It’s hard to imagine that this weekend is the Independence Day holiday, which many will celebrate over as much as four or five days here in Pacific County where our amazing seashore is such an attraction.

This has resembled occasional years in the more distant past when cool, wet springs kept me from even seriously thinking of cutting the grass until around the fifth of July. I’ve been feeling sorry for the bears and other wildlife that depend on berries — I’ve yet to see a wild bear berry, salmon berry or other species that are a spring staple. As a result, bears up in our neighborhood near the boundary of national park land in Ilwaco are more interested than ever in unsecured garbage cans. For everyone’s good, please keep your delicious human and pet food away from the bears. Pay heed to the old wildlife-management adage: A fed bear is a dead bear.

Please also “bear” wildlife in mind this weekend when it comes to fireworks. Wildlife and many pets are frightened by the noise, so be a good neighbor. It you choose to ignite fireworks, out west along the shoreline may be the best option. Misbehavior will only accelerate what is starting to appear like momentum toward a countywide ban on consumer-grade fireworks. I was nuts about fireworks when I was a boy, and haven’t advocated a total ban, but certainly understand why many want to curb the massive beach party the 4th has become.

In any event, barring extreme wildfire danger, this 4th is likely to see a huge turnout. We’ll cover it in detail.

The new 2022 edition of our popular Discovery Coast visitors guide will be in the next Observer and distributed all around in anticipation of the big holiday crowd. A popular and informative publication, it has been on hiatus since 2019. We look for it to become even bigger and better in 2023. (By the way, I came up with “Discovery Coast” as a nickname for our area in the run-up to the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial.)

As always, you have my deep appreciation for reading and supporting the Chinook Observer. This community project relies on you. If you have story ideas, I’d love to learn of them. Please drop me a note at editor@chinookobserver.com.