Sunday, July 25, 1971

July 25, 1971

Seattle, Washington

Dear Vivian,

It’s bright and sunny this morning here in Seattle and I’m sitting outside in the shade, at the motel we spent the night at, looking out over a body of water in the city here — don’t know it this is the one called Lake Washington — I rather think it’s one of the other & smaller ones in the city. doing misc packing & cleaning up I guess while Laurel is washing her hair. We let her “sleep” in this morning as she’s been complaining that we’ve been getting her up too early to start on each day’s activities. However I noticed she woke up about as usual and used the time to read in bed which is just what she’d have been doing had she been in the car riding along. I think today will be a fairly warm day here, tho I hope not like some last week which we read in the paper or heard over TV were up in the 90s. After lunch we are meeting this family that Jean knows and are spending the afternoon at the science museum & other exhibits at the site of the World’s Fair here some 8, 9 or 10 years ago; then having supper with them before we proceed on a ways before stopping for the night.

Yesterday morning we drove up to Hurricane Ridge in Olympic Park, this being the last of our several side trips into various parts of it. This ridge is at about 5000 ft elevation, and because of the combination of altitude, latitude & precipitation is in an Arctic zone as far as vegetation is concerned. From it we had a good view of the high mountains of the peninsula (including the highest, Mt Olympus at close to 8000 ft — Laurel pointed out that the real Mt Olympus was in Greece), several of the some 60 active glaciers in the park, and a somewhat obscured view of the straits of San Juan de Fuca (the entrance to Puget Sound) and British Columbia. The view was obscured partly by natural haze due to a temperature inversion but also by smog from a Crown Zellerbach plant in Port Angeles (where we’d spent the night before). We drove as far as we could but late melting snow prevented us from driving in as far as we might have later in the season. We went on a brief naturalist-conducted tour which was rather interesting, saw several flowers, some animals and clambered over several big snowbanks that still lay astride the trail we took.

On leaving the park we drove on to Port Townsend, partly because I thought it sounded interesting, and also because a member of my ride group at Shell has bought a lot there, where he intends to retire someday. Shortly after we got to Port Townsend we stopped briefly at the site of a Fort Townsend, now a state park. There he chanced across the individual in charge who was doing a little spade work putting in some parking facilities and he gave us several old square nails he’d just dug up — probably part of the old Fort buildings. In Port Townsend we drive around and looked at various of the old Victorian houses — several very well preserved ones, as the ones in Astoria, Ore that we’d seen earlier. Jean & Laurel went in one and we all visited another county museum, which seem to abound both in Oregon & Washington.

From Port Townsend we had a ferry ride to Whidbey Island — one of the larger islands in Puget Sound which we drove down, then took another ferry to the mainland & on down to Seattle. The view from the ferry wasn’t spectacular but it was interesting & certainly reminiscent of ferry trips in San Francisco Bay in years back. I think ferries will be operating a long time in Puget Sound as the distances to be traveled are large and traffic is relatively light so that the cost of bridges would be prohibitive. Also there are so many places to be connected that a large number of bridges would be required.

I’ll let this be all for this time — could you send this along to Verner’s when you write to them.

With love,

Carl