The Prize on the Trail -- Wednesday, June 7, 2017

An article at History Link tells of how Blake Island becomes a Washington State Park.  At one time it was privately owned, but the owners fell to hard times and abandoned the property, posting "No Trespassing" signs.   In 1959 Kitsap County transferred acres of land to the State of Washington, and subsequently the entire island was set aside for a park, which was developed by Washington State Parks and Recreation Department.  

Later in the year Seattle caterer William "Bill"Hewitt came up with an idea for a tourist attraction, Tillicum Village,  building a longhouse for a restaurant. Tillicum means 'friend' in First Nation language.

The front of the longhouse is decorated with First Nation Art.  70% of the employees of Tillicum Village are of First Nation ancestry and I would guess likely some of them contributed to the drawings.  I would love to have an explanation of the figures.

Herb and I go up the ramp for our afternoon walk to explore yet another of the island's eight trails.

Wow!  Look at the limb of this tree.  How and why did it grow like this?  Wouldn't it be cool to have a time lapse video of its path?

Flower photo of the day....

OK.  Can we overcome this obstacle?  Should I try it, Herb?  Or do we need to abandon and turn back?

We do try, and we succeed. It takes a few minutes to step here, hold there -- don't snag my clothes!  Under one limb, over another and soon we are on the other side. Yay!

Only to find another mud puddle all the way across the trail.  Someone has put a few small limbs for stepping on, but I am not checked out on limb walking, so we both choose to walk the left edge of the bog.  We think it would be best to do a side step movement to keep our balance.  Note shoes with white soles -- white now....

Photo rotated.

Our reward for making it this far is the sight of a deer several yards in front of us, standing watching us.  We stop.  Enjoy the moment.  Seconds go by and none of us moves.  Carefully we take out our iPhones to take a photo.  We do not want sudden movement to cause him to break and run into the brush.

With photos taken, we slowly resume our steps and our friend makes the decision to take cover down the hill to his hiding place.

I do have one more muddy mishap this morning and hope I can clean my shoes. Soon we come to the beach and camp site that faces Kitsap Peninsula.  A ferry boat can be seen in the background.

As we return to the boat, Herb takes a screen shot of the track showing the last part of our walk today.

I do believe this is one of our more fun walks on Blake Island.

Look at that rack!

Willie of Willie's Tug,
   and of Walldog, Willie and Jake
   Wednesday, June 7, 2017