Trail Seeker

My wife and I having a little fun with this well placed sign.

Someone, not here, asked about the glacier scene that I recently posted here. To put the area into perspective, I thought I would show a couple of photos showing the mountains that make up the 3 Sisters. I would like to go over and take photos now, they are beautiful white, snow capped peaks.

This first photo is looking east, making the left peak the North Sister. (7/20/04)

This photo is from the North looking South. The South Sister is out of view. (7/21/04)

I realize the photo's go out of bounds, but the larger images are better.

A couple of days ago a fellow put some cows into the field next to mine, My little heifer, thinks the ewe and her lamb that accompanies her where just not enough company and she got eager to introduce herself by pushing a hole in the fence and made herself at home. She is halter broke, but she knew enough that if I got close, that would mean she would be roped and hauled back home.

Recruiting my good nieghbor (who runs cattle) and his polaris and the heifer's halter ropes we set off to get her. First we tried to pull her out of the herd, but that soon proved not worthwhile, so we ran them along the fence in order to circle them over to the gate where we could single her out and get her on the road, but coming around the first corner, the gate going into another field was not there and they took a left rather than a right and towards the gate we wanted.

As we sped in the polaris, with me in the back, we hit a big hidden hole that tossed me into the air, fortionatley I landed back in the polaris. The other field is very wet, over grown and a creek runs down it. the cows, not being used to the field would not cross the creek and we were able to circle them around. This time, with me in the back, we thought we could race up to them and single her out and run a lasso on her, the first couple of attempts failed, but finally I got her and a rope burn too. She sure liked her new friends and sure to find a way back over from my field that we ran her up to my niegbors and let her loose with a couple of his steers. Even with the steers, you could see her looking off into the distance as her new friends resumed grazing.

I was reading through some of my past blogs and I enjoyed the read, alot better than the journal I kept on my mission. That journal was well filled up with regular entries but I can't make heads or tail of half of it. The other half is filled with personnal trials like my companion is a nit wit or my campanion is cool and I am a nit wit, sigh. But here, I can follow my posts and enjoy rereading them.

I was never the greatest in writing skills, and envied those who can take an ordinary situation and fill it with so much thought, awareness and expression. My oldest Daughter does that when writing stories, I like how she sets up the enviroment, expresses the characters feelings and so on.

I started the blog in late fall and my backpacking window was over for the year and I looked forward to the days we could hit the trail even when it was just part of the day. What has been wonderful was the realization that just down the road from our place is timber land(privately managed timber), the roads are gated now, sometimes they open them up during hunting season and I have taken the oppertunity to do just that, but I haven't been out for the past few years hunting. Since the gates are locked we can hike along the wooded, reprodded, and clear cut forests roads with out disturbance. Okay some disturbances do occur, like today we came upon a turkey, but what was really exciting was she had a quiver full of recently hatch chicks. When we got up to where she was, the chick all scattered and mother hen darted around us throwing a fuss with her wings stretched down trying to chase us away. We moved along and could hear her clucking away trying to regroup her little family.

We have been getting 6 plus miles on some of these walks and it is so nice to be there with my best friend and wife and getting in shape. And speaking of shape, we plan to reclimb middle sister this summer, a 10,000 foot peak we tried last year and with in 20 minutes from the summit a couple in our group just plain ran out of steam. My wife could hardly stand to go back down the steep descent to the saddle between Middle and North Sister. Once we got to the saddle a little lower elevation she started to perk up. to make the decent easier we took a different route down that allowed us to slide on our butts down a glacier. Once we got down we took our geocaching skills and let the GPS guide us back to our packs. A couple of photos I have posted in the past were from that trip.
Click on this image to see a larger size

yes, I am alive
sorry for the moldy blog
I'm playing outside

This is the road along Opal creek and to our destination: Opal Creek trail head. An overnight backpacking trip to Ceder flats.