Treez, Inc. "Releaf Is On The Way"    Email-atrainer92@hotmail.com "We move through the forest, thus the forest moves through us" ARTICLE FROM THE CASCADES MOUNTAIN-ECHO NEWSPAPER – SUMMARY 2007 ISSUE BY JIM FOSSETT Forest Talk You can hike a thousand mapped trails, some of which feature kiosks, and some of the which do not. A kiosk, though, can n ever replace a Pacific NW scout, someone who knows the shadows by their names and can hear – and understand the forest when it whispers. That would be Jim Trainer. Recently, the ECHO accompanied Trainer for one of his morning excursions, near Liberty, Washington. But that’s all we’ll tell you, because this story is not so much about where we went, as it is about what we saw through Trainer’s eyes. Trainer glides over the untrodden path. To keep up with him, without breaking an ankle, was a challenge. The Hike Crack of dawn, elevation 3,000 feet, somewhere in the evergreen’ed mountains overlooking Liberty. “Let’s stop here,” mumbled Trainer, as he reached into his rucksack for a bird call. Within seconds, a Gray owl swept down from the to p of a giant Douglas Fir. How did you do know? We asked him. Did you see it up there? “Just a feeling”, he replied. A hundred yards further up the trail, Trainer stopped again. “You smell that?” he asked. “Elk”. They just passed through. Sure enough on the ground below us, checker boarding muddied patches of soil, were fresh hoof prints. “Hear that?” Trainer asked. “Pileated Woodpecker. “That tree over there, with the hole in it, could be its home”. “Keep your eyes to the top of the trees”. He said. “I am pretty sure there is an eagle nesting up here”. Hunters in the Wild By high noon, we’d covered several miles. Trainer moves through mountain forests like the runner in the Last Mohican. Breathing hard was a pleasure, though. We both were drunk on the scents of wild roses and cedar. It felt good to sweat, to rid body and mind of the highway noise in the valley. Were we hiked, the stands of hundred year old trees devoured that noise and left us with the challenge to listen, in a different way, for a change. “Cougar print”, Trainer cautioned. It was a chore to keep up with Trainer’s 50-something year old legs. The downward path toward his mountain homestead was a welcome reprieve. As we broke through the tree line to cross one last open stretch of meadow, we heard the call of wild turkeys, and rushed toward the sound to the rear of a log cabin, where friends of Trainer’s lived. Barely visible in the tall grass, were two coyotes, crouched and crawling, stalking the wild turkey. From time to time the younger turkeys, bearly visible without Trainer’s help, flew from bush to bush as the deadly hunt unfolded. We stood and watched through binoculars for the better part of a half hour. Final score: Turkeys 4, Coyotes 0. Mines and Rats It would have been easier to take the hike alone, without Trainer, but with him there was n o flipping through field guides to identify the flora and fauna along the way. Through Trainer’s eyes we saw lupine, Oregon Grape, Solomon’s seal, Kinnikinnick and Black Greasewood. Along the path he pointed out bear and coyote scat, mushrooms, and mountain ridges across the valley rich in fossil deposits. A hole in the rock would have remained a hole in the rock, had Trainer not been there to explain that it wasn’t a hole at all, that it was a gold mine, one blasted and bored and hammer chipped a half mile into the mountainside. “Wood rats the size of cats like it in the mines” explained Trainer. “Coyotes and cougars go in after them.” Bonaparte Jim Trainer planted over 800,000 trees in his lifetime. His goal is to plan a million before he dies. He spends time looking for record breaking trees; a Columbia Hawthorne and a Sycamore being two recent finds, the largest in their species in the country. The former he found in Liberty, WA and the latter near Puget Sound on the grounds of an old Hudson Bay Trading Post. He appeared three weeks ago in Cle Elum with a sapling grown from a sprig cut from the Island of St. Helena, where Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled. Bonaparte, according to records Trainer has in his possession, planted the parent tree. NOT YET GOODBYE What call Trainer heard to follow his True North Compass bearing to the Pacific NW is unclear, but we are happy about that. We’d like to find out why he has chosen to marry the Great Outdoors – with his wife’s consent and support, of course. Seeing Trainer again will give us a chance to revisit with him and find out. For more information on Washington trees and Jim Trainer, visit www.treezinc.com