Ice Lakes

Hello!
We just got back from a backpacking trip with our friends Catherine and Hans Johnson. It was great!
We planned for a 5 day, 35-mile, Labor Day weekend trip, but were caught in incessant rain starting the first evening :(
We, made the most of our trip, though, and had fun getting to know our friends even better. We were soaking wet but stayed warm by running up mountains, and drying ourselves out in front of big campfires at night.
Here are a few photos:

We started at Cottonwood campground about 40 miles from the town of Entiat.

The trail was pleasant, barely an incline, and follows the river for about 15 miles. Oh, and it was lined with huckleberries/wild blueberries!

On our first day, we turned from the river trail after 3 miles to hike past Myrtle Lake.


It was a beautiful, quiet, warm little lake with clear water and grass around the borders. We would totally go back with family or kids for a fun lake camp out.

Then we hiked up to an old volcano shell called Cow Creek Meadow.
There was a natural spring!

We ate our lunch (couscous, salmon, curry cashews)

found an Amanita muscaria button!

and continued hiking up through a Larch forest (larch are deciduous conifers, every fall their needles change colors from green to yellow and orange before they drop for the winter and regrow in the spring).

We camped at Larch Lakes just as it began to rain

and rain

and rain

and rain...



Even though we were cold and wet, Adam and I hiked up to Ice Lakes:




Triumphant:


It started to snow 15 minutes after we made it to Ice Lakes, so we left. When we got back to camp, we talked with Catherine and Hans decided to walk the rest of the way out that night (12 miles). It was horrible, wet, blistery, and dark by the time we made it to our tiny, dry car. After an exhausting 5 hour drive back to Seattle, I don't think any of us have been more happy to be home in our own beds.
But it was still a GREAT trip, don't get me wrong...
:)

Jammin'

I love to make jam!
...or rather "fruit sauce."
If you ask any of my old room mates, sisters, or even husband, they might say that the only downside to living with me is that the fridge gets just too damn packed with jars of every size and shape filled up with fruit sauce of every color. It can't really be called jam since I don't always use pectin and I don't always use sugar.
Come summer I just can't stop making jam. And the fridge suffers, beside the jars, it gets so jam packed with bags of fruit I find, berries, herbs (for herb ice cubes...the best way to preserve herbs over winter). It's a mess. A mess I love, until I spot a fruit fly :(
Then I go crazy.

So far this year we have blackberry, blackberry-anise hyssop, plum, plum-blackberry, plum-rosemary, plum-sage, plum-rhubarb, asian pear, asian pear-cayenne, elderberry, jaltomate, and garden huckleberry (the last two are black Solanaceae berries from the Medicinal Herb Garden at UW). And more join the list every week.

This is what I love to find: an urban forage goldmine!

My picker:


Elderberry

A little Saturday morning Blackberry Jam Waffle beet planting session.

Feets!

Books

I have a few part time jobs. One of them is to water, weed, and prune the Erna Gunther Ethonobotanical Gardens at the UW's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

Also known as the "wild woman of the woods" garden.

I've already learned and memorized the plants. It takes several hours to water the garden and with the heat Seattle's had (over 100*F!) I sometimes water 3 times a week. In those hours I have started reading books again. I haven't actually read books like novels and such for a long time.

I read "Like Water for Chocolate," a humourous book set in Revolution Era Mexico about a girl whose cooking incites supernatural events. There is a movie I hope to see soon.

Then I read "The Botany of Desire." The apple chapter reminded me how much I want my own mini-farm with heirloom (non-hybrid, re-seeding) plants...especially fruit trees. The tulip chapter explained why the Dutch love tulips and some of the mystery behind beauty (at one point, a single tulip bulb would sell for the price of an entire estate. In the marijuana chapter I was reminded their exists a hallucinogenic lichen and that I appreciate having the quality of a sense of wonder. The potato chapter reminded me how amazing and fascinating genetic modification can be, but also how unstable.

My next books will be:
"Guns, Germs, Steel" by Jared Diamond
"Seed Saving"
and I'm going to finally finish the Joseph Smith biography "A Rough Stone Rolling."

Any other recommendations?

*

Mt. Rainier

Adam and I did a three day, 35 mile backpacking trip for our 3 month anniversary!

We did the Northern Loop Trail, part of the Wonderland Trail that circles Mt. Rainier, our local volcano.
Here we are at the start with Mt. Rainier in the background:

And here we are at the end:

It was so great to be out in the forest and on the trail with Adam. We've been working in an office/lab for far too long.

Our home for the night:


Adam is a master lightweight backpacker. He got our pack weight to around 20 pounds each (he carried our sleeping gear, and I carried our food and water). This is our tarp (like a tent), ground cloth, sleeping pads, and our homemade double sleeping bag (more on our homemade bag to come).


We saw meadows brimming with wildflowers, high country lakes and streams, rocky mountain peaks, foggy forests with slime molds and parasitic plants, glaciers, and few mean mosquitoes.


(we bathed in that lake!)
(can you see Adam in this fog?!)


(Orobanchia, a chlorophyll-lacking plant that feeds off a fungus that feeds off a conifer tree)

(a strange lichen)

(a slime mold?)


(I thought those red, fungi-like organisms above were slime molds...but they are collembola, some kind of bug! hahaha!)









(a marmot!!! so cute!)

Shi-Shi Beach

Over Memmorial Day weekend, Adam and I went beach camping with some other couples on the Olympic Penninsula.

We went to Shi-Shi Beach, near the Makah Reservation at the very Northwest corner of the United States.

It was beautiful :)



We primarily sat around talking, playing magic, and cooking food. Since we only hiked 1 mile in to the beach, Adam and I packed a feast every day. we brought eggs, butter, fresh herbs and spices, cheese, lentils, pancake mix, and more.


We saw great tidepools full of sea stars, sea anemones, crabs, and many many types of algae/sea weed.



Happy Birthday Candice! 19 years old, baby! May 24, 1990.

Bike Ride!

Yesterday, Adam and I Rode our bikes all over King County.
We started at our house in Redmond, picked up the Sammammish River Trail and rode north through Woodinville around the east side of Lake Washington to Bothell where we visited my Aunt before riding south down the west side of the Lake. The Sammammish River Trail ended and the great Burke Gilman trail began. We rode past my old house, through UW, across Seattle to Ballard, across the Ballard Salmon Locks, and down along the waterfront to Pike's Place Market for dinner!

It was amazing, we saw so much. There is something about biking through a place that makes you feel a part of it. You see much more than in a car and the sense of accomplishment ties you to the location.

It took 5 hours, but we could do it mush faster next time :)