Tea off the Beaten Path

While I've blogged about tea houses before here at Pacific Northwest Seasons,  guest blogger Brenna Ciummo, who wrote today's post, has introduced me to some great new places to experience wonderful tea in and outside Seattle. Read on!

If you’re a tea drinker in the Puget Sound region, you've likely visited many of the popular tea houses in the area. If you haven’t, you definitely should. Even though Seattle is still primarily a coffee-based city, there are quite a few tea shops that are worth checking out. Whether you’re searching for a new place to stock up on interesting teas or want to find a quiet, offbeat tea house to add to your repertoire, here are a few hidden gems to add to your list.

Seattle Best Tea
Often described as one of the best Asian tea houses on the West Coast, Seattle Best Tea is the shop for you if love Chinese teas. Seattle Best Tea isn’t a café where you can purchase a pot of tea and snack. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a great sense of community inside this International District store. There is always a seat at the tea tasting table for anyone who walks in, and Lydia (one of the shop’s owners), will work with you to find a tea that suits your tastes, while teaching you about the different types of tea along the way.  There is no pressure to purchase a tea, although with the large selection it's hard not to walk out of the store with at least a couple of teas. 

Village Eatery and Tea Company
If you head northeast from Seattle, you'll find Village Eatery and Tea Company tucked into the back corner of Country Village (a quaint, outdoor shopping center) in Bothell. They serve a tasty traditional high tea, with soup or salad, puff pastries, scones, tea sandwiches, and plenty of baked desserts. If you aren’t quite that hungry, there are also other English-style treats available, such as Cornish pasties and the Ploughman’s lunch. The shop has a wide selection of loose leaf tea, so if you’ve discovered a tea you enjoy, purchase it and brew at home. 

Experience Tea
Experience Tea is not just a retail tea shop in Issaquah, but a place to learn more about the world of tea. You can purchase a variety of unique teas and teaware, and shop owner Roberta teaches everything from a general discovery class to classes that cover specific types of tea. There is even a custom tea blending class where you can create your own signature blend to take home. All of these classes include plenty of tea tasting! 

Baicha Tea Room
I hadn’t heard of this tearoom until recently, when I was talking about local tea houses  with a fellow tea lover who mentioned Biacha. Baicha Tea Room in Edmonds (20 minutes north of Seattle) serves a variety of the tea sandwiches I've grown to adore but that can be surprisingly hard to come by. The tea room also serves up delicious brunch and lunch fare and of course a great selection of teas. You’ll find traditional white, oolong, green, and black tea as well as a number of brews  unique to Baicha, such as wellness blends, flavored and scented teas, and even tea smoothies.

The Japanese Tea Garden
 
Maybe you've been to the Arboretum in Seattle's Madison Valley, but did you know that you can attend a Japanese tea ceremony there? From April through October, tea ceremonies are held in the Japanese Garden Shoseian Tea House on the third Saturday each month. The Chado demonstrations are free and no reservations are required, but if you would like to partake in a bowl of tea and sweets from the demonstration, you can purchase a $5 ticket at the garden booth. 

Savrika Tea
There are numerous modern yet cozy tea houses popping up to the north and to the east of Seattle besides Baicha. On my list to try is SavrikaTea in Kirkland, which opened in 2012 and claims to be “a modern tea room serving over 200 teas.” If the pictures are true, the shop looks like a great place to relax. While visiting these tea rooms may take a little extra effort if you live in Seattle proper, they are a great excuse to get out and explore the rest of the area. Plus, the tea and food at these shops are worth the trip!

Brenna Ciummo is a writer for Seattle Coffee Gear and enjoys sharing her knowledge of all things coffee and tea. An avid tea drinker, she is always searching for new tearooms to explore.

 

 

Crystal Mountain Memories: RIP Chair 6/High Campbell Lift

If you're a Northwest skier, you probably already know that a piece of Pacific Northwest skiing history succumbed a few days ago to a massive avalanche at Crystal Mountain.  Beloved Chair 6, that sometimes thrilling and scary old slow double chairlift to the top of High Campbell, is no more.

Although it was apparently scheduled to be replaced this summer anyway with an updated  new lift, part of the charm of Chair 6 was that it was a remnant of days gone by.  How many times do you get to ski up to a lift line and yell "Single!"  anymore? Most ski areas these days have managed lines with roped lanes for singles.  

The lift ride alone was enough to scare some skiers from the steep, black diamond terrain it served. The sign saying Experts Only wasn't joking.

But the terrain, wow!  Not only Powder Bowl on the north side (remember the Enduro?), but Cambell Basin/High Campbell, and with some mellow climbing and traversing, the South Back (backcountry) and access to Avalanche Basin, the King, and Silver Basin.  Local skiers would vouch that terrain served by Chair 6 is the premier lift-served expert skiing experience in the Pacific Northwest.

The area that slid was on this north and east facing slope.

According to Crystal Pro Patroller Kim Kircher, who wrote the following on the Crystal Mountain Ski Patrol blog in 2009:

...Chair 6.  It certainly is an icon here at Crystal.  Anyway, nowadays High Campbell Chair is most likely the reason many people ski and ride at Crystal.  The chair has served us well and indeed will be replaced soon .

Prescient words. (Click on Kim's name above to go to her blog post about setting off the avalanche and photos of the aftermath.) So next season there will be a new lift, which will be roomier at the top so you don't have to check with your lift partner and scramble left or right quickly when you unload. 

Viewing the aftermath, almost two weeks later.

But I'll miss Chair 6, its ramshackle little lift shack at the base, and the old-fashioned single lift line. And some memorable rides up with friends, new friends, and sometimes strange strangers.

Looking down to Chair 6 (you can see the lift line down there) and the path of the slide, slightly to skier's right.

Years ago one of the lifties at the base of Chair 6 used to blast a lot of Jimi Hendrix (another Pacific Northwest icon who was from Seattle). Whenever I hear his rendition of Dylan's All Along the Watchtower, I always think of loading Chair 6 and sunny, fantastic, challenging, thrilling days skiing High Campbell and beyond.


What are some of your Chair 6/High Campbell memories? I'd love to hear in the Comments below.

Thanks for visiting Pacific Northwest Seasons!

Ready to Spring in the Northwest

Too much work and not enough play has kept us away from posting here on Pacific Northwest Seasons the last few weeks. More soon! 

In the meantime, spring is really springing up around the region. I couldn't resist snapping this sweet patch of crocuses in the planting strip just outside the Java Bean coffee shop in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood.

What signs of spring have you seen in your neighborhood or wherever you've been outdoors the last few weeks?

Check back soon for a run-down on spring skiing here in the Northwest and learn about some great new teahouses around the Seattle area.

Happy trails.

The 'Tween Season: Late February in the Pacific Northwest

If you live in the Pacific Northwest (or almost anywhere in North America), aren't you ready for winter to loosen its grip?

Living in a temperate climate here west of the Cascades,  we Mossbacks are spared extreme cold like the frigid polar vortex, but the wet, gray, dark days seem to stretch on too long.  Many of us jet away to warmer, tropical or desert getaways.

By mid-February, however, the days are getting noticeably longer. Hallelujah! So we've got this 'tween thing going on....it's dumping snow in the mountains and throwing major avalanches, while early spring flowers  are in bloom just an hour away in the lowlands. It's wildly diverse.

Yesterday I headed to the mountains for some skiing in the epic snowfall. Over 2 feet of fresh pow! I hoped to be doing this:

But avalanches and downed trees converged to make the day go more like this:

See that line of traffic?  We were turned around less than a mile from the Crystal Mountain turnoff. Mountain closed because a tree knocked out power to the whole mountain. We spent 5 hours driving up and back, covered 160 miles, including a 20-minute wait to use the loo at Wapiti Woolies in Greenwater, and no skiing.

Sigh.

So instead of moping, when I got home I took advantage of a break between storms and headed to nearby Carkeek Park. Nothing beats the frustration of hours in a car than a walk in the woods to witness early spring unfurling.

Right now the sweet, delicate snowdrops are in bloom just off the trail next to the historic Piper Orchard in the park. While these plants aren't native, these bulbs have spread in happy clumps throughout a patch of forest over the past century.

I hiked for over an hour through the lowland forest.  I heard lots of birds singing, felt a slight remnant breeze from the overnight storm, and generally enjoyed spying signs of spring, like the first shoots of this skunk cabbage beside the trail.

In a few months it will be several feet high and look like something that belongs in the tropics.

I once again appreciated our lush temperate rainforest abundance of moss and ferns, even though I couldn't enjoy the several feet of fresh snow just an hour away in the mountains. At least on this day.

While spring is charging at us, I'll head again to the snowy alpine mountains with 
my skis in a few days. Then I'll be  walking in the woods again.  Back and forth.

This proximity and diversity is one of the reasons I love living here.

Super Party for our Super Bowl Champs!

Today most of Seattle and much of the Puget Sound region came downtown to celebrate our Super Bowl champs Seahawks. And what a party!

While temps hovered just above 20 degrees (my toes and fingers say even colder), around 700,000 12s endured freezing cold to be a part of the collective joy that has gripped Seattle. That's 65,000 more than the total population of Seattle.

Mutual love for the youthful and exhuberant Hawks has even thawed the so-called Seattle Freeze. Over the last month, and especially the last few days, this city has become a melting pot of joyous, smiling, extra-friendly, happy people. In mid-winter no less!

Along the parade route, people made sure to let the kids be in the front so they could see the Hawks as they rode by in open-topped Hum-vees and other big rigs. Our Mayor Murray overruled our Superintent of Schools by suggesting that parents be allowed to take their kids out of school for the parade. Best mayor ever!

People were hanging out of windows, balconies, rooftops, trees, and even perched atop Honey Buckets to see and cheer the Hawks.  And while there were thousands of outstretched arms taking pictures with their phones and cameras, over half the Hawks were taking shots of us.

Beast Mode! Running back Marshawn Lynch filming me.  :)

Being the polite city we are, there were no arrests, although one guy was hauled off in handcuffs for not keeping back. If you haven't checked out the #howseattleriots string on Twitter, it's a humorous Portlandia-esque take on Seattle's post-Super Bowl behavior.

All in all we Seattleites want to savor our moment as long as possible. The city's ardor for this team seems to transcend mere awesome football players and games. The special feeling for this special team was palpable all season, and it just continued to build.  Civic pride is rampant.  After "hiding" in plain sight all these years in the Upper Left Hand corner, we're finally recognized! We're all winners together!

We'll be floating on this high well into Spring. 

Saving Endangered Pacific Northwest Whales and Salmon: It Starts with You

While locals and tourists thrill at seeing our resident orca whales in Puget Sound, many of you might not know how precarious are their chances for long-term survival.

Our endangered Southern Resident Killer Whale population here in the southern Salish Sea is declining, down 20 percent since the 1990s to only 80 whales. Many of our Chinook salmon runs, the food of choice for these orcas, are endangered and declining.  The forage fish that the Chinook and other salmon eat are declining. 

It's all interconnected, and we humans are largely to blame for these declines. 

We've dumped toxic contaminants into our seas and oceans, logged and trashed pristine watersheds that support salmon, altered the landscape in harmful ways, and the list just goes on. Shame on us!

But there are good people working hard to help our whales and salmon.

Southern Resident orcas in Puget Sound. Photo by Alisa Lemire Brooks.

 Last weekend I was lucky to attend part of the Orca Network-sponsored Way of Whales event on Whidbey Island. This year the place was packed as never before, and several hundred people gathered to listen to experts discuss scientific research on things such as orca food preferences, their poop that yields a wealth of information, and the struggle for Columbia River Basin salmon, an important orca food source, to survive.

Panel of biologists, activists, and government researchers discuss local orca issues.

We saw a lovely short film about our Southern Residents produced by a European filmmaker that featured 80-year-old J8 (Speiden), the second-oldest orca of the J pod who disappeared and is presumed deceased as of September 2013.  The Southern Resident orcas spend their whole lives with their extended families.

Still out there wild and surviving is J2 (Granny), presumed born in 1911. It breaks my heart that she has seen all of her children and grandchildren be born and die, but she's still looking after her pod.

So here's my takeaway from the event. The panelists were asked what one thing they would recommend to help our orcas survive.

• Don't eat farmed salmon (they contaminate wild stocks).
• Learn more about what you can do and share that information.
  
• Think about linkages to marine health of your everyday actions (e.g., don't use weed killer in your yard that could end up in Puget Sound through groundwater transport).
• Join and support organizations such as Save Our Wild Salmon  that are engaged in policy issues to support changes we need to help salmon, such as demolishing some key Snake River dams.
• Learn about your watershed where you live.
• Plant more trees.
• Pay more attention to what you're eating and how its production affects our environment (eat more organic).
• Pay more attention to the world around you, become a well-informed citizen and...
• TAKE ACTION!