Blue Mountain Hike

Last weekend, my roommate and I went down to the Blue Mountains in Southeastern Washington to look for some deer and elk sheds and go for a nice bushwhacking hike.  Our entire hike was in the Umatilla National Forest and straddled the border for the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness Area.  We heard some rumors of a lot of snow up in the mountains, and calling the National Forest confirmed that rumor.  So, I rented some snowshoes for the weekend.  Of course, once we got to the trailhead, we didn't see snow anywhere except very high up, so I was a little upset that I rented snowshoes for nothing.

On the drive to the trailhead, we saw a ton of mule deer, so I think we found some good areas for hunting this fall.  We also saw a lot of turkeys, but none of them were bearded, so this probably won't be a place for us to go for turkey hunting.  Once out on the mountain, though, after a lot of bushwhacking and climbing steep terrain, the only evidence of any cervids was a lot of trails and even more droppings.  But not the droppings we were hoping for- just poop.  At least it was in a very beautiful area and the hike gave us some great views.

We kept looking across the canyon and thinking that would have been better hiking and maybe better shed hunting.  The grass actually was greener on the other side.

I liked this view up the canyon of the Tucannon River.

It looks like there were very recent forest fires in the entire area, which made hiking up the side of the mountain not on trails fairly difficult, since we had to climb over a ton of downed trees and debris.  Here is a nice shot looking back down one of the climbs on the way up through a bunch of dead trees. 

If you were thinking that my earlier decision to leave the snowshoes in the car was a mistake, you would be right.  The higher up we got, the more snow we encountered.  We actually spent half of the day trudging through snow.  Some of it was hard-packed enough that we could walk on top of it, but a great majority of the snow was soft enough that we were post-holing at least to our knees and sometimes to our hips.  So now I was even more disappointed that I rented the snowshoes.  The ridge we hiked along was incredibly untouched, even by animals, and provided us a really nice hike in an untouched winter wonderland.

With the exception of a crazy rabbit, the only tracks we saw up here were our own.

It was a long walk for a picnic in the snow.

When we finally made it out of the snow, we started looking again for sheds, but still only found scat and trails.  The way down did provide some excitement, though, as we did come about 25 feet from some wildlife.  We were heading down and all of the sudden a grizzly bear came running out of some tree cover right in front of us!  He was staring at us as we ran down the hill to a tree that had fallen over the creek and ran up it incredibly fast (the downed tree was covered in moss and at about a 40 degree angle).  He kept running up the other side for a while before he finally stopped and looked at us for a second then kept going. His speed and agility was incredibly impressive and it reminded me how severely outmatched we are against wild creatures such as grizzlies.  With that in mind, this encounter is exactly how most encounters with dangerous wildlife will occur.  Most of the time, we won't even notice that we just had an encounter and if we do, the bear will most likely just run away.  He was already long gone before I was able to draw my bear spray and my roommate was able to draw his gun.  I think I have probably bored almost everybody reading this with conversations about what to do during a bear encounter (whether black or grizzly), so I'll stop now. Sorry I don't have any pictures, but he was a little too fast.  Although, soon I will post some pictures of grizzly bears that I get to work with.

After a grizzly bear being the only non-avian wildlife we saw while hiking in the mountains, on our drive out, we again saw a bunch of muleys and turkeys.  Overall, a pretty good day, despite once again not finding any sheds.

Exercising my green thumb, and building up some calluses

This weekend was pretty rainy and very windy, which actually would make for some good shed hunting weather, but since I am doing that next weekend, I figured I would finally get started on my garden this weekend.

This year, I have been fortunate enough to be able to rent one of the community garden plots here in town.  I was on the waiting list for a long time and I ended up getting one of the last spots for this year.  Here is a link to the website for the community gardens, in case you are interested: https://sites.google.com/site/koppelfarm/

It had looked like the plot I am renting hadn't been used in a very long time, and it was in quite a bit of disrepair, but now it is looking good.  There was a bunch of trash and junk in the plot and it was completely overgrown with grass.  I forgot to get a before picture, but I did think of taking a picture mid-way through tilling it.  Then I took a picture today after raking out most of the grass and putting a nice border/drainage around it.  In the first picture, it is a little hard to see where the plot actually is, but if you use the stake in the foreground of both pictures, you can get an idea of what I was working with.

After tilling my plot at the community gardens, I took the rototiller back to my house to work on a small section in my back yard.  My roommate and I actually convinced our landlord to put a garden in, with the stipulation that we would water the lawn over the summer.  It actually turned out to be a pretty good sized garden, considering how small the back yard actually is, with our garden butting right up next to the wheat field.  Over the course of the day yesterday, we made a few trips to Ace, where they have some deals going on right now so we were able to get a decent amount of free stuff.  We also ended up getting a bunch of strawberry plants to put in the little spot of dirt next to our front porch, which we planted yesterday as well.  I am pretty excited to be able to grab some strawberries on my way into the house this summer!  Below are a  couple snapshots of our back yard garden.  In the first picture you can just barely see Moscow Mountain in the background.  In the second, you can really get a good idea of all the wheat fields I have right behind my house that I told you about previously.  For a good part of the day today, I actually had a good time just watching the wind form waves in the wheat.

I capped off a great day gardening yesterday with watching Michigan beat Syracuse in the basketball semifinals, and I am sure you all know but now they are on their way to the championship game tomorrow night against Louisville.  I am very excited for the game!  GO BLUE!

Easter Weekend, Spring is Here!

This past weekend had a lot of excitement that has left me pretty sore and very tired.  The first weekend with temperatures in the high 60's and 70's made it irresistible to....play hockey!  Well, I also did some mountain biking and hiking to take full advantage of the weather.

This past weekend, I competed in the Puck-a-Palousa hockey tournament down in Lewsiton, ID.  The tournament was actually supposed to be in Moscow, but the rink in Moscow melted with the high spring temperatures (the rink is not so great and desperately needs a new chiller).  On the plus side of driving down to Lewiston, though, is the fact that Lewiston is about 2000 feet lower than here and is essentially a desert, so the trails down there have been completely dry pretty much all winter.  If you look on the satellite view on the map in my previous post, look just south of Pullman/Moscow and you can see the rivers and the canyons.  That is where Lewiston is.

For the hockey tournament, I was playing on a mixed "C" level division team.  The reason I was playing with them is that most of the players on the team are going to be on the newly formed Washington State University Women's Hockey Team that I will be coaching.  So, I played on this team as a player-coach and just had some fun.  We ended up losing all three games, but by the end of the weekend, the team started playing together a lot better and it showed us a lot of the areas that we need to work on.

Each day after the hockey games on Saturday and Sunday, I drove a little bit down the road from the hockey rink and rode at a place called Hell's Gate State Park.  It is called Hell's Gate because it is at the beginning of the Snake River Canyon section called Hell's Canyon.  Farther down, the canyon is the deepest canyon in North America, reaching a depth of 7700 feet in some areas.  The trails at Hell's Gate are very dry, with a lot of sage brush getting stuck in my cassette, but there are some really rocky and fun sections of trail.  There is also one section that is similar in steepness and sketchiness to the Super Sketchy Section, only a lot longer.  This section is called Devil's slide.

Here are some pictures from the top just before heading down Devil's Slide.  The first picture is looking up the Snake to the South and the second picture is looking down the Snake to the Northwest.

Hell's Gate State Park has a lot of other fun activities that I am hoping to take advantage of later, such as the archery range.  Thanks to Mr. B, I think I will be practicing my shooting with a bow soon so I can be ready to hunt this fall.  Also, when I was leaving on Sunday, there were 12 horse trailers parked at the trail head.  I am not sure how much fun that would be for all those people there, since there are only about 12 miles of trails in the park, but I guess it was a beautiful day.

When I got home from my ride on Sunday, my roommate asked me if I wanted to go for a hike with him.  I was so tired from the weekend full of so many activities, but it was so nice outside that I couldn't say no.  So we headed up to Kamiak Butte and looked for some deer sheds.  He ended up finding two small ones, and I got skunked again.  Either way, it was a gorgeous day and a perfect hike.  It was made even better since we drove to the other side of the Butte that the parking lot for the county park is, so we hiked a bunch of the Butte that is much less populated and actually has quite a bit different terrain and vegetation.  It was like being in a completely different area.

Well, that was my exciting weekend.  I got some good sun and had lots of fun.