Yes, Mom... I Remembered.

Happy Spring!!!

Now maybe I'll actually go mow my lawn...

Finally, a real hike!

This is quite a belated post, since this hike was done on February 10th. But it's been a really hectic month since then and I just now had time to update the blog. Anyway, Wendy and I decided to upgrade from "a walk in the park" status and do some actual hills. We broke ourselves in easy by hitting Cape Lookout and Cape Meares on the Oregon coast. They were both beautiful views, but for anyone headed to Cape Lookout to watch the whales, be sure you wear old shoes! Sometimes the mud was all the way up over our ankles. Anyway, enjoy the pictures!

View from the beginning of the Cape Lookout trail:

The sun came in and out of the clouds all day.

And this creepy ship followed us along every single viewpoint all day. (Both locations! We think they knew we were hiding an alpine bovine in our packs.)

Beautiful and unusual tree formations all along this trail:

From the actual lookout:

We made it!

Walter is very photogenic, even with a nearly-missing antler. He wanted to demonstrate 1. how good he looks in a tree

2. how brave he was to sit in a tree practically in midair

3. just how STRAIGHT DOWN the cliff was that held the tree he was sitting in.

See? Pretty dang far down.

We forgot to photograph the "summit" of Cape Meares... although there really isn't one.

Beautiful fern and moss-covered cliff face:

Amazing eddies and pool between the two cliffs-this was a scary place to stand!

The Octopus Tree

If you look closely, this is almost a Goonies rock. :) (Maybe we'll do that hike next month.)

Fake Hike #2

I tried again.

Really, I deserved the bust that this hike was. For a few reasons:

1. I was so determined to hit the trail that I abandoned my (overscheduled) hiking buddies and went out on my own.

2. I was trying to cover as much ground as possible but only had a few free hours myself so I had to hike very close to home.

3. I was trying to go someplace "new" so I found uncharted (by me) territory and didn't research its hiking veracity very well.

4. I was pretty sure I wasn't ready for a lung-busting hike yet, so I looked in my trail book for the easiest hike I could find within driving distance.

Consequently, it was sort of lonely and boring and once again: just another (literal) walk in the park. Well, first a park, then a farm. Apparently this park is farmed. So first I walked along the river through the woods, then I walked around a cornfield. I can't believe I moved to Oregon from Indiana just to say I hiked in a cornfield. Good grief.

But! I was determined! So Walter and I headed out to Willamette Mission State Park. And it was COLD!

The trail started in the middle of Filbert Grove, and that was pretty fun as I'd never really seen filbert trees before. There were no leaves, but the moss covering all the branches made them really pretty.

In the grove itself, the trees were really manicured and made really cool rows. When I was a kid I would have called this a fairy tunnel.

The trees were everywhere through the rest of the hike, but not as manicured. I love their tangled trunks.

(I tried to find some random hazelnuts laying around on the ground to make myself some Nutella, but it didn't happen.)

Some views along the Willamette:

Bridge behind the cabled ferry:

A view of the original Willamette Mission site- the mission was the first of its kind and established in 1834. It operated until 1840, when it was moved to Chemeketa (Salem). Offspring of the original Mission Rose brought as a gift to one of the mission founders still grow wild here and it's probably really pretty in the spring and summer. As for winter (like now), it looks like those missionaries were pretty cold...

The trail ends at the nation's largest black cottonwood... uh... it ends where you can see the nation's largest black cottonwood. From across the river. 100 yards away. It's quite exciting. Really. Jaw-dropping majesty. (cough)

Walter proving we made it to our destination:

You can tell his antler is about to fall off in this picture. Note the majesty of the tree in the back ground. It's so biiiiiiiiiiig I can barely get it in the piiiiiiiiiiicture... (I believe the loss of the antler is my penance for going solo and leaving my buddies back at home.)

Interestingly enough, a second trail in this park is across the river. It's more of an educational walk, really, and literally circles a big giant cornfield. I would know why it circles a big giant cornfield if I had taken the time to read all the educational placards dotting the 2.5 miles that circled the big giant cornfield. (Yes. You read that right. Two and a half miiiiiiiiiiiles around a CORNFIELD.) There were nice views of the river along one side, though, so it was still pretty. And the sun came out for us!

(Don't take this trail)

Almost at the end of the loop, lo and behold, we come upon the Great Black Cottonwood. On this side of the river, you can actually see it and walk up to it. Um, so... it is a pretty darn big tree.

In case you can't tell how big that is, that tiny brown dot near the bottom right side of the picture is Walter. Um... big tree. Here's a closeup and you can find his blue ribbon to get the scale. So yeah. Big tree.

I was poking fun at the tree all day (to myself, yes, I and the voices in my head have a wonderfully genial relationship) until I saw it again from across the field (you know, two and a half miles away) and I had to admit, it's sort of big. :)

So, after marveling at the bigness of the tree and the prettiness of the river, it was time to head home. Any notions of spending the rest of the afternoon enjoying a nice picnic in the park were put to rest when we found this footprint: Bigfoot!

So we high-tailed it out of there. But all in all, it was a pretty nice walk. And it gave for some classic Robert Frost moments:

Maybe next hike I'll actually go up a hill or something...

Back in the Wilderness Again...

...Well, almost.

Now that my season of debilitating neck pain is over, I decided it's time to get back on the trails and start hiking all over the northwest. I started getting really interested in hiking pretty late last year, so I really only had time to whet my wilderness appetite in 2010 before all the trails were mudded over and, well, my neck broke, so I had to wait a few months before I could head back out again.

So this last week I tied back on my hiking boots and tried to get back out again In the interest of breaking ourselves back in slowly, my hiking buddy Wendy and I picked the easiest hike listed in our entire "hikes in Oregon" guidebook. Luckily, it happened to be just a few miles from both of our houses, because to be honest... as a hike, this was a little bit of a bust. The guidebook listed it as "a walk in the park" and it was, literally, a walk in a park. Champoeg Park, to be exact, and for you non-Oregonians, that's "Shampoo-ey" to you. For you Oregonians, you know we didn't really need water packs and tents or even hiking boots- we just had a nice little stroll.

Even though most of the "real" trails were too muddy to walk on there were quite a few paved trails for us to stroll on. Not exactly a typical challenging hike with stellar views, but hey, we tried. To further perpetuate the illusion of a real hike, we made sure to bring along the summit moose just in case we got to walk up a legitimate hill. (We didn't.)

The summit moose was finally named (Walter Peyton Moosedeer) by these three tagalongs, who are showing WPMD how to fully embrace his moose-iness:

(Walter really doesn't get the whole antler thing. The boys have it down.)

Wendy trying to look as enthusiastic as possible about our super-tough flat, paved trails.

Even when it's cold, wet, flat, and paved, Oregon still has some beautiful photo ops. I love our mossy trees!

Equally cool is this red-algae covered pond:

Okay, admittedly that cool red-algae pond is from the nature reserve just down the street a few days later and not even close to Champoeg, but it's still pretty.

So, time will tell whether or not I can actually get back into regular hiking. I hope to have lots more hikes and photos to post about in the upcoming year, but for now I guess I'll just go walk circles around the playground down the street. At least then I'll know ahead of time that I'm just going for a walk in the park.