Mmm good.

We have a really great fresh fruit and vegetable program at my school. Every day during morning recess, the entire school gets free fruit and veggies. It is delightful. However, I'm not sure if it was the result of a miscommunication or what, but on Thursday this is what was delivered to my kindergarten room for snack.

Yes, indeedy it is a pineapple top. And a fresh one at that. And yes that is all they sent us. The leaves were mighty tasty.

Lost in Translation?

For the past two and a half years, we have sponsored a young boy from Colombia. We've exchanged many letters and pictures over the past two years. Cristian has often said Jill was very beautiful, so imagine our surprise when we received his latest letter and drawing. Hmm, now who was it that Cristian was finding attractive this whole time?

You can click on the picture to make it larger. :)

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B is for Bear!

Another sweet black bear. We call them sweet because they were always sighted eating berries and not humans. That's sweet in my book.

A mama grizz and her cubs ran right across a very heavily populated trail near Lake Louise. We like this angle...when the bears are running away from us.

And yet another mama grizz and her cubs. We saw these guys from the road and proceeded to get stuck in a very long bear jam. Eventually the rangers had to come and break up all the cars. Stupid tourists taking pictures of bears. :)

Not a bear, but check out the sweet mohawk.

The Skyline Trail

After spending a day exploring the sights around Jasper, we headed out on our first big backpacking trip- the Skyline Trail where 22+ plus of our miles were spent above the tree line with amazing mountain range views. This trip was filled with anticipation/fear of bear encounters by one member of our two man team. This fear was not dissipated when knowledge of the Yellowstone grizzly attacks was shared with our group. Who in their right mind tells a girl already paranoid about bears, a story about grizzlies pulling hikers out of their tents? Oi. On the way to the trailhead we did see our first bear, but he was just a cute black bear. Not a great picture, but hey, it's a bear!

Here we are before the hike. Showered and with no bug bites. Such a nice feeling.


Aw, the lovely marmots. Did you know they hibernate 9 months out of the year? What a life! I wonder what we interrupted here...

Our first day was a relatively easy 8 miler with great views and tons of nasty mosquitoes. We camped at a place that should have been called death by mosquitoes but instead it was lamely named Snowbowl. Jill suffered 16 bites along her forehead and 37 along her lower back....errr...buttocks. Bites were in all the normal boring spots as well.

Here, Jake is hanging our food and toiletries in a nice little bear hanger. I was so paranoid about the bears smelling our food and then coming to eat us that we hung up our food the second we got into camp (only to get it down about 50 times before bed).
Better safe than dead,I say.



Our second day-a 12 miler- took us up over both Big Shovel pass and the Notch (8800 feet). Big Shovel was a piece of cake, but the Notch took us by a bit of a surprise. We weren't quite ready for either the steepness or the snow that we had to cross over. It is miraculous that no pants were wet during this section of the trip. Luckily we were with our new best friends (fear makes strangers best friends quickly) and the group aspect helped a lot.

Big Shovel Pass

And the Notch

As soon as I was over the Notch the following words were heard from one sweet husband, "I didn't think you were going to make it!" And if you look closely at my face, you can see exactly how I felt during this time.

We rejoiced when we got over the pass and then realized we had many, many more miles before reaching our campground for the night. During this time we were dropping into the trees (where grizzlies like to eat berries and/or you) so we decided to sing to let them know we were coming and to get the heck out of there. One of us sang in a soft and pretty voice (not effective in grizzly scaring) and one of us sang in a very off key, boisterous voice that could only remember the words to kindergarten songs. Thanks to the latter voice, no bears were encountered.


Jake woke up early the next morning and took this picture near our campsite. Wowsers!

Our last day found us hiking out 9+ miles. Unfortunately many of those miles were on a really old forest road that was overgrown with trees and berry bushes with our only views being bear skat. Lots and lots of fresh bear skat. Too tired from the previous days we didn't make too much of an effort to make extra noise. Instead we chose to believe we could outrun our fellow hikers should a beastly grizzly appear while we dreamt of this.

Welcome to Canada

On our way to Jasper, Canada--- not a bad view from the car!


One of our first stops was Mt. Edith Cavell


Angel Glacier


If we were normal people, we might consider using this as our Christmas photo, but we have something much stranger in mind.

Bainbridge Ferry to Seattle

This is the story of a boy (or maybe a man?) who took a few too many pictures while riding the ferry, and got pooped on by a seagull...twice!