Looking back at my childhood, some of the richest and most treasured memories are the adventures in the outdoors with my family. My parents took my brother and I on all kinds of great excursions near and far, in wilderness and in places wild in their own right. As adults, my brother and I recognized the importance of these experiences and decided to continue the tradition with our own annual ...
Camping
Go Fly a Kite: A Cape Lookout Camping Adventure
Last weekend, my brother and I had our annual (well, we do our best to make it annual) sibling camping trip at the Cape Lookout State Park yurts on the Oregon Coast near Tillamook. We decided a few years back that it was a good halfway point for both of us to travel, and that February was a good time of year for us to make sure we could schedule it into life. With exciting new additions this year ...
Good Day Sunshine: A Mid-Winter Coastal Getaway
This past weekend found us escaping the heavy blanket of winter fog that had settled in, to seek out sun, sand, and surf. Often when a low cloud layer sets in to the Willamette Valley like this, it is just the opposite out at the coast, and can be as warm as 60 degrees in late January. In my eagerness to feel the sun's warmth on my face again and soak up some Vitamin-D, I got a last minute ...
Solitude on the Peaks
I have just returned from a rejuvenating getaway with the best person I could think of to spend three days alone in a fire lookout tower with...myself. I rented Bald Knob Fire Lookout for the weekend, and set off with my books, my banjo, wool and needlefelting tools, the makings for delicious meals, and some Laphroaig single-malt scotch. I had been on several fire lookout trips before, discovering ...
Night on Bald Knob
This weekend I piled my kids in the car and headed out for adventure. Our friends, Erin and Julia, had rented Bald Knob fire lookout tower and invited us to join them for an epic camping trip. Although my dreams in life of becoming a solitary forest ranger staffing remote lookout towers has not yet come to pass in life, I discovered about 10 years ago that the US Forest Service rents out their ...
One Grain of Sand: One Mother’s Musings at the Oregon Dunes
With Winter nearly over, I finally managed to find time to head out for one of my yearly off-season yurt camping excursions to the Oregon Coast. Although these cold weather sojourns to the rugged stretch of coastline around Washburne State Park have become an annual occurrence for our family, and often something we do several times in a Winter camping season, this year was different ...
Camping 101
My "Camping 101" article is up and published in the current issue of Mom Magazine if you want to give it a peek at this link here: http://www.mommag.com/media/158121/Eug_outdoor%20mom.pdf. It's a quick rundown of tips and ideas for camping with children, whether it's been awhile or it's a new experience altogether, to help get folks back in the tent again. Happy camping! ...
Sittin’ on Top of the World: Musings on Camping in Fire Lookout Towers
I discovered my first fire lookout tower when I was on a road trip the summer after I graduated high school. My best friend and I were driving around on forest service roads outside Hamilton Montana, looking for a place to spend the night camping in my van, when we arrived at the summit of a mountain and discovered what seemed to us like a magical cabin on top of the world. I had heard of ...
Camping at Cape Blanco
Last weekend we set farm work aside to get out for an April camping trip at Cape Blanco State Park. It's a favorite spot of our family's, near Port Orford on the Oregon Coast, and we've gone there the past couple of years to enjoy warm Spring days on the beach. This was not quite the case this year, but we still found plenty to do in the rain. You can read my blog post about last year's fair ...
Back in the Tent Again
After many weekends of having our plans thwarted by the weather, we finally made it out for our first tent camping trip of the season. Our yurt camping trips in the winter months are a lot of fun, and get us out to the woods and beaches year-round, but there's something about off-pavement camping that feeds the soul in a greater way. No campgrounds, no neighbors, no cars driving by, just a ...