Picking Chokecherries

 

We love chokecherry jam and syrup.  As a family we go out and find wild chokecherries and pick enough so that Teresa can bottle enough jam and syrup for a couple years.  Its kind of fun to pick the berries but it can also be tedious.

 

 

 

 



The girls picking

Hal and Quinn



This is what they look like.  Notice that they are in clusters like grapes.  Also the ripe ones are dark purple.  Red berries are not ripe.  In any case if you eat them they will pucker up your mouth.  Hence the name chokecherries.  After processing though it is a delicious flavor.

Wild Rose Hips.  We don't pick them but you could eat them as well.



A few fishing pictures from this summer

Wood Cutting this year

This year we decided to buy wood off a semi-truck rather than going through the forest.  Normally we go to The Forest Service building and buy wood permits to allow us to cut down dead trees in the forest.  It is usually cheaper but very time consuming.  Katey's violin teacher Melanie Moulton told us they were purchasing a semi load and wondered if we wanted to buy some from them.  Melanie's husband is Sean Moulton who is also our lawyer.  Sean's dad is Bishop Roy Moulton who is Bishop of the Driggs 1st ward and whom I served with as the Young Men's President before they divided the wards and we were moved into Victor 1st Ward.  A semi-load has multiple cords of wood and so we decided to buy 4 cords at $100 per cord.  Cutting it in the forest only costs around $10 per cord but its more work.  If you buy it cut and stacked its around $250 per cord.  We burn on average 3.25 cords of wood in a winter.  I wish I would have taken a picture of the pile of logs on the ground before cutting as well as the pile after cutting shown below.  It was a formidable task to cut that many trees in one day but as you can see below we did it with a lot of effort and back pain.  Sean's brother Beau also came and helped about halfway through.  It took us about 8 hours to complete and then later we hauled away the wood.


Bishop Moulton grabs a log with his backhoe which has a hook to grab the logs, then he swings it around and there's one guy with a chainsaw on each side of the log cutting until we get to the middle.  Then he picks up another log and we do it again.  In the foreground Sean is using the splitter and Beau is cutting in the back.  The other person is one of Sean's kids.

My pickup when stacked up in the middle is about a half cord of wood.

The Moulton's pile that his kids were working on.

Me in the brown coat.  At this point we are done and I'm just finishing a couple cuts.

Me alone in a sea of wood.

The splitter

Cedar Trees

9/14/13

I hadn't been to the desert in awhile so I decided to take some guns and go shooting and exploring.  I invited Eric as he had not been out there and then later learned that Lance was doing nothing that day so we invited him as well.  There are some really big Cedar trees that are in Islands where the lava flowed around allowing them to grow.  One botanist estimated the age of the trees to be around 1500 years old.  I asked Lance if he remembered how to find them.  We started in the right place and then traveled out across the desert but a little off course as we could not see the proper landmarks due to clouds.  Eventually in a large roundabout way we found them.  It turns out they are about a half mile from where we parked but in reality we walked about 3 miles in a circle before we found them.  The first pictures here are of some different trees in a different Island that are not quite as big but still impressive.  A long time ago pioneers had come in here to cut down some of these trees and the evidence of their being there was obvious.  Watch out for rattlesnakes as we have always seen them out here.  This day we saw two snakes.  The first one's tail was just sticking out of a hole in the ground and I almost stepped on it.  The second one was a big one that was under a large flat slab of basalt I was standing on.  I stepped off the rock and Lance saw the rattlesnake coming out then dart back in.  It was really agitated as it was buzzing like crazy.  Lance dared Eric to lift the rock and then I would shoot it but fortunately Eric declined.


Lance, Nelson and Eric

The tallest tree to the right on the horizon is the biggest one of the whole bunch.  We are coming in from the East but we should have been coming in from the West.  I recognized the bent profile of this tree about a quarter mile away and then we headed for it.  The tree is relatively unchanged from pictures we took of it about 20 years ago.

The biggest one



I should have put somebody next to it as you can't appreciate the size here.  I will have to find the old photos we took where a few of us were standing by this tree and we look pretty small.  It would be easy to get 3 people standing next to the tree here and it would still be bigger.



You put the butte where we parked behind us and then line up the butte to the left in the far distance of this photo and then go in a straight line for about a half mile.

Sometimes the cracks in the lava are deep enough and collect enough moisture that you will see ferns down below.  There are lots of cracks and fissures in this desert that you have to jump across.  Also it is really hard on your shoes.  Also note the geometrical shapes of the basalt.  Basalt will usually cool in a hexagon shape I believe.
 

We climb to the Wind Caves for a second time this year.

My brother in law, Eric, saw our pictures from our last post and wanted to hike up to the wind cave.  We invited his family to go but his wife stayed to can food with my wife.  Here are the pictures.  Once again we said a prayer for safety and once again we had several incidences but came out safe.  The incidences were falling and scraping along with blisters.  Kylee bumped her head so hard into a rock ceiling that a piece of the rock fell and hit my foot.  She saw stars and had to sit for awhile.  Then last but not least, I did a stupid thing and accidentally discharged my gun.  Fortunately, having had good training since a kid, I had pointed the gun in the right direction and nobody was hurt except our nerves and eardrums.  I'm not sure why it went off but I took it out of my holster and was going to put it in my backpack for awhile as I felt we were above all the bears and relatively out of danger.  I popped out the magazine and went to remove the round from the chamber and while I was trying to rack the slide it caught in my backpack and I let it go.  Then somehow in trying to redo it, it was still caught and I must have hit the trigger and BOOM!.  I felt the sting on my arm of the blast and looked around for blood but fortunately not even a scratch was on me.  The bad thing was we were in an overhang and it was extra loud.  But it taught us all a lesson of what not to do.  Here are the pictures:

In back: Kylee, Eric, Katlyn, Macey.  In Front: Quinn, Alex, me

Behind the waterfall

Kylee hit her head on that overhang in the upper left of the photo
 

Alex waiting for Quinn

Sub-Alpine Fir pinecones
 

Mountain Ash