Boolie’s Blog

Olympic marmots are the only marmots in the Olympic peninsula so there isn’t any trouble identifying them, but compared to hoary marmots in Mount Rainier you can see the different brown patches that are prevalent in the Olympic marmots instead of the white fur of hoary marmots.

All marmots will stand up on their hind legs or sit on their ample hindquarters at times, giving them an elevated view compared to being down on all fours. I found these marmots in the afternoon and hoped to photograph them in better light later in the day, but unfortunately they weren’t around when I came back in the evening.

I saw at least four species for the first time on my Washington trip, three of them mammals and two of them marmots. In addition to the hoary marmots I saw at Mount Rainier, I was lucky enough to see Olympic marmots in Olympic National Park, one of the species that is unique to the peninsula.

I expected to see them in rock formations along the trails in the Grand and Badger Valleys but neither saw or heard them. I did see a couple on the road between Obstruction Point and Hurricane Ridge, I would have missed them if a friend hadn’t seen them there on an earlier visit. The road is quite narrow with occasional steep dropoffs and made me more nervous than any of the trails I hiked, but in this particular location there was enough room to park on one side of the road and be clearly visible to traffic from both directions.

This particular marmot was wearing a fashionable ear tag.

Late last year on our way home from Long Beach in Washington, we crossed the Columbia into Oregon and stopped in Astoria for lunch. The restaurant was right on the river providing a view of container ships anchored offshore. That’s Washington to the north, the ships are pointed east towards Portland.

I’m a little fascinated by ocean-going ships, I grew up many miles from the ocean in the Midwest and Southeast and to this day have not been out on a boat in the open seas. On my morning commute as I cross the Willamette on the MAX, I look out to see if there are any container ships docked at the riverbank. Portland is a ways inland but even ocean-going ships can reach its ports via the Columbia, entering the river here at Astoria.

The heavy cloud cover we sometimes get in the winter is something else I had to get used to when I moved here. Where I grew up back east, we’d have built an ark with clouds like these, but they aren’t so unusual in the winter here (and they don’t bring the torrential downpours their image might suggest).

Wow.

This is the first time I’ve ever voted for a Presidential candidate who won and the first time I felt emotionally invested. While I’m sure there will be bumps and setbacks on the road ahead, I’m just glad we’re going down this road.

A couple more pictures of the marmot from the Skyline Trail. With such close-ups, I could see that it still had a bit of its breakfast on its teeth and that it could have used a Kleenex. I don’t know why it surprised me that the same cold and rainy weather would give the marmot a runny nose just as it did me. You can see a bit of the rain in the second picture.