4 March 2007 by ben.

On Sunday, 4 February 07, Phil stayed in Tucson for his final performance of Madame Butterfly, and Kim, Marion and I hiked most of the way up the Pontatoc Canyon Trail just north of Tucson, rising about 1900′ above the trail head and about 2500′ above Tucson for this beautiful panorama.
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4 March 2007 by ben.

After visiting the De Grazia’s Gallery in the Sun, my parents followed us to our motel where we checked in and relaxed for a few hours before going to dinner and then attending Phil’s performance of Madame Butterfly.

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24 February 2007 by ben.

Saturday, February 3rd, began with a rendezvous at DeGrazia’s Gallery in the Sun in NE Tucson with Mom and Dad and also Phil and Marion. DeGrazia lived on a working artist “ranch” with other artists frequently in residence usually in outbuildings that DeGrazia built himself. His artistic pursuits varied widely over the course of his career, from painting, sculpture and metal working to stained glass, and a variety of other ideas.

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21 February 2007 by ben.

Kim and I had our longest getaway ever this year (nearly six days!), reliving the honeymoon we never had, by flying to Tucson, Arizona at 6 am on February 1st. Yes, that’s early — we were up at 4 am — but we were psyched. Time to ourselves, away from jobs, routines, the usual worries and chores; and hopefully we’d get a huge dose of sunshine to blow away the winter blues. We were going to meet Marion, meet up with my parents a couple times, see Phil’s opera, and, weather permitting, hike in the mountains north of Tucson. And that happened, and more!

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25 September 2006 by ben.

The day after returning from Manzanita, Sunday August 27th, Kim, Bonnie and I climbed Bare Mountain in the heart of Washington’s Cascades. After driving about 45 minutes west from Seattle to North Bend, we continued north on a county road for 4 miles and then bounced onto a winding, washboarded, and fir tree-enclosed gravel road for another 18 miles to Bare Mountain Trail No. 1037.

We’d read that there were 50-plus switchbacks on this hike, so we knew it was going to be a long day. But the guidebooks promised amazing views, so we figured it would be worth it. Kim and I previously came up here in 1992, but we only made it 2/3rds the way up the slope, leaving all the best views for some later hike (14 years later, as it turned out). The lower section of the route traverses an immense, steepening field of gigantic ferns dotted with cedars and elderberry bushes. Higher up, the ferns give way to a sparse forest of alpine firs scattered among thousands of red huckleberry and wild blueberry bushes.
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30 August 2006 by ben.

For the fourth time in the past six years, we rented a house in Manzanita, Oregon, for the week starting 19 August. Manzanita is a small coastal town, population about 600, nestled between Neahkahnie Mountain to the north and Nehalem Bay to the south. It’s main street has a quirky collection of shops and restaurants, a pizza place that used to be great but greatly disappointing this year, and two miles of soft sandy beach. A chain of modestly sized sand dunes separates most of the surf from the homes, except near downtown where the sea can nearly splash main street in a good storm.

We enjoy lazing around the quiet community, our dogs are welcome, and the beach is just a block away. Since the kids are older now, we organized a couple family hikes during the week, both on the Oregon Coastal Trail as it passes through Oswald State Park a few minutes north of Manzanita. The first hike was mostly flat over three miles to Cape Falcon where we picnicked high above a primitive Falcon Cove while perched on a blackberry vine-infested trail clinging to the bluff. Views into the small cove reminded me of something I might see a million years ago — the rocky and narrow cove opening could wreck even the most daring of boaters; and no trail could safely drop the 250′ to the beach. There’s a memorial on the far side of the cove (along the cape) further up the trail than we ventured this time, and I suspect it is from a shipwreck. On our return, we detoured onto Falcon Point where we could look south past Smuggler’s Cove and Neahkahnie Mountain to Manzanita and beyond.

And just as we began our three-mile return trek, a flock of pelicans flew around the cape to fish in Smuggler’s Cove:

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15 August 2006 by ben.

On 12 August, Bonnie and I headed to North Bend for a hike up Bare Mountain, but thanks to signs that said the back country was closed (only private land, as it turned out later), we skirted around the Mount Si Days Festival headed up to Snoqualmie Pass, got up-to-date information at the forest ranger outpost, and descended a couple miles back towards Seattle to the Annette Lake / Denny Creek trailhead. Kind of a late start, but we were glad just to get there after all that traffic in North Bend.

The early part of the trail passed through a very mature forest, so there was little undergrowth and few birds. The freeway was quite audible for a while, except near the beginning when the trail crossed the smallish but vigorous Denny Creek. The going was easy for a while as the trail gradually ascended up and over the Iron Horse Trail, a smooth gravel rails-to-trail conversion of the old Snoqualmie Pass line. We paused there for a couple photos before continuing and saw a few mountain bikes coasting around the curve through the thick evergreen forest.

The next couple of miles saw us climbing quite a bit, and at times there were some great views across the valley. Ultimately, we climbed from about 1900′ at the trailhead to a peak of 3600′, dropping just slightly in the last 1/2 mile to the the lake.

Bonnie cooled herself off at the lake, and as we settled in to our picnic, we were surrounded by dozens of small black flies. We retreated a bit into the forest where the flies were fewer in an area where people evidently camped quite often, still with a nice view of the lake over the underbrush and under the high branches of the cedars and Douglass firs.

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