BINGO!

Hey everyone! Welcome back from the weekend. I know everyone is happy to be done with it huh!?

To start off our fun filled weekend, Laura and I ventured across town to play BINGO with friends. We didn't win, but a few of our friends won, and Jesse (the guy who tried to drink the gallon of milk with me) even hit it big - winning a $30 game! All we managed to do was lose and smell like smoke, I never knew so many old ladies could smoke at once! We capped off the night by making a trip to Wal-Mart to browse for deals and wallow in our loses...

Our weekend wasn't very eventful otherwise. We did some geocaching, but we have nearly found every geocache within 20 miles of Missoula now, and we have to travel quite a distance before we arrive at our nearest cache. The second trouble is most of the caches we have left to do are in the mountains, which are covered with several feet of snow. We are ready for the snow to be gone, so we can do some hiking!

We have three mountains picked to hike this summer in the immediate area. Those being Lolo Peak, Stuart Peak, and Squaw Peak.

Laura and I hiked near Lolo Peak in October 2005, but we hiked the North Peak which is a few hundred feet lower than Lolo Peak just to the south. You see North Peak and Lolo Peak together on the right side of the picture - really you are mostly just seeing North Peak because it covers Lolo Peak when you look at it from the valley. The ski runs on the left side of the picture is the Bitterroot Resort which is a hot topic right now around Missoula. Right now the ski runs are on private property, but the resort is trying to expand into the National Forest and go all the way to the top of Lolo Peak - which is 7 miles from the ski area. It would be the largest ski resort in the United States by far. The reason a lot of people don't like the idea is because the mountain offers great hiking and amazing views from the top, along with a hybrid forest near the ridge of the mountain, which occurs nowhere else in the world. I took the picture of North Peak and Lolo Peak from the park across the street from our house. You can see the two mountains a little better and get an idea what it looks like. We climbed the mountain on the right - we gook our picture on the cliffs at the top - the ones facing the raven.

Stuart Peak over looks Missoula from the north - in the Rattlesnake Wilderness. You can see it as the tallest peak in the photo to the left. You can also see the inversion which was here last week. That is a mixture of pollution and fog in the valley - thankfully, our house was above the inversion and we were able to see the sun the entire day. Here's some more of the inversion - it really just looks like a sea of clouds, but they were about 300 feet thick. Missoula is down in that fog somewhere... Sometimes I kinda like this look though, I don't have to look at the city below! Oops, did I say that out loud!?!

Laura and I have hiked into the wilderness boundary before, and Stuart Peak shouldn't be too much trouble for us to hike. If we had some snow shoes we might actually try to hike it before the snow melted, but as it is, we are stuck to boots or old running shoes and we need a fairly dry trail. Hopefully we will be able to knock this one off the list early in the summer or late spring because the mountains around Stuart don't get a lot of snow and what snow they do receive tends to melt early in the spring due to the fact they have a south face.

Squaw Peak will be our challenge to climb this summer though. It's about in the middle in the picture to the right - hard to see because of the pollution hanging over Missoula. I took this picture last week while Laura and I were geocaching. No, that's not smoke from forest fires, that's just the pollution that Missoula and the Bitterroot Valley put into the air and this is AFTER major air quality control has been done in the past decade. This was actually the day before the inversion fog set in - you can see the smog sitting up to create the fog once freezing occurred. YUK! Anyway, Squaw Peak is about 25 miles west of Missoula, which will make it hard to get to - just the fact we have to drive awhile to get there. However, I think this might be the most rewarding mountain of the three because we will be able to see into the Missoula area and also to the north into the Flathead Valley.

If you couldn't tell, I am ready for spring to arrive so I can start enjoying the outdoors without needing a coat and that also means that Spring League Ultimate will be starting too! It can't get here soon enough...

Until again

-=Nolan=-