To our north, in Washington State, we're getting news that a swarm of 130 small earthquakes has been occurring between 1 and 5 miles beneath Mount Saint Helens, the volcano that last erupted in 36 years ago, in 1980. Experts at the U.S. Geological Survey say that an eruption is not imminent, however they say that the swarm of quakes over the last two months, all with low magnitudes topping out at 1.3, indicates that the volcano is "recharging." As KATU reports, the quakes are "a sign [that] new magma is rising under the active volcano."

Wired went into some depth about these "recharge" events, discussing how they very often occur years before any eruption — Mount St. Helens in fact showed to be having a recharge around 1998-99, and the next it saw a small eruption was not until 2004. That eruption, which amounted to small spurts of magma popping and creating small new forms in the crater, went on over the next four years, ending in 2008.

Everyone over the age of 40 is likely to remember Mount St. Helens erupting in their childhoods, given that it's the last major eruption to occur in the continental US, and some may even remember the HBO film made about it, starring Art Carney. That eruption destroyed 250 homes and killed 57 people, raining ash all over the Pacific Northwest and Canada, and was as Wikipedia says "the deadliest and most economically destructive volcanic event in the history of the United States."

That eruption was preceded, a week prior, by a 4.2 magnitude earthquake.

The Wired piece appears to have set the internet and news stations off in a frenzy, with a great many covering this earthquake swarm, including The Weather Channel, despite it possibly amounting to very little.

According to the USGS, "The current pattern of seismicity is similar to swarms seen at Mount St. Helens in 2013 and 2014; recharge swarms in the 1990s had much higher earthquake rates and energy release."

2016's hottest Halloween costume? #ManInTree pic.twitter.com/J7WkoejwTG

— Austin Santiago (@AuzSantiago) March 23, 2016

Have you been following the #ManInTree ordeal? At some point yesterday morning, the above pictured man climbed the iconic 80-foot sequoia tree located in front of a downtown Seattle Macy's store and posted up. Police, fearing the man was suicidal, quickly shut down the streets surrounding the tree, and attempted to talk him down. He seemed to be, well, upset about something. Now, more than 24 hours later, the Seattle Times is reporting that the unidentified 28-year-old man has finally climbed down.

According to the Seattle Police Department, officers received reports of a man perched atop the tree shortly after 11 a.m. Tuesday. "During early attempts to contact the man, who appears to be suffering from a crisis, he threw an apple, branches, pine cones and other items at officers on the street below, and claimed to be armed with a knife," reads the police statement.

And so up in the tree he remained, all through the night and into the morning — his internet popularity, fueled in part by a (amazing, we might add) livestream of the ordeal by local station KOMO, growing the entire time.

The punny SPD Twitter account didn't really help things, either.

Even The New York Times apparently tuned in to the livestream at one point this morning, transcribing the early morning musings of KOMO broadcaster Theron Zahn.

Is there a metaphor in all of this? Like, the rest of us, in our own way, would like to climb a tree and be left alone? That’s what I think. Maybe all of us, in our own lives, with the stress of the world and everything, you just want to go up in a tree and hang out with the birds, and not be bothered.

According to Alison Grande, a reporter with Seattle's KIRO-TV, the Seattle Police Department does not plan to arrest the man following the completion of a mental health evaluation.

Related: Video: Seattle Dog Takes Public Transit To Park By Herself

Cities on the left-leaning left coast are donating in droves to Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator and candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination about whom all your (most vocal and enfranchised) friends are freaking out on Facebook.

Well, by way of the Seattle Times, here's a new one for the social media savvy Berners to share: San Francisco has offered up the 2nd most in per-capita campaign contributions of any US city to the Sanders campaign.

Seattle came in first in that metric, with total spending of $596,578 and $893 in donations per 1,000 residents. But San Francisco actually spent more: $669,283 in total spending, although there was a little bit less in per-capita spending here than in Seattle, with $785 in donations per 1,000 residents.

Next up was Portland, of course, and look, right after that it's Oakland, with $202,461 in total spending and $489 in donations per 1,000 residents.

All this info, it should be noted, comes from the FEC and Census Bureau. Sanders' campaign has drawn on small donations, a point on which he and his team pride themselves, but setting those aside for a moment the Senator still has ground to make up in the Golden State. In a Field poll from January the Senator trailed Hillary Clinton's campaign among California democrats with 35% of the vote compared to her 46%.

Related: Photo Of Allen Ginsberg And Bernie Sanders Resurfaces, Recalls Poem To Politician

Bay Area Bernie bros turned even saltier after catching wind that San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee stumped for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Saturday. Up north for a Hillary In Washington event, the Seattle native said of the Democratic frontrunner, "She's shown time and time again, as she speaks we listen very carefully, that she already knows that mayors don't have time to debate."

Not exactly sure what he means, but Mayor Lee's successive #ImWithHer tweets, showing clear support for Clinton, have a bit more clarity. To wit: "Bellevue knows #HillaryClinton fights for working families & she will continue to in the White House" and "Tacoma is proud to stand with #HillaryClinton because she stands with our diverse American communities."

The mayor's support for Clinton is nothing new. In May of 2015, the Democratic presidential candidate took time off her fundraising-only visit in San Francisco to sip (and, one can only hope, spill the) tea with Mayor Lee at a Chinatown teahouse where they reportedly discussed housing and homelessness. Lee joins an elite team of other squeaky-clean mayors, like Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, gunning for Hillary in the Oval Office.

Washington state's Democratic caucuses begin March 26.

Seattle's City Council voted today to allow freelance drivers the right to collectively negotiate such items as pay and working conditions. The New York Times observed that if the right were conferred upon contractors working for the likes of Lyft and Uber, it would be a national first. Currently, the National Labor Relations Act doesn't grant independent contractors collective bargaining rights. The Seattle Times now reports that the council voted 8-0 vote for enactment.

"While the innovative new way to hail rides in Seattle is a boon to many of us who need a ride," reads the bill before the City Council, "the drivers face many challenges, particularly those drivers who depend on this work for a living and yet fail to earn even minimum wage due to reasons beyond their control." Uber, for example, might drop its minimum charge rates without approval from drivers. "There is currently no mechanism for drivers to address these issues with their employer directly.... As a result, conflicts in this publicly regulated transportation market have become policy fights rather than points of negotiation, as they would be in other private sector employment."

Council member Mike O’Brien told the Associated Press that “This feels like the right thing to do,” despite anticipated legal challenges.

Uber chief adviser David Plouffe, the political strategist behind the 2008 Obama campaign, spoke recently of the ordinance in a Seattle speech. “The ordinance is puzzling because I think it’s generally believed to be flatly illegal what they’re trying to do," he said, not mincing words, "and I assume the courts will look at that if it were to be successful.”

Said O'Brien, “We don’t take legal challenges lightly, but we recognize that businesses sue when they disagree with our policies.”

The drivers supporting the bill call themselves the App-Based Drivers Association or the Teamsters TNC. They work closely with Teamsters Local 117.

Uber, a company valued this month at $62.5 billion after a new investment according to the Times, relies on 400,000 drivers nationwide. 10,000 of those are in Seattle. That city, one of the first to pass laws to raise the minimum wage to $15, is perceived as operating on the forefront of workers' rights. Incidentally, it's also been a hotbed of innovation for Uber. There, the company debuted its color-coded light system for passengers, and now the Verge notes they're introduced the "mass transit killer" Uber Hop, an option for multiple passengers traveling the same route.

“If the Seattle ordinance survives challenge, we’ll see it in a lot of cities,” said Samuel Estreicher, a law professor at New York University. So, as goes Seattle? But Uber has made it clear that it likes its drivers neatly divided. The company is asking drivers to sign a new agreement that will make arbitration enforceable, thereby diffusing threat of any future class actions.

Related: In Response To Class Action, Uber Sends New Agreement For All Drivers To Sign Barring Class Actions

Those who live in Seattle and Portland may have heard inklings of this for many years, but increasingly the geological and seismic science community are sounding alarm bells about a potentially massive and thoroughly catastrophic earthquake that is likely to strike the Pacific Northwest coast, possibly within the next 50 years. Back in October, as we in the Bay Area recognized the 25th anniversary of the Loma Prieta quake, the New York Times produced a documentary short highlighting the grave and not often talked about seismic danger for the Pacific Northwest. Now, in the new issue of the New Yorker, writer Kathryn Schulz delves further into explaining the reasons for worry, and quotes a FEMA director as saying that if and when this expected big one hits the Washington and Oregon coast, "Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast."

The cause is the increasing pressure along the Cascadia subduction zone, a place under the Pacific where the North American tectonic plate and the Juan de Fuca plate meet, and where the Juan de Fuca plate is slowly trying to slip underneath the North American plate.

The earthquake danger for the region was not fully understood until after the late 1980's when two scientists, Brian Atwater and David Yamaguchi, began examining a "ghost forest" of cedar trees in a salt marsh on the banks of the Copalis River. Though people understood the trees had all died because of saltwater intrusion, the assumption was it had happened slowly. That is, until Atwater and Yamaguchi took samples and found that via their rings, all the trees had died simultaneously between 1699 and 1700. Though Europeans would not make it to the region for a hundred years, and begin Western-style recorded history, it did not take long before scientists looked to Japan, where records of tsunamis and seismic events date back to 599 A.D. Because the Japanese hadn't felt any shaking prior to a devastating tsunami that hit in January of 1700, they referred to the event, which reportedly brought a six-hundred-mile-long wave their coast, as an "orphan tsunami."

But, of course, it wasn't. Scientists now know that a massive, 9.0-magnitude quake hit the northern Pacific coast at nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700. A subsequent tsunami wave the length of the continent struck our coast fifteen minutes later, and another wave took ten hours to cross the Pacific and devastate the Japanese coast, hitting there on January 27, 1700.

Parts of the coastline dropped many feet and became inundated with saltwater. Vancouver Island’s Pachena Bay people were, as seven generations of legend had it, all drowned at once that night.

The Cascadia subduction zone was to blame then, and history says it should repeat such an event every 240 years or so, meaning it is already 75 years overdue.

If only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way it could cause an earthquake in the realm of 8.0 to 8.6, and the chance of that happening in the next fifty years is one in three. There's a one in ten chance of a full-margin rupture causing another potential 9.0 earthquake, in which it's estimated thirteen thousand people will die, and it will go down as the worst natural disaster in US history. By comparison, three thousand people died in SF's 1906 earthquake and fire.

The risks, and the potential loss of life, far exceed what a "big one" along the San Andreas fault would cause — which, in case you missed the news, will never be like that stupid movie. Sorry to ruin your Monday.

Here's the earlier NYT piece:

Ahhhh... This is amazing. A Seattle dog has learned to ride public transit by herself after not wanting to wait around for her human to take her to the dog park, which is three stops away from home. The 2-year-old Black Lab, named Eclipse, has been spotted riding Seattle's D-line bus by herself in recent weeks, as KOMO 4 reports, and as one fellow passenger says, "She sits here just like a person. She's a person."

Local DJ Miles Montgomery of KISW-FM broke the story after riding the bus with Eclipse one day himself and watching her get off at her stop by herself.

The TV station tracks down her sketchy-seeming owner, who walks around with Eclipse off-leashe and explains that the phenomenon all started when he and Eclipse would be standing outside his apartment building waiting for the bus, and he'd be smoking a cigarette. If the bus came before he was done, the dog would hop right on, and he'd catch up with her later.

[KOMO 4 via Gawker]

Twenty years after his suicide (the Seattle Police are holding firm that it was a suicide), Kurt Cobain's case file has been opened up to the public a bit more, and among the items they just released is a note he had folded in his wallet, written on stationary from San Francisco's Phoenix Hotel, mocking Courtney Love and their marriage. The visible portion reads, "Do you Kurt Cobain take Courtney Michelle Love to be your lawful shredded wife, even when she’s a bitch with zits and siphoning all yr money for doping and whoring…" As CBS News points out, the undated note stands "in stark contrast to the presumed suicide note, which calls Love a 'goddess... who sweats ambition and empathy.'"

Seattle police also released a bunch of previously unreleased photos from the scene of his death, mostly of the pile of items and paraphernalia that was left next to his body — a cigar box with his heroin kit, a pack of American Spirits, a lighter, his sunglasses, a rag, and his wallet.

The bad Xerox of the note is below, and the bottom of it is cut off so there may have been more.

Nirvana had been on a European tour in the first three months of 1994, prior to his death on April 9. Just prior to taking his life, Cobain had checked out of a rehab facility in L.A. Though it's possible (and one of several biographies could confirm this) that he and Courtney traveled to San Francisco in 1993 on their own (she once lived here), the last time Nirvana performed in S.F. was a full year earlier, in April 1993, at a benefit for Bosnian rape victims at the Cow Palace, and that may have been when this note was written. But why keep it in his wallet?

See the photographs from the scene, in the greenhouse over the garage where he killed himself, here. Don't worry, they're not gruesome, but you can see the suicide note as it was place, on top of a bed of dirt, with a pen stabbed through it.

So far, Courtney has not reacted to the reveal of the insulting note yet on Twitter. Which is kind of unlike her.

[CBS News]
[Billboard]

* This post has been corrected to show that Nirvana had played the Cow Palace in San Francisco one time before 1993, along with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam, on New Year's Eve in 1991.

Up north in Seattle, a KOMO/KING 5 news helicopter crashed and went up in flames near the Space Needle this morning. Two KOMO workers inside the chopper were killed. A 37-year-old man was taken to a nearby hospital to be treated for injuries.

KOMO has more:

Witnesses said a man could be seen running from from one car with his clothing on fire, and he was extinguished by officers at the scene. He was then rushed to Harborview Medical Center in critical condition with burns over more than 50 percent of his body.

Huge flames and plumes of black smoke poured from the burning wreckage, about 50 yards from the base of the Space Needle. Fuel gushing from the wreckage caught fire and burned for a block from the crash scene.

According to reports, "Witnesses said the helicopter crashed after clipping a tree near the KOMO studio."

Choppers are no longer allowed to land in San Francisco. According to KRON 4, landing pads have been banned for over two decades, though they used to land at Fisherman's Wharf and atop the BofA Tower.

Video below:

[KOMO]
[Gawker]

Following in the footsteps of places like Paris, where taxi unions have a stronger foothold, the Seattle City Council voted last night to cap the number of Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar drivers in the city at 150 per car service. The decision was made by a 5-4 vote and will still need to ratified by a full council vote in March, but it marks a new move in this brave new world of cab-driver competition.

As the Puget Sound Business Journal reports, opponents of the ride-sharing services have characterized their cause as one of "cap[ping] corporate greed," even though in San Francisco and elsewhere there's yet to be that sort of anti-corporate sentiment around the ultra-convenient Uber service and the scrappier, fist-bump-happy Lyft.

Ride-share supporters turned out to the meeting with signs of their own, saying that capping the number of drivers hurts competition and the public. And Uber's own local rep said after the vote that the cap will definitely lead to shortages of available cars at prime times. Like when it rains. Which up there is all the time.

As you may recall, the fight by traditional taxi drivers against Uber and other services has already reached a boiling point in Paris where striking taxi drivers last month shut down highways around the city's airports and physically attacked Uber black cars.

[SF Biz Times]
[Puget Sound Biz Journal]

Fanning the flames of the smoldering Seattle vs. San Francisco war, a double shooting in Fresno reportedly began after a couple of Seahawks fans taunted a "new" 49ers fan.

According to the Fresno Bee, the two men (ages 63 and 45) at a house party soon received gunshot leg wounds after the SF fan went nuts and started shooting.

[Fresno County sheriff's Sgt. Kevin Lolkus] said the suspect, Amado Vargas, 39, was described as a "new" 49ers fan and was being taunted by people in the house. From there it escalated, Lolkus said, to him threatening people with a knife, which was wrestled away in a struggle.

Vargas allegedly charged into a room that had a gun safe, took out a handgun and fired multiple shots, with two hitting the victims, Lolkus said. The suspect then fled in a black car with family members.

Vargas was later arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. The shooting occurred around 7 p.m., shortly after the 49ers lost the NFC Game Championship.

The cops cited football and alcohol as a mitigating factor, among other things.

[Fresno Bee]
[KRON]

After the Seahawks beat the 49ers 23-17 to win the NFC Championship Game, cornerback Richard Sherman went nuts on Michael Crabtree during an interview with Erin Andrews. Why? Something about hurt feelings and football. Like a page torn from a Real Housewives script, tension between the two noted players had been brewing since a charity event last summer.

"Sherman has been upset with Crabtree since last summer. Both attended Arizona star receiver Larry Fitzgerald's charity event. While there, Sherman went to shake Crabtree's hand, and Crabtree tried to start a fight, according to Sherman's older brother, Branton.

"I'm going to make a play and embarrass him," Richard Sherman vowed that day.

During an interview with ESPN, Sherman hinted at the drama:

"He said something personal face-to-face," Sherman said. "He knows what he said, and he knows I'm going to be tough on him the rest of his career."

Later, after the Niners lost, Crabtree took to Twitter to vent, saying:

Though not directly responding to Crabtree, Sherman also went off on Twitter:

Also fanning the flames of the Sherman-Crabtree saga, Crabtree did this to the noted cornerback with 30 seconds left one on first-and-10:

So, did Sherman go too far with his response? No. Because it was entertaining. (I've watched it five times so far this morning.) Plus, he's a smart guy, one who's exceptionally self-aware. What he has to say is, so far, thrilling. You should be listening. And as Deadspin's Samer Kalaf said, "Save your stale, old-fart whining about 'class.' It can't be called arrogance when the talk's backed up."

Seattle takes on Denver in the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 2.

[Gif via Deadspin]