Dog Days
I’ll admit it, I was pretty lazy today. Mike had to work at the Wood River Valley Animal Shelter, so I spent the morning cleaning a bit and reading. It wasn’t until Mike got home that he coerced me out into the beautiful blue sky day. It wasn’t warm out, to be sure, but it was sunny and clear.
We took the dogs to Lake Creek, which is an access point to the Sawtooth National Forest. Dog walking is a great excuse to get outside, because when you have dogs as crazy as mine, they need a lot of exercise. Dog walking as a daily requirement? Yeah, ok. I’ll take it.
Lemhi as a happy fetcher.
Franconia with the Pioneers in the background.
Long Day and Green Skies
I just got home from the scariest bike ride I have ever, ever taken. And now the sky is green. Really, I can’t make this kind of stuff up.
Today started off with a sigh because I knew what was ahead of me. Due to a bunch of circumstances that I couldn’t bend to my will, I was stuck working an 8am to 7pm work day. Knowing this kind of information when you wake up in the morning isn’t helpful. Add to this the fact that everything routine and expected in my daily life was taking an unexpected amount of effort. It was just that kind of day.
Despite all this, I had a moment of complete bliss this afternoon. During my brief lunch break, I pedaled one mile across town to Quigley Gulch for a quick hike. My ulterior motive was to take an image for Earth Mosaic, an Earth Day photography celebration that will be made into a mosaic of the world. As I hiked across the foothills, snapping away, I had one of those awesome moments where I was jealous of myself. It seems incredible and accidental to me that I live in a place where I can pedal five minutes from my downtown office and be hiking on a beautiful trail away from it all. It was a brief moment of sanity and pleasure that instantly made all the sticky parts of the day seem insignificant.
After work my scary bike ride home was, well, scary. It’s twelve miles from my office in Hailey to my home in Ketchum. When I left it was sunny, 60′s, with a few fluffy clouds floating aimlessly in the sky. Halfway home, right when I met up with Mike (who had headed south from Ketchum to meet me), the weather turned into an inferno of wind, rain, and flying debris. I have never pedaled so fast in my entire life. At first I was just hearing large trees fall in the distance, then I started seeing large trees fall within 100 feet of the bike path. My bike helmet suddenly seemed incredibly ineffective. Branches ripped off and flew over our heads, and tumbleweeds attacked from all sides. We got home safe, but it was a wild ride.
Quigley Gulch - image submitted to Earth Mosaic
Craters of the Moon
Ski season is officially (as of last weekend) over. Sigh. What is a girl to do with those long, free weekends? Pack up the car and head south? Bingo.
Today Mike and I traveled to Craters of the Moon National Monument between Carey and Arco, Idaho. (as a side note, Arco was the United States’ first atomic town, whoeee!). The weather here in Ketchum was beautiful too, but Craters of the Moon gets unbearable in the summer months due to heat. So heading down on their first open weekend this year was a wise move. Far fewer tourists, and a nice cool breeze to keep the lava from melting your face off.
Craters of the Moon National Monument is a 750,000 acre preserve of hardened lava flows. Part of the Snake River Plain, it is on the same volcanic plain as Yellowstone. The seven mile loop road we drove covers a lot of different lava features – cinder cones, monoliths, lava caves, spatter cones, and volcanic rifts. We seemed to be the only tourists today willing to leave our car and hike around, so we had the trails blissfully to ourselves. A beautiful Sunday under bluebird skies, walking on a moonscape, was exactly the right medicine to cure the end-of-ski-season blues. (Click on any of the images to be taken to the Flickr gallery of today’s images)
Panhoehoe Lava Flow
Mike jogging up a cinder cone.
Bread loaf bomb.
King Mountain (Big Lost Range).
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