Hello? Lost & found? Could you please tell me where the month of June went? I seem to have missed it...

Okay, that's not entirely true. A week and a half ago, I was camping with my family in the Ochoco Mountains in Oregon. Gorgeous weather, with highs in the mid-70s and lows in the upper 20s. True to my plan, I wrote quite a few haiku, though I have yet to seriously go through them and see if I can find any gems to submit somewhere.

I also took great pleasure in finding and identifying wildflowers. Don't ask me why. Maybe it's an offshoot of bird watching. At any rate, here are a few flowers. This one is a grass widow.

Here's a Mertensia longiflora, also known as trumpet lungwort and leafy bluebell, according to Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest by Mark Turner & Phyllis Gustafson (I highly recommend this book).

Spanish Peak had a little bit of snow on it this year, as it has for the past few years now.

Here's a view while hiking up the Spanish Peak the next day.

A westish view from the top of Spanish Peak. That's Rock Creek Lake. It was hazy in the distance, but we could still see Mt. Hood.

One more photo. This one's of the rainbow trout that Agnaldo found in the creek below camp. It was a good two feet long and all banged up from swimming from who knows where to spawn. In all the years we've been camping up there, we've never seen a fish of this size! It was truly remarkable. Even more remarkable was finding a second one down at the Crossing the next day. Unfortunately, it was dead, but it makes me wonder about their story. Where did they swim from? Did they get a chance to spawn before they died? Are there others? Fascinating!


Time to get some other things done. Haiku things. Tanka things. Post office things. Pondering the next short story I'm going to write for Clarion West's Write-a-thon. There's still time to sponsor me, by the way. :) Here's the link to the website, or you can contact me (those of you who actually know me know how to contact me): http://www.clarionwest.org/events/writeathon/TanyaMcDonald I've managed to write two short stories so far (the first is about 1,600 words, the second is about 3,200 words) and am excited about writing another one this week. Off and away!