Pictures from outdoor exercise.
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I took my weekly hike up the peak to watch the wildflower progression yesterday. It's neat to see some species now blooming higher up and being bloomed-out lower down as well as new species starting to bloom. There's some phlox in a rocky area up top. It was flowering for two weeks, and now it's totally disappeared.
The native iris is slowly creeping up from 2000 feet to 4100 feet; it's probably half way by now. Beargrass is just starting to do its thing. Tiger lilies are finally starting up top, and next week will be exploding everywhere. Fawn lilies and glacier lilies are gone. Various species of lupines are blooming. Sheep sorrel is blooming. It's fantastic up there.
Look who came to say hi up in the meadow:
Three of the last four weeks I could see the beach out on the ocean and the Cascade volcanoes from the top. Very nice. Kind of hazy yesterday, but I could still see them both. It's about 7.5 miles taking one trail about 2.6 miles up to the upper parking lot, a 1.5 mile or so loop up to the summit and back, then a mile or so down another trail that has a connector "tie" trail that goes back to the initial trail. Only the first and last 1.5 miles are on the same trail.
There's ways to add other trail segments to get pretty much anywhere from a one mile to a 18 mile hike.3 -
I skipped my weekly hike last week as I was out at a festival from Wednesday morning until Monday afternoon. Tuesday was a rest day, and then yesterday I went back up to the peak. I think I missed the best explosion of tiger lilies up on the upper meadow, but I saw some nice ones down lower in the shade.
Up in the meadow there were small ones along with some lupine that was almost bloomed out. They don't come out so good in the pictures, but here they are:
Up around the other side of the peak in the rock garden, there was some phlox.
On the way down, the path was beautiful as always.
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We have tiger lilies around the deck that just started blossoming. Very nice!!0
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I left home today at 09:00 and got back after 17:00. My mission: go buy another canoe. Not outdoor exercise, but an exercise to help me get outdoors more.
I can't believe how much I spent for an 18-year-old canoe, but it's really nice. I will be putting another canoe up for sale to be able to afford this 17' 6" long Voyager
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I left home today at 09:00 and got back after 17:00. My mission: go buy another canoe. Not outdoor exercise, but an exercise to help me get outdoors more.
I can't believe how much I spent for an 18-year-old canoe, but it's really nice. I will be putting another canoe up for sale to be able to afford this 17' 6" long Voyager
Good choice
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I left home today at 09:00 and got back after 17:00. My mission: go buy another canoe. Not outdoor exercise, but an exercise to help me get outdoors more.
I can't believe how much I spent for an 18-year-old canoe, but it's really nice. I will be putting another canoe up for sale to be able to afford this 17' 6" long Voyager
Well done!!1 -
@AnnPT77
Your post reminded me that you paddle a Voyager. We had some back-and-forth about that a little while ago. I'm expecting I'll love it. Zero rocker, but more maneuverable than the Advantage with a half inch. My friend Jeff says he chose it after having his favorite boat be the Advantage for 15 years. He says he can steer it with his hips, kind of more like a kayak. I think maybe I've graduated and upgraded to a real do-it-all performance canoe. Like you had said before, the Encounter is a tank. Even at 150 pounds, I really need to add a bunch of gear to paddle it at all.
Ten years from now, when I can no longer put a 51 pound boat on my roof, I will rethink ultra-light. The person who sold me the Voyager when asked why he was selling it said he was old (I think he was my age or younger) and was selling all his boats that weight over 40 pounds except one. He had a carbon surf ski on his van and was down to watch the end of the downwind race. He said it's the biggest in the world. Not sure about that. The fastest surfskis and canoes run upriver (downwind) about 13 miles. I saw them from the freeway on the way to buy the canoe.
I took the back way around the back side of Mt. Hood to avoid the awful Portland traffic. Longer, but no interstate. Far longer. And lovely, but LONG.1 -
@AnnPT77
Your post reminded me that you paddle a Voyager. We had some back-and-forth about that a little while ago. I'm expecting I'll love it. Zero rocker, but more maneuverable than the Advantage with a half inch. My friend Jeff says he chose it after having his favorite boat be the Advantage for 15 years. He says he can steer it with his hips, kind of more like a kayak. I think maybe I've graduated and upgraded to a real do-it-all performance canoe. Like you had said before, the Encounter is a tank. Even at 150 pounds, I really need to add a bunch of gear to paddle it at all.
Ten years from now, when I can no longer put a 51 pound boat on my roof, I will rethink ultra-light. The person who sold me the Voyager when asked why he was selling it said he was old (I think he was my age or younger) and was selling all his boats that weight over 40 pounds except one. He had a carbon surf ski on his van and was down to watch the end of the downwind race. He said it's the biggest in the world. Not sure about that. The fastest surfskis and canoes run upriver (downwind) about 13 miles. I saw them from the freeway on the way to buy the canoe.
I took the back way around the back side of Mt. Hood to avoid the awful Portland traffic. Longer, but no interstate. Far longer. And lovely, but LONG.
Voyager is a wonderful boat, but now a little bit of a tank for me (at around 2/3 the body weight I was when I bought it): Advantage is better now than then.
It's subtle, but IME bodyweight matters in performance canoes, presumably because of where the waterline hits the hull. Obviously, body configuration matters, too (arm length and the tumblehome shape/boat width for example), but that hasn't changed much for me. Performance canoes have complex hull shapes, obviously.
Oddly, weight doesn't affect me as much in racing-style rowing shells . . . it matters some, but the hull shapes are more gradual in general I think - gradual V or gradual rounded-hull then taper. Extremes matter, but within reasonable ranges (of boats' bodyweight design specs), it's just variation in where the drive hits the body, mostly. I can row lightweight or medium, generally, though I'm in the LW range now.
I haven't kayaked enough to have a sense of how much those design weights matter . . . some, for sure. But CD Willow feels more OK to me than Voyager does, now that I'm lighter. 🤷♀️0 -
I took the Voyager out today. I paddled about 18 miles in the upstream wind on our local river. We started pretty far upstream, so there were some very mild rapids.
I did not immediately fall in love with the Voyager. More tank-like than the Advantage, but not so much as the Encounter. I thought it would feel more "twitchy" with less initial stability and more secondary stability. It felt solid from the moment I got in.
Swirly river currents affected it much less than the Advantage. For sure it is not as fast as the Advantage.
After about ten miles, I started to feel the "steer by hips" thing going on. Oh. Yeah. Good stuff.
I am going to keep this boat and sell the Kevlar Encounter.
Several people saw the boat and told me how beautiful it is. Well, they're right. That happened all the time with the Encounter. Not so much with the beat-up Advantage. I'm keeping the Advantage. It's fast. When I'm going out for an afternoon upstream and back or just going for fast fun, it will be the go-to boat. But I think I will fall in love with the Voyager.
I don't name all my boats, but I've been naming my canoes. I'm thinking of naming this boat "Old Blue."
We saw maybe 15 or 20 Bald Eagles. If you look closely at the black specks below, those are two of 'em.
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In the past six weeks, by myself, I tore off an old hemlock deck, replaced it with a new 12x19 deck and added a new one on the front of the house. I did skip my gym workouts while doing this. Lots of exercise.
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Yesterday - seven or eight hours of paddling to survey for invasive aquatic weeds. We explored lots of back channels and sloughs. We did find some offenders, and we had people with us to spray them out. We did fine one large infestation that will have to get sprayed another time - we didn't have staff or enough herbicide to take care of that one. We found a known infestation that was treated last year. It was much better, and we did the second treatment that might eradicate it as a source of future infestation. That felt good.
Today I did about five hours of hiking to see wildflowers up in the Cascades. I explored an additional trail I hadn't been on yet, and it was more of a route than a trail. Kicked my butt. Part of that was probably breathing the wildfire smoke that was in the air. Part was just being up over 5000 feet and hiking in the hot sun.
Tomorrow I go spend a few days paddling a river I love and camping with friends along the way.
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So much awesome!!0
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Weekly hike - about 7.37 miles.
At 1.2 miles there's a fork in the trail. I usually go left and stay on the trail I started on, then after doing the peak loop come down another trail on a different ridge and take another trail that heads back to the place where I had turned left. This time I turned right at the 1.2 mile mark and did that part of the loop in a different direction. I was surprised how different it felt.
All the tiger lilies are gone. Some of the things that were flowering now have fruits. I found some huckleberries for a snack.
I saw monkeyflower, foxglove and chinquapin and many other flowering plants.
Fireweed is blooming.
In one of the wetter areas was some maidenhair fern.
I don't understand why some folks just don't think rules apply to them. Where I parked there is a big sign that says day use only and all vehicles and equipment have to be gone before 22:00. Well, on the far end of the small lot is a little sign on a post that says no motor vehicles and the symbol for no camping (a tent with a slash through it). Over there was a motorcycle parked and a tent pitched. Uhh.... dude.... Then up the trail a nice plastic bag of dog poop that was halfway stuffed under a log. People....
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I paddled yesterday.
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Paddling again today, but this time it was to help an organization with an aquatic invasive weed event where volunteers came to learn to identify some invasives and help remove them. I was there to help with safety on the water and to help with other logistics. I ended up mostly giving out empty bags and putting heavy bags full of weeds, water, and mud into my boat. By the time my boat was loaded up, I was three or more inches lower in the water, and for sure the boat paddled very differently.
Oh. Yeah. We saw some birds.
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We did another sunset-into-moonlight barge row at the rowing club. These are not my photos, but I'm in one of them (in bright yellow, at right side, farthest from camera). I anonymized the face of the only person who was facing the camera, the rudder woman, because I don't like sharing recognizable photos of others without explicit permission. Later in the row, I swapped places with her so she could row for a while, but there's no photo from that stage.
The riverboat is at her dock in the photo, but she'd been out on the water with us earlier in the row, some kind of dinner cruise, I think. You'll note that the rowers, barge and oars are decorated with glow sticks, though the glow doesn't really show up until full dark.
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I took my whitewater canoe out again yesterday for a paddle about 11 or 12 miles. Mostly class 2 with a few class 3 rapids; some moving water in between. It was a beautiful day, but I didn't get many pictures because... I was paddling a canoe in whitewater!
I posted a club trip for Class 2 paddlers looking to start to run some Class 3. A club member asked if someone would post just such a trip. I posted it with a limit of 11 other boats (12 total including me) because that's as big of a group I thought would be safe. The trip filled up in three hours. There was a wait list for a while, but a few people cancelled, and we ended up with ten boats. We had inflatable kayaks, decked kayaks, and two open canoes. One was me, and the other was a guy who bought a canoe I sold a while back. Four swims; none from the open boats.
It was kind of a zoo. There were a lot of rafts and driftboats. Some of the rafts were not courteous at all. In fact, one group of two rafts with stern frames and six paddlers each came bearing down on us with all paddlers going full-out, but when they passed us (which we let them do because we weren't in a race) they stopped paddling, and the oarsmen even stopped rowing. Our boats are faster, so we were catching up. You can't see the water through the rafts. I went around them, and the one in front told his people to paddle again and he threatened to run me over at the top of a Class 3 rapid. I can't use colorful language here to describe these morons, but I do in person.
I'm thinking of driving over the Coast Range today to go fish a nice reservoir from my Voyager.3 -
About 40 miles of rowing over four days carrying gear for myself and four kayaks. Yes, there was smoke. Yes there were salmon jumping. Yes we saw turtles. Yes we all smiled.
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I like to go visit Waldo Lake at least once per year. At about ten square miles, it's the second largest natural lake in Oregon behind Crater Lake (nearly 21 square miles). Waldo is also the second deepest at 420 feet compared to Crater Lake at 1949 feet deep. It's one of the clearest and purest lakes in the world. On a clear, calm day you can see over 100 feet down. The water is nearly invisible, but when it's deep and calm, it's an impossible color of cerulean.
I always wait until at least early September when the mosquitoes settle down. I made the mistake of going in August one time. Camping in the forest was brutal. We got in the canoe the next morning; it was full to the gunwales with insects. It's a little less than two miles to cross from that campground to Klovdahl Bay; we were about half that distance, a mile from shore, before all the insects were gone. Awful.
We couldn't go last year because of the fires. It was sad to see all the damage from those most recent fires. The two campgrounds on the north end of the lake were closed, so visitation was way down.
We paddled about 16 miles skipping the very far south portion of the lake. There were very few other boats on the north end since it takes a while to get there and back, and the wind can come up any time. We were fairly lucky with the wind except at the very beginning of the day and then at the end. At the end we had some wind chop, about a foot swell, but we were basically in the trough going south. That's when I realized how much I like this boat; it was pretty seaworthy. It's a We No Nah Voyager, a 17.5 foot long solo canoe.
We stopped for lunch in the very northwest corner where the North Fork Willamette starts to flow. It's a very special place to me, and it was so sad to see the devastation from the fires. It won't be safe to camp there for a while as those burned trees start falling apart. Maybe the next year or two it will be OK, but after that we'll have to wait for years before it's truly safe.
Even with the damage from the latest fires, it's still an amazing place to visit. I may go back later this month or early next month and maybe even carry my camp across the lake instead of car camping. Or car-camp and spend two nights camping and two days paddling.
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I spent a couple days kayaking on the North Umpqua River. I had missed getting out to this river the last few years. Maybe since 2020! First COVID limited our travel, and then all the fires closed the river. I really love this river, so I was glad to see it. Water level was low, but still passable. I took a kayak instead of a canoe because of the low water. That was good - I hadn't been whitewater kayaking all year, and I was able to be on-the-spot for five rescues of swimmers from canoes and inflatable kayaks. And just being in my boat was awesome.
Of course since I was in a whitewater kayak, my phone was stowed in a drybox safely below deck. No pictures from the actual paddling, but I stopped along Sharps Creek on the way home for a stretch break, and I remember how pretty this spot is, too!
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You live in a beautiful part of the country. Every picture is just amazing...1
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I'll admit it, I'm cheating again. This was outdoors, but not really exercise (for me). I was volunteering today a regatta, a local head race (rowing race, staggered and moving start, timing to determine placements, longer distance than sprints but variable by even (in this case a bit over 3500m). Super heavy fog on my way there around 6:15 AM. Photos are from the wait for enough fog to burn off to make racing safe, and before the scheduled start time. One view includes the moon, the other the sun.
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I'll admit it, I'm cheating again. This was outdoors, but not really exercise (for me). I was volunteering today a regatta, a local head race (rowing race, staggered and moving start, timing to determine placements, longer distance than sprints but variable by even (in this case a bit over 3500m). Super heavy fog on my way there around 6:15 AM. Photos are from the wait for enough fog to burn off to make racing safe, and before the scheduled start time. One view includes the moon, the other the sun.
Cheating is a relative term...1 -
I belong to a couple paddling clubs and one rafting club. I almost never go out with the rafting club; they are based a couple hours north of here. One of the paddling clubs is too, but they travel and do a few multi-day trips per year where we camp and do day trips from one location for a few days.
Well, I finally joined the raft club for the "Fall Colors Float." It is a river that is just over an hour away, and I used to paddle up there all the time. I have only rowed my raft there a couple times. It's kind of a pain to get my big raft out for a day trip even though it's stored on a trailer ready to go. I usually keep the trailer shoved back into my carport, and I keep a couple composite canoes on top. Well, after a couple multi-day Rogue River trips, I'd been leaving the raft trailer out and the canoes (gasp) sitting on the ground. I know. Bad treatment of my boats. I need to build a shed.
Alas, taking my raft out without a bunch of gear means I can carry passengers. This is good because I can take people down a river who otherwise don't have the capacity to (no boat) or skills to (it takes a while to learn how to read water and navigate it safely).
It was a ridiculously gorgeous fall day with a high temperature about 80 degrees and plenty of sun. Yes, Mr. W. showed up in the afternoon, but it wasn't too bad. The main challenges were rocks just below the surface and the sun glaring off the surface hiding them. We got hung up one time, but we got off pretty easily.
The trip organizer ran down a couple of the rapids ahead of the group so he could try to get some pictures. He may share them, but he did send me one....
Now I have to decide if it's time to put the trailer back or leave it out for some more fall rowing, especially while I wait for my drysuits to come back so I can paddle a canoe or kayak once we get our seasonal weather back.
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Now that you mention it, my rowing club did a Fall color row, too - yesterday. It wasn't nearly as photogenic as your outing, @mtaratoot - it was on our usual flat river, just a bit further upstream than we usually go.
Colors aren't peak here yet, but we had to pick a date in advance. I was coxswain for a group of 3 new-this-year or new-to-club rowers plus one experienced rower (who of course sat stroke seat). It was beautiful weather, a little windy by the end for the singles, a bit on the cool side (50s F, mostly - pleasant enough when rowing, and I was dressed warmly in cox because I've done this before .)
I don't normally share photos of others here, but I think this is distant enough that they're unrecognizable. I'm at right in the quad, facing the rowers. Guy in the single at right in the photo has been refurbishing his newly-bought old wood Hudson racing single. Lovely boat!3 -
While outdoors, also not exercise.
Is it too early to start drooling?
Just button sized but give them a few more days.
I have about a dozen shiitake logs spilt more or less evenly between three varieties;- WR46 which is has a wide temperature range but has an "H" stamped on its ID tag and was the first to fruit a few weeks ago. (See photo below.)
- Night Velvet, a "warm" variety and the one currently shown in the photos above.
- and Snow Caps, a "cold" variety. I'm still crossing my fingers for this one.
I did dry about a pound of WR46 giving just over an ounce of dried mushrooms in a gallon Ziplock. (Drying is supposed to enhance the umami in mushrooms.)
I'm considering using them for a braised mushroom and broccoli dish this weekend.
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Nice shiitake David!
I went out today looking for boletes, chanterelles, and lobsters. I stomped and stomped in an area that produces well, but nothing. Well, there were boletes, but not the ones I was looking for. I got a few and will key them out. At least there wasn't any indication that someone else was just there picking them all - they just haven't started yet. When done, I went and explored another nearby area and found one lonely chanterelle and two Queen Boletes, so it wasn't a complete bust. Plus I got to walk a few hours in the rain with a leaky raincoat....
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