apple of my eye

Our daughter Isa(eee-suh) Grace Halle was born at 6:09pm Wednesday, June 11. Everyone is healthy and getting just enough sleep at this point. We are thrilled!

The good folks at Mojo Studios just finished work on our new site and files were uploaded today. There are some kinks to work out yet and an ‘about’ page and ‘purchase prints’ page soon to be added. Stay tuned!

I couldn’t pass up this moment:

It was more than a moment actually and definitely more than 6 minutes that these 2 tangoed. As a gardner it’s somewhat reassuring to see these Hemiptera(the order aphids fall into) chow hounds getting busy in your yard. I hope that they were hungry and feasted on aphids after.

Later the same day this moment was hard to miss on the shelf above our kitchen sink:

We keep this Venus Fly Trap near our fruit bowl and it captures many flys. Not until recently did I see the plant snap shut on a spider.

AC and I did a half day tour near Mirror Lake Wednesday. Winter’s going down swinging this year.

The end of winter means anything but ski doldrums in the Pacific Northwest. It means the start of something altogether new: volcano corn season.  

It’s not often we receive mention let alone praise from a really smart, prominent Economist. We photographed economist Bill Conerly for Oregon Business Magazine and art director Jon Ferland recently. Apparently Bill likes the picture we shot albeit a cropped version. He says so in his blog. Thank you for the mention Bill. And thanks to Marty, left, for agreeing to be photographed.  

Bill Conerly

Ralph, Pat and I did a familiar tour on Mt. Hood a little differently this weekend. A while back Ralph suggested that instead of doing the tour in typical car-to-car fashion we should leave a car at the Paradise trail head, walk the mile or so to highway 26 and then thumb it to Timberline along with our cousins the snowboarding rabble. Ralph uses this transportation technique paddling on the Clack all the time. Capital idea. Count me a new fan and advocate of the car-walk-thumb-skin-ski-car style of ski touring. The thumb part worked out smoothly to our surprise and glee. We thought we might have trouble being 3 unshaven, ripe rogues all with skis, boots and packs. The mountain folk smiled upon us and we were up at the great Lodge in nearly the same time it would have taken in a second car.

1 mile to hwy 26

hitching Timberline Rd.

slab avalanche

Ralph and Pat Illumination

ski track 2

Finally made the trip to Whistler Blackcomb! 

My wife Michelle has got one: 

Michelle Halle

Around June 1st things will get nutty around here. Nutty in the best of all possible ways.   

Yesterday Blake, Eric and I managed a 1/2 day tour on Mt. Hood. Trail breaking was mostly thigh and sometimes waist deep. Trench Warfare. Not the Cascade cement variety. The light, fairly fluffy and all too uncommon variety in these parts. It’s a mindboggling winter in the Pacific Northwest. A hasty pit on a forested north northwest aspect revealed a meter of new snow atop a well formed crust from the clear and frigid weather last week. 

snowy Wy'east crick

eric

blake

Hey now!

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