Trail Seeker

We had plans to do some hiking this weekend, but one of those viral bugs hit my wife making her feel to lousy. The hike we had in mind is part of an old wagon road through the cascade mountains. I have hiked this section before, in fact in my early 20's I was one of the cities park and recreation hike leaders and took folks on hikes and other trips, including the ski bus in the winter. I did this for 5 years.

One intersting story about this wagon road was the first cars to cross the north american continent in the first transcontinental race passed over this road in 1905. When the first car came to the Cache Creek toll station the gate keeper was troubled at what to charge him, since a car had never been on the road before. He decided to charge him the toll for a hog, because he was such a road hog.

We ended up resting and relaxing, playing some games while my wife rested. Hopefully soon everything will fall into place and we will get up there and make this hike, weather permitting. Hope your weekend was better.

Here is some trail scenes I took this past summer. These scenes are all from the Oregon Cascades.

Our bank has offered us a refinace package we could not pass up. When I called and asked more about it, the lady asked if we wanted to lower our payments or shorten the term, I said I would like to do both. She chuckled as if that was not possible, but she said "lets see what we can do". I did the math before I called, so I knew I we could.

They are covering all fees in exchange for a quarter percent of their base interest rate, there is little hassle invovled, no reappraisals, all we need to do is read and sign the paper work (after a lengthy phone call) they will be mailing us, get some documents notarized at the local bank and mail them back. The only thing we will have to do is open a new escrow, that was my option as they would otherwise finance the amount needed to open up a new one on the spot and I don't want to add to the amount needed to refinance.

What I don't understand is, the bank already has our loan, why would they be so eager to refinance it at a lower rate? What did I gain? 4 less years on the loan and a lower payment to boot. It's our plan to keep paying at our previous rate which saves us another 3+ years and another $7000 in interest on top of everything else.

We had a nice sunny day, although we woke to a good frost, it made it to the 50's in some areas. We made a family out of hiking 7 miles to Gordon meadows and here is our new friend dubbed Gordy the frog. At one lake we passed, had 3/4 inch of ice on it while just a 1/4 mile away another lake had absolutely none, due to one being in the sun the other not. In the shaded areas we could still find some snow left over from recent snow storms.

The girls made a snow man in some of the snow, on our way back, my youngest and I noticed someone had knocked it over and smashed the head (and here we thought we had these woods to ourselves today), I heard a noise across the meadow and saw a young couple with there parents and they were sporting 2 very young kids in kidpacks, so I am sure one of the so-called adults knocked over the girls snowman. When my oldest caught up, she wanted to blame her little sister, but i motioned her to be quiet and pointed a finger across the meadow. They saw us, so I hope they felt like idiots for smashing a couple of girls snowman. When we got back to the parking area, my wife noticed some trash in a fire ring that she was sure wasn't there before, we were sure those inconsiderate folks dumped it there. We actually got back when they did and I made it obvious I had found there trash and picked it up and threw in the back of the truck for disposal. Oh well.

We had gone up to this place in May, but could not get to the lakes due to much snow, so my Wife has wanted to go back and see the lakes, we also saw, what looked like bear tracks. Last time we saw mountain lion tracks.

We were grateful for this November sunny day to enjoy our adventure, despite the minor distraction above, it was a pleasant trip. I am now off to plan another, take care everyone.

Added 11/07/04
Yep, Gordy the frog is a tiny frog

Yes, thats the word for me this past week, and it has been healthy too rather than sit here and read things on the internet. So what extra things have I been doing? I am trying to halter break a hiefer, but she is no calf, more like a teen ager, but she is a docile one, unlike the last one I broke who ended up jumping fences and after being off the rope for a short time would not let me hook a rope back on her. She went to the auction yard this past week. I had tow heifers and a sheep, now I have just the hiefer. A nieghbor who always sheared my sheep drove by when we here herding up the cows said he had a ram, so he took the ewe with him. This heifer is really tame and she will follow me with out a rope if i have an apple in my hand, so after just a couple days on a halter, she adjusted to it well.

Saturday, the kids and a friend from church and I went up to the mountain to participate in a trail head radio excercise, we wanted to know if we could get into the valley and the sheriffs station using amatuer radio, plus see how VHF would work. We used 80 meters and was able to work not only the valley, but up and down the highway to the other 6 stations set up at various trail heads. On VHF, we were able to work the valley via relays. One fellow said he worked to use a repeater, I didn't try that repeater, but sure I could have too. It snowed on us up there and after wards we met at a little mountain restuarant and had luch with some of the other radio fella's.

We then found a geocache and checked out my youngest daugters geocache which is located up in the mountains too. Someone didn't close the lid properly and there was some moisture in it, so we fixed that up and headed home.