Claudia and Ralph and their dog, Hannah joined Andrea, Joel and myself for a trip up Malan’s Peak which is a nearby local favorite hike. Pretty steep at 2200′ elevation gain in 2.25 miles, Joel’s knees didn’t seem too bad on the descent – at least he never said anything. Andrea and I snapped a few photos of wildflowers on the way and have been using a great app called “PictureThis” which provides immediate (and then also later if needed) plant identification. Fun thing to have which now makes the wildflower identification book I just bought quite obsolete and a waste of money 😢!

Looking back at the blog I realized I haven’t posted anything about the garden. Sorry Joel!

He has been working fast and furious over the last couple of months to get many starts going inside, transplanting them, watching the weather, taking over the neighbor’s garden as they are going to be gone most of the summer, trying Potato Tower ver. 2 and planting some new things, namely broccoli … who knew broccoli was a thing to grow in Utah? We will try some tonight!

One of the new volunteers at WRCNU is fairly recently moved from the Couer D’Alene, ID, area. She is an avid outdoorsy type, about my age, has tons of energy and spent a lot of time in search and rescue with her dogs, was a member of the Spokane Mountaineering organization, etc., etc, etc. And YEAH, very interested in finding hikes in the area as her husband is dealing with some leg issues. AND is a fan of starting early to beat the crowds and heat!

So, with Joel and his knees not liking the hilly trails around here much anymore, it looks like I found a new hiking partner. It works out great as I am trying to put in a lot of miles with a heavy pack as I train for my July trip to Glacier Peak in WA. We have gone on 2 hikes with another planned for Thursday.

Wheeler Creek – Icebox Canyon Loop

Indian Trail

The status of the garden changes many times a day as Joel is busily planting, moving and constructing. With the promise of freezing weather at night slowly decreasing, most of the crops that have enjoyed being scattered throughout the house and garage are being transplanted outside. With the drought restrictions on secondary water use for lawns, several towns around us have put similar limitation on watering of gardens. I’ll let Joel worry about that … all I can say is that if we have to water the garden with culinary water, that’s gonna make for some pretty expensive veggies …

I was only half serious when I stated that it looked like all the Utah yellow flowers bloomed first based on a hike I did last weekend. Oddly enough, I went to the same place yesterday and saw almost all purple wildflowers blooming … I might be onto something here or just lucky timing!

And a couple stragglers …

Thanks to Don and Les I made my first batch of coffee a couple days ago – didn’t grow the beans but bought, blended, roasted and packaged them. A combination of trial by fire and trial and error as I completely incinerated the first two batches and they ended up in the compost bucket. Third try was apparently the charm – coffee is so smooth it is like drinking butta’. You want some – slow process as my production line can only process about 3/4# at a time? Be prepared to wait!

Between waiting for the local trails to dry out and finishing up my 200 Hr. Yoga Teacher Training, it has been a while since Joel and I got out together on the trails. Yesterday we took a quick hike about 2ish miles up the first part of the Ben Lomond Trail near our house. Since this is a south facing slope, it gets a lot of sun and we saw many flowers blooming. Seems a bit early for a couple of the varieties and I didn’t remember that the first ones to bloom were almost all yellow -pretty and colorful, nevertheless on a sort of dreary day!

Out of the blue last week I was notified by the Zoology Department at Weber State University that I had been nominated by the Dept. Chairman for their “Friend of Zoology” award.

Although I had never met him before, we had talked several times when he had students that he wanted to send to WRCNU for a work experience internship. This is one of the side projects I am in charge of – I onboard and mentor the students for the 3-4 months they commit to and the benefit for us is that, due to the fact they are earning credits, they have to show up or it reflects on their grade.

They had a nice reception and awards presentation for the noteworthy department students and me at the end … I even got a $50 gift card! Then a group picture after which Joel commented that I was the only gray hair in the group. Can’t take him anywhere!

Well, sort of … Luckily didn’t have to run from any buffalo and it was longer than 25K by almost a mile!

The day was beautiful and the course was good. As one of the slower participants the trail, although snow covered, was well packed by the time I was on it! No excuses for the slow time and having to walk quite a bit of the course … just simply the fact I had too much going on the last couple of months and didn’t train for it … OOPS! (Joel and I had scouted the course a couple times but only did the first loop.)

Trips back to New Ulm over the last few years have given Joel the chance to reconnect with his stamp collecting “roots.” Inheriting his grandfather’s collection meant bring multiple books, bags and boxes of stamps back to Utah. Many of the books had handmade leather covers (Joel’s grandfather was a cobbler) and handmade stock pages. This is definitely a long-term commitment as it will take YEARS to sort through the thousands of stamps, week out the inferior/duplicates and reassemble the collections.

Joel has found several avenues to donate the excess stamps – some through a local stamp club, some through a potential online connection (turned out to be a scam) and we took some south with us to donate to the US Postal History Museum in Tucson. A bit disappointing in that the Museum was not open due to the pandemic, but Joel was able to drop some off for the curator and received a “receipt” of sorts for his effort- he donated close to 20,000 stamps! Glad that I was not on the equivalency team that figured that math out!