clockwise around Whidbey Island
- Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve (Whidbey Island) (historylink.org)
Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve is unique – the first, and as of 2023 only, national historical reserve in the United States. Established in 1978 by the National Parks and Recreation Act (NPRA), the Reserve’s mission is to preserve, protect, manage, and interpret much of Central Whidbey Island, from the historic town of Coupeville in the east to pioneers Isaac and Rebecca Ebey’s 1850 donation claim to the west. The Reserve initially encompassed only the 8,000-acre Central Whidbey Historical District, which had been placed on the National Register of Historic Places (NHRP) in December 1973. The historical district and the Reserve were later enlarged to 17,572 acres – 13,617 acres of land and 3,955 surface acres of the waters of Penn Cove. The Reserve includes woodlands, open prairies, wetlands, shorelines, sloping uplands, dozens of historic structures, and the entire town of Coupeville. It is administered by a Trust Board of nine individuals – three representing the town of Coupeville, four representing Island County, and one each from the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission and the National Park Service (NPS). Eighty-five percent of the land within the Reserve is privately owned, and a process of consultation, cooperation, and compromise to harmonize often-competing interests has been key to its success.
- An Unbroken Historical Record: Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve (nps.gov)
Whidbey Island is in an area that once lay under 3,000 feet of ice. Thirteen thousand years ago, receding glaciers gouged out the waterways and shaped the features of Puget Sound. Glacial moraine formed Whidbey Island, and like most Puget Sound landforms, it ranges no higher than 500 feet in elevation. The island varies from one to ten miles in width and its length extends nearly 40 miles in a north-south direction. Whidbey is the largest island in the Sound; in fact, after New York’s Long Island was officially declared a peninsula in 1985, Whidbey Island could claim to be the longest and largest island in the lower 48 states.
- Moss (Wikipedia)
Mosses are small, non-vascular flowerless plants in the taxonomic division Bryophyta (/braɪˈɒfətə/, /ˌbraɪ.əˈfaɪtə/) sensu stricto. Bryophyta (sensu lato, Schimp. 1879) may also refer to the parent group bryophytes, which comprise liverworts, mosses, and hornworts. Mosses typically form dense green clumps or mats, often in damp or shady locations. The individual plants are usually composed of simple leaves that are generally only one cell thick, attached to a stem that may be branched or unbranched and has only a limited role in conducting water and nutrients. Although some species have conducting tissues, these are generally poorly developed and structurally different from similar tissue found in vascular plants. Mosses do not have seeds and after fertilisation develop sporophytes with unbranched stalks topped with single capsules containing spores. They are typically 0.2–10 cm (0.1–3.9 in) tall, though some species are much larger. Dawsonia, the tallest moss in the world, can grow to 50 cm (20 in) in height. There are approximately 12,000 species.