Snowshoeing in a Winter Wonderland

This last Wednesday, Nate and I had the opportunity to snowshoe to Stewart Falls. Since Nate had to work all last weekend, he got to take a day off in the middle of the week. My mom generously agreed to watch Austin during our excursion.

While we have hiked the trail many times before, this was our first time on snowshoes. I had seen a couple pictures of the icy waterfall in the winter, and I was excited to see it in person. It was a cold day with temperatures in the teens, so we bundled up the best we could and set out.

It couldn't have turned out better though. The whole hike was beautiful.

Really, you could say it was magical. The snow was dazzling as it sparkled in the sun. The flakes on the ground were soft and inviting.

Even the air glittered as the sun reflected off snowflakes dancing in the open space.

If you look closely, you can see the snowflakes glittering in the air.

It was definitely romantic. Especially since there was no one else around.

 

We seemed to be in some cold ethereal world full of intricate details and hung with icy crystals. I think I would hardly have been surprised to see a fairy flutter by.

The waterfall itself might have even been a towering fairy castle. Its frozen spikes were both foreboding and entrancing. Its overall form was stunning.

 

We made our way down to the river below where we could observe it from and different angle while enjoying some hot chocolate we had brought along.

It was no less amazing from the fall's base. In fact, it was completely breathtaking.

 

Beautiful. Delicate. Fragile. Tenuous. Surreal.

I don't think we could have asked for anything better.

Fixing Things Up (Catch-up Post)

A couple years ago, we started trying to finish the patio on our house. I don't know when it was originally started, but I am guessing the original owners tried building it themselves years ago. When we moved in, it wasn't completely enclosed, and over half the paneling still needed to be put up on the inside. We found the paneling we needed to finish the interior of the patio in the garage. It was also missing some of the paneling on the outside, which we also put up. Much of the patio looked something like this:

(Actually, the extra boards between the vertical supports were put in by us too.)

We bought a miter saw to cut our paneling. Here is Nate trying to assemble the miter saw sometime during October 2011:

While Nate and I were hard at work cutting and nailing in paneling, Austin watched us just outside the patio. So did Zipper. Zipper loved to sit next to Austin and keep and eye on him whenever we were out in the yard.

Zipper and Austin both sticking out their tongues

The patio took us hours and hours to finish. Measuring, cutting, and nailing in all the paneling was tedious work. Then after all that we cleaned, sanded, and varnished the whole thing. We are hoping it holds up alright over time since the people who started the job used indoor paneling for the outdoor patio.

We also ended up having to replace the patio door after a windstorm blew it off. Like everything else, that ended up being more involved than we thought it would since we found the door opening was not square.

But we finally finished it all this last fall. We are very glad to have that project done!

When we moved into our house, we also knew we would have to repaint the fence around our front porch. Its paint was peeling badly, and it looked awful.

As it turned out, parts of the section below were rotting out, so we actually had to completely rebuild this portion of the fence.

We started on this project last spring, and finally finished by this last fall. It looks much better now!

Note: These finished fence pictures were taken this fall. Our yard does not look like this at the moment; right now we have snow about a foot and a half or so deep everywhere after this last week's snow storm!

The last picture also shows the rose bushes that Nate bought me for my birthday last year. Unfortunately, they were pretty much done blooming by the time this picture was taken, but below is a picture of a bud from my favorite of them. These plants are MAJOR improvement over the rose bushes we had in there before them. The original bushes were about the wildest roses I had ever seen; I had to trim them back every week or two during the summer because they grew so much so fast!

Speaking of our yard, we also were able to put in our best garden yet this last year. This area used to be a little forest, but we planted where all the trees used to be.

I've never grown such large tomato plants. Our peppers and zucchini took off too. Everything out from those areas gradually was smaller. We think that perhaps they used to dump manure along the one side of our garden.