Sauk River Volunteer Adventure

Early Saturday morning we loaded our gear bags, dogs and mugs full of coffee into the car and headed off to the Sauk river for some volunteering and rafting.  Before we left Bellingham we had to fuel up with delicious breakfast sandwiches.  "You all headed up to the mountain?" Inquired the cook. "Nope off to the river!" We exclaimed with grins hanging from our sleepy faces and off we went.  

Pulling into Whitechuck boat ramp the clouds started to lift and the rain kept to a quite drizzle.  We went right to work shoveling and racking out clogged drainage systems.  Dogs at our heals eager to help out where needed and greet new visitors to the area. We filled bags of trash, trimmed overgrowth that had flowed into parking spaces, racked leaves, and devoured a delicious bowl of hot chowder and corn bread.  Spirits high from our hard work and bellies full from a warm meal we knew there was only one thing left to get done, go rafting!

Dedicating the day to new friends and new adventures, we decided to float a new section of the river to keep with flow. At the 530 bridge we launched our boat and boom! Right away we saw two giant Salmon dancing across the water.  Breathing in the cool crisp air we couldn’t have been a happier group of boaters.  Especially being that we were able to take two people on their first ever river rafting trip. Throughout the float I found myself trying to keep track of how many bald eagles we encountered but I lost track after 13 or so. I never felt any less amazed as they continued gracing us with their enormous wingspan and intelligent gaze. The color of the water against fall colors and painted snow capped mountains made the extra layers we were wearing well worth the gorgeous float.  Best of all, I didn’t even get my feet wet.

 

Thank you new friends for a great day. And, thank you Martha from Darrington Friends for Public Use for providing us with tools to clean the Whitechuck boat ramp.  We’ll be back again soon!

Catch you on our next adventure!
-Kristi

It's official. The bald eagles have returned to the Nooksack!

Sunset on the Nooksack

I was out on the Nooksack yesterday evening teaching a kayaking lesson, and I am very excited to report that the bald eagles have returned to the Nooksack near Bellingham.

As we were gearing up at the riverside, I soon noticed a familiar smell - dead fish. Every fall as spawned out salmon begin to die and wash ashore, the rivers of Washington get a little stinky. To us the smell is gross, but to the animals of the river corridor, it signals that a feast has begun. The dead fish provide an easy source of nutrients that are essential to the river and forest ecosystem. Many animals come to the river in the fall to share in the feast, but by far the most famous are the bald eagles.

Seeing and smelling dead fish at the put if, I figured we had a good shot to see some eagles. Right off the bat, we saw a loan bird feasting on a freshly dead coho salmon. Traveling on the river allows you to get really close to the birds, and that first encounter alone would have made the evening for me and my guest. Lucky for us, that would not be the only eagle on the river that evening.  Further down river, we spooked an eagle off of his dinner only to have him perch on a branch directly above a small wave we planed on surfing.  The eagle watched us as we took turns surfing the wave. We soon noticed that there were a number of eagles in the trees around this spot. In the 20 or 30 minutes we spent playing at the wave, we saw at least 7 birds. They were very active, flying from tree to tree and fighting over the fish that we had spooked the first eagle off of.

The bald eagle watching season is just getting started, and the numbers are only going to increase over the next few months. To find out more about Adventure Cascades's eagle watching and scenic float trips, check out our website.

Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you on the river soon,

Brian