Pacific Northwest Trip: Day 2

Monday, June 3rd we climbed Mt. St. Helens. We started our journey at 6am (although I woke up at 4:30am from a bad night's sleep!) 

Starting the uphill climb. Down in the forest it was fairly easy going. The snow was compact still early in the morning and we had no idea what laid ahead of us - the top of the mountain doesn't look that far away now does it? 

A couple that we'd see on and off throughout the day took our picture for us. It was about 7AM at this point. We still had no clue how much more intense things were going to get.

Ramin liked this cool area because the terrain was otherwordly. You can see me hiking here. This was the easy peasy stuff!

We rarely took time for pictures because we so intensely focused on what we were doing. This shot is great because it gives you an indication of how far we'd come at that point. The white stuff in the distance are CLOUDS....and we started out in the valley behind the hill just above my head. The toughest climbing was still ahead of us! 

The mountain was still snow covered of course and we had been trekking through it for a while at this point. The day was incredibly nice and so we just wanted to keep going, but we hadn't prepared ourselves for snowy conditions (we'd thought to ourselves that if we got too deep in snow we'd turn back)...so my feet were starting to freeze at this point.

You can see Mt. Hood in the very background of this picture. It was a amazing. I climbed a little bit more from this point before I started realizing that my toes were freezing. I wasn't going to make it to the very top - which was only about a 1/2 mile from here and much more vertical.

I turned around and slid on my butt back down to a meeting point - now THAT was the funnest part of the entire climb! 

Ramin is a trooper and kept climbing. Here is a shot he took of the incline he was climbing to get to the top. 

Here is Ramin's view from the top! You can see Mt. Rainer in the background and if you look close enough you can see steam/smoke coming out of the pit below.

A ridge at the top leads to an image of Mt. Adams

Ramin hung out at the top for a while with a few other people who were kind enough to take his picture. The white stuff on his face is salty sweat 

Ramin's trusty walking stick that someone left for another person to use down at the base. 

This is our last picture after coming back down the mountain...this was the only shot we took because we just wanted to get back down to the bottom.

Overall the entire trip up and down took us 13 hours. We left at 6AM and returned at 7 PM. I stopped climbing up after 5 hours of climbing and Ramin took another 2 hours to climb to the top, hang out and then return to my meeting spot 3/4 of the way up the mountain. While I waited for him I was able to dry out my socks and shoes and pants. I was also able to help some underprepared college guys who were extremely close to getting frostbite and potentially hypothermia.

We signed the book once we were done. Apparently we'd missed seeing some bears that day!

We had planned to stay one more night in our tent but we decided to find a motel instead because we wanted a NICE warm bed for the night  

Pacific Northwest Trip: Day 1

I realize it's been nearly 2 months since we took this trip, however, because of many life events that happened after we got back, I just now have the energy to post these pictures along with the stories that go with them. As is the case with all of our extended trips, I think the best approach here would be to post each day in a separate post.

So, we left SLC on Sunday, June 2nd and drove straight to the base of Mt. St. Helens. It was a LONG day, but also really fun. Ramin and I always have a great time when we  go on road trips together :)

In Hood River, Oregon, the first picture of the trip was taken after we saw this bald eagle land on top of his tree perch. He was quite amazing!

It's quite obvious that this eagle perches on this tree often.

He took off and Ramin was able to catch him in flight.

We drove straight from SLC to the base of Mt. St. Helens. This was a view point along the drive. We were kind of worried at this point because clouds were completely covering the top of the mountain - we weren't sure if our climb the next day would have the same conditions.

Both of us with Mt. Saint Helens in the background

Of course we ALWAYS get our picture taken with the official sign!

On the Trail of Two Forests you can go into lava tubes. I was too freaked out to go into the dark tiny space myself...but Ramin did just fine. The camera light is a little deceiving. 

This was a long tube...

The exit!

This is the entrance to Ape Cave. It was already about 8 PM by this point but we figured, we're going into a huge cave where there's no light anyway!

Here I am in Ape Cave. It was incredibly dark but it was a MASSIVE lava tube cave - very cool.

Here we are at Marble Mountain Sno-Park - the place where we'd be starting our climb up the mountain. This is our awesome instant tent - we love this thing! Although it's not incredibly warm 

We slept here so that we could get an early start the next morning. We ended up waking up a bit before 5AM and started out at 6AM.

Long Time, No Post!

Whoa - I didn't realize it's been two months since I last posted something on the blog. There are LOTS of pictures I need to upload, mostly our trip to the Pacific Northwest. But before I do that, I think it's best to do the June-July photo dump from the camera to catch everyone up to speed on the happenings :)

In very early June we babysat our friends (Jenn and Matt) little girls, Liesel and Lizzie. This is Liesel wearing a few of my long necklaces. I think she really likes to come to our house because of the dogs :)

Back in March or April my project group went and made some wood yard signs for Spring. This is how mine turned out - I placed it in my large front pot of course!

When we returned home from our northwest trip I went out to the backyard and was amazed at all of the beautiful roses that had bloomed!

I also get my front welcome table ready for the holiday, so here's what it looks like this year :)

I replaced the Spring sign with this one for the 4th of July. I'm leaving it and the flag in the pot until Labor Day :)

My pedestal pot on my front porch has filled in nicely. Most of it is ground cover we removed from the back yard!

When we got back from our trip I feverishly finished up an order I received on Etsy. A nice woman from Ireland wanted me to make her 10 heart mobiles for her wedding! Here's a sample of what they looked like before they were done. It was a lot of work but also extremely fun!

I also had another woman ask me to make her some patriotic ornaments. These were the ones I sewed for her - not finished of course.

We've only grilled one this year, but it was good when we did - chicken kabobs!

Remember our little tree in the backyard that started out 2 inches tall? Well now it's a monster, but I LOVE it! It provides some much needed shade back there during the hot summer days.

ACK! Dingo and I took our usual walk in the neighborhood canyon a few weeks ago and came across this guy hanging out in the middle of the path! I posted the picture to Facebook and people told me it was a harmless Gopher snake. Now that I know what it is I won't be afraid of them if I see one again, however at the time I didn't know what the thing would do. It wouldn't move! Even when I softly threw some rocks near it!

I've been much more busy at work lately. In fact, I was recently promoted! I now get to focus on leadership training, rather than customer service training - which is very exciting! But, it also means I have to work a lot differently than I used to sometimes. On this particular night I had to have a call with China at 8PM our time so it would be the morning their time. Before I left the building I turned around and noticed no one was around and the lights had turned off on me :)

Ramin and I are starting to take down our fish tanks. We got rid of our 150 gallon tank a few months ago. Now it was time to take down the 35 gallon tank now that all of the angels had died. I moved the last remaining algae eater up to live with the Betta in his small tank and we tore down the tank. In it's place we added a nice new glass curio, given to us by my good friends Tanner an KayDee! They recently remodeled their living room and no longer had room for this thing. It was JUST the perfect thing I needed for my figurines, now I just need to get some more!

The other week I FINALLY finished up my Christmas Snowman. I had taken a 6-month break from finishing him so that I could concentrate on my Etsy business...but now that he's done I'm pretty proud of the way he turned out, especially since he was my first stuffed figure.

On July 6th my friend Amy and I went to go and see Glenn Beck and his Man in the Moon show at the Usana Amphitheater near my house. It was a rainy night on and off, but we did get to see a cool double rainbow!

I've been on a new lifestyle change diet. I've gone gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, soy-free, corn-free, peanut-free and artificial sweetener-free. I know, that's a lot of "frees". It was hard at first because I had to cook for myself a lot more, can't really eat out AND had to shop at some new places. But, now that I'm in it a few weeks, I've found it's getting so much easier. AND, the best part is that I've lost about 7 pounds in the 2 weeks I've really been on the diet. You might be thinking, well what CAN you eat? I eat LOADS of protein from lean meats and beans. In fact, my favorite new thing is bean chips. They are amazing! I also eat lots of veggies and salads, brown rice, quinoa and everything coconut milk. In fact, I've found some great substitutes for ice cream (my favorite dessert) by using coconut milk ice cream! Here's an example of some of the things I've been eating!

Organic chicken (no hormones or antibiotics), steamed broccoli and brown rice/quinoa.

Typical salad including chicken, nuts and balsamic vinegrette.

Last weekend Tara and Chris came to visit and found this little guy trying to sneak under our fence! Thank goodness for our neighborhood Facebook page - we were able to sync up with the owners and they came to get him within 15 minutes :)

This week I stopped by Petco on my way home to get some bird supplies. The cashier noticed I twas buying bird items and asked if I'd be interested in taking home 3 birds with all of their supplies, including the cage! Apparently a family had to bring them back and give them away because the dad was allergic. I didn't want the responsibility at first and left the store. I went to the grocery store in the same shopping strip and kept thinking about the birds. I called Ramin and he was excited and we both agreed we might as well take them :) So I went back and adopted them! They are named Jade, Azure and Merlin, in the order you see them in the picture below.

So no we have 5 birds in two cages! Whew...that's a lot of birds. It will be a lot of maintenance and work but eventually we will get a much larger cage for all of them to live in together. These birds are still fairly young so I'm going to try and work with them a lot more to get them to be more tame, unlike our other two.

Yesterday I got in my car to leave work and looked at the temperature. 105! That's pretty normal for here though. The entire country is going through a heat spell. It's a big contract to the -3 degrees I recorded in the car back in February.

On my walk last night with Dingo I took a look at one of our side-yard plants and noticed how beautiful it's flowers are. They are like fire! I love it :)