The long river slogs became the best parts of my back country trips My ongoing, steamy love affair with rivers grew slowly. As a 20 and 30 something, river valleys were something to be slogged through on the way to the “real wilderness”, the high country. I don’t remember ever giving much thought or attention to the rivers at all. But over the decades, my back country trips became more focused on the river valleys and less on the high alpine. Those long, obligatory slogs thro

Camp on the Quilcene River, early summer 2023 In early 2023, I returned from a Soul/Vision Quest with the Animas Valley Institute. After 6 months of deep descent into soul canyon, dissolving and dying to the self I had been, I was refining and connecting with the visions of my soul’s purpose. I was learning how to step into the story I was born to live. On May 19, 2023, I was on a solo backpack trip up the Quilcene River when I got the brilliant idea to visit all the rivers

This is a story about radial flow and the magic it creates. How 14 beings can spring from almost the same source yet have such wildly different characters. It is the story of flow from source made manifest in physical form. It is the tale of land and river, intertwined and inseparable. How the land shapes the river and how the river shapes the land. This is the journey of a single drop of rain, repeated billions of times over geological epochs. It is the story of Cascadia,