On the next beautiful day, when you’re considering a nice long hike up Little Si, consider your safety first. Instead of grabbing a water bottle, granola bar and your mobile phone, grab your “10 essentials.”
The 10 essentials, as Glenn Wallace, spokesperson for King County Search and Rescue, calls them, are basic but vital.
“They don’t have to be expensive, and they don’t have to be big,” says Wallace, but you’ll want them with you in case the unexpected happens.
Over lunch at the North Bend Bar & Grill last Friday, Jan. 11 several customers had begun to notice the bright yellow King County Search and Rescue vehicle parked out back, and figured the two men in the corner were part of the effort. So it didn’t take long for the question to come up: Did they find the missing skydiver?
The answer was slow and deliberate. It had to be accurate and legal, and because it was about not just the subject of a cancelled mission, but also about his friends and family.
No, they hadn’t found him during the search mission, which was called off Sunday evening, Jan. 6, but the Guardian 2 helicopter had been in the air around Mount Si, looking for him that morning, in the first good flying weather of the week. That was officially all Glenn Wallace could say.
Citizens of North Bend celebrated their own Tuesday night, with the announcement of the city’s Citizen of the Year and Business Owner of the Year awards.
Danny and Robyn Kolke, owners of Boxley’s Place, were less-than surprised to be named Business Owners of the Year.
“I kind of knew the jig was up when I started seeing saw all my customers walking in,” said Danny Kolke, laughing.
“Hey, they’re my customers, too!” Mayor Ken Hearing, who presented the award, reminded him.
The two people accused of the Dec. 24, 2007, murders of four adults and two children in Carnation will face the death penalty when they come to trial in 2013.
Joseph McEnroe, 34, the former boyfriend of Michele Anderson, will be tried first, on Monday, Feb. 25. Anderson, 34 and daughter of two of the victims, will be tried in June, according to the King County Prosecutor’s office.
Anderson and McEnroe are each charged with six counts of aggravated murder, for the deaths of Anderson’s parents, Wayne and Judy Anderson of Carnation, her brother and sister-in-law, Scott and Erica, and their 5 year-old daughter and 3 year-old son. They have been held without bail in the King County Jail since their arrests for the murders, on Dec. 27, 2007.
It was a hard slog to make “Uncharted Dirt,” the top entry in the North Bend Amateur Film Challenge. There were weeks of shooting, plus building their own camera supports, hauling cameras and gear down remote mountain bike trails, and editing, editing, editing. By the end of it, though, director Dean Sydnor had a compelling film, and the answer to his question.
“I didn’t really realize what (mountain biking) meant,” he says early in the 6:39 film. “I mean, I know what a mountain bike is, but … who cares?”
Crossing generational divides, no problem. Sparking 10 to 12 year-olds’ interest in how arthritis and Alzheimer’s Disease affect the body, simple. Getting a diverse group of students to work together—and work hard—outside of school hours so they can compete for little more than bragging rights, just as easy.
None of these things were too difficult for the four Upper Valley elementary- and middle-school teams to enter the Washington FIRST (FIRSTWA) “Senior Solutions” competition in Bellevue Dec. 8 and 9. What they did have problems with were weak robotic arms, sensors that needed frequent recalibration, and dozens of other programming tricks to make their robots behave as needed, not to mention the expense of hologram technology.
Tom Kemp played Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, but he used the front door, not the chimney, when he came to call.
Sporting a Santa hat with a green ball-cap brim, Kemp strode through the lines of tractor-trailers parked at North Bend’s Travel Centers of America stop, a.k.a Truck Town. These trucks are the drivers’ homes when they’re on the road, and he hoped to brighten each one with a delivery of home-made cookies.
“We figure, if you’re here on the lot today (Christmas Eve), you won’t be home to get fresh-baked cookies on Christmas,” Kemp tells the drivers.
Ten days away from Christmas Eve, and the church was burning. Josh Hudson barely registered these thoughts before he had a new one: I can put out this fire.
He acted on that idea almost faster than he could think, but first he called 911 and reported seeing a small but growing fire at Cascade Covenant Church.
“It had just started, it wasn’t really burning too big,” Hudson said of the fire, at the church directly across the street from his house.
He’s almost 89 years old, but wood carver and painter Adi Hienzsch makes a point of getting out to his workshop every day. It’s not the holiday season that drives him, but the work itself.
In his Edelweiss Chalet studio lined with original paintings, hand-carved doors and statues serve as dividers, and colorful mushrooms and red-hatted gnomes (wurzenmänner, or “root men”) spill into the next room, keeping company with a six-foot cigar store Indian, carvings of the namesake flower and dozens of smaller plaques. There doesn’t seem to be room for anything more, but there is much more, in Adi’s mind.
When he walks in the workshop doors each day, he says “I already know something that I want to do. After I have it in my head, then it’s the drawing board.”
To do this job, you need not only the physical strength and ability to get someone out of danger, you need the creativity to think up the various ways people get themselves into trouble all the time.
Members of the Eastside Fire & Rescue technical rescue teams spent a week recently honing all of these skills, at Tolt MacDonald Park in Carnation. Working in shifts, all 33 team members spent a day learning the ropes of the team’s new rescue raft, a two-man inflatable designed to allow rescuers to float (on water) or slide (on ice or snow) right up to a victim, and an afternoon practicing climbing skills at Carnation’s Tolt MacDonald Park.
Eight years and at least $100 million from now, Mount Si High School could well be the most-populated high school in Washington state. That’s assuming that Snoqualmie Valley School Board members decide to pursue one of the options for a high school remodel, presented at their Dec. 13 work session.
The options, as presented by Matt Rumbaugh of NAC Architects, would both require demolition of part of the existing school building and therefore have to be completed in phases, and would both build classrooms and a courtyard on what is now the student parking lot. Each would also temporarily take over the tennis courts across Meadowbrook Way from the building, and indefinitely take over the practice softball field there, too, for parking.
Snoqualmie won’t be expanding its retail sector any time soon, even if it wins an upcoming legal appeal of a King County decision.
The city of 11,000 people has twice attempted to expand its urban growth area, or future annexation boundaries, to include 85 acres along Interstate 90 at the Highway 18 interchange.
That land, now zoned as rural, would have become a retail development serving the still-growing community, in Snoqualmie’s most recent proposal to modify its UGA through the King County Comprehensive Plan.
A King County sheriff’s deputy shot an out-of-control man in Fall City early Monday morning. The man, a homeless resident of the community, was taken to Harborview. He is alive, but his condition is unknown.
According to sheriff’s spokesperson Cindi West, the man began an hours-long rant around 2:30 a.m. Monday in the Fall City Mobile Park in the 4300 block of Preston-Fall City Road, and became so aggressive by about 6:30 that “multiple” neighbors called 911.
“We understand from a witness that about 2:30, he was outside yelling ‘it’s the end of the world!'” West said.