Penn State Chics Dig Nerds

 While in Idaho, we took the children swimming nearly every day.  One day, we rode our bike on the trail to Black Bay Park. For a while, a family of ducks swam with us. Most days, we walked to Kiwanis Park to swim in the Spokane River They absolutely loved playing on the floats that lined the swimming area.  One day, we drove up to Priest Lake.  First, we went on the Lakeview Mountain Trail. On the way to the top viewpoint, we made a discovery: Lots and lots of ripe huckleberries! The Priest Lake area is known for good huckleberry picking.  We were hoping they were ready. So, we snacked our way up the trail to the viewpoint. After descending the trail to our vehicle, we decided to go back up just a little ways with our two camping cook pots to collect huckleberries. We only saw two others on this trail.  And, they were coming to pick huckleberries as we were leaving. After our hard work picking all of those berries, we went to Kalispell Bay to eat our picni...

 Brady put together this video

A few years ago, we tried to pan for garnets at Emerald Creek Garnet Area-- but we showed up on the wrong day.  This time they were open!  Emerald Creek is know for having star garnets. As the website says: The garnets found here are called "star garnets" because of a unique property that causes some of them to display a reflection like a four or six pointed star. They would not allow us to dig into the creek anymore (environmental concerns).  But, they pre-dug for us. We dug out of the pile. Then, we used the sifters to separate the rocks from the dirt.  After sifting the rocks, we took them to the sluice box area. Sluicing the rock collection We really did find some garnets!  We didn't find any huge ones, but they were decent.  When we got back to the parking lot, there was a gem guy there.  He looked at our garnets and told us which the best ones likely were.  Then, he polished one for each of us.  Brady ended...

Shoshone Falls was our first stop in Idaho, on our way to Boise.  Our kids always ask, "When can we visit the Hosiers again?"  or "When can we visit the Pucketts and Giblers again?"  On this part of our Idaho journey, they got to spend time with the Hosiers.  As their son excitedly said, "This is really cool.  It's like an extra long play date!" On the way to Idaho the second time (after Crater Lake and Yachats, Oregon), we stopped at Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Valley of Oregon.  It was a zoo of people, especially since the fire damage from last year limited where we could go. Multnomah Falls--The sun was in a bad place.  But, the picture still turned out kind of neat. We also stopped and visited Jesse's great aunt and uncle in Eastern Washington.  It was fun to catch up with them and to see old family pictures.  Several farms were harvesting their wheat, which was fun to observe. Eastern Washington wheat fields.  ...

Every year we are out here we seem to miss a wedding or a reunion by one weekend.  This year we were unable to fit the late August reunion into our schedule.  It had been 10 years since we had visited Kamiah.  For those of you who do not know, Kamiah is where Jesse graduated from high school.  Several aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends still live nearby.  It was time for us to visit again. Friday, we drove to Kamiah to visit our friends, the Pucketts and Giblers.  Between all three families present, there were 14 children.  Everyone had somebody to play with.  Needless to say, all of our children had a great time.  It was hard to peel them away Saturday morning when we needed to go visit family members! Last summer our prayers and thoughts were with this area a lot.  While it did not garner national attention, the wildfire that spread through here was fierce.  At the time, I read updates and was brought to tears several times....

We were deciding should we visit a gold mine and go panning for gems?  Or should we go to a real creek and sluice for garnets?  We convinced the kids to go "near St. Maries" for the garnets. The internet wasn't working when we left the house, so we didn't know the exact directions other than "near" St. Maries.  But, we did know there is a chamber of commerce and a museum in St. Maries.  The museum didn't open until noon.  So, we walked the the chamber of commerce.  The chamber office person was temporarily out of the office until 9 (except that it was 10:30 at the time!).  I randomly found a brochure outside a shop that gave us a very vague map to the Emerald Creek Garnet Area.  At the garnet area, they give you sluice boxes and shovels and let you dig for garnets in the creek. We weren't prepared for "near" St. Maries to be 25 miles away from the town.  We had to stop at a small town to fill up with gas.  The kids ...

After we left Boise for Grand Teton/Yellowstone, we stopped along the way at Craters of the Moon.  There were lots of neat geologic features here that could be better explored with older kids, but we had fun nonetheless.  Plus, we learned a little too.  We hiked through the North Crater Flow Area where we saw different types of lava flow. This is Pahoehoe- Hawaiian for how this lava cooled. Then, we hiked through this spatter cone. It's a spatter cone because the volcano just spit out little spatters and a time and it cooled like this. Little white flowers, called dwarf buckwheat grew all over the cinder cones.  They are spaced out really far.  Apparently their root systems go out about three feet all around them.  This is the high desert after all.  A closer look at the dwarf buckwheat: It was at least 90 degrees this day, plus the rocks were black.  So this = HOT.  We wanted to hike to the caves (lava tubes...