Falls Over the stone lip the creek leaps out as one divides in spray and streamers, lets it all go. Above, back there, the snowfields rocked between granite ribs turn spongy in the summer sun water slips out under mucky shallow flows enmeshed with roots of flower and moss and heather seeps through swampy meadows gathers to shimmer sandy shiny flats then soars off ...
Life
Lobster Surprise! (And we’re not talking Maine)
Okay, this is going to be some shameless mushroom bragging, but the excitement over finding my biggest mushroom ever has not subsided throughout the past week. It was one colossal lobster mushroom. And finding it on my first mushroom hunt of the season is feeling like a fortuitous omen indeed. People at the trail head offered me money for it when I got back to the car, and I refused, ...
Mushrooms of the McKenzie
Sometimes, the best things in life are the surprises that come along when we aren't even looking for them. On an evening stroll this past Sunday, I found quite the surprise out along the McKenzie River Trail! I was just strolling along enjoying the woods and the river flowing by, when I spotted some orange peeking out from the carpet of moss. This seemed really early for mushrooms, but we ...
Sun Flower
"Be like a flower and turn your face towards the sun." ~Kahlil Gibran ...
Summer’s Bounty
With all the hard work we put in at the end of the spring right after moving in, our little homestead is really starting to produce! We've been spending any open time at home we can get digging potatoes, harvesting fruit, stacking firewood and beginning preparations for winter. It's a busy time indeed, but such a good feeling to be seeing the results of our labors. The garden is coming ...
Night on Tidbits Mountain
Remember when I wrote a post a while back about hiking to the top of Tidbits Mountain? Well, we decided when we were up there that it would be a lot of fun to sleep up there on top of that mountain, out under the stars. My partner said he had been talking about it for four years and had never done it, so one evening over Labor Day Weekend, after spending the day working out in the yard and digging ...
Hiking Stuart Lake
Summer is winding down with the beginning of school this week for all of us Oregonians, and as we make our way into the fall, I am feeling very fortified with Nature from all of the wonderful excursions we managed to squeeze in during the month of August. A few weeks back we traveled up to visit my folks in Washington, to enjoy some time together seeing their place and all the fruits of their ...
Hiking Matthieu Lakes
One hot August day recently, we decided to take a family day hike up to the Matthieu Lakes in the Three Sisters Wilderness for a picnic lunch and a swim. The kids, being eleven-year-olds, put up some resistance to hiking in to our swimming destination at first, but once we got out there on the trail, they were happy hikers. The trail is an old portion of the Oregon Skyline Trail, and now the ...
Sourdough Biscuits
I had the good fortune recently to take home a jar of sourdough starter from some friends of mine who have been doing a summer CSK (community supported kitchen) and offering shares of breads and baked goods to a handful of folks each week. They had so much sourdough starter that they did not mind sharing. I used to make my own sourdough from a pioneer recipe I found using boiled potato water to ...
Hiking Grasshopper Mountain
Last week saw us out on another hiking excursion to one of the less traveled trails up the McKenzie watershed, Grasshopper Mountain. One of those gems in the back of William Sullivan's hiking books, my partner discovered this trail a couple of years ago when he had tried all the featured hikes and wanted something extra. This particular day, we took our friend and his 12 year old daughter along, ...