Crater Lake is beautiful but we drank too much wine the night before we visited and I felt sick as we drove around it.

We have a new neighbor. The house next door has finally sold. Allen met him—well not the one who owns it, but his cousin from Toronto. The one who owns it is a general contractor and, according to the cousin, he is excited about the expansion possibilities. We are not so excited. Already, I hear the circular saw wailing in the distance, sifting through … Read More

The Wired Top 40 is out and there aren’t too many surprises. Moving from #1 last year to #2 this year is Google: The Internet’s librarian turns out to be its biggest power broker. Fueled by $3.2 billion in 2004 revenue, Google fulfills 200 million searches of 8 billion Web pages a day, determining which sites are seen and which remain buried. And new … Read More

poem for 5.5.05: Let Evening Comeby Jane Kenyon

Posting this for my pal Jordan, the host of Word by Word: Don’t forget to tune into Word by Word Weds. May 4th at 7 pm Pacific Time at: http://www.krcb.org (click the “Listen” button). Host Jordan Rosenfeld speaks with Philip Beard, author of Dear Zoe, and Sue Miller author, Lost in the Forest (among many others).Both authors’ books discuss deaths in the family, and … Read More

Taken from our campsite at Tofino on Vancouver Island.

Part of a glacier (the columbia glacier maybe?) taken from the Icefields Parkway. It was Labor Day 2001 and freezing cold, snowing.

Driftwood on the shore of a lake somewhere in British Columbia.

This photo was taken from the lawn of the Prince of Wales Hotel in the Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada. There is what looks to be a bit of haze in the photo but it is actually smoke from wildfires that were burning in Montana’s Glacier National Park to the south. Still, this view is one of the most spectacular I have … Read More

A view of Brokeoff peak from the top of Lassen peak–we climbed them both. Great hikes. Lassen is a beautiful park with few visitors. We loved it.

Tufas at Mono Lake, which was one of the weirdest places I have ever visited. Around the edge of the lake are the dimwitted brine flies and within the lake are millions of brine shrimp. Mono Lake is “about 2 1/2 times as salty and 80 times as alkaline as the ocean.” The tufas are “calcium-carbonate spires and knobs formed by interaction of freshwater … Read More

This photo is, perhaps, my favorite because of what it represents. It was taken by me from the bottom of the Grand Canyon as the moon was setting and the sun was rising. It was taken after we had spent the night and were hiking out. Our hike out started in the dark and ended in the heat of midday. As we were leaving … Read More