These falls are a lawyer’s dream. They’re 50-60 feet tall, not marked by any sign, and reached by a rutted 4-wheeler track that absolutely DESTROYS THE ENVIRONMENT!!! Best of all, there are no guardrails anywhere. Okay, opponents of tort reform, break out your clipboards; there’s a fortune to be made! Any kid could grab another kid at the top of the cliff, pretending to throw her off, and slip! That’s what Emma did to Abby, except for the slipping part. We climbed down to see the falls from below (again there was NO TRAIL here; just dirt between steep, non-OSHA approved rocks); I stepped across the water (I slipped and actually GOT MY BOOTS WET) and scrambled up the boulders on the other side. It had been raining and the sharp-edged shale CUT MY HAND (PAIN AND SUFFERING!)! But I got some good pictures, possibly some to use in future drawings.

This is one of the better ones. Katie is wearing my Tilly hat (that’s the last time I’ve ever overspent based on marketing, but it is a good hat) as she and Abby negotiate the next dropoff. Abby is, I think, the girliest girl we’ve had so far. But put her out in the woods and she’s game*! Finding pretty rocks, scrambling along logs, splashing in the water, curling up in a sleeping bag, she takes to it like a duck to water. Must be in her genes.

*Not the kind the hunters seek.

I feel like I’m always bragging about our lives up here. I hope you don’t feel that way. I don’t think it’s bragging to be happy with your life and you like sharing that with others. It’s a nice thing look at your life and think, hey, I wouldn’t change a thing. (Except my job, but I’m working on that. And paying off the mortgage, of course.)

Here’s a sunrise from a few weeks ago. The great thing about sunrise is that it generally happens every day.* You don’t have to live in a  beautiful land in order to enjoy a beautiful sky. All you have to do is get up early. Oh, and have an east-facing window.

This shot is actually taken from our bed, which is perched before a large window on the second floor that looks out over our view. I woke up early on a Saturday (I wake up early every day; that’s in the wiring), glanced out the window, and ran for the camera. I kept shooting every so often as the light changed, until Jess was awakened by all the clatter. When she looked out the window, she knew whence the noise.
The best part of a morning sky like this is that it could presage a stormy day, as in “Red sky in morning, sailors take warning.” Let them take the warning; I love the rain and I’m not in a boat.

The main peak in this shot is, of course, Wanderer’s Peak–so named by Emma when she was 10. We like that name lots better than the real one, “Billiard Table Mountain,” which was obviously given by somebody who’s never played billiards. Ever since I climbed it two years ago I feel like it’s my mountain. Others climb it too and that’s fine, but it’s my mountain. Next summer I’ll take the two oldest girls up to the lookout out of view on the right to spend the night, then cross the ridge next morning and summit the mountain. Eventually I’ll take everybody up there. But in the meantime it’s just nice to see the sunrise over top.

*I meant “generally” as a joke, but look at this.

Now it occurs to me that the oil still isn’t changed in that vehicle, and I’ve already installed a new oil filter. Oil level is too high. I should drain off some of it even though the old yucky stuff is now well mixed with the new stuff and probably cramming the new filter full of old glock. Oh well, if it’s not one thing it’s another.

What does this picture have to do with the BGF? Oh, nothing. It’s just that I had it on my flash drive, and today it caught my eye. I’m pretty tired this afternoon.

This is Harrison Lake from my campsite taken a couple of summers ago. The peak, which I drew, is off to the left. But I think it’s pretty neat the way the land drops off just at the edge of the lake like this. Maybe I’ll have to make this into a drawing sometime. It’ll have to wait until I have time to do it, and money to scan, frame, and ship it out. But if you like the idea, let me know.

Wish you could see it better, but that's life in the woods, folks

Steller’s jay? Jeller’s stay? This is English; you can never tell how something is supposed to be written. I used to pride myself on my spelling capability (even though I lost the 6th grade spelling bee on “asterisk”, a word I’d never heard before, but I’m not emotionally damaged, waaa!). But now that I’m getting old and decrepit—I’m 40 as of last Saturday—I’m more cautious about spelling. Teh turht is, it is psosilbe ot raed Egnlsih qiute raedliy eevn wtih sracbemld wrdos bcasuee of hwo oru bnairs wrok. Cloo, huh?

But enough about my ineptitude (for the moment). I wanted to show you a pretty picture of Stellxr’s jays (where “x” represents the trick vowel) (or was that “trick fowl,” ha ha!) that have been swarming our bird feeder all winter. Ain’t they purdy? I remember seeing these birds for the first time at Yosemite National Park when I was 11 years old. Their intense blue plumage, black heads, and crest are distinctive; as is their call. I think it’s somewere between that monkey call you hear on old Tarzan jungle movies (“aaak-gakakakakak”) and a train wreck, which is what most jays do (a short, grating call: “aaakchghhh”). This concludes my bird-call lesson of the day, especially if I’m wrong.

I’m thinking about posting only three days a week. What do you all think?

Of the Yeeeeeeeeeeeear!

We’ve had the Christmas music on, we’ll set up the Christmas tree a week from tomorrow (we always do, the day after Thanksgiving), and the weather has complied by sending snow. Jess called this afternoon and said we had two new inches. (This picture was from the other day.) Yahoo!

Not to rub it in to you city folk, but it’s sure nice to see mountains and not neighbors (or streets, or a wall) when you look out your window. You can enjoy ours vicariously. It’s free!

New England has its maples. We have our aspens, birches, and especially our tamaracks. Tamarack (Larix laricina) is conifer whose needles turn orange in the autumn and fall off the tree. There is a stand of them on the northwest border of our property, and when the sunrise moves south in the fall it illuminates them like 60-foot-tall light bulbs. Scattered as they are among other conifers, in the fall they make for a truly awesome spectacle: miles and miles of dense green flecked with gold along the flanks of the mountains, in the horizontal light of fall, with the blue shadows of clouds slowly ascending to the peaks, and the mist curling up from the canyons. It looks as soft as the softest fur. It’s a thrilling sight, one I never tire of.

Anyway, here’s our patch of tamarack as seen looking north out the front window. (Our house faces northeast.) You can see the roof of the shoop at center left, and Jacob is standing on the sofa in the lower left. Until some clown invents a CCD as sensitive as the human retina, no camera can capture both an electric display of autumn foliage and a kid in the darkened foreground.

This actually happened almost a week ago, last Friday, in fact. The snow stayed in shaded areas for upwards of four days. It’s been cooooold out there! January weather, sometimes. Way too cold for October, and I’ve been burning firewood frequently.

That said, we’re back to more normal fall weather now. It’s welcome; I still have a lot to do before the real snows start!

Well, nothing’s more important than fatherhood. So I set aside my magazine, we slipped on our shoes, and out we went.

Of course Honey had to come too, with her bark-first-investigate-later eagerness, and immediately sprang the motion-detector light above the driveway. So Abby and I went to the north side of the house and made out the Big Dipper, which she can see from her bedroom window. Polaris was hidden behind the tall trees, but then the driveway light went out, and we moved back in front of the house.

God made the stars visible to teach man his place. The Milky Way stretched in an arc directly over our heads across all the visible sky, from Wanderer’s Peak in the east to the west behind our roof. It silences me to contemplate the cloudy edge of our galaxy, as I stood in the dark holding hands with my daughter. There are no more thrilling sights on earth, I think, than black conifers stretching up toward a starry sky. In that majestic distance one looks across more miles than there are pine needles on our land. I pointed out Casseopia, and the Pleiades rising above Wanderer’s, and a few bright spots I believe are planets. Then, when the wind had chilled us, we went back into our cozy house and went to bed.

If there is no other justification for living in the country, the night sky alone might be enough.

(PS. I couldn’t find a starry-night image I liked for free, so I built this one in Photoshop. Don’t look too closely; it took me about 12 minutes.)

Some of my immediate family gathered last week to spend some time together in the mountains. On Thursday evening we hiked up Rock Canyon past the old beaver farm, up past the abandoned mine with its cascading waterfall, and in the darkening twilight we ascended the switchbacks to Rock Lake in what became the darkest part of the night—just before the full moon rose.
I took this shot the next afternoon. That little form in the lower right is Emma, who had gone out onto a rock in the afternoon and sat down contemplating. Of course I whipped out the camera. You don’t see the humps and broken crags of Rock Peak 3000 feet up to the left, nor the vertical granite slab of Ojibway Peak to the right, but a camera can’t get it all anyway. This trip was a fitting end to an eventful summer.
(I had planned to climb Sawtooth Peak in a couple of weeks, but unless I can get a few more folks along I don’t want just two of us to attempt a steep climb up a remote mountain without a trail. I may have to bag it till next year.)
That morning we had hiked to the opposite end of the lake, climbed up the cascade feeding the lake, and progressed toward St. Paul Pass just beneath the far saddle you see here. It was a rough trail, and after lunch we were ready to head back. Then we spent a few hours in the afternoon picking huckleberries, which were surprisingly thick near the lake. We picked over two gallons in a few hours, which is saying something when you’re picking these little berries scattered amongst the leaves. When we got home on Saturday, Jess made three huckleberry cream cheese pies—one of the foods they’ll serve in heaven.
Autumn is coming. This morning I went out to hang up a batch of laundry and the thermometer read 41 degrees. The shrubs and mountain maples around our house are turning yellow. Yahoo! Fall is my favorite season, except when it’s springtime.