- La Conner — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
Located in western Skagit County, La Conner was once county seat and most populous town in the Skagit Valley. Bounded by farmland, the Swinomish Channel and the Swinomish Indian Reservation, it was an up-to-date town and lively terminus for river steamers bringing timber and lumber down from the upper Skagit, and port for farm commodities grown in the surrounding delta flatlands. Its brief county seat status was lost to Mount Vernon in 1883 and a series of economic misfortunes caused the town to slowly fade and be left in the backwaters for decades. With its sweeping waterfront and business district overseen by “The Hill,” the wooded, residential midtown bluff, it’s a scenic, historic time capsule. The inherent beauty of the environs, the atmospherics, and the cheap rent of the moldering town attracted artists and eccentrics. In 1937, Morris Graves (1910-2001), who was to become a painter of international renown, came to town and brought his artist friends. These bohemians mixed with rough and tumble fishermen, tow boatmen, and farm hands. Resident novelist Tom Robbins says of the town they created: “That this was an intersection of art and fishing and farming is what’s interesting and unusual and singular to this community” (Hood).
- Cambrian (Wikipedia)
The Cambrian Period ( /ˈkæmbri.ən, ˈkeɪm-/ KAM-bree-ən, KAYM-; sometimes symbolized Ꞓ) is the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, and of the Phanerozoic Eon. The Cambrian lasted 53.4 million years from the end of the preceding Ediacaran Period 538.8 million years ago (mya) to the beginning of the Ordovician Period 485.4 mya. Its subdivisions, and its base, are somewhat in flux. The period was established as “Cambrian series” by Adam Sedgwick, who named it after Cambria, the Latin name for ‘Cymru’ (Wales), where Britain’s Cambrian rocks are best exposed. Sedgwick identified the layer as part of his task, along with Roderick Murchison, to subdivide the large “Transition Series”, although the two geologists disagreed for a while on the appropriate categorization. The Cambrian is unique in its unusually high proportion of lagerstätte sedimentary deposits, sites of exceptional preservation where “soft” parts of organisms are preserved as well as their more resistant shells. As a result, our understanding of the Cambrian biology surpasses that of some later periods.