4-15-01: It stays chilly late into the year in Washington. Here you can see that the snow is still halfway down Mount Si behind the old North Bend Animal Clinic. We finally upgraded from this old building in the spring of 2005.

4-15-01: We have always suspected that Patchouli was really an alien. Here we caught him with his antennae showing.

5-23-01: The weather finally warmed up enough for us to stop bothering our pets and get out of the house. One of our first stops was the Hoh rain forest on the Olympic peninsula. Here, I provide a sense of scale for one of the big, old growth Sitka spruce trees.

5-23-01: An old nurse log. Space is at a premium in the rain forest, and sunlight in particular. Often, the best chance a young tree has at making a start in life is on the side of an old tree that has fallen, clearing out a section of canopy to let in the bright sunlight. Hence, this near-perfect row of trees, now far larger than the remains of the nurse log that allowed them to get their start. The last time I returned to this spot, in 2005, the nurse log itself had collapsed, leaving hollows under the roots of the trees.

5-23-01: When this happens, you can get some wonderful and unusual formations of roots. Here Eric sets up for a photo looking into the mouth of these particularly Cthulhoid roots. Doesn't it look like the tree is about to wrap one of those big roots around him, and draw him into the hollow below? I think this picture also does a better job of reflecting the true scale of these enormous trees than the typical family vacation photo of me and the spruce.

5-23-01: Somehow, I felt right at home amid the strange twisted roots and towering trees. I think its because the rainforest, with its giant trees and dense ferns, looks the way I imagined the forest to be when I was young. I grew bigger, and the trees didn't... except here, they did.

6-18-01: In search of more big trees: the Tatoosh mountains on the South side of Mount Ranier. The photo, of course, does not do justice to the bright white snow and clouds, gray-black rock, emerald mountainsides, and lapis sky. Suffice it to say that the view was spectacular. In real life, there are a couple of waterfalls barely visible on this mountainside.

6-18-01: The Grove of the Patriarchs has been boardwalked to protect the roots of the old growth trees. Trees in Washington grow very shallow roots, to take advantage of the constant drizzling rain and seeping spring snow melts. Consequently, the roots can be easily damaged by the thousands of footsteps that cross this well-known area of the park year after year. Eric has found a comfy place to rest at the foot of this old cedar.

6-18-01: These twin giants are unusual in that they have both survived to become so large. They were just far enough apart to not give the other too much competition, though now they are nearly grown together at the base. The spiralling pattern of the tree on the right is also unusual, although in other ways they are typical of big Douglas firs.

6-18-01: Brown heart rot and insects have gnawed away at the softer parts of this tree, leaving this strange knotwork of the harder parts of the roots.

6-18-01: Back home, Patchouli has packed himself to go to work with Eric. He's a real lap(top) cat.

7-9-01: The next mission was to find trails and scenery that would be suitable for Grandma Sally when she came to visit. And its a good thing I checked ahead! This trail, while listed as easy in the guide book, started by fording a small river! This little barrier seemed to be enough to keep out most two-legged visitors to the Bogachiel trail, or perhaps it is simply that it is less well known and slightly less spectacular than the nearby Hoh trails. In any case, there were more elk prints than human along this trail, and I got the first of many, many, many pictures of banana slugs.

7-9-01: Beach 4 turned out to be a fantastic place for checking out tide pools. The concentration of life in these areas is stunning. Here the floor of the pool is lined with green anenomes, while barnacles and bivalves encrust the rest of the rocks. I'm not sure of the proper name for the little black bivalves with the purple-blue sheen inside of their shells, but they are certainly a common sight along the tidal areas of the Washington coast.

7-9-01: An attempt to capture the strangeness and complexity of the seaside rock formations. These particular ones are at Beach 3, another inventively named Washington beach.

7-17-01: Grandma Sally and I settled on visiting Beach 4, which is just off of Highway 101, no hiking required. We took several shots of us pestering the sea life with the film camera, but I captured this shot of some kids watching the ocean with the digi. I really love the composition of this picture, particularly the colors. The shirts the kids are wearing happen to be deep sea blue and seafoam white, their hair just a little yellower than the sand and rocks below. The jaggedness of the rocks makes their position seem a little more precipitous and contemplative than it really is, but they really were just sitting there, quietly watching the vastness of the waves as they rolled into shore.

7-17-01: Grandma made the ¾ mile hike through second-growth coastal forest to Second Beach without a hitch. Getting over the beach logs was a little trickier – they were stacked up particularly high that year, and it took a bit of actual clambering to get over them. We took it slow, though, and made it to the Pacific and its sea stacks while the tide was still fairly low and the sun still bright.

7-17-01: The next day we went to the Hoh. The great curtains of moss and person-sized ferns look all the bigger next to Grandma Sally's small frame.

7-17-01: The next day-trip was to Paradise at Ranier. This is the view down Box Canyon. It looks almost unreal in the photograph, as it it were sculpted in paraffin, but in reality it is every bit as steep and narrow as the photograph implies.

7-17-01: Paradise is full of waterfalls, particularly that summer, which was unusually soggy even for the Northwest. Here is Myrtle falls. The trail and bridge above it might give you a sense of scale.

7-17-01: A steep downhill trail leads to the foot of Narada falls.

7-17-01: An unnamed steep spot in Paradise Creek. On the film camera we got pictures of each of us standing up by those pink flowers on the right, but with the digi I only captured the water itself.

7-17-01: Grandma amid some of the many wildflowers at Paradise.

7-17-01: I really like the lighting in this picture. I think it captures the beauty of a high overcast day in the Northwest.

8-21-01: August, still raining. In the twilight of the fog on Hurricane Ridge, the deer are not particularly shy.

8-21-01: In fact, they'd let you get pretty close...

8-21-01: This one is just taking a short cut across the parking lot.

9-1-01: Where the hell are all these wasps coming from? said Eric, looking up into the tree as four or five slightly irritated yellow and black wasps circled him suspiciously. After a few moments the outline of a turban-shaped, foot-tall, Looney Toons style hornet's nest coalesced among the leaves, inches above Eric's head. Eric, go inside. Why? Just go inside. We decided that we were too little to deal with this problem, and went crying to our landlord. Our landlord, Lorie, is a nurse in the military and is way cool, and wasn't going to let a few little old wasps intimidate her. She came out the next day and blasted the thing with some sort of canned Life Remover. For about two days there was a gentle rain of dying wasps. When that stopped we gingerly removed the nest from the tree. Curiosity overcame sense and we picked it open to see what was inside, which turned out to be really neat – like a spiral staircase of paper wasp nests.... with little wiggly larvae inside. We didn't want any more wasps hatching, so we decided that the only safe course of action was to nuke it from orbit....

9-1-01: ... and incinerated it in the barbeque.

Another adventure with the local wasps occurred when we decided it was time to rotate our compost bin. I don't have pictures of this one, because half-finished compost is generally not very photogenic. I had turned over the bin (a free-standing plastic thing) and started to sort soil from not quite done yet compost, when a wasp landed on me. I didn't think much of it, but a few minutes later another one landed on me. I shooed it away, but then one tried to crawl up my glove. At this point I looked up and noticed that the compost was absolutely crawling with yellow jackets – inside and out. Apparently they had been nesting in there. Oddly for wasps, they did not seem exceptionally pissed off that I had destroyed their nest... merely a little confused. Nonetheless I decided it was time to go back inside for a while. However, I was now faced with the problem of having a big pile of half-finished compost on a tarp in the middle of my yard. I went out with a shovel, and began slowly scooping shovelfulls of compost and yellow jackets back into the bin, sifting out the usable garden soil as I went. Whenever the bugs would seem to be getting agitated, I'd go back inside and drink some tea. When they seemed to have settled down, I went back out and resumed working. We went on like this for the rest of the afternoon, and eventually I finished, without ever being stung, and with a story of the peace-loving Northwestern yellow jackets.

9-7-01: Just before Labor Day weekend, a friend of ours working in Hollywood fell and broke his legs. Not knowing hardly anyone down there, and not having health insurance, he needed some help getting his house set up to be wheelchair-accessible. We packed up the car and took off to spend our Labor Day in California. I only have a few pictures of the trip, because we just took I5 down as fast as we could, and most of the journey looked about like this picture. The Golden State is a euphemism, most of California should be called the Brown State. We finally went to see the prettier parts of California in 2004, but this field (which appears to be a big producer for the pet rock industry) is typical... except Mount Shasta in the background.

9-7-01: We were plenty amused by the road signs, though. This sign says, Weed Next 3 Exits. I can't imagine how the town of Weed ever keeps their signs up for more than a week at a time. I was not able to get a photo of the Adopt A Highway sign indicating that this section of road was kept clean by the Weed Peacekeepers Association.

9-10-01: Our friend Kevin visited from the Midwest, scoping out the area to possibly move here himself. I took him up to see the clinic, at which time he captured one of the few photos of me at the old clinic.

9-10-01: Eric decided that Granite Mountain was a great introduction to hiking in the Northwest. After all, we'd had such fun with it last year! It was about three weeks later in the year than it had been last time, and it made a dramatic difference in the types of things that were growing up there. The flowers had mostly dried and become berries, and we were able to pick and eat huckleberries most of the way up. I like this shot because of all the fall colors, with Kevin in the background.

9-10-01: Eric and Kevin stopping for a rest.

9-10-01: Don't worry, Kevin... see, we can see the top from here!

9-10-01: Kevin did manage to get some shots of us, too.

9-10-01: Gettin' there....

9-10-01: The last quarter mile or so is a scramble through a boulder field. However, you do get peeks of the lookout at the summit to guide you. Yes, this really is where the trail goes.

9-10-01: And when you do finally get there, it is a pretty rewarding view. That's Mount Ranier in the background, looking particularly volcanic.

9-10-01: We got all the tourist shots, of course.

9-10-01: Kevin took this one of me in front of the big mountain.

9-10-01: And one of those rare shots with me and Eric in the same photo.

9-10-01: There were views other than Ranier, too.

9-10-01: This view is looking to the North – Ranier is at my back, and the sun is getting low in the sky to the West...

9-10-01: I take one last shot of the view, with the sun at my back, before heading back downhill.

9-10-01: On the way back, we discovered that this route around the boulder field was open. When we were up before, it was still covered in snow, but was open at this late time of year. I really like the stark white of the rock against the green alpine vegetation.

9-10-01: The climb was almost too much for our flatlander friend, though. On the way down he used two sticks to help transfer the weight to his arms, and was barely able to keep his feet as we walked the last half mile of the trail – in the dark, no less. He moved to Salem, Oregon about two years later.

9-11-01: Everyone in the US remembers where they were on September 11^th, 2001. I was in the Hoh rainforest.

It was Tuesday, my day off of work. The phone rang at about 6am. It was Jason calling from California, saying, Someone just flew a plane into the World Trade Center. I bet it wasn't an accident, and I bet Osama Bin Laden was behind it. Eric and I went back to sleep. This was the first time I'd heard the name Osama Bin Laden and at that foggy hour I did not imagine the impact that a terrorist attack on US soil would have on the rest of the country. I had not realized that most people felt safe, that most people didn't think it would happen here.

Kevin, though, had worked in the Pentagon for over a year, and was up making phone calls as soon as he heard the news. He made sure all his friends were safe, and as the first inkling of the reaction that the rest of the nation was having began to trickle over the newscast, we decided to go on with our plans to spend the day amid the big trees.

9-11-01: Good photos are hard to get in the dim light of the Hoh. So, while we spent most of the day there (this is in the Hall of Mosses, and you can at least see that there are person-sized curtains of moss hanging from this great branch), most of the good photos are from the beaches.

9-11-01: A tree, uprooted from the shore and tossed by the waves.

9-11-01: You never know what the sea will bring. This wad of rust and leather we eventually determined to be a sled – probably a dog sled washed down from Alaska. I have no idea if it is from 1990 or 1890, but it is certainly sea-worn.

9-11-01: We weren't there long before the fog began to roll in, like a great wall moving in from the sea. It created very, very cool lighting for this shot, though.

9-11-01: My attempt to capture the waves breaking on the rocks.

9-11-01: I like this image of the sea gulls lit against the foggy background.

9-11-01: Kevin spends some time just hanging out along the shore, thinking about things.

9-11-01: Time to go back to civilization, and whatever may await us there.

9-11-01: This Smokey the Bear sign does seem more poignant in this burned stand of trees.

9-11-01: Poignant... or perhaps sarcastic.

9-29-01: The fall rains had already started (or, more to the point, they had gotten perceptibly more steady than the summer rains) so we decided to head to the rumored dry side of the Cascades to go camping. At the time we were still fuzzy on the weather patterns, and little did we know how lucky we were to find a dry camp just on the other side of Stevens Pass. The patches of huckleberry on the other side of the mountain make a beautiful autumn tie dye though, with Eric in the foreground sporting his.

9-29-01: We did find a great camp site though, right on the edge of Rainy Creek. Eric is unable to resist trying out the fallen logs criss-crossing the creek.

9-29-01: Standing the same spot, but turning the camera the other way, you get a different view... the rapids forming a half-dozen foot-tall waterfalls.

9-29-01: Eric decided that this tree needed a hug. The entire tree is in this picture. The top has been broken off – apparently many times – and yet the tree is hanging in there with its four living branches.

10-9-01: Issaquah's Salmon Days is an interesting variation on the small town days theme. It centers around the fish hatchery, where the salmon return to spawn after living in the ocean. I suppose the salmon just wouldn't feel like they were proper, hard-working, Puritan salmon if they didn't have to work to get to their spawning grounds, so the hatchery has this fish ladder to accommodate them. Here a salmon makes the leap from one level to the next of the fish ladder.

10-31-01: Its that time of year again! This year, I wanted a truly 360 degree carving. So, this is the front...

10-31-01: ... and this is the back (visible as you leave the front porch after collecting your goodies)...

10-31-01: and this is what the sides looked like. I liked the idea of not carving all the way through the flesh to give a shadowed look, as well as having the eyes looking every which way.

10-31-01: Eric was going to do his pumpkin, but didn't get around to it. So I did this one much more quickly. It also had a crack where we'd inadvertently dropped it while gutting it, so I decided to use that as part of the design. If you look carefully you can see that there are staples crossing all of the fissures in the pumpkin. It's sort of a Frankenstein's Pumpkin or medical nightmare theme.

10-31-01: So this was the view of our porch on Hallowe'en 2001.

12-20-01: Remember that picture of Eric and I in the tidal rocks at Larabee? This is the same area at high tide. The indentation in the rocks that is furthest out to sea is the one that we were sitting in the year before.

12-20-01: Sometimes, what you really need is a neutron repolarizer. Not having one handy, I decided to build one out of spare parts. It does look very much like a Doctor Who prop, doesn't it?

12-24-01: We decided that the right thing to do this Christmas was to go camping. We found a fabulous campsite on the shores of Lake Quinalt. You can only barely tell in this photo, but the trees are bigger around than our tent, and our tent is over six feet in diameter. As you can tell, we were also miraculously endowed with good weather.

12-25-01: On Christmas Day we decided to go to the beach. Yes, it was cold. This seagull is keeping an eye on Eric.

12-25-01: The seagull seems unperturbed by our antics beneath him.

12-25-01: Eric peeking through a hole in the rock.

12-25-01: Closer view. I like the way the spiral tie dye looks in the middle of the hole.

12-25-01: We decided to wrap up Christmas day with some snow. Of course, there was none on the beach, but our drive home brought us right past Hurricane Ridge, which has plenty.

12-25-01: Eric poses in front of the mountains.

12-25-01: The moon over the snowfields.

12-25-01: The moon over the snowy trees. The snow is about four feet deep at the base of the trees, and will continue to get deeper until mid-April or so. All the broken branches and stunted trees at this altitude make a lot more sense after seeing them at this time of year.

12-25-01: It was a great way to spend the holiday.