Adventures of a Discoverer

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...