What is the Salish Sea?

“What is the Salish Sea?” I was asked recently.

It is the beautiful and abundant waters of the Pacific Ocean that are protected from the open ocean by Vancouver Island in Canada and the Olympic Peninsula in the USA. It is the homeland of Coast Salish First Nation people.

This large waterway includes Puget Sound, the Strait of Georgia, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The cities of Vancouver and Seattle are here. It is surrounded by snow capped mountains and fed fresh water from mighty rivers and long fjords, some of which drain vast high icefields that are reminiscent of the great glacier of the last ice age.

It is a powerful seascape that is moving in all of its moods. I love the way it is celebrated in song by Pauline Le Bel on the CD, Voices in the Sound. And it is my home.

Please explore the region with this Google Map. We like maps! This one can be a bit slow to load.

Technorati Tags: Canada, Howe Sound, map, nature, Salish Sea, Vancouver

When Categories fail

Here is a bit of bloggery that I will forget if I don’t record what happened.

I wrote that bit yesterday about a wonderful wet romp up to the new new snow on Mt. Gardner. And created a new category called Backcountry. Backcountry is a word my spelling checker does not know; but all wilderness wanderers use it. And us environmentalists make a distinction between frontcountry and backcountry activities.

When I clicked my new category to try it out, it opened a page that reported:

Error 404 – Not Found
Sorry, but what you’re looking for isn’t here. Perhaps you typed a URL incorrectly or clicked on a broken hyperlink.

Then I found that clicking ANY of my categories led to that page. What had I done? I tried reposting that new article, and a few other silly actions, and finally went to the WordPress Site for a solution. I posted my problem in WordPress Support » How-To and Troubleshooting. Moshu, the Moderator wrote right back to say:

The right forum for you is at http://wordpress.com/forums
(we are the wp.ORG guys here)

Howesound wrote:

Thanks moshu. I suppose I should understand the distinction between org and com at wordpress. Anyhow off I go to the world of com-merce.

At the WordPress.com/forum a sticky message recognized the problem with categories, and promised a fix. So, there was no point in my posting anything. And I see that today it is fixed.

At another sticky, Andy the Key Master provides a full description of the difference between WordPress the ORG and WordPress the COM, here: http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=3700. It was good to find out about this, and to discover this helpful forum.