Cooling Off at the Pilchuck River

     Saturday was blistering hot by Western Washington standards. We broke into the 90s.  I know that will not get us any sympathy from most people throughout the nation who have had to deal with a brutally hot summer and drought. However, residents of the Puget Sound region are not used to anything resembling normal summer temperatures.  It doesn't take much summer heat for us to be suffering.  A good solution to summer heat in the little town of Snohomish is to head for Pilchuck Park and cool off in the river.

Anthony and Sofia Romero enjoying the river

Linda enjoying quality time with her Kindle

    Linda took our visiting grandkids down to the Pilchuck River. After I had cleared a few things off my to do list I was able to join them for a bit.  I spent some time wading in the river looking for agates. Just wading in the cold water was sufficient to cool me off.  I guess the mere proximity to cold water was good enough for Linda.

Honeybee gathering nectar from Japanese Knotweed

     While wading in the river I couldn't help but notice that the Japanese Knotweed was breaking into bloom.  That is about two weeks earlier than normal. The knotweed blooms were attracting attention from a lot of honeybees, unfortunately, none of them mine.  My bees don't gather much knotweed honey because we live a good mile from the river and more than three miles from Pilchuck Park.  My friend Quentin's hives gather a lot of knotweed honey as their property backs up to the Pilchuck.  Japanese Knotweed is an ornamental that escaped to the wild and is now quite a nuisance.  Like a number of invasive species it happens to be a pretty good honey plant.  Knotweed honey is quite dark and strongly flavored, but lacks the nasty aftertastes of many dark honeys.  It actually tastes very close to sorghum molasses.