A Tale of Two Moratoriums (Local Whatcomcentric)

Last week the Bellingham City administration brought forward a moratorium on marijuana businesses. The City Council passed the moratorium on a 7-0 vote.

This next week the Whatcom County Council will be considering a renewal of a moratorium that was originally passed in 2005 regarding subdivisions in the Lake Whatcom watershed. The fact that the moratorium is coming forward means that it will likely pass.

Disclosure: I personally think moratoriums are a good idea and should be used a lot more often. However, given my past experiences I recognize that my view on the subject may be a minority view point.

The Bellingham marijuana moratorium is a recognition that that the City had no rules or regulations or zoning in place for what has been an illegal business. While the State Initiative that legalized the production, sale and use of marijuana included some specific criteria for the locations for growing and selling, local governments have not had to deal with this issue in the past because it was (and still is for the time being) illegal.

The way the initiative was done and the rules the State Board are working on separates the production and sale. Hence, local governments will need to develop regulations as to where the product can be produced (grown) and where the product can be sold consistent with the state law which is still in the works. Two very separate activities. Separate as the Initiative intended them to be.

So for Bellingham, Where are the best places within the confines of State Law for marijuana to be sold? While Bellingham voted very strongly in favor of marijuana legalization, I suspect residences will have opinions as to where shops should be located. Maybe residences could care less. But at this point in time this issue has never been through any public process. The moratorium regarding sale locations will give Bellinghamsters a chance to have their say before the City starts issuing permits. The same issue must be before many local communities.

The same will be true of production facilities. This will take more careful thinking. Growing marijuana has impacts and under the State requirements those impacts will not be minor depending on the location. For one thing the State will require significant security - fences, lighting,  maybe cameras. Odor impacts are real - the stuff does not smell very good. Ventilation is an issue which raises noise issues.

The other moratorium? Whatcom County has slowly slogged through the various action items laid out in the original Lake Whatcom moratorium. Some of these issues simply were inherently slow to move through public process. The required zoning changes were part of a much bigger zoning change effort that required lots of hearings and went through a number of appeals. The last piece is new stormwater regulations and is actually the second time this issue has been reviewed by Council since the initial moratorium was passed and the fourth time in the past 15 years the County has updated stormwater rules in the Lake Whatcom watershed. Each time the stormwater rules were reviewed there was substantial improvement, but there have always been enough council members that were willing to push watered-down versions of what needed to be done that they have had to revisit the rules yet again. Typically the big stumble block has to do with small lots and the desire to not burden the small lot developer with rules that apply everywhere else.  


 

Young Men Lost - The Tragedy of Wildland Fire Policy

"You see tragedy coming from a considerable distance when you are older, but when you are young tragedy does not pertain to you and certainly never catches up to you. There are pieces of premonitions of tragedy floating around, but they do not add up yet to your tragedy. There are separate stabs of fear, of pity, of self-pity, but to a degree in separate parts of the body. Then suddenly they all merge into one sense, the encompassing sense of inevitability. It is everywhere on you as it becomes the essential whole of all that is preparing to be your tragedy. It becomes the cause of your mounting fear, your pity, your self-pity, telling you that, no matter what, it does no good to be proud, and good and young. Then almost at the end, it makes possible the triumph that can come at the end of tragedy for the young that are select and elite - the triumph of retaining your pride when you know that you have lost for good before you had a chance in life to make good, except for this." - Norman Maclean in Young Men and Fire

I wrote this quote out and placed in my upper drawer nearly 20 years ago. I pulled it out and read it yet again after hearing of the deaths of the fire crew in Arizona. I noted that Timothy Egan turned to Maclean as well new-west-old-story. In Young Men and Fire Maclean wrote of the Mann Gulch Fire. He struggled with the story for over 14 years and it was not published until after he died. Mann Gulch and the elite young men that were killed there haunted him. It should haunt all living in fire areas. It should haunt all that delve into setting wild land fire policy.

But the problem is this story keeps getting repeated. Mann Gulch took place in 1949. There was a lot we did not know then about wild land fires. We know so much more today. Communications are vastly improved. We have outstanding weather data. We have decades of research. We have a much better understanding of fire ecology. We have lessons from the past - Mann Gulch, but sadly Storm King and Thirtymile. But our vast knowledge and data and technology is useless - the story repeats.

Young men and now young women as well that enter this business of fighting wild land fires know little of policy. They are strong and tough and desire to do something good perhaps even heroic. But mostly they are just tough and willing. They train and learn in their short time a sliver of fire behavior. But they are hired and trained to do hard, dirty work that requires a high level of fitness and willingness to just grind through pain and exhaustion. It is not enough. The other end of the equation is where they are sent and a question, Why?

It is not enough to call them heroes. We must look at what policies and tactics routinely put our young and brave and strong into insanely dangerous conditions. They are not part of the economic calculation of what they are doing. And I wonder if we ever really calculate the costs and risks.

I found myself angry at the news reports saying what happened in Arizona was the worst fire fighter disaster since 9/11. There is no comparison. 9/11 was about saving life and the fire situation is not even remotely comparable. The story line in my head was: It has happened yet again, Why?

More Notes on the Bonnie Lake Steptoe

Precambrian muscovite-biotite-quartz schist on Bonnie Lake Steptoe Island

While the setting of the Bonnie Lake Steptoe is unique and it was a fun adventure just to get to the island (bonnie-lake-precambrian-schist), my previous post did not provide much information on the Precambrian schist that makes up the island. These Precambrian rocks are highly metamorphosed and so isolated any correlation is a bit tentative so there really is not any brilliance I can add as I am not real familiar with the Precambrian rocks of the area and the exposures are sparse.

Waggoner (1990) suggested that the schist is a completely recrystalized unit of the Pritchard Formation based on the likely protolith of unit being a pelitic sedimentary rock. The Pritchard Formation is a lower member of the Belt Supergroup, but is nowhere nearly as metamorphosed as the Bonnie Lake schist. These rocks were deposited along the margin of North America after a rifting event - that is North America was part of a bigger continent and the part attached to where Washington State is today rifted off to become a another continent. After the rifting the new North America may have looked something like this:

Modified from Bentley's modification of Blakely

Waggoner (1990) describes the one other outcrop of this Precambrian schist within the Rosalia 1:100,000 Quadrant. That outcrop is about 3 or 4 miles south of the Bonnie Lake Steptoe Island. Waggoner's description of that outcrop is completely consistent with the Bonnie Lake outcrop. Waggoner described garnets and sillmanite in thin sections (microscopic). I looked for garnets and alluminum silicates (sillimanite being one) but did not see any in hand specimens or outcrops.

I found that that unit was completely recystalized at least at hand specimen level. The foliation plains parallelled bedding and generally had an approximately N10E strike with a 60 degree dip to the west.  However, I did observe a lots of tight folding and rather spectacular folds. I also observed some north plunging lineations on a few outcrops where exposures were just right. Waggoner noted foliation striking to the northwest and dipping gently to the southwest. She also noted distinct southwest and northeast dipping cleavages, but did not describe any folds, lineations or veins.

General trend of strike and dip throughout the island on well defined bedding and foliation

North plunging lineation on a north striking southwest dipping foliation plain

Kink fold with vein or pressure dissolution

Tight folds like this are common

A ponderosa pine finds a niche within a siltite layer

More tight folds shot through with veins of quartz

The inside portion of this fold had broken and slipped

Steeply dipping schist with Grande Rhonde (lower layer) and

Wanapum (upper layer) basalts of the Columbia River Basalt Group.

The schist is perhaps 100 times older than the 15 million years old basalts

Bonnie Lake Precambrian Schist

1.5 billion year old schist on Bonnie Lake island. Shores of the lake are all much younger 14.5 million year old Columbia River Basalt  

The Columbia River Basalts cover over most of the ancient rocks of the former edge of North America in Washington State. The ancient Precambrian rocks poke up above the basalt in a band of higher ground south of Spokane where the basalt flows are thin. There are outcrops in the deep Snake River canyon near the Idaho border where the Snake River has carved down through the basalts. And there are a couple of isolated summits such as Steptoe Butte that rise above the floods of basalt. These Precambrian rocks were part of the former western edge of the North American Continent before all that other stuff to the west got added on.

15 miles south of and 15 miles east of the higher ground not covered by the basalt are two isolated outcrops of Precambrian schist noted on the Rosalia 1:100,000 geology map (Waggoner, 1990). The two outcrops are within a canyon on the eastern edge of the great ice age flood routes on the east edge of the Cheney-Palouse Scabland Tract. One of the outcrops is an island in Bonnie Lake. 

There are no roads to the lake shore and the lake is surrounded by private land, or where public, the cliffs present a challenge. However, Bjornstad and Kiver in On the Trail of the Ice Age Floods The Northern Reaches provide direction to access the island via watercraft up Rock Creek. The creek flows across private land but is a navigable waterway and hence is open to the public. Indeed fisherman use the creek to access the lake with small boats. This sounded like a great trip so after completing some field work elsewhere in eastern Washington, I camped at my secret hideout camp site in the Telford Scabland and then headed to Bonnie Lake in the morning (Aerial/Map View). 

Scabland Tracts (Modified from USDA, 2007)

When glacial Lake Missoula drained in the great ice age floods the waters surged into the Spokane area rapidly filled glacial Lake Colombia or glacial Lake Spokane (depending on the Columbia ice margin) and spilled south across the Cheney-Palouse Scabland, the Telford Scabland and the Grande Coulee (not shown above).  

As the water poured across the Cheney-Palouse Scabland Tract it encountered the Cheney Fracture Zone. The water scoured out the fractures which caused a significant of enough flow to be diverted eastward within the fractures to be concentrated at the Rock Creek flow path which carved a very deep canyon at Bonnie Lake. I suspect based on upstream topographic features that there may have been a precursor stream similar to Rock Creek today that may also have played a role in flow diversion. An even deeper canyon was carved downstream at Rock Lake as Rock Lake had added water diverted by another fracture zone as well as flows from flood waters that came down Pine Creek from the east. A similar but more spectacular capture of water into fractures or joints took place near Palouse Falls to the south (the-palouse-river-leaves-its-valley).

Rock Creek is crossed by Belsby Road which crosses the canyon between Rock Lake and Bonnie Lake. The creek is slow and passes through essentially a swamp of reeds and cat tails. I pumped up my inflatable kayak and began my paddle and enjoyed lots of birds. This included a female wood duck that played at having a broken wing and flopped around as though she could not fly to distract me as I glided past her ducklings hiding under the reeds.

In the swamp

The swamp stretch follows a narrow channel hemmed in by reeds and cat tails, but with the cliffs looming above it did not feel claustrophobic. After 1.5 miles the water opens up into the lake proper.

Bonnie Lake

Approaching the island

Landing spot

Upon landing I was greeted with schist containing a tightly folded quartz vein.

Tightly folded quartz vein

Muscovite-biotite-quartz quartzite schist

Island view looking north

Bjornstad and Kiver refer to the island as the Bonnie Lake Steptoe. A Steptoe is an isolated summit of older rock rising above younger rock. The name is derived from Steptoe Butte a summit 30 miles to the south of much older rock rising above the rolling Palouse landscape. In the case of the Bonnie Lake Steptoe, the island of 1.5 billion year old schist protrudes up into a lake carved 15,000 years ago with canyon cliffs composed entirely of 15 million year old basalt. A test of ones ability to grasp orders of magnitude.  

Steptoe Butte is named for Colonel Steptoe who famously survived with most of his men an attack by a united group of Yakimas, Spokane and Columbia First Nations a few miles east of Bonnie Lake. The leader of that attack, Kamiakin, lived at Rock Lake to the south of here after the wars ended.

The island is public. It happens to fall within a section of State Trust Lands managed by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. The one square mile section of land includes the island and both sides of the canyon. Perhaps not the most profitable Trust Land section; however, a timber harvest took place on the upland area on the western side of the canyon within the past two years and grazing leases are part of the revenue from these lands as well. The island has no special designation or protections, but was clean and appears to have been fairly well treated by the visiting fishermen.       

Go ahead, open that gate. Make my day.

Limited posts while off the grid for a bit. But some good landscapes. Had some typical hazards of geology work/ventures:  rattlesnakes, cliffs, and being in isolated spots as well as a paddle through a swamp. And don't forget bulls with attitude.

Go ahead, open that gate. Make my day.

Notes on Salish Sea Landscape:18,000 to 16,900 Years Ago

More bits from the talk. Again borrowing for the images produced by Haugerud and Greenburg.

The Salish Sea 18,000 years ago

The white is the Puget and Juan de Fuca ice lobes. As the ice advanced into the Puget lowlands it blocked the ouflow of water forming a large lake over the Puget lowland - the light blue on the map. Fine silts and clays were deposited on the lake bed. In the Seattle area these silts are called the Lawton Clay for excellent exposures at Fort Lawton/Discovery Park.

 

Glacial advance silts deposited in the proglacial lake prior to the arrival if the ice

 

Near the advancing ice margin the meltwater rivers and streams from the ice deposited thick layers of sand and gravel; the brown band between the ice and the lake on the above map indicates areas of active glacial outwash. This outwash is most often referred to as glacial advance outwash. Locally it may be called Esperance Sand in the Seattle area. 

 

Sand dominated outwash on shore line bluff capped with glacial drift

Glacial advance outwash with thin glacial drift cap on top

Glacial advance outwash with clastic dikes and deformation features

By 16,900 years ago the Puget lobe extended to south of Olympia (Haugerud and Greenburg)

During this time the ice left deposits behind in places and in other places the land was eroded. The direct ice deposits are glacial drift. Or a "a dog's breakfast" of very unsorted sediment ranging from clay to huge boulders.

Glacial drift. This particular drift image is from an older age age event. Glacial ice advanced into the Puget Sound area on multiple occasions.

Glacial erratic - boulder left behind by the ice in a glacial drift deposit. In this case the glacial drift was deposited at the top of the bluff. This erratic must have made a big thud when it rolled off of the eroding shoreline bluff.

LiDAR image of south Whidbey Island

The Puget ice lobe left streaks across the landscape

(Google Earth with HTML overlay)

Notes on Salish Sea Landscape 20,000 Years Ago

For my shoreline bluff talk I started of with this image.  

 

The Puget lowlands before the last ice age

Dark blue in the upper part is sea water

Light blue is fresh water

Ralph Haugerud and Harvey Greenburg developed a video (youtube) of the Vashon Glaciation in Puget Sound and the first image is of a time right before the arrival of the Puget and Juan de Fuca ice lobes. The video uses elevation estimates, estimated sea level at various times during and after the last glacial period and estimated ice extent during the last glaciation.

The beginning of the video as shown above raises the question of What did the low lands between the Cascade Range and the Olympics look like before the arrival of the last ice sheet?

Today this low land area has deep trenches filled with sea water. In the image above, the deep trenches are shown, but are lakes.  The sidebar of the video notes that the deep trenches may not have been there. Possibly there were deep Puget Sound like trenches before the last ice age but they may have been oriented differently.

But another aspect of the image above is that the deep trenches are show as lakes. A low land plain extends between the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the northwest and Puget Sound on the south cutting Puget Sound (and Hood Canal) off from the sea rendering the deep Puget Sound trenches to fresh water lakes.

A look at sediment loads in our rivers today suggests that this is not an unreasonable concept.

Estimated sediment loads (USGS)

Note that the Skagit River has a massive load of sediment relative to all the other rivers draining into the Salish Sea in Washington State. The Skagit is the largest river, but it also drains from the highest mountains and includes two large strato volcanoes. The Nooksack to the north of the Skagit is a much smaller river, but it is draining out of steep, glaciated, and very high terrain and has a volcano as well. And of course there is a very big river just to the north without a sediment figure - the Fraser River.

While many of the steep bluffs along the shores of the Salish Sea are underlain by glacial related sediments from the last glacial period there are bluffs that are underlain by thick sequences of non glacial sediments.

100-foot thick sequence of pre ice age alluvial river sediments 

One of several peat layers embedded within alluvial sediments suggesting non glacial sediment