on the trail

One day last week my family went hiking on one of the many trails around the city and of course I had to take a million and one photos. But hey, I'm fine with a ton of photos, because who doesn't want to look at pretty flowers?



I have my brother William here with me (he's the blonde one). He's an expert on plants and knew a lot of the names of the flora we stumbled upon. This flower is a Columbine and my favorite flower we saw on the hike.




William thinks these flowers are called Morning Stars, and I don't doubt his expert knowledge.







The flower on the left is called Bluebell and the one on the right is Lupine. It just amazes me how many different kinds of flowers there are and how intricate and detailed each one is. It's beautiful how each little part of the flower was made perfectly.







These pretties are Clovers, pretty common but I still love them. Who doesn't love a pretty purple flower?






This plant is Devil's Club. And that's my mom's hand. These plants are crazy huge. The leaves are around 16 inches wide, and the plant has been known to grow as tall as 16 feet!








Aside from seeing pretty flowers, we also stopped to sit on the bluff, which overlooked the ocean and the city below. It was a perfect view to see so many different aspects of Alaska: the forests, mountains, ocean, and city.

Also on our hike we ran into a baby moose. It was chilling out right on the trail. Moriah was excited about it because she thought that meant we would have to turn back and therefore not finish the hike (moose can be pretty dangerous), but after we stared at the moose and it stared back, it ran up the side of the mountain. On our way back we spotted the baby again, but it evaded us pretty quickly.









I really love being able to explore all the different places in Alaska (just maybe not so early, Daddy. :) ) and it's great to know that there are great adventures mere minutes from our doorstep.

drying flowers

day 29

Instead of throwing away beautiful flowers that people have given me, I've started making a habit of drying them so that I can enjoy them for years. There are three basic methods to preserving flowers. One way is to press them in a book. I do that a lot when I find little wildflowers on road trips or just when I explore around our property (and our neighbor's). It's good to use wax paper so that you don't damage the book; plus it squishes all the little buggies that might be hiding in the flowers.

Another method I know of involves covering the flowers with wax to preserve them, but I have never done that so not much more can be said from me.

The third method (Golly I sound like I'm writing a research paper) is to dry them by hanging them upside down. This way all the moisture runs out of the flowers so that no mold can grow on them (flower mold is extremely gross, take my word for it). It leaves most of the color in the flowers, although as you could guess they are extremely dry and sometimes crumble when you accidentally handle them too hard. But I have found it is a virtually stress free method.

I have a little nail in the ceiling beam in my loft from which I just tie a string to the flowers. They hang there for about two weeks, I would say (quite honestly I just forget about them and whenever they come to mind I check on them). Once these flowers from yesterday's homecoming are dry, I'll take them down and add them to my vase of pressed flowers. Soon I'll have to get a bigger vase! Then whenever I look at them I can remember all the beautiful memories that went along with them.