Fishing!

Saturday and Sunday, me and Josh went fishing at this lake called Quake Lake. It is a lake that is pretty close to Yellowstone and was formed in 1959 when a 7.4 earthquake collapsed half the mountain around it. It is really pretty cool. There are all these trees that are dead, but sticking up in the lake. And it seems that there are some big fish in the lake. On Sat. We got there pretty late, at around 8:30. So the sun was almost down and it got really dark real fast, so there was no luck there. But there were fish surfacing all over the place. So on Sunday we decided that we would go back. This time I got us some fly rods from the shop here and we used those for about 4 hours. But this time there were no fish rising at all. So at about 6 pm. Josh went and got his spinner rod and gave it a try with that. I think it only took about 5 mins before he had a fish hooked, followed by 3 more after that. I was a little jealous. But being the nice guy that he is, he let me try, and guess what! I finally caught a fish here! I was excited to say the least. After we got the 4 fish Josh took them back to this campsite had had going and sliced them up and cooked them for us. Quite the outdoors man he is. It was yummy!

Finally, I caught a fish out here in MT. And it wasn't even on a fly rod! But either way I was still pretty excited about it.

Josh, with the first fish he caught.

Here are the 4 fish that didnt escape. We ate 2 of them, but sadly had to throw away the other 2, we tried to eat it all!

I Love Seattle

Last weekend, on a sorta whim, me and Josh jumped in the car and drove to Seattle. We drove through the night and ended up in Seattle around noon on Saturday. We had time to see the Seattle Center, which is where the Space Needle is at, the experiencing Music Project, which is a really cool place. It has a lot of neat stuff that you can do to, experience, music. There were exhibits on Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and some other people. It was pretty cool. I think that was the only reason Josh might have wanted to go to Seattle. After that we were walking around town some and trying to get down to the water front, we saw all these tents set up with people all around and thought that we would go and check it out. It turns out to be the Seattle Hemp Festival 2005. There were people all around talking about legalizing marijuana. People selling anything hemp related, and pot related too. It was pretty interesting. After that we just hung out in downtown for awhile. We ended up sleeping in the car after driving out of town a few miles. The next day we were driving back and saw a sign for the Gorge amplitheater and decided that we wanted to stop and see what it looked like. This area was seriously one of the most beautiful place that I've seen. There was a 3 day concert going on at the time so we couldnt go to the Gorge itself, but we did stop at this winery that was near by. It was a lot of fun. We did some wine tasting and looked around. After that we started back for Montana. We stopped at a lake in Idaho for a swim. We ended up getting back at around midnight Sunday. Overall it was a good, short, fast trip. Here are some photos to document the trip.

The landmark of Seattle, the Space Needle.

Waiting to get on the monorail, the only working one left in the world. It was built as part of the World's Fair stuff.

What am I doing? "Ahoy, there be a ship ahead!"

Here's Josh after we stumbled upon the Seattle Hemp Festival 2005.

Me & Josh outside the EMP.

The experiencing music project building, that was designed by Frank Gehry.

Josh posing for a photo with Bob.

This is only one of two photos that I got of Mt. Ranier, the highest point in Washington. You can see it from a lot of differnt places in the city. You got to look really hard to see it in the photo, its right in the middle.

This is Mt. Ranier about 100 miles away from it. I can't imagin how big it must look when you are right at it. It's so weird to. Everything is flat and then all of a sudden there is is HUGE mountain in the middle of nowhere.

These are the 'rooms' at the Inn of the winery that we visited. I wish that we had been able to learn how much they would have cost. It looked super nice. And we think that this is where Dave Matthews stayed at because there were some super sweet tour buses outside.

One of the many rows that were part of the winery we stopped at.

This is a photo of the river/lake that runs beside of the Gorge. It was so beautiful here.
It was hard to believe that Washington looks like this.

Here is a pic of some of us hanging out at one of the local night spots. There is Scott, Me, Elizabeth, and Shawn.

Yesterday me and my roommate, Elizabeth, hiked, or rather climbed, Lone Peak. It was crazy. You can take a chair lift type thing about half way up and then from there you must hike the rest of the way up. The thing is it is extremly straight up and very slippery. There are mostly rocks, no dirt or grass. So for half the way up there we were climbing basiclly on our hands and knees. There were a few times when we thought about turing back because it was so steep and there was some really bad wether coming in, but we decided agaist that and kept going. It was great. So here are some photos of that hike.

The target: Lone Peak.

This is where we started the hike from after we got off the chair lift thing, called a gondola.

Here I am getting ready for the accent of Lone Peak.

Here I am getting ready to start the accent of Lone Peak.

Taking a break from the climbing. You can kinda tell how steep it was from this photo.

Another view from the way up. It did rain on us for a little bit.

Look at all the rocks, and you cant even see behind Liz, thats because it just drops off to our right.

A view from the top.

Me and Liz at the top. Take note of the box of explosives behind us. They use that in the winter to set off avalanches.

I made it to the top. In the winter you can actually ski from up here. Its amazing.

The hike back down. We picked up a buddy at the top of the mountain. There were some prople up there from the ski patrol working, so Katie ended up coming back down with us. Notice that there is no dirt, just loose, jagged rocks.