Butterfly Attack

We looked out the window and what did we see? Millions of butterflies in our tree! And the grass and the sky and on us and on the cats and on the deck.... It looked like it was snowing butterflies.

Blessed

There's more where these came from! Any takers?

Kathleen's Wedding

We went to Reno last weekend to attend Kipp and Kathleen's wedding. They were so stinkin' cute! Plus they fed us chocolate at the reception so everything was wonderful. Rory liked the fruit tarts the best.

While we were there we tagged along with Kipp's family to get some family pictures taken. They took us to the coolest house I've ever seen! The owners designed and built it themselves completely out of recycled material plus it had an amazing garden. The picture below is of their 'garden house' which was originally intended for a garden shed but turned out way too cool to store tools in.

This is the main house. The inside was gorgeous. The office was built to look like the captain's cabin in a ship.

We went to Reno a few days before the wedding and had some time to kill so we went to Tahoe and poked around for a while. The lake was beautiful. Someday we'll have to go back to hike or snowboard. This time we went mini golfing.

Mighty Fishers

Jolene caught a sardine.

Rory caught a dragonfly.

Sawtooth

We went rock climbing at this neat little spot north of town on Saturday. It was toasty hot!

Skyline Trail

We were sitting around Friday and wondering what to do with ourselves when the thought came to do a night hike. So we did. We headed to the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness and hiked the Skyline Trail and various other trails to make a 15 mile loop. It was 5ish when we started.

We lost the trail a few times... there was still snow on the ground. That's when maps come in handy.

Dinner! Honeymoon cheesy ramen. The wind was howling.

Here's one of the places we lost the trail. We didn't want to cross the massive snowfield up top so we went lower and slipped and slid across the smaller snowfields and scree. When I say slip and slide I mean it too. I slid down one of the snowfields for a while before I could stop myself. My bum got wet.

We saw a mountain goat during one of our bewildered periods. Rory saw it in all its majesty. I saw its rear end. It was an impressive rear end. After wandering around a cliffed mountain side for a while after seeing the goat we did find the trail again. Yay! Rory also scared two ghost dogs away by hissing like a snake. After lots and lots of stumbles and laughter we made it back to the car around 2 am. And then drove home... longest drive of my liiiiife and I wasn't even driving! Now we're feeling sort of zombie-ish but happy and fulfilled. It's nap time.

Man Trip to ski the South Sister in July

Matt, Aaron and I(Rory, this is my first blog post ever) went to the South Sister for some cool weather during this hot time of year. We started at the Green Lakes trail head. 

We decided to go up the day before and camp at Green Lakes .

The trail was gorgeous all the way up to Green Lakes, the river was really pretty. 

The South Sister in all her glory awaiting the mighty conquerors to ski up and then back down. By the way this is like my first real tele-mark experience.

Aaron decided to take a little swim with all of his gear on. When jumping off of the snow drift his skis hit the snow and catapulted him into the river.

Since Emily wasn't here to be the photographer I assumed the role of photographer.

The next morning we got up at 5:00am and left the campsite. As soon as we left it started to rain and rain and rain. We skinned up the side of the mountain except my skins kept coming off of my skis that I borrowed, so I decided to just hike.

Here we are..... but not at the top. After several hours and several thousand feet of climbing we decided the rain, wind and intense cloud cover won the day.  So we decided to come off of the mountain skiing.  Now I've skied before but tele-mark is a lot harder than it looks especially with a large pack on. Needless to say we all made it down in one piece, just a little wet and cold. It was definitely a fun trip.