While preparing to launch my raft at the Emil Plum access on the Snoqualmie River I was standing, looking downstream, and I think I actually ducked as I heard the loud whir of wings, seemingly right over my head. I looked up to see a large hawk in hot pursuit of a duck which I took to be a female mallard. About fifty feet downstream of me the duck dove directly into the water while the hawk pulled up and began to circle. After a few moments the duck popped up again and the hawk immediately stooped, to be greeted by a spreading ring of water as the duck submerged again. The same maneuver occurred at least five more times as the duck would pop up and the circling hawk would dive. Finally (and I could almost see him shaking his head in disgust) the hawk gave up the game and soared off; shortly the duck re-surfaced and went about her business.

On another sea-run cutthroat trip on the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, we had anchored up for a late lunch just downstream of the lower end of a steep-sided, rock-walled canyon. While enjoying a sandwich and a beer, I was startled by a drawn-out, rumbling, roar and turned around in time to see a column of water fountaining twenty feet in the air as a boulder the size of a small automobile crashed down the near-vertical wall and into the river. Rowing back upstream we could see the naked scar over a hundred feet up, near the upper edge of the wall where the chunk of rock had torn loose, bringing down a torrent of dirt and uprooted trees with it.