Teaching Award

Kent was surprised during guitar class this morning when he was presented the "Friend of the Young Child" award! He was nominated by someone in the community and there will be a banquet celebrating it on September 24th.

We haven't been posting anything lately because we have been really busy with the start of the school year. Annie is on her second week and Kent started this week. We have been busy until 9pm almost daily with meetings, rehearsals, and school work.

Today is Friday which means Annie has a football game in Peshastin and Kent is at a 5th grade instrument rental night. Tomorrow Annie is performing with the Icicle Brass Quintet from Leavenworth for a wedding. We are both looking forward to getting some sleep tonight!

Silver Falls

Kent's parents Bing and Britta are staying with us this weekend. We drove up the road by Entiat to Silver Falls and hiked up to the top of the falls.

Along the way we saw this hornet's nest hanging in a tree.

FINISHED!

We are officially finished with our patio! Friday was a hard day on both of us. We bought a diamond blade at Lowe's and Kent used it all day to cut the diagonal bricks and the ones around some of the edges. Annie spend the day laying bricks, and more bricks, and more bricks... The photo below was taken around 6:00AM this morning. We often find Cassy sleeping in "her" chair.

At the end, every muscle in our bodies seemed to be in pain, but we were very happy with the result. Now we just need some furniture!

BEFORE

AFTER!

We're getting closer!

Today was a day of adding and leveling sand. Around 3:00PM we had the delivery of bricks so we could start seeing what it was going to look like. The photo below was taken to verify that Annie worked along side Kent on this project!

Kent leveling the sand.

Finally the truck arrived! Using hydraulics, he lifted all five pallets to exactly where we wanted them.

Below is the first glimpse of what our patio is going to look like. We are both very excited and are loving the quilt-like look of it. Kent was very happy to find out that all his measurements were exactly right!

Patio

We have decided to use one of our last weeks of "freedom" (vacation from school) to add a patio to the back of our house. This morning we had a small square wood "deck" that was originally built for a hot tub. Below is the "before" photo.

We had a large stump in the back yard that we decided to get rid of. We thought this would be a morning project, but it turned out to be a huge stump underneath. It took us all day to get it out of the ground! Finally the truck was put into action and with hours of shoveling and axing it came out.

The pavers and pattern are picked out and ready to be delivered on Thursday afternoon from Columbia Block in Wenatchee. For now, we are preparing the area by removing excess dirt and tomorrow we hope to fill the area with an even layer of sand.

It was a long day of shoveling dirt in the hot Cashmere sun. We are not looking forward to the 98* weather tomorrow, hopefully we can get most of the grunt work done in the morning and evening. Hopefully there will be a "after" photo displayed on Thursday or Friday!

Kettle Falls

Last weekend we drove four hours up to Kettle Falls to visit Kent's parents. We relaxed and watched some tv which is now a treat because we got rid of our cable in June. We especially liked "Survivorman" and "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel and we also watched Tiger play some golf. We decided to take the boat out on the Kettle River. We cruised around the river with Bing showing us where the fish were.

We spotted wild life from the river! Two wild turkeys were down at the river getting a drink of water.

Cashmere Community Band

Three years ago, we had the idea of starting a community band. Our idea came from playing in the Moscow, Idaho community band in the summer. This year we played three concerts and had a really good time. Next year, when we don't have our Master's degrees to worry about we will be able to put more time and energy into this group.

We both take turns playing and conducting to cover the parts that need to be covered on each piece.

After the performance, they came to our house for dessert and we put all the music away. We now have around $500 in donations so we plan on buying uniforms or some kind of shirt for the band to wear. We may be able to bring in guest conductors also.

Backpacking Trip- Day 1

Wednesday night after dinner we had an urge to get out of our house for a while! As we mulled over the calendar and realized how soon school will be upon us, we decided to go on a backpacking trip. The next day, after mailing off our Masters projects at Kinko's we made a quick stop by Arlberg Sports for new hiking shoes and pants for Annie, dish soap, and some dinners for the trip we took off towards Entiat, WA.

About 60 miles from Cashmere we found the trail head. Cassy was going to try on her pack for the first time. She carried her own food up the trail.

Our final destination was the Ice Lakes in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area. We had never been there before and it is not an extremely well known trail. On day one we hiked eight miles to the campground on the Entait River.

Kent has a very quick and easy to use water filter so we can have fresh cold water any time we see a stream or lake.

Hot dogs tasted very good after a long hike.

We had to put Cassy on her leash because a deer would not leave our campsite alone! She would get closer and closer every time she visited. Cassy would love to chase her around, but we did not want to take this chance!

Day 2

Day two started out great. We packed up our tent and headed up the trail for four easy miles to a beautiful spot for lunch. We reached a great camp site and had lunch.

We found a trail that was marked with ribbon and followed it for a while. As we kept on walking we realized that the trail must have been washed out. We checked with the map several times and looked up the valley to see if we could spot the trail. No luck. So we kept on going.

We saw a way up the hill that followed a large waterfall. We hiked over rocks and boulders to reach it. The cold water spray and the waterfall's own wind felt great.

After enjoying the waterfall we kept on climbing. It was was not easy with our packs and the really unstable rocks. We reached a point very close to the top of the waterfall and Annie took a break. Kent explored the waterfall further and found that it would be too difficult for the dog to get through some spots.

We had to make a decision to turn around and go back down to the camp. We were both disappointed but our muscles were very tired at this point and our feet hurt badly. It was very challenging to make it down the hill side with the tumbling rocks and heavy packs. We pushed through a thicket and found the trail!

Disappointed and frustrated that the trail had not been marked clearly, we followed it back to camp. Our feet were hurting so bad we took our Thermarest chairs down to the creek and dipped our feet into the freezing water. No matter how beautiful camp was, it was frustrating that we were unable to make it to the high country we were expecting and that our bodies were now so tired from a "pointless" hike that day.

Day 3- Ice Lakes

On the morning of day three, we woke up to a spectacular view of the mountains and meadows. The camp was at 5000 feet in elevation so it was slightly colder in the morning than the previous morning. There were mountains surrounding us with three waterfalls and creeks flowing along the valley.

These photos were taken in the morning when the sun finally appeared over the mountains. Can you spot Cassy in the photo above? :)

After the slight disaster of an attempt to reach ice lakes yesterday we both had the same idea of trying it again. Now that we saw the "real" trail we knew we couldn't get lost! We packed up one of the packs with some lunch food and started up the trail.

The trail did not waist any time going up the mountain; there were no real switchbacks. We gained elevation really fast (1300 feet in one mile) so we were really happy to not have our heavy packs on.

Our camp was located at the base of this valley.

We finally made it to the Lower Ice Lake. Small fish were jumping all over this lake. No mosquitoes but replacing them was the very annoying horsefly. After spending some time enjoying the lower lake we looked around for a way up to the Upper Ice Lake.

Instead of finding the lake, we found an area where the snow was melting into a small creek that flowed into the large waterfall we saw the day before. The photo above shows the very start of the waterfall!

We were unable to find a trail; so we scrambled up the hillside and found it. Here we reached our final elevation of 7188 feet. We looked up and saw four of the hikers we passed at the top of Mt. Maude. If we had planned for it, we could have summited that mountain because it was only 9060'... not much more than the lakes.

The Upper Ice Lake is about double the size of the lower one, but there are no fish. There was more ice on this lake and even some icebergs floating around. We had a wonderful time today exploring. We were very satisfied that we had time to experience the Ice Lakes after the negative experience we had trying to get there the day before.

As we enjoyed ourselves at the Upper Ice Lake we noticed some looming clouds and decided we should turn around and go back to camp. On our way down we decided to make our trip back to the vehicle a little easier so we had our "just add water" dinner (dehydrated Thai beef satay), packed up the tent and hiked the four miles back to our day one camp at the Entiat River.