Day 9 · Scheduled earlier

Bone Marrow Awareness Day — Mount Vernon

Downtown Mount Vernon, on the Skagit River

Mount Vernon: a day to understand the next step

This day on the route

Planned date: September 15, 2026
The day: Awareness Day
Planned walking: No planned route miles

Day 9: planned Awareness Day in Mount Vernon, with no planned route miles. Use separately confirmed public event details for an in-person visit.

Gouache illustration of an empty bench beside a low river wall. Buildings and trees on the opposite bank cast warm reflections across blue water. — Illustration inspired by Downtown Mount Vernon, on the Skagit River.

The second planned Awareness Day remains in Mount Vernon. It carries no planned route miles and offers a place in the itinerary to distinguish registration from donation.

Mount Vernon follows its planned arrival day with the second of ten Awareness Days. After the approach to the Skagit River city, the itinerary pauses its mileage and turns to learning about donor registration.

Registration and donation are different decisions at different stages. NMDP uses the cheek swab supplied during registration to establish a potential donor’s HLA type. Being listed does not mean that a donation has been arranged. If a person is selected for a patient, the registry follows up with additional information and assessment.

That distinction gives a reader a practical next step: read the official requirements and the donation information before deciding whether to join. Questions about personal health or eligibility belong with the registry. The official guidance explains the screening and consent involved, so readers can consider the decision with that fuller picture.

After this planned pause, Day 10 heads toward Blanchard and the Chuckanut section. The itinerary therefore changes both pace and setting here, moving from the Skagit River city toward the wooded coastal slopes.

From the road

September 15, 2026

A world of mystery and magic, and a tent pitched above Samish Bay

She was up early and ready to walk between half past seven and eight. Next door to the Wingate was a fitness centre; they took her details for their manager, who was out, and then offered to run her up to the point on the route where she had stopped. The fourteen miles to Blanchard she had already split across two days, so there were seven and a tenth of them left.

Things do not always go the way you expect, as she puts it. The place she had hoped for in Blanchard, the Bow Sanctuary and Wellness Center, could not take her — the person who could have said yes was away for the day, and the receptionist was new and did not feel able to make that call about a stranger. She did point out a pullout next door where people park campers.

The receptionist’s name is Ellie, and she turned out to be on the NMDP registry already. Jeana asked whether her contact details were still current. Ellie did not think they were, so Jeana pointed her at nmdp.org to put it right. She was glad the two of them had crossed paths, and she wanted the same thing said to everybody reading this.

She found a spot for the tent, but it was early yet to be putting one up. A local man called John — a very kind person, she says — thought she would do better to press on. Ellie bought her protein snacks in case she could not reach the next town before she had to stop, and hard-boiled eggs, which turned out to be the next morning’s breakfast. She left Blanchard at about four.

What came after that she describes as walking into a world of mystery and magic. The road runs above three bays with islands out beyond them, and the forest on the inland side is dense and mossy and full of ferns. She stopped at Chuckanut Manor and they gave her a bowl of clam chowder and some bread, which did for her dinner — the best, she says, and worth the trip on its own. Then the road climbs. What struck her was how much her body has changed since that first night in Seattle: the same sort of hill, her knees fine, the whole of it enjoyable. It is busy and winding and the shoulder disappears in places, but she calls it a joy to walk.

At Samish Bay she spent a long time looking for anywhere flat enough for the tent. Resting on a guardrail, she spotted what looked like a level patch up in the forest across the road, and climbed to it — swinging the pack up ahead of her — only to find it was nothing of the kind. Three teenagers were passing as she started back down, and she called to them for help. The young man let her put her hands on his shoulders and they walked out together. Little angels, she calls them.

The place she settled on was a big pullout, an overlook really, with no facilities but a flat piece of grass. The ground was hard, and some Sikh men stopped to help her get the stakes in. She slept well.

If your address, email or phone number changes, go online and update your NMDP record. Then, if you’re the match, they can find you — and you can save a life.

Jeana Moore

Rough grass in the foreground giving way to flat Skagit farmland, a power line crossing a wide blue sky.

A long mountain ridge with a tall column of cloud standing above it, over mown green fields and farm buildings.

A black and white cow lying down in a pasture, seen through the leaves of a roadside tree.

A straight two-lane road with dark crack-sealing lines snaking across it, one big tree beside it and mountains ahead.

Small yellow daisy-like flowers on wiry stems, crowded together at the roadside.

An empty two-lane road with a yellow centre line, running past open fields under a pale sky.

A deep red frilled flower opening among narrow blue-green leaves.

A hand-lettered sign on a metal barn reading Buffalo and Bison Meat, steaks, hamburger, pepperoni, salami, with a phone number.

A large banner on the side of a metal barn reading EAT HEALTHY in tall dark letters.

A dark bronze bison standing on a rock in a green field, with trees and a distant ridge behind it.

A road running away toward a mountain, with farm buildings and telegraph poles along one side.

A white flower the size of a hand with a crimson centre and red veins radiating out through the petals.

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A white Victorian house with steep gables and a porch, set back behind a white picket fence beside the road.

A row of tall trees along the edge of a field of dry pale grass, with a mountain ridge behind them.

A tidal channel winding through marsh grass out toward the bay, with low islands on the horizon.

The bay and a line of low islands seen across a flat field, under bands of grey and white cloud.

A railway line and a still channel running side by side below the road, with a bridge crossing and a forested hill beyond.

The bay and its islands framed by the branches of a tree at the roadside, the sky pale above the water.

A blue and white roadside sign reading Leaving Tsunami Hazard Zone, half surrounded by summer greenery.

A roadside sign with a painted salmon above the words Chuckanut Manor, seafood grill.

Picnic tables on a bluff above the bay, seen past the trunk of a very large fir.

Late sun turning the bay to silver, with dark trees in the foreground and a tower on the far shore.

A two-lane road curving away downhill under a canopy of trees, a metal guardrail along the outside of the bend.

The sun high over the bay, the water silver-white below a road and a railway line cut into the hillside.

Tall straight conifers with the bright water of the bay showing between their trunks.

A moss-covered branch angling across the underside of a concrete road bridge, with ferns and a rocky creek in the shade below.

A concrete road bridge seen from above, its arch and parapet thick with moss and ferns, the road curving away beyond it.

A hand-painted sign reading Fresh Oysters with an arrow, beside a life-size metal heron standing on a post.

The sun going down over the bay through the silhouettes of tall firs, the sky orange along the horizon.

A band of deep orange sky above the dark ridge of an island, the sun gone and the water still.

A roadside information board headed Samish Bay Shellfish and Water Quality, with a map of the watershed.

Orange light fading over the bay, seen between the black silhouettes of firs on the bluff.

A small grey dome tent pitched on bare ground between two boulders, the bay and the last of the sunset showing through the trees behind it.

Jeana Moore in her hi-vis vest and pack straps, smiling cheek to cheek with a woman in sunglasses and a green and white striped shirt, a bare ploughed field behind them.

Find your official registry Donate to JBF See every stop

Choose where you live

Continue to the official registry that serves you. It decides eligibility, handles registration and contacts you if you may match a patient.

Choose an official registry directly:

United States — NMDP

NMDP accepts new registry members who are 18 to 35, live in the US, its territories or freely associated states, can meet NMDP’s health guidelines, and are not already registered through another US organization. Joining happens at home: you answer a few questions on NMDP’s site, they mail you a free cheek-swab kit, and you swab and send it back. Once you are a member you stay listed until you are 61 unless you ask to be removed — 61 is when NMDP takes you off, not an age at which you can join. NMDP makes the final eligibility decision.

Check the listed age range

Visit NMDP

NMDP — Join the registry · checked Sep 1, 2026

Prefer to text? Send JADA to 61474 and NMDP will take it from there.

Browse all official registry options

Eligibility rules can change. Confirm the current requirements with the official registry before joining.