I like heading in to the mountains in autumn. The crowds are gone (I’m not counting the hunters), the mosquitoes are gone, the water is low if you have to cross it, the mist has moved in, the colors are glorious, the days are warm, and the nights aren’t too cold. I recently took Emma, …

Once when I was about 10 years old, I awoke very early on a Saturday morning in June. We had just moved into our new house in Rexburg, Idaho, where my father had recently been hired as a professor at Ricks College (now BYU—Idaho). No one else was awake. The sun was not even up, …

Jessica’s surprise birthday present for me was, by the way, dinner and tickets to a performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Fabulous! The performance was inside an Episcopalian cathedral and the sound was heavenly. It was a wonderful evening, but it’s not my birthday yet. I’m not 40 for a few more days. On …

A friend invited me to go snowshoeing with him yesterday, and to my legs’ consternation I agreed. Also brought Emma along, who is shown here looking south over Lake Pend Oreille from about 3.5 miles into the hike. We had to quit at about four miles because I was too tired to continue, and we …

One advantage of living in the boondocks is that places like this are pretty easy to get to. The trailhead for this adventure is about an hour from my front door. I got out of work later than expected on Friday and so did not start up this trail until 8:10 pm local time. And …

Well it doesn’t look like it here, but it was quite a climb to get on top of this peak in Montana’s Cabinet Mountains Wilderness. This is the only way I could situate the camera to take a picture of all of us while still giving a sense of the terrain. From the left it’s …

We were headed down the mountain on Saturday before I remembered to ask Rich to get a picture of us. Rich still took the picture I’m posting, but it’s us. (Looks like his camera’s tilted too.) So here is Emma and me a hundred feet below the summit. Most of the peaks you see in …