Getting the flavor of … Gathering dinner at Hood Canal, and more
Washington’s Hood Canal, the “glitteringly beautiful” 60-mile fjord near Seattle, is “bristling with oysters, clams, mussels, and crabs.”
Gathering dinner at Hood Canal
Along Washington’s Hood Canal, you have to work for your dinner, but “therein lies the fun,” said Bonnie Tsui in The New York Times. The “glitteringly beautiful” 60-mile fjord, about an hour and a half outside Seattle, forms one of the western branches of the Puget Sound. Here the “icy runoff” from the “snow-clad” Olympic Mountains flows into the “brackish waters” of the canal, and its shores are “bristling with oysters, clams, mussels, and crabs.” Every summer, locals throw crab pots off the dock to haul in red rock or Dungeness crabs, and go shrimping for the “sweet and sizable” local variety. Visitors can join in: Hood Canal is the “kind of old-fashioned place where shellfish permits can be easily procured at a gas station or general store,” so have a go at picking and shucking. First try your hand at digging up clams along the “muddy and shell-strewn” shore and then taste “the luxuriantly round, salty flavor of the sea.”
Contact: Explorehoodcanal.com
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Joshua Tree’s hidden homestead
A “No Swimming” sign isn’t something you’d expect to see in the heart of California’s “bone-dry desert,” said Robert Earle Howells in National Geographic Adventure. But in Joshua Tree National Park, you’ll find a dam, “hand-built in a wash by Bill Keys, the Edison of desert survival.” From 1917 to 1969, Keys settled and raised a family of five in this remote location, and this dam “supplied the lifeblood” for his “improbably located” but surprisingly prosperous ranch. The remnants of the “against-all-the-odds homestead”—which include a store, schoolhouse, and cemetery—can be found nearby and toured throughout most of the year. This historic little oasis, a one-mile hike from the Hidden Valley campground, “truly is a wonder.” Surrounded by five acres of orchards and gardens—and mining machinery left from the now defunct Desert Queen Mine—you can “play survivalist” or simply bask in the sun and catch sight of desert bighorn sheep.
Contact: www.Nps.gov/jotr
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