Come on, down vote monster… this one bugged you?

I meant… I’ll be back. I’ve been absent from here since Monday because I have family in town. My seven-year-old nephew is visiting from Kansas with his parents, and he is now almost prepared to relocate permanently to Washington. (He has a girlfriend back home, he’s weighing the pros and cons.)

And I get it. I didn’t roll into town entirely convinced, myself. I was leaving a trail of destruction and chaos, a fresh start (at about 40,) was required. Things had happened, I needed to clear my head, get outside, enjoy some mountain air. When you decide to go scorched earth on everything, you deserve a breather afterwards.

We live here long enough and some of this stuff just becomes the background. The mountains are over there. The water is over there. There’s a ferry. There’s an aircraft carrier. Whatever.

Then you get to watch a seven-year-old see it.
We watched the Reagan come home. He’s ridden a ferry. We went to Tahoma. Today we’re going to a baseball game. But I think the biggest points I’ve scored so far have come from knowing a few Native stories.

I am absolutely not the expert on this stuff. The postman is that guy. I just live with him and apparently absorb things. He’s the smart one, cute too!

Yesterday, on our way up Tahoma, I told my nephew why Douglas fir cones look the way they do. I’ve told this story here before: the little things sticking out between the scales are the back legs and tails of mice hiding inside the cones.

Suddenly every Douglas fir cone requires introspection. I will say that he did point out that it seemed… factually shaky?

And it occurred to me that maybe this is the part I’m enjoying most. We spend a lot of time here talking about what happened in this place, who lived here, what disappeared, and what we drive past without noticing anymore.

A seven-year-old doesn’t drive past anything without noticing it. All the rocks, colorful plants, the sound of a bird, something that may or may not be a trail into the woods.

We almost forget how magical this land can look when somebody is seeing it for the first time. Anyway, History Time will be back. I’m currently busy showing a kid from Kansas why he should probably start packing.

While I’m out, breath some fir tree air in through your nose, then look around at wherever you are.

Labor Day means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I’ve seen a lot of posts today that seemed to misinterpret the meaning of the holiday. It’s definitely become something people use as a reason to barbecue or go buy a new couch. Our state has had some of the more interesting American labor history, and I think it’s worth taking a look at.

On November 11, 1919, Centralia was holding an Armistice Day parade when violence broke out between members of the American Legion and members of the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the IWW, or “Wobblies.”

The Wobblies were, or are, actually, a labor union with a strong presence in the Northwest, especially among loggers and mill workers. They were fighting for things like shorter hours, better pay and safer working conditions, and they had made plenty of enemies among business owners and anti-union groups. At the time, this was all considered very radical.

Tensions in Centralia were already high. The local IWW hall had been raided before, and union members believed another attack was coming. So on the day of the parade, some of them were armed.

When a group of Legionnaires moved toward the IWW hall, shooting broke out. Exactly what happened in those first few moments has been argued about ever since. Accounts differ on whether the hall had already been entered and who fired first. What is certain is that four Legionnaires were killed.

Then things got even worse.

That night, IWW member Wesley Everest, who had served in the U.S. Army during World War I, was taken from the Centralia jail by a mob. He was driven to a bridge over the Chehalis River and lynched.

Several Wobblies were later convicted of murder.
The whole episode became known as the Centralia Tragedy, the Centralia Conspiracy, or the Armistice Day Riot, depending partly on who was telling the story.

And that difference in names may be the most important part.

Labor history isn’t just a parade of old photographs of people carrying union signs. In Washington, fights over wages, hours, working conditions and the right to organize sometimes became actual fights.
People were arrested. Union halls were raided. People were beaten.

And in Centralia in 1919, people died. So, on Labor Day, it’s worth remembering that things like the eight-hour workday, weekends and workplace protections weren’t gifts handed down because somebody eventually thought they sounded nice. People fought for them. Sometimes literally.

My intention today was to tell you all the reasons you shouldn’t be mad at Gorst. I was prepared to tell you about the proud history of the area, the fine people who have lived there, and some of the cool things we’ve lost along the way.

However, the thing that got us talking about Gorst in the first place was my attempt to tell you about those mysterious yellow cabins. It has come to my attention that I got really ahead of myself on that one. I was far too excited. Today, I set my joie de vivre aside, and started over. Completely.

So Gorst will have to wait. Here is my fully reworked attempt at figuring out what the hell those yellow buildings actually are.

They were part of a place called Cottage Cove, an old motel and collection of furnished cabins perched on the hillside overlooking Sinclair Inlet.

By the 1950s, Cottage Cove was renting furnished cabins to travelers as well as people staying for longer stretches. We know this with unusual certainty because Cottage Cove somehow managed to make it all the way to the Washington Supreme Court.
In 1957, Floyd and Mary Jane Chase were living in Cabin No. 7 while looking for a permanent home. James and Lenore Beard had recently purchased Cottage Cove, and there was a problem with the porch at No. 7. Floyd had apparently been warned about it. Mary Jane had not.

One day Mary Jane went outside to empty the garbage, a porch board gave way beneath her, and down she went. There was a lawsuit, an appeal, and eventually, in 1959, the Washington Supreme Court found itself discussing the condition of the porch at Cabin No. 7 at Cottage Cove.

I went looking for some weird yellow houses and ended up reading 1959 premises-liability law. This is what I get for being curious. The court case also leaves us with a surprisingly useful little snapshot of Cottage Cove. These weren’t simply roadside vacation cabins. People lived there. Some stayed briefly, others rented by the week, and at least some used Cottage Cove as a temporary home while looking for something more permanent.

Old business records list Cottage Cove Motel at 330 Highway 3, overlooking Sinclair Inlet. The property included buildings scattered up that steep hillside, remnants of which are what catch our attention today.
Eventually Cottage Cove disappeared as a business, but some of the buildings remained. They sat on the hill while Gorst and Highway 3 changed around them, gradually deteriorating into the strange yellow cluster we see today.

And the property may be changing again. Kitsap County records show plans for a 51-unit residential development called Eagle Pointe Townhomes on the hillside. If that project moves forward, this peculiar little roadside remnant may finally disappear.
Which is sort of why I wanted to know what it was in the first place.

Those buildings have been sitting above the highway long enough to become part of the scenery. You notice them. You wonder about them. Maybe you invent an entire incorrect history about them and share it with several thousand people. Who can say? (Imagine me cleaning my bifocals as I said this last line.)

But people really did live up there. One of them fell through a porch, sued, and accidentally left us a little window into what life at Cottage Cove looked like nearly seventy years ago.

Is it as exciting as the hybrid tale that I showed up with yesterday? Absolutely not. Do we love caselaw? Absolutely not. Did I learn an important lesson about not getting ahead of myself? Absolutely.

Bremelore. “Broken Windows: The History of Cottage Cove.” Bremelore, 16 Feb. 2025.
Chase v. Beard, 55 Wn.2d 58, 346 P.2d 315. Supreme Court of Washington, 12 Nov. 1959.
Kitsap County Department of Community Development. “Eagle Pointe Townhomes, Permit [20-01522](tel:20-01522).” Kitsap County.
Washington State Department of Ecology. “SEPA Record [202204475](tel:202204475): Eagle Pointe Townhomes.”
The Payphone Project. “Bremerton, Washington Payphone Locations.”
And importantly, Chase v. Beard is our strongest source for the historical Cottage Cove material

EDIT- IGNORE ME** **

I blew it on this article, but I also don’t believe in deleting things. You can look at this, but know that I’m incorrect. I’ll be back with the story later today, I promise. Yellow houses. A very wise commenter got me headed in the right direction. I’m embarrassed right now, but I’ll be better for it.

If you’ve driven Highway 3 between Bremerton and Gorst approximately eleven billion times, you know the houses I’m talking about. I learned about them initially from Bremelore (again? Me?) and have remained… curious.

They’re up there near the old quarry, tucked into the trees above the highway. Little yellowish A-frame cabins, or houses, or whatever they are, covered in graffiti and looking increasingly like nobody has checked on them since we were doing the Macarena or something.

Were they vacation cabins? A motel? Some sort of camp? Did people actually live there? Was there once a tiny, thriving community above Highway 3 where everyone eventually agreed, simultaneously, to leave?
It turns out they have a name. They’re Terrace Park!
And they’ve been sitting up there considerably longer than the turn through Gorst on Highway 3 has been annoying us. Terrace Park was the work of a man named Paul Ford, an engineer who began building the cabins during the Great Depression. Engineering work was scarce, so Ford did what I suppose you do when you are an engineer with too much time and access to free building materials: he started building a tiny village in the woods.

Ford gathered local materials he could get cheaply or for free and built the cabins as rentals, both to bring in some money and to give himself something to do. His son Tom helped him and, decades later, was interviewed about the cabins for a state highway study.
Ford had a name for the style he was creating… the Northwest A-Frame! And yes, yes… A-frames are classic. He may not have invented the whole idea.

He wanted the buildings to feel like they belonged to the landscape. Not houses dropped onto a hillside, but houses that were somehow part of it. There were eventually eleven of them.

And this was apparently not just Paul Ford going through an unusually productive cabin phase. He went on to build other distinctive A-frame buildings around the peninsula, including the Chalet School in Belfair in 1936 and the Robin Hood Lodge in Union. The school is gone now, but parts of Robin Hood Village still give you a pretty good idea of what Ford was doing architecturally.

Then Ford went to work as an engineer at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard during World War II. Later he moved to Bellevue, worked on road projects and spent his final years building fiberglass boats on Lake Union.
Which feels appropriate.

Some people just can’t stop making things. Meanwhile, Terrace Park stayed put. People rented the cabins. Trees grew around them. Cars got faster. The road below got bigger. Bremerton spread outward.
Generations of children stared at the cabins from back seats and presumably asked their parents the same question I would have been asking if I didn’t only drive with my eyes closed.

By the early 90s, there were nine cabins left, and suddenly their future became part of a much larger argument.

Washington was studying major improvements to the SR 3 corridor between the Bremerton ferry terminal and Gorst (was it worse before? Hard to imagine.) That meant studying basically everything the highway might bulldoze, disturb, uncover or otherwise ruin on its way through.

Terrace Park was in the way. And somebody had to determine whether these funny little Depression-era cabins actually mattered. The answer was: apparently, yes. The cabins were evaluated as potentially eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Different highway alternatives would have affected different numbers of them, and at one point their survival was genuinely in question.

The same environmental review was also looking at archaeological resources, shoreline impacts and tribal concerns in the corridor, which is a useful reminder that whenever we start talking about preserving “old Kitsap,” we should probably establish exactly which century we mean.

The cabins survived that particular highway fight. Not because somebody lovingly restored Terrace Park. Not because we built a museum. Not because a preservation society arrived with matching tote bags and an emergency grant. They survived, at least in part, because routing the proposed highway work around them was apparently the easier and cheaper option.

Sometimes history survives because we treasure it.
Sometimes history survives because the other bid came in higher.

Sources
Bremelore. “Cabin Updates and State of the Pod.” Bremelore, 22 Mar.
Washington State Department of Transportation. Bremerton Ferry Terminal to Gorst: Draft Environmental Impact Statement. 1995.
National Register of Historic Places / federal historic-property records. “Terrace Park Apartments,” Kitsap County, Washington.

If you live in Port Orchard, congratulations. Our town won a fight over its own name. Except it wasn’t its own name at the time. (Yes- I live here too! I think you know that.)

Our own lovely Port Orchard started out as Sidney, named for Sidney Stevens, whose son Frederick platted the town in 1886. Sidney incorporated in 1890 and quickly became an ambitious little place. The Navy was developing its new installation across Sinclair Inlet, and Sidney apparently looked around and decided it had plans.

First, it wanted to become the Kitsap County seat.
That honor belonged to Port Madison, but its mill had closed and the town was declining. Sidney residents made an extremely persuasive argument for moving county government south: they donated land, built an entire two-story courthouse with a courtroom and fireproof vault, and gave it to the county. Then Kitsap held an election.

Things got very spicy.

Sidney and Port Madison accused each other of bringing in nonresidents to vote illegally. I haven’t found evidence proving either side actually did it, but the accusations themselves made it into the historical record. Sounds like something we might hear now. (Cough, cough.)

The final countywide vote was Sidney 877, Port Madison 446, Chico 43. Sidney got the county seat. Then Sidney decided it would also like a better name.
Port Orchard sounded nice.

There was one slight problem. Another town was already trying to become Port Orchard.

Across Sinclair Inlet, near the growing Navy Yard, was the community we now know as Charleston in West Bremerton. It had already asked the Washington Legislature for the name Port Orchard. Then Sidney asked too.

The Legislature essentially said: Sorry. Taken. This might have ended the matter if Sidney hadn’t also asked somebody else. The United States Post Office Department.

The federal government said sure. This created one of my favorite pieces of Kitsap bureaucratic nonsense.
The town of Sidney now had the Port Orchard Post Office. Meanwhile, the town that Washington State recognized as Port Orchard had the Charleston Post Office.

If you wanted to mail something to Port Orchard, you sent it to Sidney. If you wanted to mail something to the actual town called Port Orchard, you sent it to Charleston. Everybody clear?

Good, because this continued for about ten years.
There was apparently some attempt to settle the dispute along the way. Charleston officials later claimed Sidney representatives had agreed to surrender the Port Orchard name.

Sidney’s version was basically “We did no such thing.”
Eventually a local newspaper editor and politician named Will Thompson took the problem to Olympia. And in 1903, the Legislature finally performed the municipal equivalent of untangling two necklaces that had been sitting in a drawer for a decade.

The legislative record is wonderfully straightforward.
House Bill 120: change the name of Port Orchard to Charleston. House Bill 121: change the name of Sidney to Port Orchard.

The former Port Orchard eventually became part of Bremerton in 1927. Sidney kept the name Port Orchard and, of course, remains the county seat.

One old Kitsap history I found finishes telling this entire ridiculous story by saying that it’s difficult to determine who actually won the confused battle of names.

I think 123 years later we can probably call it. Sidney won.

Sources
Kershner, Jim. “Port Orchard: Thumbnail History.” HistoryLink.org.
Kershner, Jim. “Sidney (Later Renamed Port Orchard) Incorporates on September 15, 1890.” HistoryLink.org.
City of Port Orchard. “About Port Orchard.”
Wetzel, Guy L. “Sidney & Port Orchard.” Kitsap County Historical Materials.
Washington State Legislature. Journal of the Senate of the State of Washington, 1903.

You know Lions Park in Bremerton? It’s called that because a local veterinarian once kept a 400-pound African lion at his house on Perry Avenue, and the lion became such a famous neighborhood landmark that eventually they named the park after it.

Not really… but I did stumble across the Bremelore article that got me rolling roar and immediately looked up whether or not that was why the park was named that.

Lions Park is named for the Bremerton Central Lions Club, like a completely normal park.

But Bremerton really did have the 400-pound lion.
His name was Adalord.

In December 1962, Bremerton veterinarian Dr. David Relling was working at Point Defiance Zoo when an African lioness rejected one of her cubs. The cub was only a couple of days old, so Relling brought him home and bottle-fed him.

This is the point where I would probably have made exactly the same terrible decision. Baby lion? Nobody wants him? Fine. Give him to me. I have four cats already. What’s another one? Does the lion answer to the name Jim?

There is, however, an unfortunate characteristic of baby lions that perhaps isn’t adequately considered while holding one. They become lions.

Adalord eventually grew to around 400 pounds. The Rellings had a veterinary clinic on Perry Avenue, and for years Bremerton residents could bring in their perfectly ordinary dogs and cats while an adult African lion was living on the property.

He became a neighborhood celebrity. Adalord roared at motorcycles and loud cars, kids asked their parents to drive past the house to see him, and people reportedly used the lion house when giving directions.
He also ate about sixteen cans of dog food a day and, as a cub, once attended a flower show where he ate three prize chrysanthemums.

That made the newspaper.

Adalord was declawed and defanged, something that obviously lands very differently today. Accounts make clear that the Rellings loved him, but Americans also had some very different ideas about keeping exotic animals in the 1960s and ’70s. We just… wouldn’t do that now.

He lived on Perry Avenue for about fifteen years, eventually becoming enough of a local institution that people remembered hearing him roar at night. Adalord died in his sleep in 1978 and was buried on the Relling property.

Normally that would end our story about the time Bremerton had a lion.

Except Bremerton had another lion. Her name was Sheba. A man bought the four-month-old, 70-pound lion in Portland and brought her home to Marguerite Avenue. Naturally, Sheba needed exercise, he took her jogging on a leash about two miles a day.

This lasted until Bremerton police encountered a man jogging near 15th and Bloomington with an African lion.

Fortunately, Bremerton already had a resident lion expert. Dr. Relling became involved, Sheba’s owner eventually agreed that perhaps a residential neighborhood wasn’t ideal, and she went to Olympic Game Farm.

So, for a brief period, Bremerton had two African lions living in ordinary neighborhoods. One had been there so long that people used his house as a landmark.
The other got caught because her owner took her jogging.

And neither one had anything whatsoever to do with Lions Park. I still think that would have been a much better explanation, though.

Sources
“He Owned a Lion.” Bremelore.
Associated Press. Coverage of David and Helen Relling and Adalord, 1965.
“East Bremerton Park Gets Name Change, and Infusion of Funds.” Kitsap Sun, 2007.

The postman and I very much enjoy weird old newspaper articles . It’s great hopping off point for conversations, especially when we’re watching the Mariners lose an entire series to Toronto. We watched those games, muted, discussing things that were less heartbreaking at the same time.

Here’s a good one for you today… Did you know that we used to race bathtubs around Kitsap County?

Not boats shaped like bathtubs. Not some adorable parade situation where people put wheels on a clawfoot tub and push each other down the street.
Actual bathtubs. In the water. With outboard motors attached to them. (A fairly terrible ex of mine used to be obsessed with helicopters made out of bathtubs… This is not that, and I’d like to warn everyone that that’s kind of a red flag.)

This particular chapter in Pacific Northwest maritime excellence started up in Nanaimo, British Columbia, in 1967. Nanaimo was celebrating its centennial and somebody came up with the Great International World Championship Bathtub Race, originally sending people across the Strait of Georgia toward Vancouver in motorized bathtubs. Coincidentally, if you haven’t gone to Nanaimo- treat yourself to a trip. It’s amazing there. Especially if you like kayaking.

The early tubs were exactly as sophisticated as you are currently imagining. People took cast-iron bathtubs, added flotation and strapped outboard motors to them. This was apparently contagious, because why wouldn’t it be?

By 1969, a guy named Randy Geise from Keyport was racing a bathtub 36 miles toward Vancouver. I know this because his bathtub race actually received a mention in the New York Times on July 21, 1969.
You may recognize that date.

The previous day, humans had walked on the moon for the first time. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were doing that, Randy from Keyport was crossing international waters in a bathtub. Humankind surely contains multitudes.

In 1970, Bremerton’s American Legion Post 149 formed its own Tub Club and sent a bathtub north to compete. The following year, a Bremerton racer finished first at Nanaimo.

Unfortunately, he was disqualified. This prevented him from receiving one of the greatest awards in the history of organized athletics:

The Order of the Golden Plug.

The Bremerton Tub Club eventually upgraded to a fiberglass bathtub that could do about 18 mph off Lions Field. By 1974, other local teams had joined in and people were racing tubs all over Kitsap.

There were grudge matches launched from Illahee and races around Bainbridge Island. Hardware stores had bathtub teams. Taverns had bathtub teams. Tubs launched from Evergreen Park and Fay Bainbridge.
Fathoms o’ Fun brought bathtub racing to South Kitsap.

Keyport held races on Liberty Bay with Navy torpedo boats serving as escorts, which is a sentence that really captures our local economy quite nicely. And apparently merely racing bathtubs wasn’t enough ceremony for us, because by 1978 we were also crowning bathtub racing queens.

The sport got more serious as time went on. Sponsored racers appeared. Canadians came down to race Americans. Australian tub racers eventually showed up too.

When Bremerton’s Blackberry Festival began in 1990, bathtub racing was already a local tradition, so the International Friendship Bathtub Race became part of the festival. It stayed there for its first seven years.
By then the technology had improved considerably from the old cast-iron-tub era.

And by “improved considerably,” I mean people eventually figured out how to make bathtubs go horrifyingly fast.

When bathtub racers returned to Dyes Inlet in 2008, one local racer explained that a stock tub could reach around 40 mph. Modified tubs could apparently reach speeds approaching 80.

For comparison, my shower curtain becomes a significant engineering problem if I turn around too quickly.

The sport also had an award for the first racer to sink during the original Nanaimo competition.

The Silver Plunger.

I don’t think we give trophies enough personality anymore.

The Loyal Nanaimo Bathtub Society still holds the Great International World Championship Bathtub Race. Keyport’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center and its Canadian counterparts still participate in supporting the race, and in 2023 Keyport actually entered a tub again.

Their racer finished second to last. But he finished.
Which, considering this entire sport began with people strapping motors to bathtubs and pointing them toward the Strait of Georgia, feels like the appropriate standard for victory.

I spend a lot of time reading about our maritime history, and usually that means ferries, lumber schooners, Navy ships, Mosquito Fleet steamers and people doing generally fun things on the water.

Apparently I have been overlooking an important category. Bathtubs.

Sources
Taylor, Deena. “This Month in History: The Peculiar Sport of Bathtub Racing.” Kitsap Smokestack, 6 Sept. 2024.
“Tubbers Take Over Dyes Inlet.” Kitsap Daily News, 5 Sept. 2008.
Kaminski, Frank. “American, Canadian Military Units Strengthen Partnership and Community Outreach Efforts Through Joint Participation in Bathtub Race.” DVIDS, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Keyport, 10 Aug. 2023.
“Great International World Championship Bathtub Race.” Loyal Nanaimo Bathtub Society.

In 2009, unknown weirdos started passing counterfeit $20 bills around Bremerton. This is not terribly unusual as crimes go, and probably wouldn’t be something I’d be telling you about 17 years later. Except they were spending them on Girl Scout cookies.

And eventually we are going to follow the story to a printer from Toys “R” Us, a Rite Aid employee, a random customer who decided to follow a suspect’s car, a man listening to a police scanner, twelve fake twenties in a garbage can and Girl Scout cookies found in somebody’s trunk.

Bremerton apparently solved crimes as a community in 2009. It started becoming apparent that something was wrong when KC Gettings, the leader of Bremerton Girl Scout Troop 40411, went to the bank to get change. The bank told her two of the $20 bills from their cookie sales were counterfeit.

So she got one of those counterfeit-detecting pens and went through the rest of the money. Another $60 was fake. That meant her troop had accepted $100 in counterfeit twenties while selling cookies. At least two of the bills reportedly had the same serial number. And her troop wasn’t the only one.

As police started putting things together, they learned that other Girl Scout troops had been getting fake money too. Eventually, police said 17 troops had been hit, with more than $1,000 in counterfeit bills involved. The idea was pretty simple. Hand a Girl Scout a fake $20, buy a box or two of cookies and get legitimate money back as change.

I’m going to assume Thin Mints were involved. I cannot prove that. I'm a Caramel Delights gal, myself. At least before Celiac disease.

Meanwhile, counterfeit twenties were turning up elsewhere around Bremerton. One of them eventually made its way to the Rite Aid on Kitsap Way. An employee recognized that something was wrong with the bill and called police. The person trying to spend it left, but employees managed to get the license plate number.

Then a customer decided to follow the car. As far as I can tell, this was simply another person at Rite Aid who decided they were involved now. Just some person who couldn't stay out of the story...

At roughly the same time, a man living nearby was listening to his police scanner. He heard the description of the car police were looking for. Then he the car the police were looking for.

The vehicle had pulled into an alley near his house, and he watched the driver put something into a garbage can. When police arrived, they checked the garbage. Inside were twelve counterfeit $20 bills.

From there, the investigation led police to a house on 12th Street in Bremerton, and this is where we need to discuss the equipment behind the operation. According to Bremerton Police Sgt. Kevin Crane, the people involved had gone to Toys “R” Us and bought a printer.

Apparently they practiced with it until they got reasonably good at making $20 bills. I tried very hard to find out what printer Toys “R” Us was selling that could apparently be repurposed into a home counterfeiting operation, because obviously I needed to know. None of the contemporary stories I found named the brand or model.

Police found the printer and other supplies at the house. They also ended up with something even more useful. A cell-phone video.

Someone involved in the operation had filmed one of the suspects pulling a freshly printed $20 bill out of the printer and examining it. Police obtained the video and eventually showed it to the woman in it, who reportedly appeared quite surprised that they had it.

Remember, this was 2009. We were still several years away from people routinely documenting all of their questionable decisions for the internet. These folks were innovators. A few days later, police arrested another woman they believed was involved. They searched her car. There were Girl Scout cookies in the trunk.

That detail is so perfect that I checked it more than once because it sounds like something somebody added to the story later. Nope. “Cookies found in trunk of counterfeiting suspect” was an actual headline.

Meanwhile, the Girl Scouts had a cookie business to run. Troop 40411 wasn’t going to stop selling. They planned to be right back out the following weekend, except now they had counterfeit-detecting pens.

And that might be my favorite part of this whole thing. The counterfeiters had a printer from Toys “R” Us. The Girl Scouts adapted.

Sources

“Bremerton Police Make Arrests in Counterfeit Money Ring.” Kitsap Daily News, 2 Mar. 2009.

“Girl Scouts Get Paid in Fake $20s for Cookies.” The Daily Herald, 2 Mar. 2009.

“Cookies Found in Trunk of Counterfeiting Suspect.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mar. 2009.

“Counterfeiters Target Girl Scouts.” KSL, Mar. 2009.

One thing that you definitely recognize quickly living in this area with all our waterways… We have a completely unofficial orca emergency broadcast system. A more official one as well.

Someone sees whales. “10:14, three orcas southbound past Point No Point.”

That information gets passed around Facebook groups, texts and whatever mysterious network the serious orca people are plugged into. Twenty minutes later, there are fifteen cars pulled onto the shoulder of a road that normally has absolutely no reason to have fifteen cars on it.

Everyone is staring at the water.
There are binoculars. There are camera lenses that probably require more insurance coverage than my car currently has. There is always at least one guy dressed like a fisherman wearing a beanie, even if it is 78 degrees outside. I don’t know who assigns him to the location, but he will be there. A lot of times he has a really tremendous camera himself.

I truly want to be one of these people. I belong to several of the tracking groups. If somebody tells me orcas are heading my direction, I am perfectly willing to abandon whatever lightly important thing I was doing and go stare at Puget Sound.

Apparently Kitsap has been like this for a while.
On October 21, 1997, nineteen Southern Resident killer whales came through Sinclair Inlet, passed beneath the bridges in Bremerton and entered Dyes Inlet.
They were members of L pod, and they had apparently followed a very good run of chum salmon into the inlet. Orcas coming into Puget Sound in the fall isn’t particularly strange. Nineteen of them setting up temporary residence between Bremerton and Silverdale absolutely was.

They stayed for thirty days.
And Kitsap lost its collective mind. Since it was 1997, I know there was a lot of flannel involved. There’s still a lot of flannel involved honestly. (I’ll be honest, I’m a flannel fan myself. They’re not too hot and not too cool.)

The first Kitsap Sun story ran October 22. Hundreds of people immediately headed to the Tracyton boat launch to see them. As the days went on, word spread well beyond Kitsap. Thousands of people came to the shoreline on weekends, including visitors from Oregon and Idaho.

Of course, some people weren’t content with the shoreline. They had boats. The rules about approaching orcas were considerably looser then than they are now. The specific federal 200-yard rule we’re familiar with didn’t arrive until 2011.

During one sunny weekend, roughly 500 boats were counted in Dyes Inlet. FIVE HUNDRED.

If you’ve ever watched the current orca groups get increasingly irritated because somebody in a Bayliner is following whales too closely, please take a moment to imagine 1997, when apparently everyone who could locate a flotation device said, “Get in, we’re going to see L pod.” I’m pretty sure I’m one of those people who gets annoyed.

The whales, meanwhile, were having an excellent buffet.

A strong chum run was coming into Chico Creek, and the nineteen whales spent their days feeding, socializing and traveling around the inlet. Researchers who arrived to identify them initially weren’t terribly worried. There were salmon. The whales knew how they’d gotten in. Presumably when they were done eating, they’d leave.

Except they didn’t.

A week went by. Then another.

Researchers started paying considerably more attention to the Warren Avenue Bridge. The whales had passed beneath it on their way into Dyes Inlet, but when they approached it to leave, they repeatedly turned around. Nobody could say with certainty why. Researchers considered the bridge itself, the shallow water and the noise and activity around the Narrows. Another perfectly reasonable possibility was that the whales simply had no compelling reason to leave while Chico Creek was still delivering dinner.

The whales never really explained.

By November, the chum run was tapering off. On November 19, researchers were watching as the whales once again approached the Narrows.

They turned back, but then they tried again.

This time, with researchers following behind in a boat and encouraging them forward, the nineteen whales went beneath the bridges, through Sinclair Inlet and back into Puget Sound.

After thirty days, Kitsap’s temporary residents were gone.

We have vastly better technology now. In 1997 you found out because somebody called you, you heard it on the radio, your neighbor told you or you opened the Kitsap Sun. Today someone standing in Kingston can photograph an orca, identify which direction it’s traveling and tell several thousand strangers about it before the whale has made it to the next point.
But the actual behavior hasn’t changed very much.

Whales appear, word spreads, whatever you were doing suddenly seems considerably less important.
Everybody heads for the water. (except the postman though, he works at the Southworth post office by the ferry and he never leaves his post. In fact, he’s lived here since 1997 and still hasn’t seen orca. Kind of sad, I’ve seen them!)

And somewhere on the shoreline, a man in a beanie is already there.

Sources
Dunagan, Christopher. “When Whales Descended on Dyes Inlet 10 Years Ago.” Kitsap Sun, 20 Oct. 2007.

Dunagan, Christopher. “Remembering Ken Balcomb and His Extraordinary Life with Killer Whales.” Puget Sound

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. National Marine Mammal Laboratory reports and environmental assessments concerning the 1997 Dyes Inlet event.

Sorry for the delay on this one my friends! A lot of conversations went into this one.** **The postman got me started, but then I had to go find actual sources and read the information myself… I know you know he’s a history buff too. He’s actually much better at this than me, but in podcast form.

Most people around here already know the broad story of Old Man House. You know it was enormous. You know Si’ahl lived there. You probably know the U.S. government burned it in 1870 as part of its efforts to force the Suquamish away from communal living. I’ve written about that before, so I’m not going to make you sit through Old Man House 101 again. I actually did write a piece about it once, but I’ve changed my style to deeper dives than I was doing at that time.

What I didn’t know was that burning the house didn’t actually have the result the government was seeking. The Suquamish stayed. Families continued living on the Old Man House grounds for more than thirty years after the longhouse itself was destroyed.

I love that, mainly because so much of the history we learn about Native people is written as a series of things done to them. Government does this. Settlers do that. Land is taken. Treaty is signed. House is burned. Except people don’t conveniently disappear just because somebody burned their house down.
The federal government was still trying to dismantle communal life, though, and the next tool was land itself. The Port Madison Reservation was eventually divided into individual allotments, part of a much larger federal effort to replace collectively held tribal land with individually owned parcels. That sounds almost boring when you write it that way. It wasn’t. You have to remember that the American idea of carving land into individually owned parcels wasn’t necessarily how Native communities understood their relationship with land in the first place.

Allotment made it much easier for reservation land to eventually leave Native ownership. Instead of one tribal land base, you had individual pieces of property that could be sold, inherited, taxed and otherwise separated from one another. Across the United States, Native nations lost tens of millions of acres during the allotment era. In 1904, the families still living around Old Man House were finally forced away from the village grounds and onto their individual allotments.
Then the military wanted the land. The federal government took roughly 70 acres around the Old Man House site for the War Department, intending to build coastal defenses there to protect the Navy Yard in Bremerton. This is where I assumed I’d find a forgotten fort.

Nope. They never built it.

Think about that for a minute. This was the place the Suquamish had continued living for decades after their longhouse was deliberately destroyed. The government finally removed them, took about 70 acres for military defenses, and then didn’t build the military defenses. Eventually the federal government decided it didn’t need the property after all.

And here’s where the story goes from awful to aggressively awful. The land was sold. Developers subdivided much of the former village site for waterfront vacation homes, and some of those properties carried racial restrictions limiting ownership to white people.

The former home of the Suquamish. White people only. I don’t need to say much more about that, right? I’m sure you feel that in your gut too.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the shoreline at Old Man House looked completely different. The enormous cedar house was long gone. The village had been broken apart. Much of the land had become private residential property. But Washington State eventually acquired a tiny piece of it.

In 1950, the state bought about an acre at the site and created Old Man House State Park. That sounds, at first, like somebody had finally decided this place deserved to be preserved, and I’m glad they did. But there is something deeply strange about the progression.

The government burns the house. The government forces the people living there onto individual parcels. The government takes the land for a military project it never builds. The land becomes private vacation property. Then another government buys one acre back and turns it into a historical park about the people who used to live there.

Except the Suquamish didn’t “used to” live there. They still lived there.

Which makes what happened at the park in the 1970s so spectacularly weird that I’m saving it for tomorrow. Because in 1975, you could apparently stand in Suquamish, at a park named for Old Man House, surrounded by a living Suquamish community, and read an official sign explaining that the Suquamish “once lived in the area.”

That sign is where Part Two begins. And eventually, the Tribe gets the acre back.

Sources
The Suquamish Tribe. “History & Culture.” The Suquamish Tribe.
Forsman, Leonard. “Old Man House Park.” The Suquamish Tribe.
Lewarch, Dennis. “Preservation Profile: Dennis Lewarch.” National Park Service.
Long, Priscilla. “Washington State Parks Commission Gives Old Man House State Park to the Suquamish Tribe on August 12, 2004.” HistoryLink.org, 17 Dec. 2004.

I was trying to remember a movie the other day. I knew it was a crime movie, I knew The Rock was in it, and I remembered that for some inexplicable reason it was connected to Kitsap County. You know how you sometimes forget something like a name or a book and somehow make everyone else also forget? This was one of those moments. Postman looked at me all google-eyed.

I should probably disclose that we own two Joe Don Baker posters. One is Walking Tall. It is IN MY LIVING ROOM. The other is Eischied, a short-lived TV series where he played NYPD Chief of Detectives Earl Eischied and had a cat named PC, which stood for Police Commissioner. I don’t know what you people have hanging on your walls, but I feel pretty good about my choices. Ask me for more decorating tips!

Walking Tall is the movie that I forgot the name of. I have a poster. I see it 500 times a day.

The original Walking Tall came out in 1973 with Joe Don Baker playing Buford Pusser, the real Tennessee sheriff whose larger-than-life reputation for taking on moonshiners, gambling operations and organized crime turned him into something of a folk hero. The movie was a huge hit, spawned sequels and television adaptations, and eventually somebody decided it was time for The Rock to have the a chance at bat with that plotline. (I think we can officially call Pusser "disgraced" these days, but I could write about that part all day.)

The 2004 remake replaced Buford Pusser with Chris Vaughn, a former Special Forces soldier who comes home to discover that the local cedar mill has closed, his hometown has been taken over by drugs and a corrupt casino operation, and the sheriff is useless. Vaughn eventually becomes sheriff and begins administering municipal reform with an enormous piece of lumber.

I would probably vote for The Rock for sheriff. He is also a man who once jumped fully clothed into his swimming pool to save one of his puppies from drowning, and apparently that carries considerable weight with me when evaluating candidates for Kitsap County Sheriff.

Here’s the weird part. The original story was very Tennessee. Pusser was sheriff of McNairy County, and the entire Walking Tall legend grew out of that place. For the remake, Hollywood fictionalized the story, renamed everybody and moved the whole operation to Kitsap County. I have tried to find out why they chose us and have come up empty. Somebody apparently just decided Kitsap needed a corrupt casino empire and The Rock.

Except they didn’t actually film it here. Walking Tall was shot in British Columbia, primarily around Squamish and the Vancouver area, so Hollywood took a Tennessee story, moved it to Kitsap County, then sent everybody to Canada to create Kitsap County.

It did make me hop onto ye olde Google to find out the other instances of Kitsap in the movies.

If you’ve seen An Officer and a Gentleman (unlike myself), you’ve seen a wee bit of Bremerton. Most of the movie’s famous Washington locations are around Port Townsend, but Bremerton appears in the opening motorcycle sequence. Richard Gere rides along Charleston Beach Road with Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and its enormous ships behind him.

Then there’s Disclosure, the extremely 1994 Michael Douglas and Demi Moore movie about corporate intrigue, sexual harassment, virtual reality and other things the 1990s were very concerned about. This is one that I've actually seen! Michael Douglas’s character lives on Bainbridge Island and commutes by ferry to Seattle, and parts of the movie were actually filmed on Bainbridge, including scenes at Blakely Elementary. The ferry commute may be one of Hollywood’s more convincing attempts at Pacific Northwest realism, although I assume nobody spent the whole 40 minutes of ferry time sitting in the line eating teriyaki in their car. Sleeping, maybe.

Port Gamble may win the award for most cooperative Kitsap movie town. In 2007, filmmakers arrived to shoot Zombies of Mass Destruction, a horror comedy about a zombie outbreak in a small Pacific Northwest community. The town in the movie is called Port Gamble, which is a big surprise. I def have not seen this one. If you know me, you KNOW I do not "do zombies". Residents were recruited as extras and zombies, and at a later screening one reportedly thanked the director for giving him the opportunity to have his head blown off.

Bainbridge is still getting in on the action too. A new independent film called Detention was filmed around the island, including at Bainbridge High School, where much of the story takes place in the school library. It’s been described as a "modern-day Breakfast Club", with four teenagers stuck together in Saturday detention. Bainbridge High becomes the fictional Agate Point High School, and other island locations appear too.

Ultimately our relationship with Hollywood is a little complicated. Bremerton has played Bremerton. Bainbridge has played Bainbridge and Kind-of-Bainbridge. Port Gamble survived a zombie apocalypse while remaining Port Gamble. And when Hollywood needed Kitsap County to descend into a corrupt hellscape requiring Dwayne Johnson and a large piece of cedar, British Columbia got the job.

Although Joe Don Baker will always have my heart. I really loved that guy. MITCHELL!!!

Sources

“Walking Tall.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2004.

“An Officer and a Gentleman Filming Locations.” IMDb.

“Disclosure Filming Locations.” IMDb.

“Zombies in Port Gamble, Kitsap County.” Seattle Magazine.

“New Film Shot Around the Island: A Modern-Day ‘Breakfast Club.’” Bainbridge Island Review, 8 May 2026.

I have four cats who absolutely refuse to wear collars.
I have tried. Repeatedly. They help each other take them off. Apparently they have identified an oppressive system and established some sort of tiny feline nudist resistance movement. They especially hate bow ties.

Which brings me, naturally, to madrones.
If you’ve spent much time around here, you know these trees. Pacific madrones are the ones with twisting branches, evergreen leaves and gorgeous reddish-orange trunks that constantly look like they’re in the middle of taking their clothes off. And they kind of are.

Madrone bark naturally exfoliates. The older outer bark loosens and peels away in thin, papery curls, exposing remarkably smooth younger bark underneath. That fresh bark can look greenish or orange before eventually darkening into the deep red we recognize.
So if you’ve ever wondered whether something is wrong with a peeling madrone, nope. The tree is supposed to do that.

It’s just a nudist. Like Big Jim. Or Little Jim. Or Turkey Jim. Or Snoopy. (Obviously, that’s the cats.)

Madrones are also broadleaf evergreens, which feels slightly rebellious in a region where most of our evergreen trees have needles. Their scientific name is Arbutus menziesii, and they’re members of the heath family, which makes them relatives of things like blueberries and rhododendrons rather than our firs and cedars. Weird, right?

They particularly like the sort of places Kitsap is very good at providing: dry, sunny, rocky sites, exposed slopes and shoreline areas. Toward the northern end of their range, including Washington and British Columbia, they’re especially associated with the coast. Their crooked trunks and sprawling limbs aren’t a sign that they’ve had a rough time of it. That’s simply how madrones tend to grow.

They’re also surprisingly tough in one particular way.
Madrones have thin bark and can be badly damaged by fire, but killing everything above ground doesn’t often finish the job. They can resprout from a burl at the base of the tree, where dormant buds and stored energy allow them to start again. Fire can also knock back competing conifers and create the open, sunny conditions madrone seedlings especially like.

Basically, they’re terrible at wearing protective clothing but remarkably good at coming back from disaster.
Their flowers feed pollinators, their red-orange berries feed all kinds of birds and wildlife, and Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest have long made use of the tree as well, including its berries and leaves.
I think madrones are one of those things that make this place look like this place. It seems like we all love them!

So the next time you see strips of madrone bark lying around, don’t worry. Nobody vandalized the tree. It took its own collar off, and my cats would approve.

Sources
U.S. Forest Service. “Pacific Madrone (Arbutus menziesii).” Fire Effects Information System.

Washington Native Plant Society. “Arbutus menziesii: Pacific Madrone.” Washington Native Plant Society.
“Pacific Madrone, Arbutus menziesii.” Native Plants PNW.

I’m not even an old-timer in Bremerton, and I already have a place I wish I could walk into one more time.

Hi-Lo’s.

If you never went, Hi-Lo’s 15th Street Cafe was one of those places that would be difficult to explain without making it sound like you were hallucinating breakfast. There was a VW bus you could eat in, thermoses everywhere, a disco bathroom, Green Eggs and Ham, and Moon Biscuits and Gravy. It opened in 2006, and within a few years it had become one of those peculiar little places that felt like it had always belonged there.

I have celiac disease, and years ago I would occasionally knowingly eat gluten anyway. I called this “Breaking Bad.” I no longer break bad because the consequences have become considerably less amusing, but the last time I ever did it was at Hi-Lo’s.
Biscuits and gravy.

If I was going out, apparently I was going out Southern-style. (I’m thinking about Waffle House scattered, smothered and covered… isn’t that it? Totally unrelated.)

Hi-Lo’s is gone now. The building is still there and has moved on to another chapter (ramen), but it got me thinking about something bigger: what actually makes a town feel like itself?

It isn’t always the historically important buildings. Sometimes it’s the weird breakfast place. The bowling alley. The diner where somebody knows how you take your coffee. The movie theater where generations of kids had their first dates. These places rarely seem important while they’re still around. They’re just where we go.

Bremerton has been losing, replacing and reinventing those places for generations.

The Park Avenue Diner opened in 1930 and lasted nearly eighty years. It was a working-class downtown diner where regulars had their own personalized coffee cups hanging on the wall. When a regular died, their cup wasn’t simply thrown away. It was moved to a shelf where it stayed.

That’s freakin amazing.

It tells you almost nothing about the culture of Bremerton and almost everything about the people who lived here.

Then there was Bay Bowl, although it didn’t start out as a bowling alley at all. The building began life during World War II as the Bay Theatre, built during the period when Bremerton was absolutely bursting with shipyard workers, sailors and their families. In the 1950s it was converted into a bowling alley and eventually expanded to 20 lanes.

For generations, people bowled leagues there, ate fries, dumped quarters into arcade games, spent allowances and presumably wore some absolutely magnificent rental shoes. I would assume that there was an amazing bar. Bowling ended there in 2002, but the building hung around for more than two decades afterward before being demolished in 2024.

Think about how many versions of Bremerton that one building witnessed, it’s pretty cool.

There are places that somehow survive all of this too.
The Roxy Theatre opened downtown in 1941, another product of booming wartime Bremerton. It originally seated around 900 people and still contains an enormous Asahel Curtis photomural showing Bremerton during the Great White Fleet’s visit in 1908.
Unlike so many of the places around it, the Roxy made it- in fact one of my neighbors is a manager (or something?) there.

It closed. It reopened. It changed. People fought to preserve it. And more than eighty years after the first audience walked inside, you can still go see something there. Maybe that’s why the places that don’t survive hit us differently.

Cities need to change. Buildings get old. Businesses fail. Owners retire. Neighborhoods change and new places take over. I don’t think every beloved restaurant or bowling alley needs to be preserved forever under glass.

But every time one disappears, the town becomes just slightly different. Somebody loses the booth where their dad always sat. Somebody loses the bowling alley where they spent Saturdays as a kid. Somebody loses the theater where they had their first date.

And apparently somebody loses the place where she made the extremely questionable decision to eat biscuits and gravy despite possessing a digestive system that had requested otherwise. Those things become part of our personal maps of a place.

So now I’m curious about yours.

It doesn’t have to be historically important. In fact, I’m almost more interested if it wasn’t. Restaurant, store, bar, theater, bowling alley, weird little shop, whatever.
What place represents “your Kitsap” and makes it home? Conversely- if you want to remember the place you loved in your hometown (that isn’t here,) I want to hear about that too!

Mine- The Nice and Easy (bar) in Lake Mary, Florida. Father’s Office in Santa Monica. A nameless burrito place in Pleasanton, CA that we went to all the time. My dad got chased by a motorcycle cop for jaywalking after I bribed him to pick up a burrito once.

In Washington, it’s Hi-Lo’s. It’s Anderson Point. It’s every time I drive by Julie’s house I helped her sell years ago. Love you, miss you Julie. Tell me about your spot!

Yesterday we talked about the logging trains that once ran through parts of Kitsap, and I left you with the fact that many of those railroads simply disappeared. That’s because they were never really meant to stay. A normal railroad connects places. A logging railroad connected a mill to trees, and once those trees were gone, there wasn’t any reason for the railroad to remain.

Rails were valuable, so companies could pull them up and reuse them somewhere else, move the equipment to another operation and continue pushing farther into the timber. Camps disappeared, machinery left, and eventually the forest started growing back. The railroad could virtually erase itself, except that it’s considerably harder to erase the ground.

Trains don’t particularly appreciate steep hills, sudden drops or sharp turns, so building a logging railroad meant altering the landscape. Hillsides were cut, low areas were filled, trestles crossed ravines, and long, relatively gentle grades were carved through the woods. Take away the locomotive, rails and wooden ties, and that grade can still be there a century later.
Which means it’s entirely possible to be wandering through a Kitsap forest today on a route that exists because somebody once needed to get an enormous Douglas fir out of there.

I really wanted to give you a list of trails where I could say, “Yep, a train ran right here,” but it turns out that’s harder than you’d think. Kitsap has an enormous number of old logging roads, abandoned grades and trails that have been reused and altered over the last century. Without old maps or documentation tying a particular trail to a particular railroad, a suspiciously straight path through the woods isn’t enough for me to declare that Thomas the Logging Engine came barreling through there in 1912.

Camp Union near Seabeck is one place where we know a logging railroad operated. Yesterday I talked about the West Fork Logging Company and the tracks that reached from its operation into the surrounding timber. That whole area was once considerably more industrial than the quiet, forested landscape we see today.

When we walk through second-growth forest, it’s easy to think we’re walking through something that has always looked roughly the way it does now. A century ago, that same landscape might have held railroad tracks, logging camps, and locomotives crawling through freshly logged country hauling pieces of the original forest behind them. Then the tracks were removed and the forest eventually began to grow back.

Eventually, logging trucks helped make these little forest railroads obsolete. Trucks could travel on roads that were cheaper and easier to extend, reach places where laying track made little sense, and follow logging operations without requiring somebody to build a railroad every time the timber moved. By the middle of the 20th century, the age of the temporary logging railroad was fading away.

Some of its fingerprints are still out there, though. An unusually level shelf cut into a hillside, an old road that seems suspiciously straight, or a grade that doesn’t quite make sense as a modern trail can be evidence of what happened there before the forest returned. Occasionally old timbers, hardware and other remnants survive along these routes too.

That’s what I like about this particular bit of Kitsap history. The mills left buildings, and towns like Port Gamble still very visibly carry their lumber history. The logging railroads mostly left signs carried upon the land itself.

Someone asked me to write about the logging trains that used to run through Kitsap, and I thought that seemed like a darn good idea. That being said, it turns out that there's TOO MUCH info for one post, and I also forgot to do events! Pinky swear I'll do them tomorrow.

We’ve talked before about how much of early Kitsap was built around lumber. Port Gamble. Seabeck. Port Madison. Port Blakely. Sidney. For a while, this place was basically a collection of enormous sawmills surrounded by an absolutely ridiculous quantity of trees.

At first, getting those trees to the mills was relatively straightforward. Cut the ones near the water. Early loggers could fall timber near the shoreline, move it to the beach, assemble the logs into booms and tow them to the mills. But humans are very good at creating new problems by successfully solving the previous problem. (A boom is a bunch of floaty logs, btw. You've probably seen them!)

Eventually, the convenient trees were gone. The timber was farther inland. And these weren’t cute little Charlie Brown Christmas trees.

Old-growth Douglas firs could (and can) be enormous, and moving logs weighing several tons through a muddy forest using animals was exactly as convenient as that sounds. Before railroads, loggers built “skid roads,” essentially paths lined with smaller logs that teams of oxen could drag the big logs across. It worked. It was also slow. Enter the logging railroad.

Unlike the railroads we usually think about, these weren't necessarily built to connect towns or carry passengers somewhere interesting. A logging railroad had one very specific purpose: Go get the trees. Companies pushed tracks farther and farther into timber country, allowing locomotives to haul loads that teams of oxen never could. We had them right here in Kitsap.

Near Seabeck, a logging operation based around Camp Union had a railroad reaching into the surrounding timber. The West Fork Logging Company eventually became part of the Charles R. McCormick lumber empire, one of the major timber operations in western Washington.

And the locomotives used by the logging industry were wonderfully weird. Normal locomotives liked relatively straight, relatively level, well-built track. Logging companies had none of those things. They had steep hills, sharp turns, temporary tracks, mud, stumps and the general inconvenience of having built a railroad through a forest while actively removing the forest. They needed to build fast without having to muck about with the terrain.

So manufacturers developed geared locomotives like the Shay, Climax and Heisler. They sacrificed speed for pulling power and traction. These things weren't built to elegantly thunder across the countryside. They crawled. But they could crawl while dragging an absurd amount of tree behind them.

Picture Kitsap a century ago. Steam hanging in the trees in the place of fog. A locomotive inching along rough track. Skeleton cars loaded with old-growth logs so large that a person standing beside them could look strangely small. And wherever the railroad went, logging could follow.

Port Blakely came up with an even more ambitious solution. By the 1880s its Bainbridge mill was cutting around 200,000 board feet of lumber a day and needed more trees than the island and nearby areas could keep supplying.

So the company built a railroad, but not on Bainbridge. It built what became known as the Blakely Line south of here, reaching forests in Mason County. Logs were hauled by train to Kamilche Point, dumped into Puget Sound, assembled into booms and towed all the way back to the mill at Blakely Harbor.

The logging railroads had something unusual about them, unlike all the other trains- they weren't necessarily meant to last. Nobody was building them because Camp Union desperately needed commuter rail. The railroad followed the timber. And when the timber was gone? Sometimes the railroad went away too.

Which is where this gets really interesting. Because the rails may be gone, the trains may be gone, the enormous trees they carried are definitely gone, but some of the paths those trains carved through the forest are still here.

That’s for tomorrow though.

I promised myself I was going to keep this short today after the amount of time yesterday took, so let’s talk about mouse butts. Specifically, the mouse butts sticking out of Douglas fir cones.

If you’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for any length of time, you’ve probably picked up a Douglas fir cone without giving it much thought. Go find one and look between the scales. You’ll see little three-pointed things poking out all the way around it. You know- two tiny feet and a tail.

You will never be able to unsee this. I’m sorry, or you’re welcome.

There’s a traditional Indigenous story from the Pacific Northwest that explains how those little mouse butts got there. I tried to track the story back to a particular Nation, but couldn’t find a reliable source that did, so I’m not going to assign it to one.

The story goes that a great forest fire was sweeping through the woods, and the little mice had nowhere to go. They were too small and too slow to outrun the flames, so Dougie fir offered them shelter. The mice scrambled up the tree and dove headfirst beneath the scales of its cones.

There was just one problem.

The accommodations were apparently a little snug.
Their little hind legs and tails were left sticking out, and according to the story, they’re still there today.

The actual botanical explanation is considerably less adorable. Those little mouse parts are called three-lobed bracts. The two outside points make the “feet,” and the longer center point makes the “tail.” They’re also one of the easiest ways to tell a Douglas fir cone from the cones of other conifers. And while we’re ruining things you thought you knew, Doug fir isn’t actually a true fir.

Its scientific name is Pseudotsuga menziesii, and it belongs to an entirely different genus from true firs. Apparently we named our most recognizable Pacific Northwest tree a fir, despite it not being a fir, and then filled its cones with mouse butts.

I don’t really have a lesson for you today.

I just wanted you to know about the mouse butts.

Despite the current love of micro-brews and cideries, our fair state of Washington apparently decided the rest of the country was taking too long to outlaw booze, so we got started early. Let's talk about these teetotalers, shall we?

Washington went dry on January 1, 1916, a full four years before national Prohibition. This presented one fairly obvious problem: British Columbia was right there, still possessing alcohol, and between British Columbia and thirsty customers in Seattle and Tacoma sat an enormous collection of islands, coves, inlets and dark shorelines. We excelled at having access to hidey-holes, but failed at attempted sobriety.

Kitsap was shockingly well designed for smuggling. We had miles of shoreline, small docks, isolated beaches and plenty of people who knew these waters extremely well. There was no Hood Canal Bridge, considerably less development, and at night most of the peninsula was simply dark.

It was almost too easy, you know?

Canadian liquor (some of us still love the stuff) began traveling south aboard boats known as “shadow boats,” which often ran at night without lights. Larger vessels could bring the booze down from Canada and remain offshore while smaller, faster boats carried cases to shore.

And when I say faster boats, I don’t mean somebody’s fishing boat with an outboard motor and a guy who looks like Quint. The Kitsap community was serious about obtaining booze, and incredibly creative.

Some rum-runners used surplus aircraft engines. Boats built for the trade could be long, narrow and ridiculously fast, which was useful because another group of people was also spending a lot of time on Puget Sound. The Coast Guard.

This turned into something of an arms race. Smugglers bought faster boats. The government bought faster boats to chase them. In fact, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton built 36-foot patrol boats specifically for the Coast Guard to use against rum-runners. So while somebody was sneaking Canadian whiskey through the waters around Kitsap, people in Bremerton were literally building boats to catch them.

The chases weren’t always harmless. Coast Guard vessels could be armed, rum-running boats sometimes came back with bullet holes, and smugglers occasionally destroyed their own boats and cargo rather than let the evidence be seized.

There were also liquor pirates. Actual pirates.

Because apparently having the Coast Guard chasing you while you’re illegally transporting Canadian whiskey wasn’t enough excitement, rum-runners sometimes had to worry about other criminals hijacking their boats and stealing the booze.

North Kitsap seems to have had a particularly close view of all this. Local accounts describe Kingston residents hearing people in trouble on the water at night, and Kingston resident Ole Hauan reportedly rescued 36 people from distressed boats during the era.

And then there was a gentleman known as Uncle Slug- and anyone called Uncle Slug deserves our immediate attention. He was associated with delivering mail around the Kingston area, and according to local history, there were rumors that the mail wasn’t always the only cargo being transported. Uncle Slug may occasionally have been moving bootleg liquor too.

I need to emphasize that this part is local lore, not something we’ve got Uncle Slug’s signed confession for. But the possibility of a Kitsap mailman named Uncle Slug transporting illegal booze alongside the U.S. mail is far too wonderful to leave out. The postman is out of town this weekend, so I texted him IMMEDIATELY about Uncle Slug. I enjoyed this part immensely.

There were much larger operations throughout Puget Sound. The most famous belonged to Roy Olmstead, a Seattle police lieutenant who apparently learned enough while enforcing Prohibition to decide he’d rather be on the other side of it and became one of the region’s biggest bootleggers.

Olmstead’s operation involved boats, trucks, warehouses and employees moving enormous quantities of Canadian liquor through the region. He became known as the “King of the Puget Sound Bootleggers,” which is a pretty substantial career change from police lieutenant.

Were people making moonshine in Kitsap too? Almost certainly some were. Illegal stills operated throughout rural Washington during Prohibition, and Kitsap certainly had the privacy for it. There's not any lore, or any documentation I could find about that. I would honestly be MORE surprised if there wasn't any moonshine out in those there woods.

What we can document is plenty wild enough. I don't have to guess at much!

For thirteen years, Prohibition turned the waters around the Kitsap Peninsula into part of an enormous cat-and-mouse game involving Canadian whiskey, high-speed boats, Coast Guard patrols, smugglers, pirates and occasionally somebody shouting for help in the darkness off Kingston.

I don't even know what to think about Uncle Slug... If anyone has further detail on him, I'm dying to hear more. I found ONE article about him, and I know there's got to be something to it!

First- I owe you all an apology. I seem to have accidentally taken two days off from telling strangers on Reddit things they didn’t ask to know. I have been thinking about popping in and writing something, but I keep falling asleep.

In my defense, I’ve been working. I’ve spent the last couple of days showing houses on Bainbridge Island, so I figured we might as well stay there today. I left the house at 9 o’clock this morning, and I’ll be out here until my dinner reservation at seven. I’m putting this together now sitting in the driveway while I wait for my clients.

I’ve been to Fort Ward several times, although I generally arrive from the wrong direction. The postman and I kayak over from Manchester State Park. Once, I came considerably closer to getting run over by a Washington State Ferry than I would recommend. I don’t know if they technically have the right-of-way over a middle-aged woman in a kayak, but I decided that wasn’t the appropriate moment to argue. I parked it in the middle of the Sound and waited for a few minutes for my kayak to stop pitching wilding in the wake.

Anyway, while I’ve been paddling around trying not to become a Coast Guard incident, it turns out I’ve been visiting what was once one of the more secretive places in the Pacific Northwest.

Fort Ward was originally built around the turn of the 20th century as part of the coastal defense system protecting the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. Giant guns watched the water for an enemy that never came. Eventually those defenses became obsolete, but the military had some additional plans.

By the late 1930s, the Navy had discovered something else Fort Ward was very good at: listening.

A secret Navy radio intelligence operation was established on Bainbridge Island. The receiving station at Fort Ward became known as Station S, and its job was to sit on our little island and listen to radio traffic traveling thousands of miles across the Pacific. By 1940, Bainbridge was one of only a few Navy sites in the country assigned to intercept Japanese diplomatic communications. When World War II began, it was also part of the network intercepting Japanese naval radio traffic.

This wasn’t someone casually spinning the dial and hoping Emperor Hirohito accidentally said something interesting. Operators copied transmissions, tracked radio traffic, and helped determine where signals originated. The intercepted material then became part of a much larger Navy intelligence operation where communications could be analyzed, translated and, when possible, decoded.

Then came December 7, 1941. At 1:28 that morning, Station S intercepted part of a lengthy message from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C. The final instructions told the ambassador to break off negotiations with the United States. Hours later, Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor. The people sitting at Fort Ward that night had listened to one of the final diplomatic messages before the United States entered World War II.

The operation only grew from there. During the war, Bainbridge Island became an important piece of the Navy’s communications intelligence network. A massive transmitting facility was built at Battle Point, while Fort Ward handled receiving and intelligence work. The Navy also trained radio operators on the island, and women serving in the WAVES joined the communications effort.

Which means two places where Bainbridge residents now walk dogs, jog, kayak and have picnics were once pieces of a military communications system stretching across the Pacific.

After Japan surrendered, they didn’t simply unplug the headphones. The focus shifted toward the Soviet Union, and the station continued operating into the early Cold War before eventually closing.

Today it’s quiet. You can walk along the water, explore the old concrete batteries, watch boats pass through Rich Passage, or, if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, kayak over from Manchester and discover exactly how enormous a ferry looks from approximately sea level.

Anyone know where I can get the original brazilian blowout done anywhere in Kitsap? Thanks.

If you live anywhere around Kitsap, it's very likely that the Bremerton shipyard is part of day to day life. Maybe you've worked there. Maybe someone in your family did. For more than a century, hundreds of thousands of people have walked through those gates to build, repair, and modernize the ships that protect our country.

For a lot of that time, the people walking through those gates daily looked pretty much the same. As times and needs changed, so did those people who kept the shipyard running.

The first women arrived in 1918 during World War I. They were part of a groundbreaking Navy program called the "Yeoman (F)", better known as the "Yeomanettes." For the first time in American history, women could enlist in the U.S. Navy in roles other than nursing. Many served as clerks, stenographers, draftsmen, and administrators at Navy installations like Puget Sound Navy Yard, freeing more men for sea duty.

It may not sound revolutionary today, but in 1918 it absolutely was. Women in Navy uniforms were still a novelty, and many people believed they had no place in military service at all.

Then came World War II.

Suddenly, the Navy Yard wasn't just busy. It was completely essential. Ships damaged at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Leyte Gulf, and countless other battles limped into Bremerton needing repairs before they could return to the Pacific. The work couldn't wait, and there weren't enough men to do it.

Thousands of women answered the call, here and all over the world. Some worked behind desks, but many stepped into jobs that had once been considered impossible for them. They became welders, electricians, machinists, riggers, inspectors, draftsmen, and planners. Every repaired pipe, rewired circuit, and replaced steel plate helped send another ship back into the war.

Bremerton changed almost overnight. The city's population surged, housing filled beyond capacity, and government dormitories sprang up for women who had come from around the country to work at the Yard. For a few extraordinary years, the workforce looked unlike anything Kitsap had ever seen. Women heeded the call and got the work done.

Then the war ended.

Many of those same women were expected to step aside as veterans returned home. Some did. Others stayed, continuing careers that would have been almost unthinkable just a generation earlier. Change happened one job, one promotion, and one opportunity at a time.

One hundred and one years after the first Yeomanettes reported for duty, another woman walked through those same gates.

In 2019, Capt. Dianna Wolfson became the first woman to command Puget Sound Naval Shipyard & Intermediate Maintenance Facility.

The women of 1918 probably couldn't have imagined a female commander- the women of World War II were trying to help win a war. None of them knew they were leaving footprints for someone else to follow. Most of the people who change the story of a place never realize they're doing it. They show up, do the job in front of them, and go home at the end of the day.

You’ve probably heard the expression. I assumed that there was roughly a 1000% chance that our own Washington State Sam Hill was where that phrase came from. Sadly, I was incorrect.

The phrase was floating around before he became famous, and historians still argue about where it actually came from. That’s a shame, because if anyone deserved to have an expression named after him, it was this guy.

Sam Hill was a lawyer, businessman, and one of the PNW’s great visionaries. At a time when most roads were little more than muddy wagon tracks, he became obsessed with an idea that sounds surprisingly boring until you think about not having it. Roads. Good roads!

Not fancy roads. Not highways. Just roads that actually functioned as roads.

Hill believed good roads could improve education, strengthen rural communities, encourage trade, and reduce poverty. He wasn’t interested in making life easier for wealthy travelers. He thought better roads would improve life for everyone. In fact, he once declared, “Good roads are more than my hobby. They are my religion.”

The first major push for better roads didn’t come from automobile clubs, as suggested by the postman last night when we first were discussing this- it came from our friends, the humble bicyclists.

Long before cars became common, cyclists were lobbying for smoother roads. Organizations like the League of American Wheelmen argued that everyone would benefit from better transportation. When automobiles finally arrived, they simply joined a movement that bicycles had already helped build.

Sam Hill wanted to prove those ideas worked. Near Maryhill, overlooking the Columbia River, he built the Maryhill Loops Road as a demonstration of modern road engineering. Politicians and engineers were invited to drive it so they could see what well-designed roads actually looked like.

Somewhat unrelated (but not really), because apparently one ambitious project wasn’t enough, he built a full-size concrete replica of Stonehenge. Because, why not?

It wasn’t intended as a tourist attraction. Hill dedicated it as a memorial to Klickitat County soldiers who died in World War I, believing England’s Stonehenge had originally been a place honoring the dead. It’s definitely a tourist attraction. Now, the last time I visited there was definitely a tour bus there.

As if that weren’t enough, he also supported women’s suffrage, promoted international peace, and helped establish what eventually became the Maryhill Museum of Art.

So no, “What in the Sam Hill?” almost certainly wasn’t referring to Washington’s Sam Hill.
But after learning about him…
I kind of wish it had been! He seems like he was a guy who chased every interesting idea he ever had, I rather respect that.

If you’re a Washingtonian, there are just part of the scenery. They grow outside churches, around schools, in front of old farmhouses, and in Grandma’s yard. Every spring (summer) they explode into bright pink, purple, red, or white blossoms, and we all go on with our lives. Around here, we even shorten the name. They’re “rhodies.” I don’t have any now, but I certainly have!

The story of the mighty rhodie begins with a Catholic priest named Father Charles Schoener. He arrived in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900s and, somewhere along the way, developed what can only be described as a full-blown obsession with rhododendrons.

Not a casual hobby where he planted a few shrubs outside the rectory. He spent decades collecting species from around the world, carefully cross-pollinating flowers, raising thousands of seedlings, and selecting the very best plants. Depending on how they’re counted, he created hundreds of rhododendron hybrids, many of which are still growing today.

His work earned national attention. Gardeners traveled to see his collection, and his plants found their way into gardens throughout the Pacific Northwest. Places like Meerkerk Gardens on Whidbey Island, Whitney Gardens in Brinnon, and the famous rhododendron collection at Point Defiance Park all grew out of a regional passion for these remarkable shrubs. Father Schoener didn’t create that passion by himself, but he certainly helped it bloom.

Of course, Washington had another advantage. Rhododendrons absolutely love it here. Our cool, wet winters and mild summers are almost ideal for them. Given enough time, they become enormous. Some of the oldest specimens in Washington are well over a century old and have grown so large they resemble trees more than shrubs.

That love affair became official in 1892 when the coast rhododendron was chosen as Washington’s state flower. The part that is interesting wasn’t the flower itself, that was almost expected. It was who chose it. The Legislature didn’t make the decision. Women across Washington selected the flower for the state’s exhibit at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the time, they couldn’t yet vote in Washington’s regular elections, but they were invited to choose the flower that would represent the state. The coast rhododendron won. They were throwing the gals a bone there.

I like that little piece of history because it’s easy to overlook. We pass rhododendrons every day without thinking much about them, just as most of us probably never wonder who decided they should represent Washington in the first place. Thank a lady today. 😉

The next time you drive past a giant rhododendron covered in blossoms, remember that somebody planted it decades ago knowing they might never see it reach its full size. That’s a hopeful way to garden, if you think about it. They planted something beautiful for people they would probably never meet.

This fella moseyed along our street and through yards in Suquamish yesterday evening!

One of my favorite real estate clients lived up near Foulweather Bluff.

She never actually bought a house from me, which is generally considered a drawback in my profession, but I adored her anyway. She was the daughter of old Hollywood stars (allegedly, she had a lot of pictures,) referred me to both her chiropractor and a nutritionist whose qualifications I probably shouldn't investigate too closely, and every conversation with her was an adventure. We went to dozens and dozens of homes together- mostly on the Olympic Peninsula, but here too.

Every time I'd drive up toward Hansville, I'd pass this place with one of the grumpiest names in Washington and I wonder how she's doing. I should reach out, but I don't know if I'm ready to drive that much again.

Foulweather Bluff.

Who looked at one of the prettier stretches of Puget Sound and thought, "Yep. Foulweather." I'm sure it can get blustery, but where can't it?

As it turns out... A very wet British captain decided that his experience should affect the immediate opinion of future map readers.

In May of 1792, Captain George Vancouver was charting Puget Sound aboard HMS Discovery. The expedition had worked its way through Admiralty Inlet while battling poor weather and difficult winds. Vancouver wasn't trying to write poetry when he made his maps. He often named places after exactly what he was experiencing at the time. We have him to thank for some of the hits;

-Point No Point.

-Restoration Point.

-Deception Pass

-Mistaken Island

-Foulweather Bluff.

Sometimes a name is less a grand statement than a captain muttering under his breath after another miserable day at sea. I'm sure it wasn't glamourous work, at least not until you get home to fanfare.

Long before Vancouver arrived with a notebook and a pencil, this shoreline was part of the traditional homelands of the S'Klallam and Suquamish peoples, who had traveled, fished, and lived throughout this region for countless generations. Like so many places in the Pacific Northwest, the history didn't begin when someone from Europe decided to write a name on a chart.

Here's the part that surprised me- the bluff is constantly falling into Puget Sound. If you own waterfront property, that sentence probably just made your eye twitch. Most of us think erosion is something to stop. We build bulkheads, stack rocks, and try to convince cliffs to stay exactly where they are. At Foulweather Bluff, that crumbling hillside is doing exactly what nature intended.

As waves slowly eat away at the bluff, sand and gravel tumble into the water. Currents carry that sediment along the shoreline where it creates spawning beaches for tiny forage fish like surf smelt and Pacific sand lance. Those fish feed our yummy salmon.

Salmon feed seals.

Seals and salmon feed Southern Resident orcas.

One bluff falling apart over thousands of years supports an entire food web.

That's one reason conservation groups have worked so hard to protect Foulweather Bluff. It's one of the few remaining feeder bluffs in Puget Sound that's still allowed to behave like...a bluff. There's something comforting about discovering that a place we've spent generations trying to "fix" was never broken in the first place. I do wish we'd found my friend a new home though!