Visiting Matt

As I've written about before (and some of you are aware), my good friend Matt recently moved to California from Vermont. From a purely selfish standpoint it's great: Vermont is one of the most difficult places in America to fly to from Seattle, and the Bay Area is one of the easiest.

I went to visit him this weekend and it seems like the move was a good one for Matt as well. He's at Stanford University in Palo Alto, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. The campus is beautiful (see entries from August or May on the right). The people in his program are smart, diverse, and interesting. His program sounds academically rigorous, meaning that Stanford's stellar reputation is probably based in some sort of reality.

Matt was able to break away from his studies long enough to celebrate his birthday with a bunch of new friends, go for a hike in the neighboring Santa Cruz mountains, and take an excursion to San Francisco. It was a fantastic weekend.

I didn't bring my camera, but Matt took some pictures. They're on his site in his October album; the pictures with me start about a third of the way down right after the stormy ocean shot.

Japanese Garden

Today we went to the Seattle Japanese Garden to see the spectacular fall color their collection of Japanese maples put on. While the garden is usually a peaceful, serene place (it's best when it's raining), their autumn festival made it relatively crowded. They had music, painting, a bonsai exhibit, etc. We'll have to go back some other day to experience the garden's transquility, but today turned out to be pretty nice for taking pictures.

The album is here.

Van Trump Park

After a summer that was longer, sunnier, and hotter than normal, fall is setting in here in the Northwest. Knowing that the days of fair weather in the alpine are numbered, we wanted to get up into the mountains one more time as hikers (sadly, ski season is still a couple months away).

We drove to the south side of Mount Rainier National Park and hiked a trail that we tried a couple years ago in June only to be turned back by steep, treacherous snowfields. Not so today. But, although last winter's snow is now long gone, this winter's snow has just started arriving.

The trail is a steep, difficult one: it climbs 2200' feet in less than 3 miles, most of it over rocks and roots. There are two goals for this hike; the first is the spectacular Comet Falls, at 320' one of the tallest waterfalls in the Park. It's also where, at an elevation of about 5,000 feet, it started snowing.

The endgame for this hike is a splendid sub-alpine meadowland named Van Trump Park. On clear days the scenery here is (supposedly) great. We didn't get to see any of that. But with a fresh dusting of snow and no wind it was a peaceful and humbling place - and no less breathtaking for the lack of huge vistas.

The picture album is here.

Golden Gardens

If you follow the blog even semi-regularly, you've doubtless seen pictures from Golden Gardens Park before - it's just such a scenic place. Today was a beautiful fall day, so we took Oliver and went for a walk on the beach. We had the camera and were able to take a few nice pictures.