Spring is here... somewhere.

The pelicans are back in the basin, that means spring is supposed to be here, right? Here's a picture I took of the pelican rookery on Clear Lake-- the lake we fly every week looking for the radio tagged fish we released last fall. Spring, spring, spring, rode the motorcycle today, supposed to be 63 tomorrow, go pelicans!

Crater Lake ski trip

Paige.... be nice to your sister!

Avalanche!!!

Avery the ski bunny 

Oops, looks like we lost one 

Yep, she's gone 

Here's Madison doing a backflip

off the road cut. 

Your turn Avery 

Paige and Madison made a cool little

ice cave in the side of the road cut. 

Crater Lake ski patrol weekend

 Here are some photos from ski patrol up at Crater Lake this past weekend

Ski out to the Crater Peak trailhead 

 This is a photo from the second floor balcony of the ski patrol house--

looking up at the snow drifts

 Cleaning out the webcam window in the Admin building-- Click the link below to see what a good job we did.
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The rotery cleaning the parking lot

Resetting trail markers in three feet of new powder

My Chaco plug

Let me tell you how much I love my Chaco sandals. But last summer on my Grand Canyon trip the soles separated from the foot beds and by the end of the trip the duct tape/superglue/gorilla glue patch job had made them pretty ratty looking. So I sent them into Chaco still covered in glue and sand asking if they could reattach the soles, and while they were at it if they could put a different sole on with better traction. And they did, plus replace all the webbing because I had gotten glue all over them. Basically a new pair of sandals minus the splotches of glue embedded with Grand Canyon sand and grit (but that's a war-wound souvenir). Thanks Chaco.

Avery's butterfly

Last summer, I think it was about middle of August, the girls found a caterpillar in the garden and Avery, loving all things crawly, set up a caterpillar jar to keep it in. After about a week it turned into a chrysalis and we waited and waited for the butterfly to come out. By the end of November we thought it had died and so we emptied the jar and put the chrysalis up on a shelf and kind of forgot about it. Then last night as I was getting ready to go to bed, this big swallow-tail butterfly sails by my head. This morning I woke up Avery and showed it to her, and half asleep she asked where did it come from, did I leave me window open or my door open? I then told her it was her caterpillar from last year and her eyes got wide open and she took a deep breath and was so excited. Now we just need to find some flowers to keep it going until spring.