Friday, December 25, 2015

Christmas Eve Concrete Ghost Town Visit With Spencer Jack

What you see here showed up in my email Christmas Eve, photo documentation by Spencer Jack's dad of their Christmas Eve visit to the Skagit Valley town of Concrete.

The following explanatory text was included with the photo and video documentation...

Spencer Jack and I drove up to Concrete today. 

I think we were the only two people in town literally.  Note that Main Street was empty and the only car in town was ours.

CONCRETE must be a really HARD place to live, we figured.

We were expecting to find more snow than we did.
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Concrete is the last town-sized town one comes to when heading east on Highway 20 in the Skagit Valley on the way over the currently closed for the season North Cascades Pass. There are a couple small settlements as one continues east, with gas stations, convenience stores and a restaurant or two. Newhalem and Marblemount come to mind.

Concrete is sort of a tourist town. I don't know why it was a ghost town on Christmas Eve, looking like downtown Fort Worth on the day after Thanksgiving.

Concrete was the setting of one of Leonardo DiCaprio's early movies, This Boy's Life. I remember when that movie was being filmed, but I did not go upriver to gawk. During the filming of the Michael Douglas / Kathleen Turner movie, War of the Roses, I did drive over to Coupeville on Whidbey Island to join the throngs gawking at Danny Devito directing a fight scene between the Roses which did not make it into the movie.

Below is video of Spencer Jack tossing a big snowball into the Baker River. I wonder if my Favorite Nephew Jason knows that if you head up the primitive road that heads north from the Baker River Bridge you will soon come to Lower Baker Dam, it being a very old, sort of scary looking dam, built years before the more frequently seen Upper Baker Dam, which does not look scary. Unlike Upper Baker Dam, I don't remember being able to drive across Lower Baker Dam.

Anyway, Spencer Jack making a big splash....

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