Enchanted Valley

The Enchanted Valley is in Olympic National Park. If you like bears this is the place to go. I believe it has the highest proportion of bears in the entire park. People say they have seen as many as 20 bears in the valley at one time. I only saw 4 on the entire trip. One got a little too close for comfort near bedtime. It got about 30 feet from my tent. The waterfalls are amazing. I counted no less than 20 from where I was sitting and I didn't go into the upper valley.

Mt Hood Summit video

As the title says this is a 30 second video clip of the view from the summit of Mt. Hood. It was about as perfect of a night/morning/day as we could get. It was warm enough to be wearing shorts and there was little to no wind. We started the climb around 12:30 a.m. and made the summit around 5:00 a.m., after taking our sweet time on the way up.

Going from right to left in the video you see 1.) Columbia River 2.) Mt. Adams 3.) Mt. Rainier 4.)Mt. St. Helens and 5.) Portland

The guy standing right next to me is the guide, Randy Sofich, and the other person is Sarah, who decided to tell us on the way up that she was scared of heights. Imagine climbing a mountain and being scared of heights. She made it though, so it wasn't so bad after all. Oh, and her best friend graduated from the U of A in '06 with a master's in environmental engineering!

Barret Spur, Mt. Hood

Mt Defiance, Columbia River Gorge

Olympic National Park, Hoh River & Coast

Crater Lake Snowshoeing

Here are some pictures from this past weekend of a snowshoe excursion at Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon.