Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

I'm making only one promise about this trip report: it's going to take a while to get to the end, because I'm heading out for more adventures and have no expectation of getting all the photos edited, let alone posts created, before I leave. August 9-14 (actually 8-15 counting the trip up and back), two friends and I joined a small group kayaking adventure out of Port McNeill, BC, to the Broughton Archipelago. The trip started, for me, with a rendezvous at my house at 7:30 a.m. to drive to the ferry in Canada. We gave ourselves tons of time for the border crossing, which in fact took only about 5 minutes. I wasn't taking chances--we had a ferry to catch. I don't take a lot of photos of ferries, but this line in the water was particularly striking. It's the flow from the Fraser River refusing to mingle with the waters of the Salish Sea. After the 2 hour ferry ride, we had another 4 hour drive to Pt. McNeill--it really is a long way from anywhere! In the evening th...

This week's book review comes from my "outdoor adventure and environmental studies" pile.    Title : North to the Future: An Offline Adventure Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska Au thor: Ben Weissenbach. Read by the author Publication info : Grand Central Publishing, 2025. 11 hours. Hardcover same, 320 pages. Source : Library Publisher's Blurb (via Goodreads) : At the age of twenty-one, college student Ben Weissenbach set out into the Alaskan wilderness armed with little more than inspiration from his literary heroes and a growing interest in climate change. What meets him there is a landscape both stark and awe-inspiring—a part of the world seen by few outside a small contingent of scientists with big personalities. There’s Roman Dial, the larger-than-life field scientist who leads him on a five week journey into the Alaskan backcountry. There’s Kenji Yoshikawa, the isolated researcher who leaves Ben alone for eleven days to care for his remote cabin, whe...

This is the 3rd and final post from my  backpacking trip into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness last August.  Here's the report on the  first two days   and here's the 2nd report, on days 3 and 4. Day 5: Oly Lake to Rough Lake This day started with another beautiful sunrise.  For those of you who wonder, this is a big part of why I haul a heavy load into the mountains and sleep on the ground--because it's darned hard to see sunrise at a remote lake on a dayhike. Early light reflected in Oly Lake. Sunrise reflections in Oly Lake. Our route leads up that cleft in the rocks across the lake. It was a relief to wake to calm winds and mostly clear skies, because we'd had a pretty impressive storm at bedtime the night before. Little did we know, that was just the warm-up.    We had a short hike before us, though we knew it wouldn't be fast, so we didn't leave camp until 8:15. We were heading up the creek and over the mountain (back across the divide anyway)...