Bonneville Dam and hatchery

The fish ladder at Bonneville

The Rainbow trout pond

The Sturgeon Pond

More trout ponds

Vista House

Horsetail falls

Bonneville

yard update

So, over the past year or two we have been working on our yard, you can go back and look at yard remodel 2007 for the before and after pics. The yard has had a chance to mature and we are putting in new features. Our most kind, lovely and somewhat workaholic neighbor put in the terraced boxes on the side hill, for which we are most grateful and for which I daily thank God, as they are beautiful. Lets take a walk and see..........

The roses are in good form this year. we figured out they are long stemmed, so I have been pinching back the side shoots and just letting them grow as long stems. They look so nice cut in a vase!

And our special surprise this year, the strawberries which are huge and lovely. I actually had to remove some which were overrunning the roses and put them up on Craigslist. they got taken.
The hydrangea changed color this year, it is deep pink instead of purple.

A gift from our neighbor.

This is one of my personal favorites. I like the composition of this picture, I love the way the color gradient shifts from blue to red and also, if you click on it for a close up, the incredible clarity and detail of the plant in the foreground is very striking.

May and June

Ah, I found a good picture of the campsites we had at the park, this was a jpeg off the actual state park website, that's why it has the writing all over it, it isn't really clickable.

For Fathers Day we decided to camp a few days at a new State Park near Vernonia, in the coast range but before you get to the coast side of the hills. Stub Stewart state park. I do wish I had gotten pics of the actual sites, they were all w/c accessible, which is nice if you have w/c, but basically were gravel pads with no grass. Our site was on the very top of a ridge, very open and exposed, and being a rigde in a mountain range there was a steady biting wind. It made for good campfires, however. The first coule pics are just bucolic farmland you see throughout the Willamette Valley, very pretty.




My little God daughter had her first Communion a few weeks ago, Les and Peter were both trying not to get into any trouble

and Hanni was just being cute.
Back to Stub Stewart- the hillsides were covered in this Lupen, I think it's lupen. I couldn't get a really good shot, Les made me take the pics from the window of the car so, you can't get the sense of how it blankets the ground like apurple moving carpet, very pretty.