The Land Wizard of the Columbia River Gorge
Sensors, soil, and sorcery. Skamania County, Washington.
Links
Who the organizations on the events page actually are, and what you can get from them. Where an outfit keeps a working calendar, it is linked separately.
Land
- Underwood Conservation District [news]
- Soil tests, native plant sales, and a tool library where you can rent a no-till drill for the price of a nice dinner. Both rounds of our natives came from their plant sale. The drill runs $165 for two days and the manure spreader $65; the library is at Mt. View Grange in White Salmon, open Wednesdays and Fridays, noon to two. Soil testing is free for Skamania and western Klickitat landowners. Plant sale ordering opens in January with pickup in March, and the fall sale has been held at Stabler, which is our side of the county line.
- Mt. Adams Prescribed Burn Association [events]
- Membership is free — you sign an agreement and get use of their equipment cache. They will do a site visit and review your burn plan for nothing, and recruit volunteers to help staff the burn itself.
- Mt. Adams Resource Stewards [updates]
- Consulting forestry for private landowners, a stewardship crew that does thinning and fuels reduction, and free home wildfire risk assessments. They run Columbia Gorge TREX, a two-week prescribed fire training out at Ekone Ranch.
- Friends of the Columbia Gorge [events]
- Free guided hikes every month, volunteer work parties at preserves on both sides of the river, and a searchable database of a hundred-some Gorge trails.
- East Cascades Oak Partnership [events]
- Free staged guidance for managing your own oak stand, including a tool for scoring the condition of oak habitat. Quarterly meetings are open to anyone.
- Columbia Land Trust [events]
- Volunteer restoration days around the region, and the East Cascades program that backs the oak work up here.
- Washington Native Plant Society
- The Suksdorfia chapter covers the Gorge, Skamania included. Six to eight guided wildflower hikes a year between March and September, plus chapter plant sales.
Community
- Skamania County Chamber of Commerce [calendar]
- The densest listing of what is actually happening in this county, by a wide margin. Membership, a directory, and a job board that is usually empty.
- Skamania County
- The fairgrounds and the Home Valley Pavilion are rentable, and there are rec programs at the Hegewald Center. The county's own events page lists the annual festivals without printing a single date on them; the fair keeps its own site.
- Stevenson festivals
- The annual lineup with actual dates — Spring Fest, Blues & Brews, Bluegrass, the fair, the Mushroom Festival, Christmas in the Gorge. The city also posts a meeting calendar if you want to know what the council is up to.
- Rockford Grange #501
- A community hall in Hood River run by people who have lived, worked, and started businesses there. Median age around 65. Members get together to eat, craft, and tell stories. They rent the hall out for music and birthday parties, and a lot of quinceañeras go through there. It is a community hub trying to stay afloat of its bills. Meetings are the first Wednesday of the month at 5:30.
- Gorge Grown Food Network [events]
- Farmers markets in Hood River and White Salmon, SNAP matching, and a directory of free and low-cost food that lists the Stevenson pantry and the Skamania gleaners.
- Gorge Current [calendar]
- The best general calendar for the region, and one of the few that carries Skamania listings. Anyone can submit an event to it for free.
- Columbia Gorge News [happenings]
- The local paper. The Happenings column is free to read and free to list in.
Clubs
- Radio Amateurs of the Gorge, W7RAG [events]
- Skamania County is inside their footprint. Monthly meeting is the second Saturday at the Hood River fire station, with free license exams the same morning. The Skamania County ARES net runs Tuesdays at 1900 on 440.325. Dues are $20 a year, free under 18.
- Gorge Technology Alliance [events]
- Quarterly events. It is the local tech meetup, and they run a job board. I have been to one and met fantastic people. Associate membership is $85 a year, free for students and teachers.
- Oregon Mycological Society [calendar]
- The forays are members-only and announced by email, so the public calendar will never show you one. Membership is $30. The fall mushroom show in Portland is open to anybody.
- Goldendale Observatory [parks calendar]
- Solar and evening programs are cancelled for the time being over staffing. The grounds stay open dawn to dusk. When the programs do run, reservations are required and they turn away anyone who shows up without one.
- Barony of Three Mountains, SCA [calendar]
- Portland-based, and Skamania is not in their territory, but they are the nearest group. Armored and rapier practice twice a week, archery, and a newcomers' night if you want to look before committing to anything.
Credits
textfiles.com — the construction GIFs on these pages came out of its under-construction archive.
Buttons
An 88×31 button is customary. Here is ours; hotlink it or save it, this is not a website that lectures you about bandwidth.
