Here We Go Again

After a protractedly cold and wet spring, with March extending into June, summer finally arrived in the Pacific northwest around mid July. Yay!

Yesterday I went down to Mount Tahoma (Rainier) National Park and hiked the Emmons Moraine trail. I decided against going up to Sunrise having read the trip reports from the day before of how bad the mosquitoes were, so I stayed down at lower elevation. I'd originally planned to hike up to Glacier Basin after visting the glacier briefly , but construction work on Hwy 410 delayed me considerably, so I shortened the hike because it was getting very hot...

( Mountain, lake, and a glacier )

The Hood Canal is a very bizarre name, because it's not remotely a canal, it's a fjord. Maybe someone meant to call it the Hood Channel back in the 18th century and someone wrote it down wrong? Anyway, I went to the Hood Canal fjord last week for a couple of days of diving. Sea and mountains, it's very pretty!

( Photos above water )

I took a snowshoe trip to Franklin Falls from Snoqualmie Pass. The snowpack is melting fast this year - last year I did a snowshoe from the same starting point in the first week of March, and the snow level then was about the same as today. Unless they get some fresh fall up there, the ski season will be ending early this year.

( Snow, water and mountains )

Technically it may no longer be summer, but yesterday you couldn't tell. Shorts and T-shirt weather at 6000 feet in late September is an opportunity not to be missed!

I don't often get around to the west side of Mount Rainier, so despite hiking there regularly for more than a decade, I'd never done the Eunice Lake and Tolmie Peak Lookout hike.

Oh wow. This is a contender for best view in the park. Definitely top three. Mount Rainier National Park can throw views at you that are so eye-boggling they look like fakes.

( Tolmie Peak Lookout hike photos )

Our second morning on Orcas, we wandered around the village of Eastsound (that doesn't take very long) and visited the Orcas Island Historical Museum.

The museum's actually pretty fun, more interesting than I was expecting. They've taken six log cabins built by settlers in the 19th century, moved and rebuilt them in the town, then linked them all together under one roof, so each main room in the museum is one cabin. There are a lot of early settler artefacts, plus some from the indigenous people, and a lot of extra oddities. My favourite was the story of the local school district commissioner, who had to oversee all the different schools in the islands and was given a rowboat to do it with. In the five years he did the job, they estimate he rowed around seven thousand miles, and they had the rather sorry-looking boat there in the museum. It said once he got caught in a storm and it took him three days to make the ten miles between San Juan and Orcas islands....

That afternoon, we drove around the island a bit and investigated the various edges.

( Here come the photos. )

We took a sunset trip with Seattle Ballooning, who fly out of the Auburn area. The balloon launched from a small airfield on a gorgeous evening.



( Much more lies below )

Summer is here, and the weather is lovely! The rabbits appreciate the fully developed clover lawn in the early mornings (and the cats are very frustrated that they can't get to the rabbits. Neko in particular is driven mad by them.)



I put some solar powered lights around the edges of the patio. I hadn't been intending to get ones with fancy patterns, but these ones got the best reviews for reliability and for no hassle warranty replacement, so I bought them with some slight apprehension over how they would look. But I actually like the result, and even the SO remarked positively on them.



I also bought a bird bath with a solar powered fountain that floats in it. It doesn't need full sun to work, but on an overcast, rainy Seattle day, it only gives a spurt every few seconds instead of the full sun continuous flow. I've yet to see any birds use it, but it's only been a week, and they're wary of new things.



We had another bat in the house incident last night, so we were up at 4.30am trying to catch and remove it. The sequence of events goes like this:
1. Locate and remove all the cats from the bat room.
2. Open the patio door.
3. Two naked humans holding a large towel between them attempt to use the towel to steer the bat towards the open door (we always try this and it never works. The bat always dodges back past us away from the door again. Next time we should probably skip this step.)
4. Wait for the bat to land somewhere not too inconvenient, put a large sieve over it, slide cardboard beneath and remove from the house.

After that, I was wide awake for another hour. And when I did finally go back to sleep, I dreamed of wildlife invading the house and we had to keep catching and removing them. I recall there was a band-tailed pigeon, and after I took that outside, there was a grouse in the house, so I caught and released that then found something like a big mole with claws for digging. I was getting very frustrated trying to figure out how they were all getting inside...

I was supposed to have gone diving this morning, but two days ago I got an email from my dive buddy saying he'd been in a 'minor' accident on his motorcycle and would have to cancel. I emailed back that even a minor accident on a motorbike is scary, wished him a speedy recovery and asked him to let me know when he'd be up for rescheduling. To which he replied that he's torn all the ligaments in his ankle, has a compound fracture in his tibia and is looking at a couple of surgeries. That is not 'minor', Eric! But hey, he came off his bike and he's not dead, and he's neurologically competent and typing emails that same day, so I suppose by some standards, that's minor...

So no diving for me, and no hiking in this beautiful weather either, because three weeks ago I slipped on the stairs and I'm pretty sure that I have a hairline fracture where my big toe meets my foot. It barely hurts at all just walking around on it, but I'm going to wait for all the swelling to go down before I hike on it. And that's the summary of me!

Yesterday was relatively mild and precipitation-free and I wasn't working, so I headed up to the mountains. The last of our snow disappeared mid-week, and I went out hunting for more.

( Gold Creek Basin )

Among the things that arrived in the house this Christmas were some new cat beds.

Here's old man Kuro in the one I call the igloo.


( More cats below! )

So, after the landscaping project was finally completed a few weeks ago, it promptly began to rain. A lot. But I've got some photos now on a non-gloomy day, and here's the end result.

( New hardscaping )