The road to riches

My baby with my sisters baby

This weekend was filled with more driving. I headed west Saturday morning munching on nuts and M&Ms for breakfast and stopped in a sideways rain to pick up #61 and we continued west and just before the ascent to the Pass, dropped in at Mountain High Hamburgers to see Mickey Blue Eyes and have lunch made by him on the way to the Puget Sound to check out the new baby. The three of us: Miss O, #61 and myself made lip balm together and then #61 played hero to his cousin by taking her outside to play in a tree covered in tulip blooms, add in some tag and hide and seek and bonding between the redheaded cousins was complete.

The new baby was a comfortable size with lips so sweet, you know why they call them rosebud lips. She kept them pursed in sleep and occasionally emitted whale like squawks. Her hair a golden cinnamon supported by cheeks and jowls that were like buried treasure when you tipped her head back to inspect her they kept unfolding like an accordion. Gabriella Patrice we welcome you!

Heading back over the pass in intermittent rain showers where I had a lovely curry chicken dinner with friends and then headed down to the Pastime for the fight and to catch up with other friends. Mickey Blue Eyes came to hang with his Mom for a bit. The night air for early May was cold, so when I stepped out of my car at the end of the night, I was surprised to hear the sounds of summer nights with crickets and frogs birthing in the mountains. This Mothers Day morning got up and had tea while reading some smut laying around true friends house then went to breakfast with my boys and their Dad.

South Cle Elum Depot on the Coal Mine Trail

#61 and I had plans to mushroom hunt and walked the mile or so in the cold wind sweeping off the mountains making our ears ache. Arriving at the secret spot and within minutes hit the mother lode of mushrooms. In twenty minutes we had filled up two grocery sacks and had not covered even a third of the area we usually hunt. We came out of the woods and had an exciting moment of coming across a plank of wood that we maneuvered and used to cross the creek as a balance beam. We regretted not taking pictures of this moment. He was trusted with the mushrooms and I was trusted with the cell phones as we each took a turn crossing the four inch wide board.  The wind at our back this time we headed back down the trail.

The Coal Mine trail

At the beginning of the trail is a depot and next to it sits an old power plant made of Brick and I think it would make a fabulous artists house with the large rectangular bays imagined as windows, some of them able to open as French Doors. Every year I hike pass it, I dream a little bigger about it's potential as my dream house. At the top where the window is arched would be the master suite.

Headed East toward home and the storm clouds rolling off the mountains started meeting the warm air of the desert side of the state, bunching up into a storm brewed and stirred in the North Eastern sky.

Thorpe Storm

Not quite sure how this color combination happened; meaning it was the same sky as the previous photo? But thought the spooky aqua tones were fascinating.

To the best of my knowledge I did not touch any button to create this color.

Veered off to Manastash after debating taking the river route along the childhood stomping grounds next to the Columbia, but decided I might be able to get a cool photo of the whole valley from the lookout point. By the time I got there though the bottom had fell out of the top of the sky similar to the winter snow covered roads of Roslyn in a warm spell. "The bottom fell out" a term used by the City guy's when the hard packed snow on the road is melted underneath.

A delightful weekend, the road to riches is not always paved and this trail was covered in gravel and at the end were cookie sheets of swampy morels.