Finding New Hoodoos On The Tandy Hills While Hearing From Betty Jo Bouvier About The Oso Landslide

I think other than on a Prairie Fest day today I saw more people on the Tandy Hills than I ever recollect seeing before.

Among those people was a pair of twin young ladies lamenting that they wish they'd arrived earlier, due to thinking it was too HOT at that point in time. I told them I was not HOT and suggested that they might be cooler if they copied me and also went topless. They said they would consider my suggestion.

Barely 70 degrees is not too HOT at this location on the planet.

A pair of guys said they were feeling sort of lost. I told them not to worry, they'd find their way back to civilization.

And then there was the mom and dad and young daughter combo I came upon in the main Tandy Hills Hoodoo zone.

The mom and daughter of the trio was having fun constructing the new Hoodoo you see above in the foreground.

That is the latest iteration of the original Tandy Hills Hoodoo you see behind the new Hoodoo, at the end of the trail at the crest of the hill.

Continuing on, on one of the trails which heads uphill from the Tandy Bamboo Tepee Grove, another new Hoodoo has sprouted. That would be the other new Hoodoo below.

I wonder how many Hoodoos now stand on the Tandy Hills? I suspect I have not discovered all of them.

Changing the subject from a potential rock slide to an actual rock slide.

I heard from Washingtonian Betty Jo Bouvier this morning. Betty Jo is one of the Wild Women Of Woolley, which indicates Betty Jo lives in the Skagit Valley in the town of Sedro Woolley. Sedro Woolley is close to the town I grew up in, Burlington, and close to the town I lived in before I moved to Texas, Mount Vernon, which also makes Sedro Woolley close to the Oso Landslide disaster.

Betty Jo mentioned the Oso Landslide disaster in a way both personal and interesting. I will copy, in part, what Betty Jo had to say.......

"I am sure you read about the huge slide in Oso. That is beyond horrible. Did you happen to read about the little girl spear heading a cause to support the families and workers??? She is my former neighbor, a 10 year old girl. The whole family is behind the cause. They have 5 kids and home school. They were all down at Walmart yesterday collecting donations and $$. I brought them all hot cocoa. When I went to buy it at Starbucks, the lady started to ring it up (over $30) and then she said,..."it is on me."  How nice!!! (that is after she knew I was taking it to the people at Walmart)..."

Betty Jo Bouvier, one of the kindest, sweetest, funniest people I have ever known.

Talking About The Oso Landslide I Learned My Mom's Washington Memory Is Better Than Mine

A couple days ago my mom called, apparently erroneously thinking I'd not called in a sufficiently recent time frame.

During the course of talking to my mom the subject of the Oso Landslide in our old home state of Washington came up.

At the point in time where my mom and I were talking about the Oso Landslide it was only a couple days old and at the point in time the fatality numbers had not reached the dozen point, nor had the projected number of fatalities reached the current projected number of well over 100.

When I first learned of the Oso Landslide, the day it happened, I thought the name sounded familiar and thought it was one of the small towns one drives through on Highway 2 when one heads over Stevens Pass to Eastern Washington. I was erroneous.

Mom told me she thought Oso was on the Stillaguamish River, upriver from Arlington. I said to mom, isn't the Stillaguamish the river that runs beside Highway 2 on the west side of Stevens Pass? Mom told me she thought that was the Skykomish River. That then had me confused as to whence the Snoqualmie River flows from and to.

I lamented with mom that after 15 years of being away from Washington,  I am losing memory of places and routes and, apparently, rivers. Mom told me it gets worse when one gets older.

After I got off the phone I opened up my Microsoft Map program to quickly learn my mom was right regarding river locations. So, even though mom claims the memory woes get worse as one gets older, mom remembered better than me the river locations in question.

I was more than a little surprised to see where Oso is actually located, as in how close it is to my old abode in Mount Vernon, as in only about 22 miles distant, as you can see via the screen cap above, with the thick black line drawing the route from my house to Oso.

I think the last time I took this particular route was with nephew Joey. We had gone mountain biking at a location the name of which I can not remember, then drove east to Lake Cavanaugh, then over the logging road mountain pass that eventually drops down into the Stillaguamish River Valley and the little town of Oso.

This Oso Landslide is by far the worst natural disaster to hit the Pacific Northwest since Mount St. Helens erupted over 30 years ago. If the worst case scenario turns out to be accurate, the Oso Landslide will result in more fatalities, by far, than the Mount St. Helens eruption.

I need to use Google Earth to do some virtual driving in Washington. I am totally drawing a blank as to the route I would have taken, multiple times, to Granite Falls and the Mountain Loop Highway, with that loop being looped a lot of times, hiking, mountain biking and cross country skiing. And yet I can not remember the route from I-5 to Granite Falls. If I remember right the Mountain Loop Highway loop goes from Darrington back to Arlington via Highway 530, passing Oso a short distance from Darrington.

I need to spend a month in Washington doing some road tripping.....