About Me

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Growing Up In The WA Cascades From the time I was half way through Grade School until I left home my family lived in a canyon in the foothills of the Cascade Mountain Range of WA State. Town was down canyon about five miles away. At the upper end of the canyon our property bordered the Wenatchee National Forest. After a homesteaded, sheep ranching, hermit who lived about a mile up a side canyon was gone our nearest neighbor was about two miles away down canyon. And for a long time that was where the power lines, school bus, mail service, and paved road stopped. As you can see from the collection of photos here we used to get a fair amount of snow in the winter. So every fall we hauled as much wood as we could and piled it up down near the house so we would have enough to keep warm through the cold winter months. Besides cutting wood winter chores consisted of feeding and caring for the livestock and milking the milk cow. In summer we built and mended fence, repaired buildings, and tended to the vegetable garden. But we also found time to do some exploring. It was growing up in that canyon that gave me a love of nature and the outdoors. One summer we moved all of our beds outside into the yard and slept out under the stars. Another summer my brother and I found our parents jungle hammocks stored in the attic. So we pitched them down by the creek between the Cottonwood trees and slept in them.

Hiking Experience

I have done some hiking in the Idaho Rockies and the Blue Mountains in Southeastern WA, and a few other miscellaneous locations mostly in the Western US. But the majority of my hiking has been done in the Cascades and on the Olympic Peninsula of WA State

My longest hike to date lasted for several months while I loosely followed the route of the PCT southbound through WA, OR, and CA with detours to climb Mt. Shasta and to hike along the coastal mountain range in CA when lateness of the season forced me out of the Sierras at Mammoth Lakes.

Much of my hiking has been solo. I find going solo has several advantages - you can travel as fast or as slow as you please, and you often see more wildlife going solo. But I also enjoy hiking with others in small groups. Often my hiking is for an overnight trip because I really enjoy spending a night away from the city where you can see the stars and listen to the sounds of nature instead of traffic. I'm not in as good a shape as I used to be so I don't hike as far each day as I used to, but if I get out often enough that may change. If you live or hike in the Pacific Northwest and think you might like to go for a hike with someone else, contact me by e-mail.

As time permits I will be adding some pictures and notes about some of my hikes to the web site.

Work

When I'm not hiking or thinking about how to lighten up my hiking gear so I can enjoy my hiking trips more, I am most often parked in front of a PC keyboard writing softwae mostly for industrial process control and monitoring applications.