After the snow...

Exactly one month after my last post we woke up to 22" of snow in our yard! The snow began on December 17th and continued all night, well into Dec. 18th. It set a new 24 hr record for Spokane. And the snow didn't stop there! For the next couple weeks we continued to have waves of snow from 4 to 10" per system until our yard had seen at least 60" by early January. Then we finally had a melt. Most undisturbed areas have a crusty, compacted 8" layer of snow in our neighborhood.

Well, that's just to help me get re-started. I'll see if I can get back into blogging in the next week or so!

Auburn visit

This is a shot from our visit with Skye & Sarah last weekend. The top of the hill where they live has a good view of Mt. Rainier. Using the zoom lens helps make it appear a little closer than it really is!

I'll try to update the blog with some more family & photography news soon. I'm wrapping up the launch of my first serious website by this weekend.

Japanese Garden

This past weekend I stopped by the Japanese Garden in Manito Park to check out the fall colors. It was much better than I expected! I will create a link to some of the pictures later on. In the meantime I'm printing some of them as greeting cards for my November show at Arbor Crest, River Park Square location-

Got sidetracked!

I've been working on several photography "projects" as well as the Cle Elum airport during August & September. I will now try to catch up my Blog for the nearly 10 week time gap! In this time, outside of work, I have visited a couple wineries to collect scenic and commercial images, shot some portraits and worked my way through a Photoshop CS3 book. Well, a book focused on a simplified editing system, not a comprehensive, learn-everything-possible book!

The image below is from Hattrup Farms in Yakima, WA. They are not a winery, simply a vineyard growing mainly red varietals and selling all the fruit to wineries in Washington and Oregon. I believe these are Cabernet Sauvignon grapes with the sunset in the background-

Getting caught up in Cle Elum...

OK, finally recovered from the wedding and helping move some of Skye & Sarah's stuff to Auburn. I'm back on track at my inspection job in Cle Elum. Takes a while to get back in the mood! We're finally building the runway base and should have asphalt in place by the end of the month. In the meantime we had some visitors on the site this morning. Just some young bucks checking out the scene...

Skye & Sarah's Wedding!

The final event of a busy summer! Just a quick note here with a couple pictures- I will update this more later. The wedding was held at the Davenport, arranged by Tom & Kim Olson, parents of the bride. It was a wonderful event, too many details to describe at first! A storybook beginning to a wonderful marriage of two young people who are working hard at doing life the right way!

Long hike...

I'm trying to post once a week but I haven't taken interesting photos lately, just a hike that was too long with too little to show for it!

The Cle Elum-Roslyn-Ronald area had a long history of coal mining. You can hike an old railroad bed that was converted into a trail several years ago. It' s interesting due to family history- my maternal grandfather was an electrician in a coal mine. Longer story for another blog! Anyway, if you are in the Cle Elum/Roslyn area this is one way to kill two hours and end up with sore feet! Wear stiff hiking boots or shoes because there is plenty of mid-size gravel in places. My feet were beat up by wearing running shoes.

The 2nd picture here is some old piece of equipment. It's hard to see any evidence of the old mining operations. I'll have to explore more later....