And thus our journey among the islands and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest nears its conclusion on a warm afternoon in Friday Harbor, on San Juan Island. We have sailed through landscapes carved by Pleistocene ice a mere 12,000 years ago, while we basked in the warmth of a Pacific Northwest Indian Summer. We paddled our kayaks in waters once crossed by the red cedar canoes of Native Americans, who left their mark on a rock wall in Jervis Inlet. We visited their descendants at Alert Bay, who shared their culture with us. We walked among the mighty mammoths of the Temperate Rainforest - red cedar, western hemlock, Douglas fir and big-leaf maple - and kneeled to look closely at the mosses, lichens, and ferns of the forest. We sailed through waters teeming with shearwaters, phalaropes, murres, rhinoceros auklets, and gulls of several sorts (none of them beginning with "Sea..."). We hung over the bow to watch Dall's porpoise as they escorted our ship through Blackfish Sound. We gazed in awe at the black and white monarch of these seas, the orca or killer whale, and we saw the noble banana slug. (Can it get any better than that?). We take away photographs, memories, and an appreciation for the landscape, forests, and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest.