Found, Marker

National Park Service marker for Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area

Daily Note

Every day, a photograph, a poem. Today we walked at Crescent Bay on Lake Roosevelt. We don’t walk by the boat launch; we walk around the little bay called Crescent Bay and the hills around it. There’s rest rooms there because the locals enjoy the free beach during the summer. It’s a great place to walk the dog, especially in winter since we’re often the only ones there, except for a few anglers who don’t mind the cold and wet.

Today we’re in a river of rain — an atmospheric river over the Pacific Northwest in which the rain pours and pours and pours. I was drenched after our forty-five minute walk. For the science behind this see this NOAA article: What Are Atmospheric Rivers?

Guthrie did not mind a bit. He ran here and there and everywhere, miles to my one. And, he wasn’t ready to quit. At only a year old, he’s got puppy energy.

This is a great place to walk the dog when no one is there and he can be off his leash. He runs ahead and I duck in behind a large sagebrush and wait for him to realize I’m no longer following him. He rushes by and past me, and I wait quietly until he sniffs backwards to find me. He hasn’t really sniffed back to find me yet, but he’ll learn to. Our other dog of the past, Pooka, learned to use his nose to find us without running past our hiding places. It was a game we played, and I’m looking forward to this with Guthrie.

On one of my dodges behind a sage brush, I found the boundary marker where the edge of the Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area is. The other side is the Bureau of Land Management, federal land. Boundaries are important. We need boundaries to protect the wildlife and preserve nature for all of us to experience and enjoy. We need boundaries ourselves for our own personal space. We don’t need boundaries with labels that discriminate, yet boundaries that help us see the value of differences are helpful to eliminate that which discriminates.

We humans are still working on creating a better world. Some of us want the planet for all of us. We have work to do.

Anyway, my poem is about the park boundary, a place for everyone to enjoy and experience nature, a real treat for those who might not have access to nature otherwise.