Hyalite Peak

I had heard good things about Hyalite Peak and I was glad I did, it was very beautiful. Chris and I headed out early in the morning from a very full parking lot, but aside from the trail runners and hikers checking out the nearby falls the trail was pretty sparsely populated considering how close the trail is to Bozeman.  I hope to bring any visitors on this hike!

There were waterfalls lining the trail most the way up.

From behind the falls.

Pretty nice lunch view.

The lake near our campsite.

We crossed a couple snow fields.

We made it!

Back to Montana!

I certainly missed the cooler, and certainly drier weather, the big sky (lower case) and the mountains of Montana.  Oh yeah, and the lack of people in general. I was fortunate enough to have a friend pick me up from the airport and whisk me away so that night I could camp in the beautiful Bridger Mountains.  We easily found a free camp spot along the road leading up to Fairy Lake and the next day hiked around said lake.

This is a scene that I'm happy to wake up to in the morning.

Another thing Leo loves is chasing sticks, he's not so much into the scenery as he likes to get into the scenery.

But for all of us humans, look how gorgeous the lake is!

We found a different but also great free camp spot the next night and made a delicious meal of gnocchi with a red sauce, had a fire and were only moderately bothered by the flies.  Well I guess that depends on who you ask.

Leo found our campsite to be restful too.  This dog is a great camping companion.  He virtually never barks unless someone or something suddenly comes up and surprises him.  Which in bear country is nice.  Luckily he only barked once on the trail and it was a trail runner.  No bears in sight.

The next day we decided for a slightly more strenuous day and we found Ross Pass to sound like a nice hike. So we drove up the gravel/mud mountain road about as far as we could then hiked to the pass.  The weather was fickle.  At one point we were sure there was a storm (there was thunder and all) so we stayed right by the truck to eat lunch, but by the time we were done it the skies were blue. So we headed out. 

Leo makes a good model.  This is the flowery meadow where we ate lunch.

My sister gave me this pack as a last minute carry on piece of luggage, I was happy for it the next couple days so I could have a backpack on our hikes.

Up the hill.

Forth of July

I got a new camera, not that I'm unhappy with my Canon, but I felt like it is too big and too fragile to take on overnight trips, especially as I try to be a prudent and frugal packer on these trips.  Well, at least now that I have a smaller backpacking backpack.  Anyway, I bought a GoPro, because they are small, light, take good photos and video and come in a water/shockproof case.  Unfortunately I am not especially tech savvy and can't figure out how to make the photos from the GoPro compatible with my computer.  I can get them on any other computer, but so far no dice on my own.  So I'm skipping all the trips where I only have photos from my GoPro.  I guess I don't need pictures for the blog, but writing takes longer than downloading a few picture files, and as you can see, I don't sit down and work on this blog very often.  So I will skip my first backpacking trip after school started and the trip I took in West Virginia with my brother David, sister Kelly and our friend Evelyn, and will skip to the Forth of July with my family.  Oh yes, my cousin Jenna's wedding was in there too, it was very fun and beautiful, if fact all my cousins were looking extremely beautiful in the wedding.

I hadn't originally planned on staying that long in Ohio, but my family kept convincing me and  I miss our family parties quite a bit so it didn't take too much persuasion.

The first part of the weekend I spent at my sister's and we had dinner with our friends.  The girls helped me make some festive deserts, I especially liked the decoration with the gigantic strawberry!

Not all the cupcakes had such absurd adornment.

Evelyn made the guacamole, which true is more green and red than blue and red, but still delicious.  Plus the chips were blue.

I want to eat that meal right now! And that is only the "appetizers". 

Nina and David Brown aren't particularly slow to laugh and Dad sure does like to put on a show.

 The next part of the Forth celebrations took place at my aunt and uncle's house. The "fun in the sun" part didn't really happen until later in the weekend, but we had a lot of delicious food and a lot of sitting in various circles.  It would have been interesting to have an aerial timelapse of the party, to see circles growing and shrinking and moving as the day progressed, following the sun, shade and food.

This was the biggest circle, or nearly so, I think a few people had left at this point.  This was the circle where we did the traditional reading of the Declaration of Independence, one of my favorite Forth traditions. 

My aunt is particularly matchy today.

As are Kasey and Amy!

A favorite game of the weekend, "President's War". Using a deck of cards depicting all the presidents with some info on the back the game is played just like normal "war".  The "better" president wins the war. 

Sometimes the presidents are comparably good (or bad) so WAR! Who will you win? Handsome Harry Truman? The obscure and confusable Taylor or Tyler? Or one of the "Mt. Rushmores" (Aces all).

After playing the game for a while we decided we needed to try to rank them according to, well, something.  So taking into account notoriety, positive and negative influences on American policy and history, and yes, even attractiveness when all else fails, we got a bit of a line up.  Though there were a lot of presidents we didn't know much about.  We found out some interesting presidential facts in our study.

 

Memorial Day kicks off the summer

The first summertime adventure I had in Montana was my three day Memorial Weekend trip with my friend Fern. 

 We started our trip by driving up through White Sulphur Springs to the some national forest land to camp.  It was the first camping I had done that year and Fern was a great camping companion.  We did all the normal things, set up our tent, made dinner and saw some wildlife.  I only saw birds and rodents, but Fern saw some sort of large canine, either a large coyote or a wolf!  The next day we went to the hot springs in White Sulphur, a little too late in the day to be truly enjoyable that time of year. Plus the springs were in pools in the courtyard of a hotel surrounded by murals that portrayed the landscape around the area.  Or at least what the landscape used to be.   On three sides the mural was full of animals, and the forth depicted Native Americans standing along, wading in and otherwise enjoying the hot springs. The mural was probably not intentionally designed to offend, rather probably just show an idyllic scene, but I personally was just constantly reminded of America's sordid history where the native people are concerned.  Beyond that, the mural seemed to say "this is beautiful, this is lovely, so we decided to put a bunch of concrete and walls around it."


After White Sulphur Springs we decided to drive through Yellowstone National Park.  But we didn't want to just "drive" through so we asked for a hike recommendation at Mammoth.  We somehow missed where the actual trailhead was so we took what appeared to be a "locals" trail, that led to a little fire ring behind some cabins.  We eventually found the trail that we were looking for, and took lots of jumping and flower photos, only a few of which I will subject you to.

I have a lot of pictures of Fern looking at the ground, she is as fascinated by plants as I am, if not more so!

Yay Yellowstone!