July 2026

Dorothy Jean Gleason Witt was a botany student at Washington State College (now Washington State University) from 1938-1948. Born in Ellensburg, Washington, in 1921, Jean and her family moved to Spokane during the Great Depression, where her father, Jay Gleason, served as a chaplain with the Civilian Conservation Corps. Jean developed an interest in botany […]

In early May, I took a trip around the Olympic Peninsula on the opposite side of Washington state. The Olympic region lies in the middle of the Pacific temperate rainforest zone, the largest such zone on the planet, ranging from northern California up to Alaska. As the name implies, these rainforests get heavy precipitation, around […]