Bellingham to Sumas

August 27, 2014

Old Skagit Valley farm house. The land thanks to ice age floods is extremely productive.

There is virtue to traveling unrehearsed and spontaneously, leading the flaneur's life. As I get more and more experience on the road I have grown more and more accepting of the day's end whatever and wherever it may be. However there's also something to be said for planning one's accommodations well in advance during the Labor Day weekend. All the Forest Service campgrounds on the west side of Mt. Baker were reserved. It is also Labor Day in Canada. Still wanting to see Mt. Baker from the west side I stopped early in Sumas. Using a 2010 favorable review from a fellow cyclist’s journal. I booked two nights at the Sumas RV Park - "Under New Management" bellowing on a banner in the breeze. $10.00 a night for a tent site for the old biker, what’s not to like? The plan was to head up to Mt. Baker’s west slope with a light bike and enjoy the view and return to Sumas before nightfall.

The story of one cyclist and the anchor tenants (permanently placed RVs and trailers) at the Sumas RV Park and most of the tenants could reasonably be labeled anchors - perhaps with various subtleties of meaning. Up to ten days prior to my arrival when James and his wife took over as managers of the park it was the Whatcom County center for meth and heroine distribution less than half a mile from the Canadian border. Even as I was pitching my tent, a late model white SUV was circling the grounds until James had an in depth conversation with the man in white.

Washington has recently become a “recreational” marijuana legal state and as the evening progressed music from the 60s and 70s was emanating from some of the anchor trailers along with the sweet smelling smoke of Whatcom Wowie. The buzz and music seemed to die off at a reasonable hour. As a tentative first report, legalized marijuana seems to be OK. The poor working tenets of this park seemed to be up in the morning and getting ready for work. Their children were well dressed heading off to school before the holiday weekend.

Logging is still economically viable. The logs on the trailer are from GMOed franken trees.

Maybe barely viable. Long gone are the high value old growth trees. Never to return for hundreds of years -- maybe? The franken trees are engineered to be harvested in twenty to thirty years. My guess is they wouldn't survive long enough to be something like old growth. Certainly they will not be part of an old growth forest a thousand years from now.

Under new management! Made a difference.

Anchor tenets were cleaning their coaches, filling potholes with a pile of gravel James, the new manager, had truck in.

I heard one of my neighbors say to turn down the volume as a courtesy to the old man in the yellow tent. Mahalo. (That's James on patrol.)

I give this RV park 3 stars (4 stars for trying), but my experience at RV parks is conditions can change pretty rapidly. If you riding towards the Canadian frontier best to check ahead of time. I've certainly slept in far, far more chancy parks when on tour.

Today's ride: 40 km (25 miles)
Total: 50 km (31 miles)

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