It has been over a month since I updated my site, which is not what I intended to do when I revived it a few months ago. However, life has been, as can be seen in this post, full. Here we go:

Sara won an award! I am fairly quiet in terms of my spouse, Sara, but this one, to me, deserves a shout-out. She was the recipient of the 2023 Nursing Excellence award in the “Innovator” category. She has a detailed way of thinking about things and noticed processes that could be improved in terms of the day-to-day work that she does as a nurse at the local hospital. These are being implemented across the hospitals in the system and she was nominated for this recognition and then selected. It was a super day to see her get this award along with others in the other categories.

The whole group! Yes, the hospital kind of looks like a hunting lodge one might see in Montana.

This team! They played hard and learned a lot this year. It was always fun to watch them play. Now Nora is onto softball . . .

This past weekend my friend Kurt and I headed into the Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area for a nice backpacking trip. The area was razed by a fire in 2005, and is slowly coming back, however, you can see much of the burned out hillsides still. This is at the start of the trip. A few snaps below:

The trail went above the Illinois River, winding its way to the coast.

I tried out a new ultralight backpacking tent on this trip (20 ounces), made of a fabric known as “dyneema.” It was perfect. We camped at Pine Flats, next to the Illinois River after dropping down 1000 feet to get there. Overall, we hiked in 6.2 miles, then did a 12.4 mile day hike and then on Sunday, hiked out. This area is west of Grants Pass, Oregon in the Coast Range. Lovely hike with my friend that I have known for almost 40 years now.

This is the Kalmiopsis flower which as I understand it is a rare one. Lovely weekend!