Featured Articles & Essays

When I began to call Spokane home, I wondered what the river's problems were, what challenges it faced, and what we were trying to do better. This spring, I followed my curiousity.

It had been five years since I’d hiked to the lake. It was a modest alpine lake in the northeast Cascades, tucked in the Lake Chelan-Sawtooth Wilderness, an area of public land that had accrued meaning for my family through years of trips and storytelling.

The West I know has a speckled hawk on a telephone pole every quarter mile. It’s spotted with dust devils after plowing, flushed red when the cheatgrass is up, smeared with the haze of wildfire smoke—dependably now—every mid-summer.

The way I interact with nature has changed a lot since becoming a parent. I became a mom right around the time the pandemic broke out, and my son was four months old when we were faced with lockdown.

When the harvest rotation is slow—when a truck full of wheat has left the field, or the combine has dipped into a draw—I take a moment to walk the sunbaked creek beds lining our fields. It’s no small undertaking in the dry, ninety-degree heat of the place.

It might just look like a fuzzy, red plant. But Pacific Dulse seaweed is a call to think about the food you consume, just like you think about the coffee you drink.