(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The Daily Bucket: Tommy Thompson Trail - Anacortes, WA [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-04 A couple maps for orientation. The yellow highlight is our route on the Tommy Thompson Trail and a little beyond. The red dot at upper left is where we parked and started. The red dot at right is where we turned around. The trail officially ends at the east end of the trestle, but we extended our walk up the hill to the high point on March Point, the thumb of land at the right. The dark blue dot is a huge rock, a glacial erratic. The green dot at far right is an old project site that I worked on over 20 years ago (last paragraph). The view looks south. Anacortes is at right. March Point and its two oil refineries are at left. Starting point is the pin at right in Anacortes. Turnaround is the point at left on March Point. The trestle is the faint line across the Bay. The trail begins in a commercial area, then goes through a light industrial area devoted mostly to boat repair and maintenance. This part of the trail has open areas with grass, shrubs, and small trees that make it a good place to find sparrows: Song Sparrows all year, White-crowned mostly in summer, and Golden-crowned in winter. It’s one of the few places where I see House Sparrows. A few hawthorn trees grow along the trail where its berries attract Cedar Waxwings. I don’t have any photos of these birds from this last walk, but here’s a Robin we did see. Robins and grass, it’s their thing. American Robin The trail continues along through a woodsy area of big leaf maple, past an RV park and then finally out on the trestle. Looking west from the top of the hill on March Point. You can see that the trestle offers a great vantage point for observing waterfowl and seals on Fidalgo Bay. The official end of the Tommy Thompson Trail is at the far left where the trestle ends, but we extended our walk to the top of March Point. That big ass rock on the left side of the road is a glacial erratic. Looking east from the trestle to March Point to the top of the hill where we were in the preceding photo. The big glacial erratic is next to the road at right. Here’s a closer view of the big ass glacial erratic. I didn’t get a real close look at the rock but it looks like a metasedimentary/metavolcanic type rock perhaps related to the complex of rocks in the San Juan Islands. The takeaway is that the advancing ice sheet picked this rock up along the way and then dropped it here when the ice sheet melted. This is all I could find about it here: Glacial erratic field trips. March Point is the the location of two, huge oil refineries; two of the five refineries located in Washington State. There were warning signs posted not to take photos of the refinery infrastructure. I tried not to. A pair of Bald Eagles on March Point When we reached the top of the hill, we turned and walked back down the hill, back to the trestle. We didn’t see much in the way of waterfowl or even gulls. We saw some Common Goldeneye, Buffleheads, and other ducks too far away to identify. Three female Common Goldeneye On the way back as we were passing the RV park, I saw what looked like possibly a Cooper’s Hawk perched up in a tree among the branches. Indeed it was a nice juvenile Cooper’s stealthily concealed in the branches. The surrounding area had nice stretches of lawn with Robins and Brewer’s Blackbirds, yum! Cooper’s Hawk Cooper’s Hawk Cooper’s Hawk Cooper’s Hawk As mentioned, March Point is the site of two of Washington State’s five refineries. Marathon Anacortes Refinery looking east across Fidalgo Bay Oil tankers docked at March Point The title photo shows Mount Baker, a volcano that is sleeping for now, but still burbling gases from fumaroles near the summit. The most recent major eruption of Mount Baker, about 6,700 years ago, began with flank collapse events that resulted in lahars that moved down the Middle Fork and Nooksack Rivers as well as down the east flank (damming Baker River and creating Baker Lake) and ended with a widespread tephra fall. In 1975-76, Sherman Crater, immediately south of the summit, exhibited signs of renewed volcanic activity as a result of magma intruding into the volcano but not erupting. This activity resulted in monitoring that was more intense than previously applied at any other Cascade Range volcano and produced important baseline data against which recent research has been compared. Sherman Crater has been the site of increased steam emission since 1975. Although monitoring was increased as a result to the 1975-76 activity, much of it has been dismantled and monitoring at Mount Baker is now insufficient due to the threat that renewed activity would pose to nearby communities and regional infrastructure. Mount Baker is one of several Cascade volcanoes that are high priority to have their monitoring systems enhanced in the coming years. That’s all for this little walk, altogether 8 miles when you throw in our bonus walk up March Point. Like most of our walks, we start with a hearty breakfast somewhere. For this hike we had breakfast at the Calico Cupboard Old Town Cafe & Bakery in Mount Vernon. We also picked up donuts at The Donut House (no website) in Anacortes, the best donuts for miles around. These are in fact endorsements if you’re ever in the area. As a side note, back around 2000, I worked on a project on March Point, the Northwest Petrochemical Corp site as marked by the green dot on the opening map. The site had some issues, to say the least, including a past deep injection well for disposing of industrial wastewater. I was doing some of the field work there, soil samples collected using a direct-push drill rig. My main memory was that at that time, the facility was operating as a manufacturer of terpenes and related products from petroleum-based material that they obtained from the nearby refineries. The facility had tanks, cracking towers, and pipes running everywhere. The whole place smelled strongly of Pine-Sol multiplied a hundred times. All the tanks and cracking towers have since been demolished and removed. I found no reports and documents on the EPA or Department of Ecology websites, although we had submitted several reports to the USEPA. That’s all I have for today. What’s going on in your natural worlds? Thanks for reading the Daily Bucket. Phenology is how we take earth’s pulse. We discuss what we see in each Bucket. 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