Explored a huge area between Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens, called the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. There’s a several thousand acre lava bed (above) that’s stocked with pumice, wild flowers and bear grass. There’s also a series of ice caves (below) which has icicles year round.
Drove the length of the old historic Columbia River highway, and took in half a dozen (or more) of the waterfalls that line the river. Most of them were bigger than any that I had ever seen before, and all of them were VERY photogenic.
After driving through the Columbia River Gorge, we set off for Mt. Hood. After decades of east coast mountains, it’s hard to put a 11,000 ft volcano into perspective. Spent the latter part of the day wandering around the Timberline Lodge, a ski-resort on Mt. Hood that is operated by the U.S. Forest Service.
Just outside of the Japanese Garden is a HUGE Rose Garden, which serves as a kind of public square for Portland families. The garden has hundreds of different kinds of roses, each layed out in 8 foot by 2 foot plots, side-by-side and end-to-end across acres of land. It’s simply overwhelming.
Summer vacation, finally, and I am hanging with the hippies of Portland, Oregon.
Part of the Oregon Zoo complex on the outskirts of Portland is a Japanese Garden, which is maticulously maintained. It’s rare that I feel like something was worth the cost of admission, but here not only was it a steal, I felt that my $8 was actually being folded back into the park itself. I can’t imagine how much they spend to keep this place up, but it is certainly more the cost of admission.
I had no idea that my hosting provider (lunarpages, not as evil as most hosts) actually provides its clients with as many instances of WordPress as we can handle. Now, I’m not a blog snob but I do like having the ability to categorize posts. How has blogger lasted so long without categories?
Anyway, it was a weekend’s worth of work, but 99.8% of that was formatting the display template. The default was “pretty,” but I wanted the look and feel to merged seamlessly with my main site.
I made my third shooting trip in three days today. It was miserably hot, and while I was pleasantly surprised at how big Prince William Forest Park was, I was startled at its lack of photogenic-ness (at least the Pyrite Mine Loop). A butterfly flirted with me for a couple of minutes (highlight of the afternoon), but then grew bored with me and flew off.
I had a spare Saturday night with little to do, so made my semi-annual treck around D.C.’s national monuments at night. I last did it in 2003, and haven’t done it with my new camera. It’s amazing how much of a difference the camera makes …
It’s Friday / Flexday season at work again finally, and I took the day to hike part of the Cedarville State Park, located about 15 miles southeast of the District. Interesting park, with lots of recreational opportunites, like fishing, boating and archery. Not a heck of a lot to look at, but there is pleant of it there to wander around.
Hiked another Nature Convervancy preserve, this on called the Fraser Preserve near Great Falls, Virginia.
It’s a nice hike, relatively flat and easily navigatable … except for one tiny little problem. Apparently, the trail crosses onto the property of a neighboors who doesn’t like the Conservancy much. There is a 5-string barbed wire fence blocking off fifteen (yes, 15) feet of the circuit trail. How much do you have to hate conservationists (not to mention the baptists that co-own the preserve) to do that?!?
To make matters worse, everything around that part of the path is swamp-land, so you have to go all the way back past the river and use the government access road to get across the property … just to get to where the blue blazed trail picks back up.
When you do make the trip, you’ll have the opportunity to stand at the barbed wire fence and stare at the neighboor has he fishes away on his fancy-pants barbed-off stream. I did, and it was a heck of a lot of fun … tho he didn’t seem to enjoy it that much.