9-1-04: My family visited in another rainy season, and so we decided to spend this day at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium. The otters looked very determined as they charged in circles around their pen.

9-1-04: The beluga whale coming up for a breath.

9-1-04: The walrus seemed to be making a series of slow circuits around his tank. He would always cruise this section upside-down, although the reason remains a mystery to me.

9-1-04: He did finally come by for a close look at me.

9-1-04: A puffin taking a bath.

9-1-04: I've always liked sea horses. A cluster of them hangs onto the sea grass wih a shrimp in the background.

9-1-04: The only thing better than sea horses are leafy sea draongs. This is a head-on view.

9-1-04: If this one is representative, they hardly move at all, but instead sort of float, faintly waving their fronds every now and again. The waves of its back do look like the kinks of the sea weed as it branches.

9-1-04: Ace, deep into vine moss.

9-1-04: I don't know what this plant is called. It grows a single, glossy blue berry off of a central stem. The berry is hard and looks more like a gumball than something you'd expect to find in nature.

9-1-04: Around this time of year, Eric's sister and her family came to visit. We brought the kids up to Franklin Falls to play in the water. There were lots of other kids there (the ones that belong with us are Hope, to the far left, and Maya, the young one to the right).

9-1-04: Later, I made the longer hike up the Denny Creek trail to the next set of falls – Keewulee falls. They are about 3 miles up the Denny Creek trail.

9-1-04: This is the ancestor of the tiger lilies that you see in gardens. This flower is about an inch in diameter, but you can definitely see the family resemblence.

9-1-04: Pearly everlasting.

9-1-04: Foamflower. These are tiny little flowers that grow along the edges of the trails. Once you get used to looking for them, they're everywhere – but this was the first hike which I'd noticed them. The flowers are less than half a centimeter in diameter.

9-1-04: The next hike I took was to a place called Dirty Harry's Balcony. This is a plantain. I liked the cup-shaped flowers.

9-1-04: Dirty Harry's Balcony is a hike up a logging road from the turn of the century. “Dirty Harry” was a logger whose practices made even the other loggers blanche. He made a business of buying land that no one else wanted to log, and figuring out ways to get the trees off of it. The logging road barrels through streams and rocks that raise the hair on the back of your neck to picture wagons and early trucks careening down the road. The road's entrance is so overgrown, now, as to be barely visible. I found it by virtue of a good map and some other hiker's sticks that they had left on the ground nearby. It would be a harrowing drive but is a fairly easy walk.

9-1-04: Dirty Harry's Balcony is the view off of the black rock chimneys that jut from the south side of I90. They look like charcoal-brown columns against the green of the trees from the highway. They also look like they drop straight down! They nearly do, on the highway side – but you can pick your way along the trail and come up to them from the back.

9-1-04: My pack and walking stick, left in a precarious position to illustrate the vertical terrain.

9-1-04: The next hike with Echota and Josh, I decided to bring them to the ocean. We headed for Second Beach, and made a stop by Lake Crescent on the way in. This time I decided to try to capture the incredible clear blue of the water, and this shot is as close as I could get.

9-1-04: The walk in to Second Beach is through forest that was logged very early in the history of Seattle, so its trees have been growing again for nearly 100 years. The density of life in this part of the forest is amazing. These ferns are crowded on a flat spot on the trunk of this twisted tree. Life will grow nearly anywhere.

9-1-04: I have walked past this fallen tree many times, and am always amazed at how perfectly placed the ferns and huckleberries are in its roots. I can imagine having this as a sculpture in a garden.

9-1-04: The branches on this tree grew strangely. In the foreground, Josh speculates on how it may have come to be this way.

9-1-04: This tree looks as though it is stretched to its limits as it clings to the other for support.

9-1-04: The inevitable banana slug photo.

9-1-04: Lots of driftwood and fog on the beach today.

9-1-04: These are not colors that I normally like, but somehow they look good on an anenome. Sea-green is a color you can get away with if you actually live in the sea.

9-1-04: I had my eyes open for artistic arrangements of beach flotsam this day. I liked the white bones, black kelp, and gray sand.

9-1-04: An assortment of things washed up on shore. I love the smoothness of wood that has spent time being worn by the sand.

9-1-04: On the way out we found a patch of clover on steroids. This is ordinary white clover, the kind that's a weed in most lawns. This patch just happened to grow flowers the size of my palm.

9-29-04: Its autumn on the east side of the mountains. You can see the fall colors starting to show amid the evergreens against the white rock and blue sky.

9-29-04: A series of little waterfalls near Icicle creek.

10-31-04: Just before Hallowe'en Kendrick and I took a trip to Oregon to check out the mushrooms there. We were hunting in the forest surrounding Mount Hood, and caught this picture of the mountain with its reflection.

10-31-04: This year we were throwing a big Hallowe'en party, so I decided to do several pumpkins.

10-31-04: This one was actually the trickiest of the ones I did. I was very proud of getting the smoke from the hookah to look appropriately smokey, and the mushroom (an Amanita muscaria, the “Alice in Wonderland” mushroom) to look taxonomically correct.

10-31-04: Two different exposures of the “Reaper” pumpkin. This shot shows the outlines better...

10-31-04: ... and this one shows the details better.

10-31-04: My favorite of this year's pumpkins, the Dalek pumpkin.