Nate Hough-Snee

Must be Present to Win

2026-05-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Summer Holiday vs. Punk Routine

2025-10-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

From the winter spring came

2025-05-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

February 2025 Wenatchee River Institute Talk on YouTube

2025-03-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

It was an honor and privilege to deliver an evening seminar on Cottonwood to the patrons of the Wenatchee River Institute and to members of the Washington Native Plant Society and the Society of Wetland Scientists in Leavenworth this past February. The talk is now available on YouTube:

I'm extremely grateful to both Holden Village and WRI for their generous hosting of general audience-oriented aquatic and riparian ecology evenings at their respective venues. I'm humbled by the turnouts and appreciative of everyone who came out, asked questions, engaged with their peers and neighbors, and said, "hello!"

Event: Upcoming environmental talks at Holden Village and the Wenatchee River Institute

2025-02-19T10:00:00.000-08:00

The mighty Populus trichocarpa (western black cottonwood). Photo: Nate Hough-Snee

I'm pleased to announce a trio of general audience talks on topics that I hold dear: riparian cottonwood forests, and the ecology of Lake Chelan.

Holden Village, Chelan County, WA

Thursday, 20 February 2025, 6pm - Canaries in the coalmine? What can cottonwood tell us about our Pacific Northwest Rivers?

Saturday, 22 February 2025, 5pm - Stories from Lake Chelan

Wenatchee River Institute, Leavenworth, WA

Thursday, 27 February 2025, 7pm - Cottonwood: unlocking our rivers' histories

These talks are all interactive, designed to engage a general, curious audience, and inspire curiosity about rivers and floodplains, and the history and status of Lake Chelan, Washington State's largest lake. Both talks focus on people, change, and resilience as both ecological and personal themes.

Periphyton and water quality sampling in the summer of 2024 in Lake Chelan's Wapato Basin. Image courtesy of Lake Chelan Research Institute and Steven Gnam

New poems at ThisRiparianLife.com

2024-09-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

This Riparian Life

Remembering our friend Matt Primomo

2024-04-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

Last month there was an unfortunate accident in my community, and husband, father, son, brother, and friend to many, Matt Primomo, was lost to this world. Matt was an exceptional person, and while I could speak volumes about my friend and the people to whom he meant so much, numerous friends are already working hard to document who he was for print and online memorials. Upon reflection, the medium that makes the most sense for me to remember my neighbor and friend, is poetry. Matt was a man who didn't waste words, and I wanted to measure mine for him, so I wrote an elegy called "Seasons."

If you were lucky enough to have known Matt, it might mean something to you. If you didn't, then trust me, it surely means something to me.

You can read it on my sporadically updated website of poetry: Seasons, an elegy for my friend, Matt.

Winter Light

2023-12-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

Solstice Light

2022-12-21T16:19:00.002-08:00

Meadow Run Environmental: Chelan County and North Central Washington-based Environmental Consulting Services

2022-05-25T18:02:00.007-07:00

Meadow Run Environmental has a new website:

http://www.meadowrunenv.com

Please get in touch if you have any queries related to our wetland and floodplain research, restoration, and management services!

Deferred Maintenance

2021-11-11T20:00:00.001-08:00

Springtime

2021-04-01T00:00:00.001-07:00

Seasons turn

2020-12-01T21:00:00.001-08:00

Signs of the times

2020-09-01T22:00:00.001-07:00

New Chelan Mountain Rescue Website

2020-08-22T14:58:00.004-07:00

Chelan Mountain Rescue has a new domain and website:

https://home.chelanmountainrescue.com/

Signs of the season...

2018-12-07T16:00:00.000-08:00

...largely being stuck in a ridge of high pressure.

Signs of the changing seasons

2018-10-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

Reviewing Ben Goldfarb's Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

2018-08-05T23:00:00.000-07:00

Earlier this summer, I had the pleasure to read and review Ben Goldfarb's Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. Wetland Science and Practice, the newsletter and magazine of the Society of Wetland Scientists, ran in their most recent issue (June 2018). While WS&P is paywalled for a couple months after publication, I've dropped my full take into the public domain below:

Perceptible Changes: impending website update

2018-06-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

In 2010 or 2011, when it initially seemed like a good idea to launch a blog, I thought I'd start writing about ecological restoration, the human effort to re-envision, reclaim, and rewild the world's impressive natural, semi-natural, and human-dominated ecosystems. It was a long time coming.

I grew up as a rustbelt kid, with sublime Lake Erie a stone's throw away and the shadows of twentieth century urban and industrial decay around most corners. So when I struck out on my own and Cleveland was still close in the rearview mirror, I got excited about trying to understand how ecosystems get degraded, and more importantly, how they can be turned around. Restored, if you will. This vision to restore trashed ecosystems led me pretty quickly to ecology research. This excited me because it provided chances to see and evaluate the impacts that humans have had on a landscape, and where opportunities arise, work to improve the quality of that landscape through restoration.

In short, I wanted to spend my time looking at environmental problems and implementing solutions. And, as time allowed, I wanted to write about them here.

Restoration monitoring at a retired gravel mine: North Cascades National Park, WA

This amounted to me reporting on my early restoration efforts: small, successional projects that targeted limited damage. So I wrote about the projects that I was involved in, where restored ecosystems were quick to flourish. I could see how a former landfill or denuded campsite, with enough planning and effective project construction, could sometimes quickly resemble the ecosystem that it had replaced. In some cases the restored and semi-natural ecosystems' trajectories diverged, but most became largely functional ecosystems (the jargon would say "novel" ecosystems). I saw these ecosystems' evolution as perceptible changes.

I didn't coin the term, but derived it from Bill McKibben, who in his first book on climate change, The End of Nature, wrote:

Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly if at all, is the result of a subtly warped perspective.

I wanted to show people that the world changes quickly, and in the case of ecosystem restoration, can even change for the better...in real time.

With this in mind, I originally aspired to make the old perceptiblechanges.blogspot.com a hub for information on environmental events, and to profile the science, conservation, and restoration organizations, that I found fascinating.

Somehow, in the process of my Ph.D where I tried to understand how and why floodplain ecosystems differ from one another, I actually moved away from narrating perceptible changes in ecosystems in a way that people could relate to. This blog, like those of many scientists before me, became more of a journal, opportunistically scratching down ideas. I got busy. And I wrote less well and, well, just plain less.

Somewhere along the way, this website became natehough-snee.org, a hybrid professional landing place and personal blog. Some of this structure works, and much of it doesn't. So I've made and will continue to make some new perceptible changes to the website.

I've taken down old, dated event content. I'll review what's in the annals and may repost some of this content in the future. There's also a chance I decouple the blog from the domain entirely and archive everything at the old blog.

In the next few months (and likely years), I'm going to refrain from posting too much new content here. To go alongside my freelance science and environmental consulting work, I've been doing some freelance writing. It's not clear where I'll promote that stuff.

I purchased the domain name thisriparianlife.com and plan to start uploading podcasts and a weekly blog post as a creative outlet that brings stories of rivers, watersheds, conservation, and collaboration to light. Stay tuned.

As time allows, I'll use a post or two to spell out where I've been, where this site is going, and what else goes on at the other websites. I still want to tell the stories behind everyday perceptible changes, scientific or otherwise, but this website's next few laps around the sun will be different from the last couple.

There's still a an awful lot of work to do. Wear gloves.

*This post was initially written in June 2017 and revised ~~May 2018~~ June 2019 with a website ~~overhaul~~ checking to see if this was still here

Signs of the early Spring

2018-05-09T15:00:00.000-07:00

Signs of the late winter

2018-03-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

Signs of the early winter

2018-02-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

The Cascade Crest Classic

2017-12-31T14:30:00.000-08:00

The Cascade Crest 100 (aka the Cascade Crest Classic or CCC) is a 100-mile foot race run largely within the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest near Snoqualmie Pass, WA. By Washington standards, CCC is a historic 100-miler, having been run since 1999. With 30+ miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, a run through the abandoned Snoqualmie Railroad Tunnel, and a good chance you catch sunrise from near the Domerie Divide between Lakes Cle Elum and Kachess, it is uniquely Pacific Northwest.

Alongside the Plain 100, it is one of two mountain 100-milers within an hour drive of our home base at the confluence of the Wenatchee and Icicle Rivers. Given the proximity, history, and small size of the event, I've been stoked to run sections of the course and check out the cool scene that Rich and Adam have cultivated at CCC and the course preview, Needles 50k. Last year involved a modification of the course due to fires in the Teanaway but, judging from the events at the Easton Firehouse, you'd never tell that there had been any inconvenience. It went off without a hitch and some fast finishes, which, considering the added elevation gain, was pretty damn impressive.

The Jolly Mountain Fire flaring up to the north of the 2017 running of CCC. Photo taken from below Goat Peak.

Only 160 lucky women and men get a chance to race the CCC loop each year, so the race has less of the mega race feel you might get at a large 100-mile event, like Leadville or UTMB, or even Utah's Wasatch and Bear 100s . Although low-key, CCC has sixteen full service aid stations, a water stop and bumping finish line festivities. Abundant, cheerful, and largely long-time volunteers make sure that everything is swell for runners and crew.

In the next few weeks, I'll be sharing some maps and course summary graphics that I've put together for CCC 100. If you're checking out the rapidly filling North American hundred-mile race calendar for 2018, then be sure to get your lottery entry in for CCC between tomorrow, New Year's Day, 2018, and February 5th for the annual running of CCC this August 25th-26th, 2018.

Signs of the shortest days

2017-12-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

Signs of a changing season: All you can control is your own attitude.

2017-10-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

Nearly ten years ago, my friend Greg Ettl said to me, "All you can control is your own attitude."

I think about that more than some people might.

Mostly because it's true.

In the grand scheme of things, the adversity of being an early-career, (sometimes) under-employed researcher is really quite low on the human suffering scale. Especially when you have a few layers of privilege stacked up. And it's placed into full context when any real life adversity hits. If you follow the news, a whole lotta adversity has been hitting an awful lot of people for a very long time. I'm not really one of them.

I don't have a manifesto on how the world should be, how my communities should be, or what I "deserve." But, I know that I can control my attitude, which dictates my actions and reactions to to the world around me.

Thanks, Greg.