Back to Big Four Mountain

Today Jey-hu was acting as tour guide, showing a new resident of Washington State some of the sights. We opted to make a quick trip up to Big Four Mountain and do the relatively easy, four mile (approximately) round-trip hike up to the ice caves. A perfect day for it, too, as the clouds lifted in the afternoon, giving us warmth but not too much.

I have a new camera lens, acquired from an Ebay photographer, which is a wonderful step up for me in my retirement. I use an EOS Rebel (Canon) and had been using a manual Tamron telephoto but it was frustrating when I wanted to do closeups or have more depth

of field. Now I have a lovely 28-105 mm range and here are some of my shots. This little fellow

patiently nibbled on some tidbit and let me fire off a couple of frames before he scampered away.

Then I was transfixed by the dew, or yesterday's rain, that was still on some of the leaves. It was exciting for me to have the lens auto focus in on them!

What was also fun was that Jey-hu and our guest were also camera buffs and we took turns using each other's equipment to see what results we could get - and even looking in the same direction, each one of us saw something different that was particularly appealing to our artistic eyes.

If you look closely at the purple flowers, foxglove, you can see at least one honey bee getting into the pollen. Did you know that if you have an allergy to a certain pollen you can lessen its impact on your sinuses by eating natural honey from the region where the offending pollen comes from?

It may be hard to see the ice caves in the photo, but they are openings which stretch approximately 30 feet across and are anywhere from 7-10 feet high at the opening. People are NOT supposed to enter them, but they do anyhow, as I think can be seen on closer inspection of the cave below.

I have been reading some releases of information which suggest that certain trees in South America have remarkable healing

qualities, including the ability to reverse damages from certain treatments. If this is so, there could be marvelous answers ahead in overcoming some dreaded diseases, without having to undergo obliteration of the immune system to achieve health. There is coming up in September a fund-raising event for the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, part of a nation-wide effort but localized for regional focus.

If you are a swimmer, you might want to join www.swimacrossamerica.org or if you know someone, you can support their swim. I will support the event, partly to memorialize a former MM blogger who received part of his treatment with SCCA, and partly to fund a possible cure which SCCA has an interest in achieving.

Our guest on this walk took this interesting, deliberately out-of-focus shot of us walking together. I like the framing and focus he used with the path and the trees. It was a special day in so many ways - thanks for stopping by to take time to follow along.