Sam is off to college

After just shy of 18 years here, Sam has left the house. Catherine took him off to Pittsburgh today to move in at CMU. Orientation starts Monday and classes a week after that. Bye, Sam.

Backcountry travels

This summer's family trip was to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. (The latter are awfully craggy for something that reminded a lonely french trapper of breasts... Even considering how long he'd probably been out there on his own.) We spent two days driving around Yellowstone seeing the various weird thermal features and the canyon, then four days on horseback along the Snake River, and finally two days in Jackson and the Tetons. 

Anna captured our horseback experience pretty well when she looked at me late on day 2 and, with level gaze, said "Dad, what were you thinking?" That was an especially uncomfortable day, with about 6 hours of riding on already sore butts, and not enough experience yet to know how to more-or-less relax. Also, nothing very scenic.

Day 3 was great - we ended up at a beautiful meadow somewhere a bit north of the river, surrounded by mountains and with a large-ish thermal feature about 3/4 mile from the campsite, which Sam & I hiked to.








There we saw a little geyser, continuously spouting about 3' high, coming out of this green and yellow cone, looking a bit like some sort of giant squash.

We also heard wolves howling in the meadow that night, which was very cool.






The weekend after we got back, Sam & I went off for a 2 night backpacking trip into the Sierra Nevada between Echo Summit (hwy 50) and Caples Lake (hwy 88). We did a loop trail, starting at Hwy 50 just below the Summit, on a little-used, one-time route of the pony express called the Hawley Grade. We really had to hunt to find it, as there was no sign and it began behind the highway guardrail. We never really got far enough from either trailhead to lose the day-hikers, as you can in Desolation. From the Hawley Grade, we continued about 4 miles south, connecting first to the Tahoe Rim Trail, then eventually to the PCT along which we finished the route back to Echo Summit. The second night campsite was a spectacular cliffside spot that Sam found. We just barely snagged it, beating out a couple who'd been stopped by a ranger and forced to wait while he wrote out a fire permit for them. Of course they found out about the site from the same ranger, so we didn't feel too guilty.