Take the Family to Work Day

Right now at work, Dave is doing forest-use surveys. This means that he drives to a trailhead and waits to talk to people who have been using the forest. Since this survey is required by the congressional committee that finances the Forest Service, it is unnecessarily complicated. It's a stratified random survey, which basically means that they break down different trails into strata based on its location or designation (horse, bike, foot etc), assign each strata/trail a number and throw it into a random-number generator. All of this means that Dave spends a lot of time talking to nobody because somehow the trails that are picked have little or no use this time of year. So, Dave reads or carves on things or hikes the trails. Yesterday, Jed and I tagged along to see what Daddy does at work. First Dave and I set up a trail counter, on the off-chance that if someone actually came, they'd get counted. And then we hiked up the trail.

Dave and Jed getting ready to go

Yay, Forest Service boys!

Before hitting the trail

The trail wound up the mountainside among a ton of old-growth Douglas fir trees. A lot of them were super old and mostly dead. They were enormous and it was great to see them. We were high enough up that we also saw some Engelmann spruce among the lodgepole pines. It smelled great!

There was the prettiest little stream right here and we stopped to check it out.

No, I didn't go all the way across on that log. It was TOO rotten!

The water was so clear and cold. We even saw a little trout!

Jed loves riding in the back pack.

Further up the trail, it got a little colder and there was a lot of ice. We thought this one was really cool. And after we took this picture, we threw rocks at the ice to break it. It took a pretty big rock!

Done with our hike. We had a great time! It was so nice to get out and enjoy the beautiful fall day. After Jed ate (again) we packed back up and drove home while we listened to A Prairie Home Companion.

We had to drive through someone's pasture on the way out. They had SO many haystacks like this--I think I counted about 16. That is one thing I love about this part of Montana. They still use the old methods of stacking hay.