Tour de Glacier + POTD

As promised, here are my photos from my weekend trip to Glacier National Park.  Enjoy, comment, vacation vicariously.

First stop: COFFEE.  When you leave at 5 in the morning, a little bit of espresso is in order.  Thankfully, Autumn is also a coffee drinking enthusiast, so I was not alone in mandating a stop.  Cafe au Laît with a healthy dump of cinnamon :)

While Clint purchases our park pass, Ellen, Autumn and I perused the general store.  At the register were a bunch of the buoy-like cubes attached to key-rings.  When we asked the cashier what the mini-buoys were for, he told us that they were key 'life preservers.'  Apparently the number 1 item reported lost in Glacier Park is people dropping their keys in the rivers/lakes.  It also happens that the number 1 cause of death in Glacier Park is also falling into a body of water (NOT bears as the scary literature leads one to believe).  Note to self:  avoid water in Glacier.

We entered from the West side of the park, so our first "attraction site" was McDonald Lake.

(Clint's shift on the camera...so, just us ladies)

 Eventually, we made it up into the trails and past all of the automobile tourists.  Very pretty and serene :)

We all loved this tree.  It looks like it has a giant nuclear tumor growing out of it.  To give perspective to the size: all four of us could stand right underneath the mushroom-like growth.

By about 4 in the afternoon we reached the far end of St. Mary Lake where it runs into the Black Feet Indian Reservation.  There were all took a giant PB & J snack break, stripped our hiking boots off to wade in the frigid water and sat down on the rocks to do some last minute school-work.  The never ending reading assignments are the bane of a college student’s life. Gah.

Plate of the Day (POTD):

It's amazing what dishes one comes up with when their fridge as a limited (and hodge-podge) inventory.  For breakfast I made a variation upon my crock-pot oatmeal...other than the ingredients were not your typical English porridge kind...

It is a mixture of leftover rice, oatmeal, nutritional yeast, tamari, chopped green onion, Italian parsley, handful of Shiitake mushrooms, couple heaping spoonfulls of toasted pumpkin seeds and the LAST BIT (rest in peace inside my tummy) of my dark-chocolate-quinoa bar.  Very strange, unexpectedly paired, but crazy delicious.  I may have to track down some of the ingredients again just to make "left-over-porridge" on purpose.

Cheers, kaite ;]

Mac + Cheeze and Bits About Campus

I've gotten pretty nostalgic lately for mac & cheeze.  The only problemo with making the ambrosia-like-stuff is it requires either a stove top or a few good hours of prep in the crock-pot.  Ihhhhh.  College-mentality has severely kicked in folks.  I want my vegan-cheeziness NOW. On the upside, the campus grocery store does stock Amy's Frozen Soy Macaroni and Cheeze.  On the downside, Mum and Dad don't want to know how many UMT$ the little frozen box cost...  Yesterday, I broke down while purchasing my outrageous $3.75 carton of soy-milk and added the Amy's macaroni to my check-out stack.

Admittedly is does contain a small amount of casein in it (milk protein), but this cheatin' vegan lunch is well worth it when the goings get tough.  I added a chunk of frozen peas and a touch of cilantro to jazz up the flavor. Yum.  Cue Handel's Messiah, someone.

Over Labor Day some friends and I drove up to Glacier National Park to go hiking/exploring. Our day started at 5am and we didn't land back back in Missoula until 11pm.  Loooooong, but very fruitful day.  Unfortunately,  most of my photos are in "transit mode."  Everyone took shifts manning a camera, so Ellen (co-hiker) has taken on the duty of consolidating the best of the pictures into one file.  UPDATE ON GLACIER SOON!  Please leave comments on what in particular you would like to see and or hear about.  And just because I know you are going to ask Dad, NO, we did not see a bear.  But we did encounter much bear scat.  Animal tally = fish, many birds, a chipmunk with a nut, half-dozen mountain goats, butterflies and a fleeing coyote.

HERE IS A "SNEAK PEAK" of my Glacier Nat'l Park pictures:

Its kinda sad... you can see the glacier melting before your eyes.  The wet sludgy bits along the edge of the snow are the eroding glacier.  Me thinks the scientists were right when they said all the glacier would be gone by 2030.

Anywho.  Life on the campus of UMT has a few quirky bits to share too.

This maxim is plastered on every recycling bin on campus and around the city.  Its a nice little reminder that I am not the only one pitifully separating my glasses, plastics and papers to deposit into their corresponding bins.

Reminds me a bit of Capitol Hill in Seattle.  They just keeping posting over and over and over the old signs.  Seriously.  These bulletin-bagotas have about an inch think of paper products adhered to them.

These pictures do not to the bike brigades justice.  In the heat of the day, all of the bike stalls are PACKED.  Its frexing difficult to find a place to park your bike if a lecture hall class is in session.  NOTE: these pictures were taken last week when we had a solitary morning of drizzle.  Now we are back in the 90s.  May my fan have a second wind...

Really bad view of the central clock tower, but I was trying to get a decent picture of the 'M'.  Unfortunately the wild-fires on the other side of this hill make the campus super smokey in the mornings.  The University clock tower is just like the glockenspiel in Marienplatz, Munich.  Promptly at noon each day it plays a five minute bell chorus.  Ahhhhh. Its a nice highlight I look forward to while scampering from Writ 101 to the Food Zoo (or more likely, my dorm).

Cheers, kaite ;]

Hiking & a Long Weekend Holiday

I am thanking my lucky stars that the weather-gods delivered cooperative weather on the Washington coast.  Not a single drop of rain.  Yay!  The clouds even cleared out enough to go star gazing on the beach at midnight ^_^

I stayed in a little, day-dreamy cottage at the edge of the vacation village, Seabrook.  It was a tiny place—but utterly charming.  Red shutters, minty-blue walls, white-lace curtains, window seats, a lazy porch and stacks of poetry books.  It felt soooooooooooooo good to sleep-in and wake-up to the sound of the lulling ocean and the coffee pot percolating.  On Sunday, my parents and I meandered up to a diner overlooking the beach for breakfast.  Yummy oatmeal loaded with hazelnuts, cranberries and molassesy brown sugar was the perfect way to kick-start the day.

The day before, my family drove inland to Lake Quinault with a few family friends also holidaying in Seabrook.  We decided to go on a quick hike through the state park before lunch—which turned out to be an epic journey….  Everyone started out on the trail together, but by the end of it, the 17 person group had whittled down to a brave six.

My brother and his amigos went one way.  My fellow uni students turned back 15minutes in.  Two of the adults broke off to find a short-cut back to the lake. And I continued on with three of the adults and Alex (another student my age).  If anything could wrong, it probably did.

At least until we arrived back at the lake, we lived in ignorant bliss.

The woods were teaming with huckleberry bushes and other shrubbery.  We saw both the highland (blue) huckleberries and red huckleberries along the trail.  Usually, the highland variety only grows at higher elevations—as their name suggests.  Yet there they were, snuggled right next to their red-berried cousins. The blue huckleberries taste incredible.  Almost a cross between blueberry, current and blackberry.  Over in Montana, they make pies, jams, ice cream and fruit-studded-sweets with the highland huckleberry.  Huckleberry preserves could easily give Marion berry jam a run for my favorite :P.  Which is really saying something (especially, for everyone who knows me well).  I am a girl who is serious about her Marion berries.

I <3 this smiling stump. It made my day!

Anywho, after the six of us remaining hikers hit the highest point in the trail, we broke through the trees to a gorgeous lookout over a waterfall.  The half-our tramp in the humidity was worth completely worth it.  Alex did a little off-roading around the falls, while the rest of us took in the view from the bridge over the river/stream.

When we finally made it back to the lake it was well into the afternoon.  Snack bars and water can only get you so far… thus we all beeline for the restaurant at the lodge.  Unfortunately, the restaurant closed at 3.00 and it was 3.45. Poo. (And they even had a PB&J on the menu!)  No one else from the original big-group was at the lodge, which meant they either hadn’t made it back yet, or went on another adventure.  Traveling in groups sometimes turns into herding cats.

Alex and I found the rest of the Uni students down by the lake snooping on a wedding and the parents managed to locate my brother + company in the lodge restaurant waiting for someone to show-up to pay their bill.  Now the only party members MIA were the two adults who took a “short-cut.”  And we all know how short-cuts turn out.

As soon as we scraped together a search-party to send back up the trail, a car pulls into the lodge parking lot.  One of the kids shouts, “Wait!  I think those are my parents!”  Low and behold, his parents had hitchhiked their way back to the lodge.  Apparently, the two took a wrong turn and followed a trail the long way along the lake ending up some 2 miles from where we started.  Oh-well. All we could do was laugh.

Later that evening I went stargazing with the adults.  We headed out to the beach in attempt to see the Northern Lights**, but ended up taking turns looking through a pair of binoculars at different constellations.  Cassiopeia and Hercules took center stage, along with Ursa and her cub ;)  I love looking at the stars.  They walk that fuzzy line between magic and science. All the little pin-pricks of light left their home thousands of years ago, yet their celestial history is such a permanent part of our present and future.

To cap off the night, we raided the fire-pit at the park in Seabrook.  I made a smore with Mexican Spicy Chile chocolate from Theo’s Chocolate. Mmmmmmmm.  No one can say Kaite can’t stay up until 1.30 in the morning!!!!

Anyone else been to or headed out to the coast this summer?  Any star-gazing stories or quick hikes to share?

Cheers, kaite ;]

**Supposedly, the red aurora of the Northern Lights could be seen over Seattle this Saturday (6 Aug).  The only catch was, you had to get far enough away from the light pollution congesting the Puget Sound skyline to see them…