What’s on tap for this week’s weather? Check our local weather coverage.
In case you missed them, here are some of the top stories of the weekend:
Little evidence remains today of the fire that, 114 years ago, tore through Southwest Washington in what’s now known as the Yacolt Burn State Forest. Trees cover the landscape once again. Hikers, mountain bikers and horse riders traverse the forest. Hundreds of homes dot the area.
Until recently, the Southwest Washington blaze was the largest fire in state history, and some wonder if a fire that devastating could happen here again. Since the Yacolt Burn, much about forest management and fire prevention has changed. Officials work to balance sometimes competing interests — preventing future wildfires, preserving wildlife habitat, generating revenue and creating spaces for outdoor recreation.
These days, the risk for a large forest fire in Western Washington is lower than it used to be, but as the planet warms and droughts become more common, forest managers find that they may have to evolve yet again.
In the case of the Yacolt Burn, the September 1902 wildland fire came on the heels of 77 days without rain. In just three days, it burned more than 350 square miles — almost 239,000 acres — in Clark, Cowlitz and Skamania counties, killed 38 people and destroyed 12 billion board feet of timber valued at $30 million at the time.
“What burned in the Yacolt Burn was essentially virgin forest,” said Jessica Hudec, a forest ecologist with the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. The forest was full of vegetation with several different canopy levels — or as foresters say, it contained large amounts of biomass.
Read the full story about the Yacolt Burn more than a century later.
Thursday’s all-day giving spree, Give More 24!, raised $915,539 for Southwest Washington charities. While it was $84,461 shy of the day’s $1 million fundraising goal, it’s almost $240,000 more than was raised last year.
While there were more large gifts this year, Maury Harris with the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington, the host and marketing power behind the day, said the charities are getting better at navigating the day and attracting donors. Nearly half of the gifts came from people in Vancouver.
“Vancouver is driving a lot of the donations, and that’s largely because a lot of the nonprofits are based in Vancouver,” Harris said.
In total, 3,062 donors gave 4,421 gifts through the Give More 24! website. Camas Christian Academy garnered the greatest number of gifts, 267, and raised $15,575. That’s about $59 per donation. A central message of Give More 24! is that all donations, even small ones, make a big impact when a lot of people contribute.
Read the full story on Give More 24!
Some words to remember: “Why put the mop on the stairs if the cat can’t see it?”
Remembering that sort of thing should be pretty easy, after all, when it’s been part of your family sound track for more than 20 years. And that’s what might make it a good candidate for a new log-in option, known as a passphrase.
It’s an alternative to passwords. Those guardians at the gates of all our digital domains are involved in a tug of war. As people look for shortcuts, some choose a password such as, well, “password.” Or they log in with the name of a pet, which is easy to remember but not the gold standard in cyber security.
That is forcing systems to make their log-in rituals even more complex.
Passphrases can offer the best of both worlds, as the Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago. You can use a string of words, which is good. They can appear to be chosen at random, which is even better. Hacking programs “are thrown off by length nearly as easily as randomness,” Todd C. Frankel and Andrea Peterson wrote in the Post. “To a computer, poetry or simple sentences can be just as hard to crack.”
Read more about how to secure your online life with phrases of nonsense.
“We got scat down here!” Jane Skelly said.
She hovered over some brown pellets in the reedy grasses at Vancouver Lake Regional Park.
“Cocoa puffs,” said Stephanie James, a terrestrial ecologist as she pulled out her guidebook for identifying animal scat and tracks. The droppings looked like they belonged to a wood rat. But, James said, “you can really only tell by taste.”
The rat scat, along with what appeared to be coyote scat, was found a few hundred feet from the volleyball nets and the more manicured part of the park. On Saturday, about 150 volunteers scoured Vancouver Lake in search of wildlife and insects as part of Eco-Blitz.
Saturday’s event was part of the Portland-Vancouver Regional Eco-Blitz Series aimed at raising awareness and appreciation of biodiversity, creating a database of regional species and natural resources through collaboration among professionals, educators and the general public.
“The point is to identify all of the species that live in the park,” said Jane Tesner Kleiner with the Clark County Clean Water Program.
Read the full story about the Eco-Blitz.
