Wenatchee River Institute

Doors open at 6:30pm for a community social with beer and wine available for purchase

Big River: Resilience and Renewal in the Columbia Basin

In BIG RIVER, award-winning photographer David Moskowitz and writer Eileen Delehanty Pearkes illuminate the natural history, hydrogeology, beauty, and human activity on the Columbia River, while also highlighting the challenges facing the region and the people working on sustainable solutions.

The culmination of Moskowitz’s many years of photographing the river and exploring its watershed and Eileen’s decades of research, Big River seeks a path forward for the Columbia River Watershed, balancing the demands around water, salmon, agriculture, energy, and climate with the fundamental need for a sustainable living river.

Join WRI for our Plant Foraging Series. We will be hosting plant foraging workshops to introduce people to the abundance of local plants and their edible, medicinal, and functional uses. Each workshop will feature a new plant at its unique harvest time. Participants will learn hands-on how to identify, harvest, propagate, and make use of the plant. Our goal is to empower people to respectfully and reciprocally engage with the plants that live here.

This fall workshop will be with local herbalist Kyra Skaggs. The class is designed to instruct you on foraging and harvesting elderberries and what you can make with them. This will be a hands-on class to become more familiar with this plant.

This will be an opportunity to harvest chicory on the WRI campus and learn how to process the roots for making your own drink. Plan to wear clothing to get dirty, something to collect your harvested roots, and a long-handled shovel.

This workshop will be instructed by our WRI Land Steward Tiffany (who also goes by Tiffa). She is madly in love with native plants, lichen, and fungi in general and has a BA in Environmental Studies/Biology from UC Santa Cruz.

Cost is Pay What You Can. Choose a price that is reasonable for you. WRI offers this in recognition that not everyone can afford to pay for classes. We hope that people who can, will pay to help those you cannot.

Streaming link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZVMVlkbTRk

Doors open at 6:30pm for a community social with beer and wine available for purchase. The presentation will start at 7:00pm.

Grizzly bears roamed the North Cascades region for thousands of years as a key part of the ecosystem. They distributed native plant seeds and kept other wildlife populations in balance. Since then, populations declined primarily due to direct killing by humans. The last confirmed sighting of a grizzly bear in the U.S. portion of the North Cascades ecosystem was in 1996. In April 2024, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) decided that restoring grizzly bears to the North Cascades ecosystem (NCE) would be undertaken by relocating grizzly bears from other ecosystems. National Park Service Wildlife Biologist Dr. Jason Ransom will discuss the ecology of grizzly bears in the NCE, what the restoration process looks like moving forward, and best practices for coexisting with both black bears and grizzly bears in the Cascades.

Come explore the forests near Leavenworth to look for fungi of all shapes and sizes! Fall is a great time of year to find mushrooms and other fungi, especially in our environment on the eastern slopes of the Cascades. This trip is for those interested in encountering the vast diversity of fungi in our area, not just the edible species.

We’ll meet in the WRI parking lot (address above) and transportation will be provided in our van. We’ll drive for about 30 minutes to where we’ll spend the day walking through the woods. Total walking distance will be about 3 miles. We’ll mostly be walking on a maintained trail, with some off-trail walking required. Total elevation gain ~500 ft.

To know what to bring with you. Please visit the website.

With over 45 years of bicycle touring experience, Bob and Carolyn have some biking stories to share! They have ridden through cyclones, snowstorms, and mud wallows; with a baby, three teenagers, and with many families; on single bikes, on a tandem and on mountain bikes; as newlyweds, parents, and retirees; in campgrounds, wilderness, youth hostels and guesthouses; with laughter and with tears.
Join us for an evening of storytelling through photos and reflective memories highlighting how their touring has changed over the past four decades. They’ll share a bit about gear, how to take a bike on planes, trains, boats, escalators, and elevators, and bike touring resources to know about. If the snow’s not too deep, they’ll bring their loaded tandem.