Accidental Serendipity

On the remote chance you missed it, title is in homage to Yogi Berra (he of "deja vu all over again" fame).

I recently found a chance for a little backroads exploration. My inspirations included, besides the obvious off-the-beaten-path, several touted birding sites and anomalous terrain known as the Tenino or Mima Mounds. The latter involves intriguingly hummocked meadows, with theoretical causes ranging from freeze-thaw cycles when the area was in the outwash of the ice sheet that occupied Puget Sound a while back to gophers (go figure). In hindsight, birds and all were an interesting excuse, but the wandering was the primary goal and ended up being the biggest benefit.

But along the way I spontaneously turned off old Highway 99 (a pretty obscure highway itself at this point), catching a glimpse out of the corner of my eye as I started up even more minor (but paved) sideroad of as small sign saying something about "Haven." I shortly came upon Wolf Haven, a wolf-recovery site renowned throughout the NW (and probably beyond). I certainly knew of the place, largely because of daughter's recent thesis work on wolves, and had general parameters of location (i.e. somewhere within 50 miles of actual locale) in my mind, but this was a bit uncanny. I'd talked of the place with a co-worker with a lupophilic son (hi, Danny!) recently and with daughter only a couple days earlier, but it was not in my consciousness when I stumbled on it. Short of time, I chatted with giftshop-worker, admired birds at feeder (the best I would see on my jaunt: yellow-winged blackbird, goldfinch, towhee), drew her excited attention to a couple baby rabbits wandering in adjacent garden, and moved on, a little giddy over the coincidence.

My reverie was only broken when I struggled to parse sign a few miles later: "if you study here, sit happens." My double-take revealed it was a dog boarding/obedience facility.

I wandered some more blue highways, including a visit to the Mima Mounds Wildlife Reserve and a short stroll there. The mounds were fun, but paled in comparison to my recollection of Sky River Rock Festival back in 1969 (of course much pales in comparison to that!). I was a bit pressed for time knowing I had a rendezvous with rush-hour traffic on the Interstate ahead of me. I did wander off-course enough to stumble upon an intriguing Nature Conservancy site where there is obvious plant propagation underway. This site is along the Black River, a generally intriguingly obscure waterway that appears to invite birders, kayakers, butterfly-swimmers, gosh knows who wouldn't be interested. Crowd-lovers, I guess.

But latter part of my ramblings were more in the way of preliminary tastes, frankly. Some interesting exploring options there.