Cle Elum Isn’t So Far Anymore

Ran into an old acquaintance while walking in Seattle’s Discovery Park, a beautiful preserve on the Magnolia bluffs. Discovery Park is part of the reason why living in the city of Seattle does not feel like most U.S. cities.

Our discussion Sunday went like this: With population growth expected to expand 25 percent by 2030, Seattle is only going to feel more crowded. This is prompting many people who moved to Seattle for its faraway/remote and easy-going lifestyle contemplate what direction to flee when Seattle gets more expensive and congested. It seems to be a popular topic, with the San Juan Islands and Methow Valley getting top consideration.

That’s when my acquaintance told me that she owns a 20-acre spread in Cle Elum, on the east side of the Cascades. Her property fronts the Teanaway River, a tributary of the Yakima River which provides irrigation for a large garden. With two kids and plans to move to Bainbridge Island, our friend is on the verge of selling her Cle Elum land, which has a barn and home on it.

This, of course, prompted a major hmmmm on the part of LandCrazed (the blogger.) Cle Elum? 90 minutes east of Seattle?Near “The Palm Springs of the Northwest?” The funny thing is, what seemed like a rural retreat and safe haven from the increasingly hectic Seattle lifestyle is also on the verge of becoming too congested.

It is our opinion that in a matter of time, 90 minutes east of Seattle won’t be rural much longer. Not rural enough anyway, with developments like Suncadia popping up near Cle Elum. On 6,500 acres of land purchased from Plum Creek Timber Company, Suncadia is the epitome of the Baby Boomer retirement development — and a sure sign that strip malls and chain food restaurants are on their way to Cle Elum by the tractor-trailer load.

In Yakima, a similar project (The Vineyards) is being considered. It’s big country over there. Lunar hills of the high desert — there’s plenty of land for development. Still, the question is, will it be rural in 2030?

Land’s Beauty Leads to Disaster

LandCrazed wonders if it’s a gender thing. Does man’s love of land tap into a more profound need to “command” or alter the landscape than, say, a woman’s love of and relationship to land?

This is not to suggest that a woman landowner has not been known to operate a backhoe or excavate a koi pond. However, I had to wonder about the potential for this gender difference after watching ABC News’ 20/20 Friday night. The show featured a segment (“Trouble In Paradise”) on a Kauai reservoir that’s dam burst after a local landowner is alleged to have bulldozed over the dam’s spillway.

“Multi-millionaire Jimmy Pflueger owns more than 500 acres on Kauai, including most of the property surrounding the Kaloko Reservoir and the entire dam itself, and it was Pflueger who (whistleblower Mike) Dyer was referencing when he spoke with the governor. After Pflueger bought the land, over the next decade, he had his workers level a 50 foot hill just to the side of the dam to clear the land for waterfront home sites. ” — ABC News

My friend Jim, who owned hundreds of acres of rural land in the mid-Atlantic states, made me wonder what made him so driven to work so hard and owned so much machinery (backhoes, skid loaders, bulldozers etc.) for the purpose of grading and “improving” his land.

Such “improvements” takes on many different permutations and begs the question: Why and at what cost is it worth altering what is already such beautiful terrain?

Bette Midler (from Hawaii) owns land in that fateful area, which she bought to keep “wild.” She is part of a lawsuit, ABC reported. Her quote talks about the divergent attitudes about what should be done with such beautiful land:

“The devastation has to be corrected … it’s hard to believe that people don’t love the land the way you do,” Midler said. “And they don’t love their neighbors they way they ought.”

There’s rural & there’s Out There

Perusing the list of parcels to be auctioned this weekend in Bellevue, Wash. by auctionparcels.com, LandCrazed has found one that prompts the question:

Is there a difference between RURAL LAND and LAND AT THE END OF THE EARTH?

This 40-acre parcel in the middle of the Quinault Reservation certainly falls into the latter category. It sits a few miles south of La Push — a lonely little spit on the Pacific edge of the Hoh Rain Forest (which means it RAINS!!!) — and a few miles north of Aberdeen, Wash., the rainy home of Kurt Cobain. And we all know what happened to that fine young man.

I have strange memories of La Push, where I stayed one (rainy) weekend in a former life. It has something to do with trying to buy a box of Rice-A-Roni in the one store within 100 miles of our Quileute Indian Reservation “motel” and having to wait about an hour while the cashier had an argument with his ex-wife’s mother. Never thought I’d see the sun again.

But I did, and now I know that any land I buy at Sunday’s auction will be on the SUNNY SIDE of Washington State.

link farmer starts openland.com

Look at what we found last night! A link farm like we’ve yet to see for land search.

It has no personality. It has no content. It appears to have been created by “Jeff”, Tang –“a developer in the software development business for over 12 years. Hes been a principal software engineer, senior software engineer, and consultant at both start-ups and Fortune 500 companies.” — Amazon.com book blurb bio.

50 Acres of Major League Rock$

Talk about a great confluence of news items! Spring training, baseball, land and a lucrative stone quarry!

Sign us up!

Turns out that L.A. Dodgers pitcher Matt White bought 50 acres in western Massachusetts from his ailing aunt three years ago with the intent of putting a house on it. Nice country out there near the Berkshires, as LandCrazed blogged about this week. And now this news about White’s quarry — he paid $50K! — worth hundreds of millions of mica schist!

“White, who has appeared in seven big league games in nine professional seasons, paid $50,000 three years ago to buy 50 acres of land from an elderly aunt who needed the money to pay for a nursing home.

While clearing out a couple acres to build a home, he discovered stone ledges in the ground, prompting him to have the property surveyed.

A geologist estimated there were 24 million tons of the stone on his land. The stone is being sold for upward of $100 per ton, meaning there’s well over $2 billion worth of material used for sidewalks, patios and the like.” — Associated Press

If we bought 50 acres from an ailing aunt, we couldn’t get a perc test to pass, let alone come up with billions in mica schist! Let’s go land hunting, fellers!