Mission Log 3

Mission Log, Day 61

There are many important examples of the interactions between the primary bipedal species and the numerous animal species of the planet; few exhibit the level of ceremony and ritual as that of the annual Poultry Sacrifice.

Harvest festivals are common among agrarian societies, and the Poultry Sacrifice seems to be a carryover of an earlier stage in the development of the bipeds’ civilization, when scarcity was more common. It hearkens back to another, rather counter-intuitive, commonality among more primitive peoples: sacrificing something dear to ensure its later availability. Presenting grain at the altar of a grain god in hopes of a bountiful harvest, for example. When these sacrifices involve animals, or even people, the sacrificial individual is often given a high standing and exemplary treatment, to emphasize or even heighten the value of the sacrifice.

In the example of the Poultry Sacrifice, size is an important consideration. Bipeds will often compete with each other in their food distribution centers for a prized specimen of the avian in question, and even reserve a sacrificial subject with the merchant weeks in advance. The sacrifice is a family event, with some members of biped extended clans traveling great distances; the size of the gatherings often results in multiple sacrifices.

Curiously, sacrificial events when the avian begins the proceedings alive are incredibly rare, even unknown. Instead, this large species of avian is killed, deflocked, gutted, and in many cases frozen well in advance of the ceremony.

The purpose of the ceremony itself is perplexing. If it involved the ritualistic slaughter of the avian, then it would be natural to assume that, like the example of grain sacrifices cited above, the intended goal would be to entreaty some higher power for a bounteous hunt, or otherwise successful procurement of edible supplies in the coming winter months. Instead, the ceremony seems to be an attempt to restore life to the avian; perhaps this is the goal, with the belief that by restoring life to the avian, even symbolically, the bipeds will be restored to health, or guaranteed bounty in a perceived future life or afterlife.

First, the avian is cleaned, and in recent years, an additional step has become popular: to soak the avian’s body in a saline solution to symbolize a return to the seas where life first evolved on this planet. Thus the sacrificial specimen is cleansed, renewed, and the bipeds are vicariously renewed with it. When removed from the saline bath, it is rubbed with fragrant herbs, spices, and oils, much as the bipeds themselves are known to douse themselves with fragrant oils and floral extracts.

Second comes the ceremonial feeding, wherein the avian is hand-fed great quantities of bread, fruit, vegetables, and nuts, all of which are symbolic of life and food in general across several biped cultures. I find this step especially puzzling, as even I, a stranger to this world, can tell that they are feeding the wrong end of the creature. I have yet to determine the ceremonial significance of this oversight.

Third, the avian is placed in a great incubator, or ceremonial womb, in which it is heated for several hours, and treated to frequent re-applications of the same oils and herbs used after the bathing. Many biped families choose a different method for this stage, using a smaller incubator filled with oils to save them the trouble of re-applying them manually. They claim this method is superior, but the number of biped dwellings which fall victim to fires related to these devices suggest that whatever higher power they seek to please with the ceremony may not be convinced of the sincerity of their efforts.

Finally, when the flesh of the avian has darkened and become aromatic, it is removed from the incubator and devoured by all those present, to infuse their own bodies with the symbolic life they have striven to instill in the avian. This is commonly followed by a couple hours of quiet meditation for each biped, sometimes while listening to the broadcast of bloodless gladiatorial combat which I shall explain later.

The Cutting

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68

One year ago today, I crossed the border into Maine, the state where Mom was born, on her 67th birthday. I was about two weeks from the end of my thru-hike, and I started the day in high spirits, even though the four friends who'd been hiking with me since Vermont had decided the previous evening to part ways with me for a few days.

This year, I'm working on getting my manuscript published.  I've written a book about hiking the Appalachian Trail, what led me to the trail in the first place, and why I took Mom's ashes with me.  Agents have been queried; now it's a matter of waiting for a favorable response, and constantly agonizing over whether my work is good enough to impress anyone.

Let's find out. Below is an excerpt from the manuscript, a single chapter from late in the trail. There are a couple references to earlier chapters, but I think it still stands alone well enough to be readable.  Why this chapter, instead of one more inspiring, uplifting, or funny? Because this chapter covers that day, one year ago, when I brought Mom home.  Happy Birthday, Mom.

Alone Again

          My friends left me.  The hike from Pinkham Notch had been harder on them than I’d realized, and during the night at Imp Shelter, they decided to stop at a hostel the next day.  I passed the hostel before noon, and was certain that they wouldn’t catch up with me by the time I reached Rangeley, our next planned resupply town.  They had tried to convince me to join them, plying me with the promise of beds, showers, laundry, and good food, but they lost me when they revealed their plan to slackpack for a day or so to conserve energy.  Slackpacking is when you hike with only a daypack, and a shuttle either drops you off at the start, or picks you up for the return, and you generally spend both nights at the same place.  Many hostels along the AT offer this service for free, even supplying the daypacks, because it encourages hikers to stay a second night and spend more money.  My decision wasn’t motivated by thrift, but conviction.  That wasn’t how I wanted to hike the trail.  I had never slackpacked, yellow blazed, or taken shortcuts, and I wasn’t going to start less than three hundred miles from the end.  It wasn’t my idea of thru-hiking.  I saw the hostel, gave the signs advertising baked goods and cold drinks no more than a passing thought after three meals from Simon and Irene, and kept hiking.  My friends had slept in, knowing they didn’t have far to go that day.  Doyi’s toes were in bad shape, and Ginko was getting crabby and short-tempered.  We all needed a rest, but I didn’t allow myself a break.  It required some rough climbing and difficult terrain, but that night I was rewarded with white lady’s slippers on the side trail to the Gentian Pond Shelter, which was oriented to provide a stunning view of the sunset over the valley below, and a few steps from the shelter I could hear where the pond drained into a waterfall that worked its way down to the valley.

          I left at five the next morning, June 23, my 106^th day on the trail, and what would have been my mom’s sixty-seventh birthday.  That was the day I entered Maine, the state where she’d been born, and where we would finish our 2,185.3 mile hike together, a dream we’d both had for decades, but only I would see completed.  The weather was beautiful, and I was filled with hope for the day, my eyes damp with all the importance I had heaped upon it.  As soon as I realized, days earlier, that I would cross the border on her birthday, I felt it would be auspicious.

          It was miserable.

          I’d had Gentian Pond and the shelter to myself for hours, and fell asleep by seven, excited at the prospect of nine and a half solid hours of sleep, but two section hikers I’d met and forgotten arrived at eight, making lots of noise, and tried to maintain a conversation that didn’t interest me.  I didn’t get to sleep again until well after nine.  My energy level was low throughout Mom’s birthday, and the trail was very rough.  In the south, I’d estimated my arrival times based upon a walking speed of three miles an hour, and I often arrived earlier than I’d expected.  In Maine, I would estimate arrivals based upon a speed of two miles an hour, and I was later than I’d hoped every single day.  Maine was brutal, and I was never sure whether it was because it was brutal all on its own, or because I got there after hiking almost two thousand miles in under four months.  The hiking machine was rapidly losing steam.

          The day I entered Maine, it took me almost twelve hours to go a little under fifteen miles.  One of those miles was Mahoosuc Notch, a section of trail described by my guidebook as the “most difficult or fun mile of the AT,” a jumbled maze of boulders I’d actually been looking forward to navigating, thinking that as a rock climber, I’d have a distinct advantage.  Before we stopped at Imp Shelter, we had planned on hiking through Mahoosuc early in the morning, when we were fresh, and helping each other through as a group.  I arrived at Mahoosuc in the afternoon, already tired, accompanied accidentally by Pack and Big Hungry.  Pack had a barely-noticeable lisp, and had already hiked the Pacific Crest Trail.  Big Hungry was a fourteen pound rat terrier he’d adopted from a shelter just before starting the AT.  She was so small that she didn’t carry a pack, as many trail dogs do, but spry enough that she had less trouble navigating Mahoosuc than Pack and I.  In one spot, she darted out of the way just as Pack fell on his way over a sedan-sized boulder and landed on his backpack where Big Hungry had been just a moment earlier.  I proudly congratulated myself internally, knowing that my skill and experience as a rock climber would easily get me over the obstacle, and moments later fell at exactly the same place after my foot slipped off exactly the same edge that had failed him.  I dropped six feet with windmill arms and wheelbarrow-handle legs before landing so hard on my right ass cheek that I was certain I’d be limping for the rest of the trip.  It took a minute or two before I could even stand up straight, and I was later surprised to see that I wasn’t purple halfway down my thigh.  I’ve never bruised easily off-trail, and I’d always assumed that it was thanks to a high-protein diet, but the jar of peanut butter I ate every four or five days didn’t seem enough to protect me after that fall.

          It took over an hour to get through Mahoosuc Notch, and the physical difficulty in passing it was only one factor; it’s not a well-blazed section, and Pack and I often had different ideas about where the trail went.  Sometimes neither of us knew, and it wasn’t until one of us found a new blaze and yelled to the other that we both got back on track.  I tore a new hole in one of my shoes, and then painfully drove the exposed toe onto the jagged edge of a chunk of granite on the north end of the notch, after I’d thought the worst was over.  By then, any excitement I’d had about Mahoosuc Notch had evaporated with my high hopes for Mom’s birthday, and the last shreds of my good mood from my final day in New Hampshire.

          Two hours later, I arrived at Speck Pond Shelter and creaked slowly to the floor.  I changed shoes and busied myself sweeping the shelter and arranging my bunk, then took what I needed to stock up on water from the spring, but returned with only enough to get me through the evening.  The blackflies in the area were fierce, and I only found relief from them by wearing my entire rain shell, because they easily bit through everything else I had.  I put on my other pair of socks, because the camp shoes Liz had mailed to me in Delaware Water Gap were made of a mesh material that provided easy access to my feet, and I constantly brushed my hands against each other and my face to keep the blood-sucking bastards off of my flesh.  One of them snuck in under my watch band and bit me on the wrist.  When blackflies bite you, you almost never feel it.  Blackflies carry an anticoagulant in their saliva; the first indication of a bite is pinprick marks on your flesh that bleed like open wounds.  Later, those pinpricks itch like crazy.  I realized I’d been bitten under my watch because when my sleeve pulled back, I saw a bright smear of blood on the cuff of my yellow rain jacket.  I spent most of my evening swearing and miserable, on the brink of tears.  Happy birthday, Mom.

          I stayed at Hall Mountain the next night, and felt a bit better because I’d eaten a filling dinner at Speck Pond, did a better job of hydrating, and to my boundless delight, Hall Mountain wasn’t clotted with fucking blackflies.  I still had one problem: because we’d stopped at Imp instead of Rattling River three nights earlier, I was no longer sure I had enough food to get me to Rangeley.  I’d planned on cooking a large dinner for my friends to celebrate entering our very last state, but we parted ways before that happened, so I knew I had enough dinners—I just didn’t have enough hiking food for the days between the dinners.  I was working out that math early in the afternoon when I stepped out onto B Hill Road, and as I looked for traffic, a van pulled up and stopped beside me.  Even before the gravel stopped crunching, Doyi leaned out of the passenger window, and a moment later the sliding door opened to reveal Socs, Ginko, and Catch Me.  They had gone from one hostel to another, and invited me to join them, but I was still adamant about not slackpacking.  Then they asked if there was anything else I needed, explaining that they were on their way into town for a resupply when they chanced upon me popping out of the woods.  “Actually, yeah—could you spare a couple granola bars, or a Snickers?  I have almost enough food to get to Rangeley, but I’d feel a lot better with two or three more snacks.”

          Doyi couldn’t reach his pack, but Ginko, Socs, and Catch Me immediately started handing me food, and I soon had more than I’d need—in fact, I had enough that I had two extra snacks that day as I finished my hike, and I would be hard pressed to decide whether the extra food or seeing my friends did more to boost my morale that afternoon.  Whichever it was, when I reached Hall Mountain Shelter at the end of my 107^th day on the trail, I was in such a good mood that I left my pack in the shelter and practically jogged up the mountainside behind it to an overlook—several days after I’d started giving the finger to “viewpoint” signs along the trail.  Socs had taken over my planning duties for the rest of the group, and she assured me that I’d see them again in Rangeley in two days.

Berlin

Last week was a break from Germania because I was out of town for a few days, and I didn't get a chance to write more about our recent trip to Europe.  I've been busy with a couple other things, one of which may become a Pretty Big Deal soon. Are you excited? I know I am!

Meantime, want to see some pictures of Berlin? We spent a few days there, seeing what we could manage in the time we had. The Girl's cousin (second cousin, whatever) served as a tour guide and a translator for those of us who can't get by in German (me).  As luck would have it, he's a bit of an expert on the division and later reunification of Germany, and the Berlin Wall.  I joked that we could take him blindfolded anywhere in the city, remove the blindfold, and he'd know whether we were in East or West Berlin, and how far we were from the wall, but I really think he could have done it.

Berlin's official past time seems to be graffiti. Almost every building is covered up to about eight feet. This wall is set up specifically for graffiti; anyone can come and paint it whenever they like.

We saw a LOT in Berlin. On one afternoon, we took a bike tour of sites with a historical connection to the wall and reunification.  We visited an art museum, an Allied History museum, and a German history museum.  It was all fascinating, but it was also pretty heavy. I never realized how much empathy I had until I tried to digest a steady stream of Berlin history for four days straight. As I told our guide/second cousin, "It's no wonder you people drink."

Tiny wooden people helping each other in an alley.

A sculpture outside the Allied History Museum celebrating the liberation of Berlin.

There are still a lot of reminders of World War Two and the division of Germany. Older buildings (and a few monuments) still bear bullet holes and scars from heavier artillery. We saw at least two prominent churches which had suffered heavy bombing, but the damaged remains are still standing today--and mysteriously free of graffiti, as though there are some lines nobody will cross.

After the Nazis were defeated and Russia occupied East Germany, they built a monument to the Russian forces in Berlin. When they left during reunification, part of the agreement was that Berlin had to preserve and protect that monument. It's surrounded by an eight foot chainlink fence, and a gate that closes each night. It doesn't get many visitors.

The view from the top of one of Berlin's tallest buildings.

The Brandenburg Gate.  The tiny vertical line in the distance is the Victory Column.

One afternoon, we had a tour of the Bundestag (or the Reichstag, depending on your generation). This is like touring the Capitol Building in DC; it's their seat of government. It's been bombed, burned, and rebuilt. You can see the styles of three different architects, but the most prominent feature is the enormous glass dome on top. It has a separate access from the rest of the building, so you can see it just by getting in line and going through a security checkpoint. We went up there before taking a tour of the rest of the building.

The mirrored funnel shape reflects heat and light through a large window in the floor to the legislative assembly chamber below. The sides of the dome are glass, but the very top is open to the elements. It's an amazing structure.

The Bundestag.

The Jewish Memorial. The ground level drops as you cross, so the columns eventually block your view. It's meant to show how families were separated, and didn't know where their lost people had gone. It's very effective, and a little creepy.  The building in the background is the American Embassy.

A set of wings outside the Mexican Embassy, perfectly designed for photos.

Scweinshaxe, the manliest meal I've ever had. It broke my knife.

Sparrenburg Castle

Sometime in the thirteenth century, Sparrenburg Castle was built to watch over the trade route through Bielefeld. It also held the mighty coffers; safe passage required a toll, and all that money had to be kept somewhere.

It's not pertinent to the tour, but I liked these plants.

Foundations of the old armory buildings. Tunnels connected the armory (and adjacent barracks) to the two nearest towers.

Naturally, it became a bit of a target.  It was attacked and besieged numerous times in its past, but it was never, in all of those engagements, captured.

Part of the wall of one of the corner towers. A tree has spread its roots across the wall; that small alcove is full of votive candles, like a tiny shrine.

A model of the castle's original structures.

I got most of my information about Sparrenburg from The Girl's cousin, who doubled as our able tour guide for the final few days of our German trip.  He got the information from the official tour guide at the castle, who conducted the tour in rapid, detailed German.  My translator did his level best to keep up, but there was a LOT of information to convey, and I eventually assured him that I was paying very close attention to where we were throughout our tour, and if he could remember later where he was when he got the tidbits he parsed out to me, I could connect them to their rightful places in my mental files.

Armory foundation and the central tower.

The Girl demonstrated tower wall thickness, and window smallness.

We climbed the tower ourselves, before the tour began, for an aerial view of the city below us.  The base of the tower, in local custom, had at one point been used as a prison, and was later converted for use (a door was installed) as a store room.

Tower stairs

The view from the top.  (click to enlarge)

Most of the castle has been rebuilt and restored from the rubble left at the end of World War II, among other destructive conflicts in the fortress's past, and the restoration continues.  Today, only the foundation remains of some of the outbuildings , but the castle's main walls show the overall size of the structure, and the central keep has been rebuilt and is used as a restaurant.

At one time, there really was a drawbridge. Entry by that entrance was strictly for the VIPs. Everyone else had to come in through an opening at the base of one of the walls, passing by five thick oak doors. Each of those doors would be barred when the castle was under attacks; vertical shafts would allow castle defenders to pour rocks, hot oil, and other unpleasantness on encroaching attackers.

Our tour took us through the grounds, and later underneath them, to tunnels which served two of the towers at the fortress's corners.  Cannon emplacements to protect from ground troops are at the lowest level, as is the bakery which fed the forces protecting the castle.  Our favorite nugget of castle knowledge: although bread was baked fresh every day, it was stored until it had begun to stale before serving it to the troops.  Fresh bread is delicious, and you want to eat a lot of it.  Stale bread is more of a chore than a pleasure, so you eat less.  Feeding the soldiers old bread meant feeding them less bread, which saved a lot of money.

Note the hole in teh ceiling directly above the fire ring. This room (well under ground, beneath one of the corner towers) is where defenders fired cannons at attacking ground troops. It is also where defending troops would stream out and attack any attacking forces which made it past the cannon fire.

Shelves in the bakery.

One of the vertical shafts above the commoners' entrance tunnel.

When we finished at the castle, we walked through town for a little while before dinner. It became a running joke that Germans love pizza, because we kept finding (and eating at) places that specialized in it.  It was a little strange for us Yankees, because when a pizza arrives at your table in Germany--even one meant for a single person--you notice two things. First, it is enormous. Second, it is never cut. You do that yourself.

Classy, totally non-threatening table lamps at an Italian restaurant in Germany.

See the common table knife beside this huge pizza?  And people think American portions are too big.

Idstein

As I've already mentioned, The Girl did all of the planning for our trip to Germany and Iceland. My only contribution was asking, "Can we see Ginko?"  He's the only person I knew in Germany, a fellow thru-hiker who I met very early in my trip last year, and who ended up hiking with me and two other thru-hikers for the last month or so of the Trail.  We managed to see him twice in Germany; the first was when he met us in Idstein.

There used to be leather production in Idstein; this statue represents the workers... and the vat of chemicals. 

This is the sort of old-world architecture Americans go to Germany to see... and which Germans, we learned, go to America to escape.

There are lots of unique carvings and ornamentation on the houses. The Girl and I started collecting pictures of architectural features like these that we want to incorporate into a house someday.

Buildings like this one made us wonder whether those old-world builders ever used levels.  The tower in the background is the Hexenturm.

Cobbles, and a nearby school.

After we met Ginko (trailname, not his real name) at the train station, we wandered through town for a little while, working our way to the Hexenturm, or Witch Tower.  At its base is a plaque with the names of witches condemned during the witch trials of 1676.  It's a long list for such a little town.  When they first told me the translation of Hexenturm, I had high hopes that the tower belonged to the witch, but the tower was part of Castle Idstein (see previous link), used primarily as a watch tower.  The name comes from the prison in the base where they put condemned witches, or those awaiting trial.  It was built like an oubliette (a type of medieval prison with only one access point, in a high ceiling, rendering escape impossible unless assisted by someone outside), and it is still visible through a window in the floor of the tower's ground-floor room.

Hexenturm

This view shows how thick the walls are at the base; I was just inside the door, looking into the ground-floor room.

Climbing the Hexenturm.

Inside of the roof.

There were nice views of the town from the top of the tower, but I readily admit to being more interested in the structure and its history than in what I could see from the windows.  At lower levels, the windows felt more like tunnels, because the glass was set at one end of long horizontal shafts in the thick walls.  The top of the tower was wooden, and the walls were much thinner--like someone had put a treehouse on a stone column.  A stone column with accused witches locked in the basement.  I don't know how that place isn't riddled with ghost stories.

Ginko and Treefrog

After we returned the key to the Hexenturm (you guide your own tour up the tower, after getting the biggest skeleton key I've ever seen from whoever's in charge. I don't know who that was, because all the signs were in German, and one of our hosts retrieved the key while the rest of us waited), we spent some more time walking through town, looking at neat buildings, decorated lamp posts, and streets clogged with people, but almost devoid of motor traffic. Then we got some lunch and applewine.

It seemed like every lamp post in Idstein was decorated like this. Fascinating, and pretty cool.

Potato pancakes with lox.

The next day, we moved on to our last set of hosts in Germany.  The Girl's second cousin and his wife, who came to visit us in Virginia last year.  Most of the day we were stuck in cars, but when we arrived, we got a tour of his family's rose farm, then went to dinner in a converted church.

Germans really know how to pack car snacks.

Inside one of the greenhouses.

I really liked the optic effect here. See that donut of light just to the right of the window?  It's coming from behind me...

...Through this window. The blue section in the middle blocked enough light that you only see a ring projected on the opposite wall.

We returned to the rose farm the next morning and toured the proprietor's beekeeping operation, but that was so much fun that I'm saving all of it for a separate post.  After that, we were off to Sparrenburg Castle... but you'll have to come back next week for that.

The Honeymooners, Day Three

I admit it: by our third morning in Bend, we were getting a little tired.  In our defense, between last-minute planning, driving to Ohio, the wedding, the reception, the flight, the hiking, and the skiing, we'd been going non-stop for over a week by then, and a lot of that was pretty big-deal stuff.

So we had a slow morning.

This bugs me. Because I don't have a garden where I can do stuff like this.

I took a few pictures of our rental, and wandered up Awbrey Butte a little way, looking at houses and watching the mule deer grazing in yards.

I also want to get a bunch of busted spigots so I can put these flowers somewhere.  There were a LOT of them in this yard.

People have great yard art in Bend, and there are certain themes to the architecture that I really like.  I even took pictures of houses, collecting ideas in case I can ever afford to build a place exactly as I want.  You know... on that mountain I want to buy.

shhh... there's a bear!

I had to kill a little time, because we had made plans to meet my dad's cousin again, this time for lunch at a little cafe on the north side of town called McKay's Cottage.  Somehow, I'd never visited it when I lived in Bend.  The Girl got a Smith Rock Benedict, because we were heading to Smith that afternoon, and she loves hollandaise sauce.  She also loves avocado, and they were nice enough to add some for her.  I got... I don't remember what they called it, but there were layers of pulled chicken, spicy sauce/salsa,eggs, hollandaise, crispy corn tortillas that somehow stayed crispy despite all the eggs and sauces, and it was permeated throughout with deliciousness.  I don't remember anything we talked about over breakfast.  I just remember wanting to find a room where my breakfast and I could spend some very special Alone Time.  It was outstanding.

There's a party in my mouth, and NOBODY ELSE IS INVITED!!

We took another little tour of downtown (I love Bend's downtown), mainly because we were trying to find gifts for people.  We never did, but we had a good time anyway.

Solid marketing.

It's not just yard art; there's lots of art on public walls in Bend, too.  More even than when I lived there.  We saw brand-new murals in alleys, new sculptures, and a few new businesses.  My town is doing really well, and it made me happy to see all the improvements.

"Ghost town Richmond, Smith Rock"

Words to live by.

Looking across Mirror Pond.

That afternoon, we drove to Terrebonne and Smith Rock.  Smith is one of our favorite places in Oregon.  That means even more coming from The Girl, who often doesn't consider a hike worthwhile unless there are waterfalls.  She was really excited to go back to Smith.  We both fell into a familiar pattern: see something amazing, take a picture, take two steps, take a nearly-identical picture.  I ended up making a conscious effort to take fewer pictures, and just try to enjoy the visit directly.  I still took a lot of pictures.  It's a beautiful place.

Asterisk Pass

Looking toward Gray Butte (left side, horizon) and the Burma Road (right side) from the Misery Ridge Trail.  Don't let the name fool you.  Misery Ridge is a hoot.

On one of my earliest visits to Smith Rock, The Girl called me from Virginia and asked me what it was like.  I remember giving her a very heartfelt speech about how amazing it was; that it looked like barren, rocky desert if you glanced at it, but if you took even a moment longer to study the surroundings, you saw that you were surrounded with color and life.  The rocks had rich, warm hues, and cooler shades of blue.  The grayish scrub concealed colorful blooms, and the cracks in the rocks were packed with tiny, struggling life and vibrant flowers.  I loved it.  I still do.

A climber uses aiders to ascend Monkey Face, a tower of tuff (rock made of compressed volcanic ash).

Cascades panorama, from Broken Top to Black Butte.

Monkey Face (and The Girl) from inside a hollow boulder along the trail.  Uncountable visitors have worn the inside of the boulder so smooth that it's hard to sit still inside.

Me, in the boulder (photo credit: The Girl)

Coming down from the top, in the shadow of Monkey Face.

I love flora in harsh climates, like deserts and alpine areas.  I know they're fragile, but I can't help but marvel at how tough they must be to survive at all in such conditions.

Monkey Face.  The name makes more sense from this angle.

Another effort in my continuing search for the perfect action shot of a bee.

Yellowbell

budding sagebrush

Smith was formed by the same volcanic system that later subducted under another plate, moved east, and formed Yellowstone.  The formations that remain near Terrebonne are all that remains of the caldera of a supervolcano.  Later eruptions from Newberry Crater, south of Bend, send enormous lava flows north.  These flows formed the basalt cliffs along the Deschutes and Crooked Rivers.  Smith's parking lot is at the top of these cliffs.  The same flows redirected the Crooked River itself, pushing it toward Smith Rock, where it eroded the existing tuff before settling into its current path.  The geology of the area fascinates me.

Crooked River.  My brother, Dad, and I once saw a group of otters playing very near this spot.

That night we met Nahid for dinner at Deschutes Brewery.  The Girl ordered a taster flight (we were careful to select beers we couldn't get back east) to go with dinner.  I got a burger with bleu cheese, and thus concluded that every burger should have bleu cheese on it.

There oughta be a law.

Libation!

That was our last full day in Bend.  The next morning, we got up early, grabbed a quick breakfast (and a sandwich for later) at La Magie, and drove back to Portland.  We both agreed that the only disappointment of our trip was that we didn't get to eat all the things we wanted to eat while in town.  We also agreed that if La Magie was our only option for food on that trip, we still would have been very happy.