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Scenic Photography of the North Cascades

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I grew up in a small town in the North Cascades. My adult life I have spent variously employed as a laborer, sailor in the U.S. Navy, welder, logger and biological technician. I have a lifetime goal to walk into every high mountain lake in the Skagit River watershed.

The Skagit River drains the North Cascades of Washingtonand British Columbia and is the third largest river on the West Coast of the lower 48 states behind the Columbia and Sacramento. Its watershed encompasses an area of 3,100 square miles (4990 sq km). There are probably well over one thousand lakes in the watershed and I estimate that the number of lakes that I have been to numbers in the mid to high hundreds. I purposely haven’t counted either the number of lakes actually in the watershed or how many I have been to. If I did, it might seem too difficult a task and it might be easy to become discouraged. I prefer to go from year to year, map by map. As I finish a map, i.e. go to every lake onit, I move on to the next map. This way I always have something to look forward to, even if I don’t accomplish my overall goal.

My interest in native plants began when I worked as a logger. Logging, from my experience, is typically a lot of boredom punctuated occasionally by moments of sheer terror. So, during slower times, I would entertain my friends by naming all the trees around by their Latin names (actually I mostly entertained myself by aggravatingmy friends by doing this). I somehow remembered all of the scientific names of the common trees of the area that I learned in tenth grade biology. Finally, my friends started asking me what some of the plants other than trees were. Most of these I did not know, but I was curious enough to invest in a plant identification book and begin to learn some of them. I lost my job when the company I worked for went out of business. I went back to school and trained to become a biological technician and learned even more about native plants.

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Pat Buller Nature and Scenic Photographer

P.O. Box 279 Marblemount, WA 98267