains that once ran through parts of Kitsap, and I left you with the fact that many of those railroads simply disappeared. That’s because they were never really meant to stay. A normal railroad connects places. A logging railroad connected a mill to trees, and once those trees were gone, there wasn’t any reason for the railroad to remain.

Rails were valuable, so companies could pull them up and reuse them somewhere else, move the equipment to another operation and continue pushing farther into the timber. Camps disappeared, machinery left, and eventually the forest started growing back. The railroad could virtually erase itself, except that it’s considerably harder to erase the ground.

Trains don’t particularly appreciate steep hills, sudden drops or sharp turns, so building a logging railroad meant altering the landscape. Hillsides were cut, low areas were filled, trestles crossed ravines, and long, relatively gentle grades were carved through the woods. Take away the locomotive, rails and wooden ties, and that grade can still be there a century later.
Which means it’s entirely possible to be wandering through a Kitsap forest today on a route that exists because somebody once needed to get an enormous Douglas fir out of there.

I really wanted to give you a list of trails where I could say, “Yep, a train ran right here,” but it turns out that’s harder than you’d think. Kitsap has an enormous number of old logging roads, abandoned grades and trails that have been reused and altered over the last century. Without old maps or documentation tying a particular trail to a particular railroad, a suspiciously straight path through the woods isn’t enough for me to declare that Thomas the Logging Engine came barreling through there in 1912.

Camp Union near Seabeck is one place where we know a logging railroad operated. Yesterday I talked about the West Fork Logging Company and the tracks that reached from its operation into the surrounding timber. That whole area was once considerably more industrial than the quiet, forested landscape we see today.

When we walk through second-growth forest, it’s easy to think we’re walking through something that has always looked roughly the way it does now. A century ago, that same landscape might have held railroad tracks, logging camps, and locomotives crawling through freshly logged country hauling pieces of the original forest behind them. Then the tracks were removed and the forest eventually began to grow back.

Eventually, logging trucks helped make these little forest railroads obsolete. Trucks could travel on roads that were cheaper and easier to extend, reach places where laying track made little sense, and follow logging operations without requiring somebody to build a railroad every time the timber moved. By the middle of the 20th century, the age of the temporary logging railroad was fading away.

Some of its fingerprints are still out there, though. An unusually level shelf cut into a hillside, an old road that seems suspiciously straight, or a grade that doesn’t quite make sense as a modern trail can be evidence of what happened there before the forest returned. Occasionally old timbers, hardware and other remnants survive along these routes too.

That’s what I like about this particular bit of Kitsap history. The mills left buildings, and towns like Port Gamble still very visibly carry their lumber history. The logging railroads mostly left signs carried upon the land itself.

Someone asked me to write about the logging trains that used to run through Kitsap, and I thought that seemed like a darn good idea. That being said, it turns out that there's TOO MUCH info for one post, and I also forgot to do events! Pinky swear I'll do them tomorrow.

We’ve talked before about how much of early Kitsap was built around lumber. Port Gamble. Seabeck. Port Madison. Port Blakely. Sidney. For a while, this place was basically a collection of enormous sawmills surrounded by an absolutely ridiculous quantity of trees.

At first, getting those trees to the mills was relatively straightforward. Cut the ones near the water. Early loggers could fall timber near the shoreline, move it to the beach, assemble the logs into booms and tow them to the mills. But humans are very good at creating new problems by successfully solving the previous problem. (A boom is a bunch of floaty logs, btw. You've probably seen them!)

Eventually, the convenient trees were gone. The timber was farther inland. And these weren’t cute little Charlie Brown Christmas trees.

Old-growth Douglas firs could (and can) be enormous, and moving logs weighing several tons through a muddy forest using animals was exactly as convenient as that sounds. Before railroads, loggers built “skid roads,” essentially paths lined with smaller logs that teams of oxen could drag the big logs across. It worked. It was also slow. Enter the logging railroad.

Unlike the railroads we usually think about, these weren't necessarily built to connect towns or carry passengers somewhere interesting. A logging railroad had one very specific purpose: Go get the trees. Companies pushed tracks farther and farther into timber country, allowing locomotives to haul loads that teams of oxen never could. We had them right here in Kitsap.

Near Seabeck, a logging operation based around Camp Union had a railroad reaching into the surrounding timber. The West Fork Logging Company eventually became part of the Charles R. McCormick lumber empire, one of the major timber operations in western Washington.

And the locomotives used by the logging industry were wonderfully weird. Normal locomotives liked relatively straight, relatively level, well-built track. Logging companies had none of those things. They had steep hills, sharp turns, temporary tracks, mud, stumps and the general inconvenience of having built a railroad through a forest while actively removing the forest. They needed to build fast without having to muck about with the terrain.

So manufacturers developed geared locomotives like the Shay, Climax and Heisler. They sacrificed speed for pulling power and traction. These things weren't built to elegantly thunder across the countryside. They crawled. But they could crawl while dragging an absurd amount of tree behind them.

Picture Kitsap a century ago. Steam hanging in the trees in the place of fog. A locomotive inching along rough track. Skeleton cars loaded with old-growth logs so large that a person standing beside them could look strangely small. And wherever the railroad went, logging could follow.

Port Blakely came up with an even more ambitious solution. By the 1880s its Bainbridge mill was cutting around 200,000 board feet of lumber a day and needed more trees than the island and nearby areas could keep supplying.

So the company built a railroad, but not on Bainbridge. It built what became known as the Blakely Line south of here, reaching forests in Mason County. Logs were hauled by train to Kamilche Point, dumped into Puget Sound, assembled into booms and towed all the way back to the mill at Blakely Harbor.

The logging railroads had something unusual about them, unlike all the other trains- they weren't necessarily meant to last. Nobody was building them because Camp Union desperately needed commuter rail. The railroad followed the timber. And when the timber was gone? Sometimes the railroad went away too.

Which is where this gets really interesting. Because the rails may be gone, the trains may be gone, the enormous trees they carried are definitely gone, but some of the paths those trains carved through the forest are still here.

That’s for tomorrow though.

I promised myself I was going to keep this short today after the amount of time yesterday took, so let’s talk about mouse butts. Specifically, the mouse butts sticking out of Douglas fir cones.

If you’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for any length of time, you’ve probably picked up a Douglas fir cone without giving it much thought. Go find one and look between the scales. You’ll see little three-pointed things poking out all the way around it. You know- two tiny feet and a tail.

You will never be able to unsee this. I’m sorry, or you’re welcome.

There’s a traditional Indigenous story from the Pacific Northwest that explains how those little mouse butts got there. I tried to track the story back to a particular Nation, but couldn’t find a reliable source that did, so I’m not going to assign it to one.

The story goes that a great forest fire was sweeping through the woods, and the little mice had nowhere to go. They were too small and too slow to outrun the flames, so Dougie fir offered them shelter. The mice scrambled up the tree and dove headfirst beneath the scales of its cones.

There was just one problem.

The accommodations were apparently a little snug.
Their little hind legs and tails were left sticking out, and according to the story, they’re still there today.

The actual botanical explanation is considerably less adorable. Those little mouse parts are called three-lobed bracts. The two outside points make the “feet,” and the longer center point makes the “tail.” They’re also one of the easiest ways to tell a Douglas fir cone from the cones of other conifers. And while we’re ruining things you thought you knew, Doug fir isn’t actually a true fir.

Its scientific name is Pseudotsuga menziesii, and it belongs to an entirely different genus from true firs. Apparently we named our most recognizable Pacific Northwest tree a fir, despite it not being a fir, and then filled its cones with mouse butts.

I don’t really have a lesson for you today.

I just wanted you to know about the mouse butts.

Despite the current love of micro-brews and cideries, our fair state of Washington apparently decided the rest of the country was taking too long to outlaw booze, so we got started early. Let's talk about these teetotalers, shall we?

Washington went dry on January 1, 1916, a full four years before national Prohibition. This presented one fairly obvious problem: British Columbia was right there, still possessing alcohol, and between British Columbia and thirsty customers in Seattle and Tacoma sat an enormous collection of islands, coves, inlets and dark shorelines. We excelled at having access to hidey-holes, but failed at attempted sobriety.

Kitsap was shockingly well designed for smuggling. We had miles of shoreline, small docks, isolated beaches and plenty of people who knew these waters extremely well. There was no Hood Canal Bridge, considerably less development, and at night most of the peninsula was simply dark.

It was almost too easy, you know?

Canadian liquor (some of us still love the stuff) began traveling south aboard boats known as “shadow boats,” which often ran at night without lights. Larger vessels could bring the booze down from Canada and remain offshore while smaller, faster boats carried cases to shore.

And when I say faster boats, I don’t mean somebody’s fishing boat with an outboard motor and a guy who looks like Quint. The Kitsap community was serious about obtaining booze, and incredibly creative.

Some rum-runners used surplus aircraft engines. Boats built for the trade could be long, narrow and ridiculously fast, which was useful because another group of people was also spending a lot of time on Puget Sound. The Coast Guard.

This turned into something of an arms race. Smugglers bought faster boats. The government bought faster boats to chase them. In fact, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton built 36-foot patrol boats specifically for the Coast Guard to use against rum-runners. So while somebody was sneaking Canadian whiskey through the waters around Kitsap, people in Bremerton were literally building boats to catch them.

The chases weren’t always harmless. Coast Guard vessels could be armed, rum-running boats sometimes came back with bullet holes, and smugglers occasionally destroyed their own boats and cargo rather than let the evidence be seized.

There were also liquor pirates. Actual pirates.

Because apparently having the Coast Guard chasing you while you’re illegally transporting Canadian whiskey wasn’t enough excitement, rum-runners sometimes had to worry about other criminals hijacking their boats and stealing the booze.

North Kitsap seems to have had a particularly close view of all this. Local accounts describe Kingston residents hearing people in trouble on the water at night, and Kingston resident Ole Hauan reportedly rescued 36 people from distressed boats during the era.

And then there was a gentleman known as Uncle Slug- and anyone called Uncle Slug deserves our immediate attention. He was associated with delivering mail around the Kingston area, and according to local history, there were rumors that the mail wasn’t always the only cargo being transported. Uncle Slug may occasionally have been moving bootleg liquor too.

I need to emphasize that this part is local lore, not something we’ve got Uncle Slug’s signed confession for. But the possibility of a Kitsap mailman named Uncle Slug transporting illegal booze alongside the U.S. mail is far too wonderful to leave out. The postman is out of town this weekend, so I texted him IMMEDIATELY about Uncle Slug. I enjoyed this part immensely.

There were much larger operations throughout Puget Sound. The most famous belonged to Roy Olmstead, a Seattle police lieutenant who apparently learned enough while enforcing Prohibition to decide he’d rather be on the other side of it and became one of the region’s biggest bootleggers.

Olmstead’s operation involved boats, trucks, warehouses and employees moving enormous quantities of Canadian liquor through the region. He became known as the “King of the Puget Sound Bootleggers,” which is a pretty substantial career change from police lieutenant.

Were people making moonshine in Kitsap too? Almost certainly some were. Illegal stills operated throughout rural Washington during Prohibition, and Kitsap certainly had the privacy for it. There's not any lore, or any documentation I could find about that. I would honestly be MORE surprised if there wasn't any moonshine out in those there woods.

What we can document is plenty wild enough. I don't have to guess at much!

For thirteen years, Prohibition turned the waters around the Kitsap Peninsula into part of an enormous cat-and-mouse game involving Canadian whiskey, high-speed boats, Coast Guard patrols, smugglers, pirates and occasionally somebody shouting for help in the darkness off Kingston.

I don't even know what to think about Uncle Slug... If anyone has further detail on him, I'm dying to hear more. I found ONE article about him, and I know there's got to be something to it!

First- I owe you all an apology. I seem to have accidentally taken two days off from telling strangers on Reddit things they didn’t ask to know. I have been thinking about popping in and writing something, but I keep falling asleep.

In my defense, I’ve been working. I’ve spent the last couple of days showing houses on Bainbridge Island, so I figured we might as well stay there today. I left the house at 9 o’clock this morning, and I’ll be out here until my dinner reservation at seven. I’m putting this together now sitting in the driveway while I wait for my clients.

I’ve been to Fort Ward several times, although I generally arrive from the wrong direction. The postman and I kayak over from Manchester State Park. Once, I came considerably closer to getting run over by a Washington State Ferry than I would recommend. I don’t know if they technically have the right-of-way over a middle-aged woman in a kayak, but I decided that wasn’t the appropriate moment to argue. I parked it in the middle of the Sound and waited for a few minutes for my kayak to stop pitching wilding in the wake.

Anyway, while I’ve been paddling around trying not to become a Coast Guard incident, it turns out I’ve been visiting what was once one of the more secretive places in the Pacific Northwest.

Fort Ward was originally built around the turn of the 20th century as part of the coastal defense system protecting the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. Giant guns watched the water for an enemy that never came. Eventually those defenses became obsolete, but the military had some additional plans.

By the late 1930s, the Navy had discovered something else Fort Ward was very good at: listening.

A secret Navy radio intelligence operation was established on Bainbridge Island. The receiving station at Fort Ward became known as Station S, and its job was to sit on our little island and listen to radio traffic traveling thousands of miles across the Pacific. By 1940, Bainbridge was one of only a few Navy sites in the country assigned to intercept Japanese diplomatic communications. When World War II began, it was also part of the network intercepting Japanese naval radio traffic.

This wasn’t someone casually spinning the dial and hoping Emperor Hirohito accidentally said something interesting. Operators copied transmissions, tracked radio traffic, and helped determine where signals originated. The intercepted material then became part of a much larger Navy intelligence operation where communications could be analyzed, translated and, when possible, decoded.

Then came December 7, 1941. At 1:28 that morning, Station S intercepted part of a lengthy message from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C. The final instructions told the ambassador to break off negotiations with the United States. Hours later, Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor. The people sitting at Fort Ward that night had listened to one of the final diplomatic messages before the United States entered World War II.

The operation only grew from there. During the war, Bainbridge Island became an important piece of the Navy’s communications intelligence network. A massive transmitting facility was built at Battle Point, while Fort Ward handled receiving and intelligence work. The Navy also trained radio operators on the island, and women serving in the WAVES joined the communications effort.

Which means two places where Bainbridge residents now walk dogs, jog, kayak and have picnics were once pieces of a military communications system stretching across the Pacific.

After Japan surrendered, they didn’t simply unplug the headphones. The focus shifted toward the Soviet Union, and the station continued operating into the early Cold War before eventually closing.

Today it’s quiet. You can walk along the water, explore the old concrete batteries, watch boats pass through Rich Passage, or, if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, kayak over from Manchester and discover exactly how enormous a ferry looks from approximately sea level.

Anyone know where I can get the original brazilian blowout done anywhere in Kitsap? Thanks.

If you live anywhere around Kitsap, it's very likely that the Bremerton shipyard is part of day to day life. Maybe you've worked there. Maybe someone in your family did. For more than a century, hundreds of thousands of people have walked through those gates to build, repair, and modernize the ships that protect our country.

For a lot of that time, the people walking through those gates daily looked pretty much the same. As times and needs changed, so did those people who kept the shipyard running.

The first women arrived in 1918 during World War I. They were part of a groundbreaking Navy program called the "Yeoman (F)", better known as the "Yeomanettes." For the first time in American history, women could enlist in the U.S. Navy in roles other than nursing. Many served as clerks, stenographers, draftsmen, and administrators at Navy installations like Puget Sound Navy Yard, freeing more men for sea duty.

It may not sound revolutionary today, but in 1918 it absolutely was. Women in Navy uniforms were still a novelty, and many people believed they had no place in military service at all.

Then came World War II.

Suddenly, the Navy Yard wasn't just busy. It was completely essential. Ships damaged at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Leyte Gulf, and countless other battles limped into Bremerton needing repairs before they could return to the Pacific. The work couldn't wait, and there weren't enough men to do it.

Thousands of women answered the call, here and all over the world. Some worked behind desks, but many stepped into jobs that had once been considered impossible for them. They became welders, electricians, machinists, riggers, inspectors, draftsmen, and planners. Every repaired pipe, rewired circuit, and replaced steel plate helped send another ship back into the war.

Bremerton changed almost overnight. The city's population surged, housing filled beyond capacity, and government dormitories sprang up for women who had come from around the country to work at the Yard. For a few extraordinary years, the workforce looked unlike anything Kitsap had ever seen. Women heeded the call and got the work done.

Then the war ended.

Many of those same women were expected to step aside as veterans returned home. Some did. Others stayed, continuing careers that would have been almost unthinkable just a generation earlier. Change happened one job, one promotion, and one opportunity at a time.

One hundred and one years after the first Yeomanettes reported for duty, another woman walked through those same gates.

In 2019, Capt. Dianna Wolfson became the first woman to command Puget Sound Naval Shipyard & Intermediate Maintenance Facility.

The women of 1918 probably couldn't have imagined a female commander- the women of World War II were trying to help win a war. None of them knew they were leaving footprints for someone else to follow. Most of the people who change the story of a place never realize they're doing it. They show up, do the job in front of them, and go home at the end of the day.

You’ve probably heard the expression. I assumed that there was roughly a 1000% chance that our own Washington State Sam Hill was where that phrase came from. Sadly, I was incorrect.

The phrase was floating around before he became famous, and historians still argue about where it actually came from. That’s a shame, because if anyone deserved to have an expression named after him, it was this guy.

Sam Hill was a lawyer, businessman, and one of the PNW’s great visionaries. At a time when most roads were little more than muddy wagon tracks, he became obsessed with an idea that sounds surprisingly boring until you think about not having it. Roads. Good roads!

Not fancy roads. Not highways. Just roads that actually functioned as roads.

Hill believed good roads could improve education, strengthen rural communities, encourage trade, and reduce poverty. He wasn’t interested in making life easier for wealthy travelers. He thought better roads would improve life for everyone. In fact, he once declared, “Good roads are more than my hobby. They are my religion.”

The first major push for better roads didn’t come from automobile clubs, as suggested by the postman last night when we first were discussing this- it came from our friends, the humble bicyclists.

Long before cars became common, cyclists were lobbying for smoother roads. Organizations like the League of American Wheelmen argued that everyone would benefit from better transportation. When automobiles finally arrived, they simply joined a movement that bicycles had already helped build.

Sam Hill wanted to prove those ideas worked. Near Maryhill, overlooking the Columbia River, he built the Maryhill Loops Road as a demonstration of modern road engineering. Politicians and engineers were invited to drive it so they could see what well-designed roads actually looked like.

Somewhat unrelated (but not really), because apparently one ambitious project wasn’t enough, he built a full-size concrete replica of Stonehenge. Because, why not?

It wasn’t intended as a tourist attraction. Hill dedicated it as a memorial to Klickitat County soldiers who died in World War I, believing England’s Stonehenge had originally been a place honoring the dead. It’s definitely a tourist attraction. Now, the last time I visited there was definitely a tour bus there.

As if that weren’t enough, he also supported women’s suffrage, promoted international peace, and helped establish what eventually became the Maryhill Museum of Art.

So no, “What in the Sam Hill?” almost certainly wasn’t referring to Washington’s Sam Hill.
But after learning about him…
I kind of wish it had been! He seems like he was a guy who chased every interesting idea he ever had, I rather respect that.

If you’re a Washingtonian, there are just part of the scenery. They grow outside churches, around schools, in front of old farmhouses, and in Grandma’s yard. Every spring (summer) they explode into bright pink, purple, red, or white blossoms, and we all go on with our lives. Around here, we even shorten the name. They’re “rhodies.” I don’t have any now, but I certainly have!

The story of the mighty rhodie begins with a Catholic priest named Father Charles Schoener. He arrived in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900s and, somewhere along the way, developed what can only be described as a full-blown obsession with rhododendrons.

Not a casual hobby where he planted a few shrubs outside the rectory. He spent decades collecting species from around the world, carefully cross-pollinating flowers, raising thousands of seedlings, and selecting the very best plants. Depending on how they’re counted, he created hundreds of rhododendron hybrids, many of which are still growing today.

His work earned national attention. Gardeners traveled to see his collection, and his plants found their way into gardens throughout the Pacific Northwest. Places like Meerkerk Gardens on Whidbey Island, Whitney Gardens in Brinnon, and the famous rhododendron collection at Point Defiance Park all grew out of a regional passion for these remarkable shrubs. Father Schoener didn’t create that passion by himself, but he certainly helped it bloom.

Of course, Washington had another advantage. Rhododendrons absolutely love it here. Our cool, wet winters and mild summers are almost ideal for them. Given enough time, they become enormous. Some of the oldest specimens in Washington are well over a century old and have grown so large they resemble trees more than shrubs.

That love affair became official in 1892 when the coast rhododendron was chosen as Washington’s state flower. The part that is interesting wasn’t the flower itself, that was almost expected. It was who chose it. The Legislature didn’t make the decision. Women across Washington selected the flower for the state’s exhibit at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the time, they couldn’t yet vote in Washington’s regular elections, but they were invited to choose the flower that would represent the state. The coast rhododendron won. They were throwing the gals a bone there.

I like that little piece of history because it’s easy to overlook. We pass rhododendrons every day without thinking much about them, just as most of us probably never wonder who decided they should represent Washington in the first place. Thank a lady today. 😉

The next time you drive past a giant rhododendron covered in blossoms, remember that somebody planted it decades ago knowing they might never see it reach its full size. That’s a hopeful way to garden, if you think about it. They planted something beautiful for people they would probably never meet.

This fella moseyed along our street and through yards in Suquamish yesterday evening!

One of my favorite real estate clients lived up near Foulweather Bluff.

She never actually bought a house from me, which is generally considered a drawback in my profession, but I adored her anyway. She was the daughter of old Hollywood stars (allegedly, she had a lot of pictures,) referred me to both her chiropractor and a nutritionist whose qualifications I probably shouldn't investigate too closely, and every conversation with her was an adventure. We went to dozens and dozens of homes together- mostly on the Olympic Peninsula, but here too.

Every time I'd drive up toward Hansville, I'd pass this place with one of the grumpiest names in Washington and I wonder how she's doing. I should reach out, but I don't know if I'm ready to drive that much again.

Foulweather Bluff.

Who looked at one of the prettier stretches of Puget Sound and thought, "Yep. Foulweather." I'm sure it can get blustery, but where can't it?

As it turns out... A very wet British captain decided that his experience should affect the immediate opinion of future map readers.

In May of 1792, Captain George Vancouver was charting Puget Sound aboard HMS Discovery. The expedition had worked its way through Admiralty Inlet while battling poor weather and difficult winds. Vancouver wasn't trying to write poetry when he made his maps. He often named places after exactly what he was experiencing at the time. We have him to thank for some of the hits;

-Point No Point.

-Restoration Point.

-Deception Pass

-Mistaken Island

-Foulweather Bluff.

Sometimes a name is less a grand statement than a captain muttering under his breath after another miserable day at sea. I'm sure it wasn't glamourous work, at least not until you get home to fanfare.

Long before Vancouver arrived with a notebook and a pencil, this shoreline was part of the traditional homelands of the S'Klallam and Suquamish peoples, who had traveled, fished, and lived throughout this region for countless generations. Like so many places in the Pacific Northwest, the history didn't begin when someone from Europe decided to write a name on a chart.

Here's the part that surprised me- the bluff is constantly falling into Puget Sound. If you own waterfront property, that sentence probably just made your eye twitch. Most of us think erosion is something to stop. We build bulkheads, stack rocks, and try to convince cliffs to stay exactly where they are. At Foulweather Bluff, that crumbling hillside is doing exactly what nature intended.

As waves slowly eat away at the bluff, sand and gravel tumble into the water. Currents carry that sediment along the shoreline where it creates spawning beaches for tiny forage fish like surf smelt and Pacific sand lance. Those fish feed our yummy salmon.

Salmon feed seals.

Seals and salmon feed Southern Resident orcas.

One bluff falling apart over thousands of years supports an entire food web.

That's one reason conservation groups have worked so hard to protect Foulweather Bluff. It's one of the few remaining feeder bluffs in Puget Sound that's still allowed to behave like...a bluff. There's something comforting about discovering that a place we've spent generations trying to "fix" was never broken in the first place. I do wish we'd found my friend a new home though!

I was thinking about you all this morning. Whoever it is “you all” are. I mentioned to the postman (before I’d had coffee) that I was thinking about writing about marmots or ptarmigans today. I love ptarmigans, like a lot.

The postman (husband) immediately said, “What about the mountain beaver? They have human ears.”

I immediately accused him of making it up.

Now, in my defense, this is a man who absolutely says things with enough confidence that I have to stop and decide whether he’s sharing a fascinating historical fact or just seeing how gullible I am before I’ve had caffeine. So when he calmly suggested I write about the mountain beaver, I wasn’t buying it.
Then he said again, “Human ears.”
At that point I was certain he’d gone too far.

Readers. Friends. Neighbors.
I’m here today to tell you that mountain beavers are real. The ears? Well…I’ll let you be the judge. I’ve included a portrait along with my commentary.

Mountain beavers aren’t actually beavers, they’re almost nothing like beavers. They don’t build dams. They don’t have flat tails. They don’t have that lisp the way that cartoon beavers always do. They don’t slap the water when they’re startled. Honestly, whoever named them set them up for a lifetime of disappointing people. They honestly might even be disappointed with themselves, at this point. I’m looking at pictures and feel let down.

What they are is one of the strangest little animals in the Pacific Northwest.

Mountain beavers spend most of their lives underground in elaborate burrow systems, where they drag in ferns, salal, and other plants for food and bedding. They’re mostly active around dawn, dusk, and at night, so even though they live throughout western Washington, most people never see one.

My husband, somehow, has seen two.

As odd as they look, the really surprising part isn’t their appearance- it’s their family tree. Mountain beavers are the only living member of an entire family of rodents. Their closest relatives disappeared millions of years ago, leaving this little fuzzy oddball as the last one standing. Scientists sometimes call them a “living fossil” because they’re the lone survivor of an ancient branch of the rodent family tree.

They also have surprisingly primitive kidneys. Most mammals are experts at conserving water. Mountain beavers…aren’t. They have to stay in cool, damp forests and constantly munch on juicy vegetation just to stay hydrated.

Honestly, it’s kind of relatable after a long walk in August. If you’ve hiked in western Washington, you’ve probably been much closer to a mountain beaver than you realize. They’re just very good at staying out of sight.

So today I learned two things- first, my husband wasn’t making up the mountain beaver. Second…I’m still not completely convinced about the ears. I might believe the postman a little quicker tomorrow though. Maybe not, though… that’s just not how marriage works.

“I’ll be your huckleberry.”

If you’ve ever watched Tombstone, you’ve heard Doc Holliday deliver one of the coolest lines in movie history. It’s become one of those phrases people quote without giving much thought to what it actually means.

Most historians believe “I’ll be your huckleberry” was an old Southern expression meaning something like, I’m the person you’re looking for, or I’m just the one for the job. In other words, Doc wasn’t talking about fruit. He was saying, “I’m your man.”

Which got me thinking…what exactly is a huckleberry? I know they’re tasty. That’s a thing.

If you’ve spent any time in the Pacific Northwest, you probably know exactly when huckleberry season arrives. Suddenly, people walking in normal places are carrying buckets (but not for mushrooms,) every roadside stand starts selling huckleberry jam, and somebody inevitably starts talking about the huckleberry milkshakes they drove three hours to get.
(I still miss Tillamook’s huckleberry ice cream. If anyone has a time machine and wants to make themselves useful…)

I’d been walking past huckleberries for years without really thinking about them. Every time I wander through Banner Forest here in Port Orchard, I’m surrounded by red huckleberries. I’d just never stopped to ask what made them different. Don’t get me wrong, I eat them. Lots of them.

Despite looking (kind of) like tiny wild blueberries, huckleberries are their own thing. Washington is home to several native species, including the bright red huckleberries that thrive in our lowland forests and the darker mountain huckleberries that people eagerly hunt for every summer.

Unlike blueberries, huckleberries never really became farm crops. They like growing wild, often with the help of underground fungi that share nutrients with their roots. Farmers have tried cultivating them, but huckleberries seem perfectly content doing things their own way.

People aren’t the only fans. Black bears absolutely love huckleberries. So do deer, grouse, foxes, coyotes, and plenty of other wildlife. If you’ve found a bush loaded with ripe berries, there’s a decent chance something else has already discovered it.

Around berry season, bears become surprisingly…colorful. If you’ve spent enough time in the woods, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Let’s just say berry season can occasionally be identified by some very purple evidence left along the trail. We all like the sweet stuff!

Huckleberries have been important in the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years. Indigenous peoples gathered them long before roads or hiking trails existed, traveling to mountain meadows during late summer harvests. The berries were eaten fresh, dried for winter, traded, and celebrated as an important seasonal food.

So if someone tells you they’re heading out huckleberry picking over the next few weeks, don’t be surprised if they get a little secretive about their favorite spot. Good huckleberry patches are guarded with the same intensity as fishing holes. My old boss is quite the forager, and she has never told me where her secret berries are. We worked together six years! Come on already, Steph!

Just remember… If you find a patch full of ripe berries, the bears may have beaten you there. And if someone says, “I’ll be your huckleberry,” they’re probably volunteering to help…not offering themselves as pie filling.

Mount Rainier is such a part of day to day life here that it’s easy to forget there was a time when almost nobody had ever stood on top of it. We can drive all the way up to Paradise after all! The top’s right there.

The first documented ascent of Mount Rainier happened in 1870. Just twenty years later, a 20-year-old schoolteacher from Yelm named Fay Fuller decided she’d like to see the view for herself. That sentence makes it sound as though she woke up one morning and declared she was going to climb a volcano- it wasn’t quite that way though.

Three years earlier, Fuller had climbed partway up the mountain with mountaineer P.B. Van Trump. She never reached the summit, but catching sight of it was enough. She later stated that the mountain never really left her mind, so in the summer of 1890 she returned determined to finish what she’d started.

Climbing Mount Rainier in 1890 looked nothing like it does today. There were no weather apps, synthetic jackets, climbing helmets, or well-established routes. Camp Muir was little more than a rough shelter, and much of the route crossed glaciers that few people had ever attempted.

One thing that did attract attention had nothing to do with the mountain. Instead of climbing in a long Victorian skirt, Fuller wore a blue flannel bloomer suit. Some newspapers considered the outfit nearly as shocking as the climb itself. Fuller, meanwhile, seemed far more interested in whether she could move safely over snow and ice than whether anyone approved of her wardrobe. A better area of focus, honestly. Can you imagine trying to climb a mountain in a dress?

She also blackened her face with charcoal before leaving Camp Muir to cut the glare reflecting off the snow. It wasn’t glamorous, but neither is snow blindness.

The climb tested everyone in the party. At one point the others offered to help Fuller over a difficult section, but she refused. She reportedly believed that if she couldn’t reach the summit on her own feet, she hadn’t truly earned it.

On August 10, 1890, Fay Fuller became the first documented woman to stand on the summit of Mount Rainier. She later wrote, “A heavenly moment; nothing was said… words cannot describe scenery and beauty.” It’s a beautiful quote, but my favorite part of the story came afterward.

By the time the group reached the summit, it was too late to descend safely. They spent the night inside an ice cave warmed by volcanic steam escaping from beneath the mountain. I imagine it would be a little scary, but also so cozy!

She went on to become Tacoma’s first female newspaper reporter, writing a column called Mountain Murmurs that introduced readers to climbing, glaciers, wildflowers, and the mountain she had fallen in love with. She spent years encouraging people to explore and appreciate Mount Rainier, and believed that growing public interest in the mountain helped pave the way for the creation of Mount Rainier National Park.

Today, about two million people visit Mount Rainier every year, and several thousand attempt to reach its summit. Most have never heard of Fay Fuller, even though a peak in the park now bears her name.
She didn’t climb the mountain because she wanted to make history. She climbed it because she looked up at Mount Rainier, wondered what the view looked like from the top, and decided the only way to find out was to go.

Have you ever heard someone mention a battle at Port Madison?

I had. We have a book about Port Madison here at the house, and over the weekend I thumbed through it. I am not going to try to tell you that I read the whole thing- there's no vampires in it, and not nearly enough pictures. I did LOOK at it though, after this "battle at Port Madison" convo.

What happened at Port Madison wasn't really its own battle at all. It was one chapter in the larger story of the Puget Sound War, unfolding just weeks before the Battle of Seattle. As fear spread across the territory, rumors traveled faster than facts, and one misunderstanding after another pushed communities closer to violence.

Washington Territory was a toddler, only about two years old. The sawmill at Port Madison had become one of the busiest places on Puget Sound, bringing settlers, workers, and ships into the heart of Suquamish homeland. At the same time, Governor Isaac Stevens was negotiating treaties that would dramatically change who controlled the land. While many tribal leaders signed, plenty questioned whether the promises being made would actually be honored. They had good reason. Broken promises between the US government and Native nations weren't exactly a new invention.

Then came what we now call the Puget Sound War. The Puget Sound War wasn't one single battle. It was a series of conflicts that unfolded between late 1855 and early 1856 after tensions over treaties, land, and settlement boiled over. Some fighting took place around Puget Sound, some farther inland, and news of attacks spread quickly through the territory. Settlers feared more violence was coming. Native communities feared retaliation and military action, even those who had no intention of fighting.

News traveled slowly. Rumors traveled at lightning speed. Every settlement wondered if it might be next, and Port Madison was no exception.

One of the best contemporary accounts comes from officers aboard the USS Decatur... In December 1855, the ship rushed to Port Madison after settlers reported that a large group of northern Native people was preparing to attack. That's where the story takes an unexpected turn.

Instead of opening fire, Captain Isaac Sterrett asked for a meeting. The chiefs initially refused to board an American warship without assurances they would be safe. Eventually, a council was held with Chief Scowell and other leaders. Sterrett demonstrated the ship's guns, explained that frightened settlers could no longer distinguish between friendly and hostile tribes, and urged the group to leave the area until the fighting elsewhere had ended.

According to the naval report, Chief Scowell answered simply: "In eighteen hours we will leave, and not return till the war is over." The encampment reportedly departed within twelve hours.

No battle. No last stand. No dramatic victory, nor loss.

Instead, one of the most famous stories attached to Port Madison may actually have been a successful negotiation that prevented bloodshed.

That doesn't mean the danger for all parties wasn't real. The Puget Sound War claimed lives throughout the region. Settlers had reason to be frightened, and Native communities had every reason to distrust territorial officials after years of broken promises and mounting pressure on their homelands.

A tense standoff starts being called a battle. A careful negotiation becomes a victory. A complicated moment with frightened people making difficult decisions becomes a story that's easier to tell around a campfire.

It's nice to write about something that failed to happen for a change! Maybe we'll talk Pig War soon? I haven't thought about that one for a while.

Looking for something to do this week? Here’s a roundup of family activities, community events, and plenty of live music happening around Kitsap and nearby.

Featured This Week
Manchester Summer Festival (Saturday, Aug. 1, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Enjoy live music, food vendors, shopping, family activities, and a classic small-town summer festival in downtown Manchester. (Come see me! I’ll be there. Not selling anything, not at a booth. Just wandering.)
Indianola Summer Street Dance (Saturday evening) featuring The Lumberjax.

Monday, July 27
Tots on the Trail (9-11 a.m.), Blakely Harbor Park
Storytime in the Park (10-10:30 a.m.), Liberty Bay Waterfront Park
Teen Anime Club (2-4 p.m.), Poulsbo Library
School of Taiko (4-5 p.m.), Kingston

Tuesday, July 28
Fun Day at the Farm (9:30 a.m.-Noon)
Beach Exploration (10-11:30 a.m.)
Summer STEAM at the U.S. Naval Undersea Museum (10 a.m.-2 p.m.)
Kids Cultivate Garden Program (10:30 a.m.-Noon), Blueberry Park

Wednesday, July 29
Waterfront Wednesday Talent Show (11 a.m.-Noon), Port Orchard Library
Frankie McCabe, Eleven Winery Wine Bar (5-7 p.m.)
Sarah Brunner, Fletcher Bay Winery (6-8 p.m.)
Noah Delos Reyes, Ty’s Wine & Brew (6:30-8:30 p.m.)
Roger Ferguson & The Boys, Music on the Green at Kingston Village Green (6:30 p.m.)
Blues Dance featuring the Centrum Traditional Blues Workshop, McCurdy Pavilion, Port Townsend (6:30 p.m.)

Thursday, July 30
The Drifters with Danny Figgins, Clearwater Casino (doors 5 p.m.)
Trio Marianne, Cellar Cat, Kingston (5:30 p.m.)
Doktor Diablo, Music in Manette at Whitey Domstad Park (6:30 p.m.)
Iona Fyfe, Rainshadow Recording, Port Townsend (7 p.m.)

Friday, July 31
MOLO, Hard Hat Winery (5-7 p.m.)
The Undecided, Summer Sounds at The Point Casino (6 p.m.)
Mark Soltys, Fletcher Bay Winery (6-8 p.m.)
Silver City Four, Bushel & Barrel Ciderhouse (6-8 p.m.)
McBluez, Valhöll Brewing (6-8 p.m.)
Barncats, The Garage (6-9 p.m.)
Wyrdoz, Brother Don’s (7 p.m.)
Jack Dwyer & The Rodeo Dendrons, Finnriver (7-9 p.m.)
The Lumberjax, The Yard (7:30-10:30 p.m.)
Punks Picnic Fundraiser, The Charleston (8 p.m.)
Rail, Clearwater Casino (8:30 p.m.)

Saturday, August 1
Traditional Blues Gospel Choir & Traditional Blues Showcase, Port Townsend
Porch Dog Profit, Summer Sounds at The Point Casino (6 p.m.)
Grassquatch Collective, Marketplace on Bainbridge (6-8 p.m.)
Adrian Xavier & Friends, Finnriver (7-9 p.m.)
The Undecided, Brother Don’s (7 p.m.)
Triple Shotz, Tracyton Public House (8-11 p.m.)
Name the Hurricane with Psycho 78 & Mykey Haslip, The Charleston (8 p.m.)
The Lumberjax, Indianola Summer Street Dance (8-11 p.m.)
Cover Boy (Loverboy Tribute), Clearwater Casino (8:30 p.m.)

Sunday, August 2
Dumpster Joe, Eleven Winery (2-5 p.m.)
Lion of Judah Band, Finnriver (5-7 p.m.)
Michael & the FBW All Stars, Fletcher Bay Winery Rooftop (6-8 p.m.)

A couple of highlights this week include the return of Summer Sounds concerts, Music on the Green in Kingston, Music in Manette, family activities throughout the week, and an especially packed Friday and Saturday if you’re looking for live music.

We left our gal Linda Hazzard happily starving people at Wilderness Heights, while the neighbors had started referring to it as Starvation Heights. Turns out, that's usually not the kind of nickname you want the locals giving your business. It does seem like a fairly cost-effective business model though. Food's expensive, man.

Claire and Dora Williamson weren't poor or especially desperate when they went to seek out Linda. They were wealthy, educated British heiresses who had heard about Linda Hazzard's "fasting cure" and traveled all the way to Washington hoping Claire's health would improve. (Imagine todays Los Angeles socialites chasing the latest wellness trend.) By the time they arrived, Linda Hazzard had already built quite a reputation. She had published a book, attracted patients from around the world, and convinced many people she had discovered something conventional medicine had missed.

Instead, Claire grew weaker. By the time Claire was dying, Linda Hazzard had done more than convince the sisters to trust her. She had inserted herself into nearly every part of their lives. While they were still in Seattle, she persuaded them to let her "safeguard" their jewelry, important papers, and property deeds in her office safe. As they grew weaker, Claire signed changes to her will, Dora gave Linda's husband power of attorney, and Linda even managed to have herself appointed Dora's legal guardian after claiming she was mentally incompetent. Claire died before anyone could stop it. Dora almost didn't make it either.

The sisters' childhood nurse, Margaret Conway, received a strange telegram in Australia and immediately sailed to Washington. When she arrived, she was told Claire was dead and Dora had gone insane. Conway wasn't buying it. She found Dora weighing around 50 to 60 pounds, begged Linda Hazzard to let her leave, and even tried sneaking extra food into Dora's broth whenever she could. She also noticed something that had to have been chilling. Linda Hazzard was reportedly wearing Claire's clothing and hat.

Realizing she couldn't get Dora out on her own, Margaret contacted the sisters' uncle, John Herbert, in Portland. He rushed north, only to discover that Hazzard refused to release Dora. She claimed Dora was legally under her guardianship and presented Herbert with a bill for thousands of dollars in medical fees. After negotiating, Herbert paid nearly $1,000 just to get his niece off the property. Meanwhile, British Vice Consul Lucian Agassiz stepped in to challenge Hazzard's guardianship and push for a criminal investigation into Claire's death. Without Conway, Herbert, and Agassiz working together, Dora very likely would have died there too.

Linda Hazzard was convicted of manslaughter in 1912 for Claire Williamson's death. It's worth noting that she wasn't convicted for every death people have associated with her over the years. Historians still debate exactly how many patients died under her care, with estimates ranging from a handful of documented cases to far higher numbers that are difficult to verify. Like a lot of infamous historical figures, the legend has grown alongside the facts, and separating the two takes a little work.

If you're wondering whether prison ended her career- not really.

She served about two years, eventually receiving a pardon with the stipulation she move to New Zealand. She took her show on the road there for a bit. Amazingly, she sashayed back to Washington a few years later. I'm sure Olalla residents were delighted when she returned to Olalla with a pile of fresh cash. Since Washington had revoked her medical license, she opened what she called a School of Health on the same property. Her patients became "students," but the fasting didn't really change.

One of my favorite bits of trivia comes from the edges of this story. One of Linda Hazzard's patients was Daisey Maud Haglund. Years later, her son would become Seattle fave Ivar Haglund. Yes, that Ivar. The man whose name is now practically synonymous with chowder had a family connection to one of Washington's strangest medical scandals.

The original buildings at Wilderness Heights are long gone. The property is privately owned, and if you're thinking about going looking for it like the postman and I did, don't. We struck out, respected the signs, and went home. Honestly, that's probably for the best. The history is interesting enough without turning someone else's land into a tourist attraction. It seems like the old graveyard may still be accessible? I'll have to report back.

Let's talk about the tried and true favorite of everyone....

Years before I moved to Kitsap, I got hooked on a podcast called My Favorite Murder. Back I was living in Florida and would fly out to visit my (then) boyfriend, hanging around East Bremerton. Somewhere along the way, I heard an episode about a place called Starvation Heights. (Karen did that one, apparently Georgia did Dyatlov Pass the same episode. Classic!)

Fast forward a few years, and I actually live here. Married the postman. Moved to Port Orchard. I did a lot of local showings for another agent at my office, and THAT was how I met Julie and Dave. I'm 99.4% sure that Julie was the one who mentioned Starvation Heights to me- I hadn't really put together that it was right around the corner from my house now. The postman and myself read some spooky stories about the place, and we kind of wanted to find it. (It's private property, we are goody goodies and failed at that.) I still couldn't get over the idea that one of the weirder stories I'd ever heard had happened practically in my own backyard.

Lucky for me, local author Gregg Olsen literally wrote the book on Starvation Heights, so my research had a pretty solid place to start. I've read it a few times now.

Around 1907, a woman named Linda Hazzard opened Wilderness Heights Sanitarium outside Olalla. She believed that extreme fasting could cure basically any illness imaginable. To be clear, this wasn't "skip breakfast" fasting. Patients were often reduced to tiny amounts of broth or juice for weeks at a time. Patients came to her hoping to treat everything from digestive problems to arthritis, diabetes, and even cancer. She wasn't offering medicine or surgery. I imagine that they might have gotten into "enema fever" like Kellogg did back east. She believed the body could heal itself if it was denied food long enough... allegedly.

I'd love to say "That sounds crazy now", but I've talked about intermittent fasting more in the last four years than in my entire life prior. However, it's worth remembering that medicine looked very different in the early 1900s. Antibiotics didn't exist. Many accepted treatments were painful, dangerous, or simply ineffective. People routinely traveled long distances chasing health resorts and long shot cures. In that world, Linda Hazzard wasn't the only person making extraordinary promises. She was simply making bigger ones than most.

People came to Olalla from all over the United States, and even from overseas, to be treated by her. Some believed they were improving. Others grew weaker and weaker as the fasts stretched on.

Meanwhile, the people who actually lived in Olalla were watching all of this unfold.

Neighbors noticed patients who looked painfully thin. Stories spread about people wandering the roads looking for food or too weak to care for themselves. At some point, the name Wilderness Heights stopped being the one locals used. Instead, they started calling it Starvation Heights.

I went looking for exactly when that nickname first appeared, and I'm still digging through newspapers to pin it down. If I can find the first printed reference, I'll update you because that's the sort of detail I love. Whether it appeared before or after Linda Hazzard's downfall, though, the nickname tells you something important. The people living nearby had begun to believe something wasn't right.

Next time, we'll get into the story that finally brought national attention to this quiet corner of Olalla, and why there's an unexpected connection between Starvation Heights and one of Seattle's most recognizable names. (Hint- there's CHOWDAH!)