Moving on. Moving forward. Thanks to a lot of help from my friends Gail and Mike, things are moving forward. I think it’s forward, it’s hard to tell these days. It’s not moving backwards, so that cuts down the odds.
I’m here at Mike’s house in Oceanside. The weather is nice, Mike is a great cook and we’re watching the baseball playoff games until we fall asleep. I will be heading over to the desert as soon as the latest tropical storm passes. Not sure what I’m going to find, but I’ll at least have a look.
The recently past summer in the local Cascade Mountains was pretty nice overall. Thankfully, there were no major wildfires in the mountains, but there was a devastating fire next to the Columbia River where a number of homes and buildings were destroyed. A lot of the forest on this side of the mountain was destroyed in a large fire last year.
Not much worry about fire in the spring. Everything is green and growing quickly with plenty of water from melting snow.
You can practically see the trees and plants growing. The forest clearings are filled with butterflies.
Summer turns quickly into fall in the mountains. There was no significant rainfall all summer, so it’s dry and dusty with extreme fire danger.
As the mountain night temperatures drop, I move down a few hundred feet in elevation, where it is a bit warmer. There are a few scattered rain showers as winter approaches.
One last stop in the Cascade foothills at Buck Creek. This is the first place I went camping when I moved here and spent a lot of time on my mountain bike riding the trails and forest service roads.
Next blog post will likely be from the desert somewhere. Exactly where I really don’t know.