The Hobo Cedar Grove is a nice easy 1-mile hike through a grove of giant old-growth trees. It is the perfect hike for toddlers to explore nature, which is why we brought Clara up there on Sunday. She enjoyed the large trees, but wasn’t into walking the trail much. Eventually Erin had to carry her for most of the hike. In hindsight, she may not have completely gotten over her illness from Friday and Saturday.
Dolly Sods Meadow, originally uploaded by Matthew Singer. In the fall, I visited West Virginia’s Dolly Sods with my parents. The foliage on the blueberry bushes was amazing, but the trees had not yet turned. I was planning to return a week later to backpack through the wilderness area during its peak foliage, but my car broke down and I was unable to make the journey. So I decided I’d make a spring visit instead. So, a week and a half ago, I did just that. I got together with Charlie (uvagolfer), another hiker and photographer I met on Flickr,…
After a long summer with not much exploring, the pace has changed and I’ve had a fairly busy two weeks. The series begins with the return of the Annual Wallowas Weekend. In the six Septembers that I have lived here, I’ve led a backpacking trip to the Eagle Cap Wilderness four of those years, with this year being the fourth. Each time I bring someone new, and each time we explore new trails. This is the first year that we didn’t spend a night at Mirror Lake and the first year that Tyler didn’t join us. Instead, Wesley returns for…
View Upper Basin Trail in a larger map The Upper Basin Trail is a 5 mile loop in the upper basin of Elk Creek just north of Elk River The trail is near the giant western red cedar, thought to be the largest tree in the U.S. east of the Sierra-Cascade crest. The loop is also near the Morris Cedar Grove, another grove of large old-growth red cedar. unfortunately, the road to the Morris Grove was closed and blocked off on Saturday. If you’re looking for a difficult challenge, the Upper Basin loop is not for you. The trail was…
I just realized that August has come and gone and I have yet to write about anything that happened during this month. It’s not as though I haven’t done anything. In fact, I was quite busy every weekend. So, let’s see, what happened in August? It got really hot. In fact, it got so hot, that doing things became unpleasant. Nevertheless, we took Clara out to Elk River to beat the heat. At first, she didn’t like sitting in the cool water, but by the end, I got her to tolerate it. We also took Clara up to Kamiak Butte….
I’m two weeks on this post, but forgive me because the last two weeks of the semester have been insane. The bi-annual northwest evolution conference, Evo-WIBO, occurred the last weekend of April. If you don’t remember, I attended the last meeting two years ago and presented a talk on the results of our selection experiment. This year, I presented a poster (my first) on the use of function-value trait analysis to analyze video tracking data. In short, we can use functions to describe behaviors over time and use more details in the data than if we were to simply distill…
This snowshoeing thing is taking off, and if I keep this up, I’ll be in shape enough to not suck at hiking at the beginning of the hiking season. This week’s adventure brings us up Spud Hill, also known by some as Mount Deary. Spud Hill was my first Idaho summit, and it’s a great little local hike that I often overlook. But I’ve always wanted to hike it in the winter, and today, Spud Hill became my first winter Idaho summit. The one difference between snowshoeing and hiking, aside from the snow on the ground, is that distances seem…