With the days getting a little longer now, I find myself developing that late afternoon itch to get out and enjoy the outdoors. After being tantalized by the sunshine outside my window all day, I am ready for a good adventure before I settle in for the night. At the end of this last lazy Sunday afternoon, I not only got outside to enjoy the fresh air in a field by Blue River Reservoir, but I took ...
Sunday Mornings on the McKenzie
I've been fortunate to spend a good amount of time getting to know the McKenzie River lately. After living in the Willamette Valley for so many years, you would think I would have headed up this way more often, but the Coast Range, Willamette Pass, and Southern Oregon have been the primary areas of my expeditions, reserving the McKenzie River watershed as an unexplored gem. On the weekends I have ...
Daylight Savings
The best part about daylight savings; descending Mt. Pisgah with my guys on a warm March evening. ...
Brandenburg Snow Shelter: A Saturday Snowshoe Trek
Finding new adventures in the snow has been a fun theme this winter, and last Saturday's visit to Brandenburg Snow Shelter up Santiam Pass was yet another excellent excursion. My partner and I took off after a hearty home-cooked breakfast with our snowshoes, snacks, map and great sense of adventure to explore the South Loop of the Ray Benson Snow Park. We were expecting it to be crowded, but ...
Go Fly a Kite: A Cape Lookout Camping Adventure
Last weekend, my brother and I had our annual (well, we do our best to make it annual) sibling camping trip at the Cape Lookout State Park yurts on the Oregon Coast near Tillamook. We decided a few years back that it was a good halfway point for both of us to travel, and that February was a good time of year for us to make sure we could schedule it into life. With exciting new additions this year ...
Snowshoeing Maxwell Butte: A Backcountry Snow Shelter Excursion
This weekend's adventure brought me to an intriguing destination that I had long heard tell of, but never made it out to see for myself; a backcountry snow shelter. I knew from books, maps, and friends who get out in the snow much more than myself that there are cabins with woodstoves scattered around the backcountry of the Cascades that you can access by skiing or snowshoeing for a nice warm-up ...
First Nettles
The air has had the feeling of shifted seasons and new growth in it this past week, which often means that the nettles are up. On Friday afternoon, after adding the remainder of last year's dried nettles to a batch of my handcrafted chocolate, I headed for one of my favorite local parks with my partner so that he could go for a run while I went on a nettle hunt. I took my time moseying over to my ...
Snowshoeing Proxy Falls
This Winter has seen me getting out into the snow a good deal more often than I have in past years, enjoying some snowshoeing treks in the Cascades. I had been on snowshoe adventures several times in the past and loved it, including a burly climb up Moscow Mountain in Idaho with a friend during college, but somehow each Winter season came and went with many trips to the coast, and none up to the ...
Sowing the Seeds of Dreams
Every day, I am noticing more and more signs of the seasons shifting towards Spring. Green grass and wild plants are emerging from the soil, the biting cold has gone out of the air, the light lingers a little longer in the evening, frogs are singing their choruses at night, and wild geese are returning from their journeys south. As all the wild weed seeds are germinating in the soil and popping ...
Good Day Sunshine: A Mid-Winter Coastal Getaway
This past weekend found us escaping the heavy blanket of winter fog that had settled in, to seek out sun, sand, and surf. Often when a low cloud layer sets in to the Willamette Valley like this, it is just the opposite out at the coast, and can be as warm as 60 degrees in late January. In my eagerness to feel the sun's warmth on my face again and soak up some Vitamin-D, I got a last minute ...