Adventures of a Discoverer

On Saturday of the last week I spent a really nice afternoon at the HONK Fest West - it was my first time there. HONK Fest is the name of various music festivals in the United States and abroad in which street bands get together to play in a public space and in this way bring the community together and enjoy some fun music. They happen in New York City, Boston, Providence, among other American cities, and also in Seattle, where we have the HONK Fest West. The organization put this year's festival in a public park in Columbia City, a neighborhood in South Seattle, and it happened on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of last week. It was a very well organized festival: there were four different stages for the bands to show up, some of the streets around the park were closed, there were porta-potties and hand-washing stations, maps and programs of the festival, and etc. Surprisingly, for such a well put together event, it is completely free - tips are recommended, but everything is taken ca...

The hiking season is just starting: the snow is melting on the mountains and that is revealing the trails underneath. However, that means that most trails still have large stretches of snow, which is not so fun to go through. Fortunately, some are already fully snow free, and yesterday I could check one of them: the trail to Pete Lake. The lake is in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, on the eastern slope of the Cascades. The trail to get to it is interesting because it's mostly flat, which makes it relatively easy. In addition to that, there are a number of good campsites next to the lake, so many people choose this trail to make their first backpacking trip: it's a great way to get used to carry a full backpack around. And, indeed, yesterday I could see quite a lot of backpackers on the trail and many tents set around the lake. I noticed something a little bit concerning on this trail, that increased the level of effort needed: I had never seen this many logs on a trail....

Just yesterday I did my first hike of the year: I followed a trail to two amazingly beautiful waterfalls in the middle of the forest, the Otter Falls and the Big Creek Falls. It was a very nice and surprisingly easy hike and it couldn't have been a better way to start the hiking season. The falls are located in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, deep into the woods past the Snoqualmie river. A somewhat rough dirt road takes you to the trailhead, and then you follow the Taylor river through what used to be a forest road: that makes for a trail with little elevation gain and a relatively wide path, so it is pretty easy to cover the more or less four miles until the Otter Falls. I've been blessed in my life that I have been in places where you can say that pictures don't do them justice. That is very much the case of the Otter Falls. They sit on this vast rocky mountain side, a narrow stream of water going all the way down to a small lake. The only way to absorb the sca...

A literary salon is a gathering in which a host brings people together to listen to and talk about prose and poetry, typically with the people who wrote said prose and poetry. This last Wednesday I had the opportunity for the first time to participate in one, at the Hugo House in downtown Seattle. The Hugo House is a non-profit community center for the writing community of Seattle. It has a number of programs for new writers and it is a great institution for the local literature. This was my first time at their new location: the Hugo House used to be in a previously residential house in a somewhat improvised fashion, but now they occupy the ground floor of a new building in Capitol Hill (the "bohemian" neighborhood in Seattle and quite an appropriate location for a writing community center) in a much better setup. In addition to a small bar, various small rooms for writers and lots of bookshelves, there is a small theater, the Lapis Theater. "Collections: a Live Magazine...