I moved. Come see.

Friends and family are beginning to descend upon us for the eagerly anticipated Visiting Season. We've been taking them on a lot of little trips - hiking, biking, swimming, brewery visiting...

Rope swing jumping / grilling out:
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The most scenic brewery I've found yet: Solera in Parkdale. Beer is phenominal too.
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Elk Meadows is an easy hike, if you stop at the river.
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The wife enjoying the COLD glacial melt water. Shot with adapted '69 Rokkor MC 55 f1.7 lens.
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You-pick flowers
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Cousins that are beginning to look more like siblings.
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Wife joined the cyclocross team for the local bike shop (and I mean they're a block from our current rental house). The shop is kinda amazing... aggressively laid back and not pretensious, serve beer at the repair counter, attached to a coffee shop / bakery / breakfast place, really cool people working there. All the "cool kids" in town seem to be friends with them and hang out there, it's a great crowd. So she's raced cyclocross maybe 3 times, only for fun, and we don't own the rightkind of bike, but someone on the team offered her a loaner. I get super excited by this, because it means we get to go to races, and my daughter and I get to photograph them. Cross is maybe the best thing I've ever shot. So much fun.

This weekend was practice, and the loaner bike didn't show up, so she trained on my commuter mountain bike (with the rack still on, which I sorta love... so wrong). I snapped a few.

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One man's "have to" is another sadist's "get to."

Yeah the gist of cyclocross is riding very road-like bikes on dirt courses in a big loop, with stairs, logs, rocks, mud, sand, and all manner of man-made barriers like these to hop. Dismounting, hoisting your bike, running with it, and then remounting is the key to success. The faster and smoother you are at it, the less speed and time you lose. The REALLY good riders, like pros, I've seen just hop right the hell over things like these without even getting off. When you're stationed alongside a barrier like this and you shoot 55 people running over it, and someone suddenly comes at it full tilt without slowing, your heart shoots into your throat, because it feels like you're about to watch a spectacular crash. And then they just magically jump over it, and it's all you can do not to gape at them open-mouthed.

Some of the shots I got at races back in New England (including a spectacular Halloween race):

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Made it out to Oneonta Gorga yesterday evening for a very short waterfall hike. I had a full wetsuit and booties with traction, and was in heaven. Mrs is more brave than me, as usual, and went in a bathing suit. XT1 and rokinon 12 in a backpack / short strap around my neck. Challenge was to make it look less crowded than it is.

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The payoff.
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Very accessible place, too, which is good and bad. From where you park, it's just a ten minute walk upstream. And the parking is right off the interstate, between us and Portland, so it gets flooded with tourists who were visiting Portland anyway. It's a great getaway for people who want to go put their face in a real waterfall, and I don't begrudge them. But it can get crowded, and I saw a lot of people who were dressed totally improperly, could barely scramble over the wet logs, had selfie sticks, were walking along with their music blaring on a bluetooth speaker, etc. These places are undoubtedly more magical without a lot of people in them. Still an awesome spot, though.
 
Very accessible place, too, which is good and bad. From where you park, it's just a ten minute walk upstream. And the parking is right off the interstate, between us and Portland, so it gets flooded with tourists who were visiting Portland anyway. It's a great getaway for people who want to go put their face in a real waterfall, and I don't begrudge them. But it can get crowded, and I saw a lot of people who were dressed totally improperly, could barely scramble over the wet logs, had selfie sticks, were walking along with their music blaring on a bluetooth speaker, etc. These places are undoubtedly more magical without a lot of people in them. Still an awesome spot, though.

When we were in RMNP on certain trails the aspens had been desecrated by many carving their names in the trees. The sight of that made me sick to my stomach. People...sigh
 
Some of you may have heard, but the entire upper west coast is pretty well on fire. It's made our town very hazey and camp firey smelling, but this past saturday a few teenagers ignored all the warning signs (literal and metaphorical) and hiked up a bone-dry trail 16 miles away and lit off firecracker after fire cracker. The predictable happened almost immediately. It's grown in 4 days to cover over 31,000 acres. People are being evacuated from towns in its path. We might be next. Meanwhile I can't see across the river anymore, it's so thick.

We happened to be in the town where it started, at the same time. At 4pm when it was lit, we were biking and hiking below it and had no idea. By 6:30, we were enjoying ice cream after the ride and looked up to this...

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We were shocked, sad, and angry. It's since grown immensly larger, and jumped over the COlumbia river to start a new fire in Washington. The air quality is abyssmal. At any rate, before we knew about it, we were enjoying Wahclella Falls, which has since burned of course.

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