A Walk In The Woods

Trying out the panorama feature that came with the last big OS update on the iPhone. Anyone see the spooky skull lurking in the leaves?

Everywhere you go around here you run into "Tamarack"; street names, business names, organizations, etcetera.  We'd wondered if all the trees we thought were pines were actually tamaracks, but that was not the case. It turns out the neat thing about tamaracks is that they are deciduous coniferous trees that turn bright yellow in autumn!

From Wikipedia: Tamarack Larch, or Tamarack, or Hackmatack, or American Larch (Larix laricina).  The name Tamarack is the Algonquian name for the species and means "wood used for snowshoes."

Just a couple weeks ago we started noticing pointy yellow trees in the woods and up the mountains behind us and today E suggested we take advantage of the break in the weather to see if we could see one up close.

If you'll notice that my glasses are covered with rain then you'll realize that the break in the weather didn't hold.  We had worn rain gear and we were so recently Oregonians that a little rain wasn't much of a deterrent & it didn't ruin our hike.

This is as close as we were able to get without hiking down into the ravine where the creek was flowing at a pretty good clip this afternoon.  The Beastie Grrrlz were more than willing to careen down to the bottom, but we called them back, leashed them up and then tired to make them pose for pictures.

It's not all that easy to see in any of the photos, but we're all wearing safety orange tape.  E & I on our heads, the Beastie Grrrlz around their necks, because it's hunting season and we don't want to be mistaken for deer. We learned this trick from the girls' friend Bella.

One of the best parts about an autumnal walk in the rainy forest is coming home to a toasty warm house, changing out of wet gear & into warm dry comfort clothes and having a beer.  We did that, too.