Colville 2009

We returned Saturday night from another week-long missions trip to the Colville Indian Reservation. This was my fifth time going. I felt really privileged to serve with such a fine group of people, and I think we were all excited by the things God is doing up there. Our team from Westminster was pretty heavily involved in the construction part of the ministry, but different ones were also able to serve through VBS and the senior music ministry. It was a real whirlwind of a week. It's nice to be home, but part of me is sad to have it over and already missing everyone I spent the week with. I didn't take as many pictures as I have other years, and a lot of these are more artsy than documentary, but here they are.

Nice pose

The moon over the hills near the Longhouse, where we stay.

The beautiful entrance to the Longhouse

Evening sky

One evening we took our traditional hike up behind the Longhouse and the school grounds. This is looking roughly northwest, over the school grounds to a storm in the distance. We saw more thunderstorms than ever before.

One of the houses we worked on early in the process.

Getting closer to finished

Another house we worked on.

Friday evening barbecue at the Stampede Grounds is an important time. We invite people we have met throughout the week to join us for the evening. A good number of tribal elders attended this year, as well as kids from VBS.

Playing the stick game after dinner. The stick game is a special traditional game for the Colville people.

Silver Star

Christina and I had the chance to Hike Silver Star Mt. this past Tuesday with some friends, and all I can say is that it was beautiful.  The clouds hadn't burned off yet when we started out, but that's actually the best conditions for photographing flowers and stuff.  By the time we reached the summit, it was sunny--good for getting a really good view.     

There were so many wildflowers!  The meadows were covered in yellow, orange, red, white and blue.

Cute bumblebee.  There were lots of bees, butterflies, and normal old annoying flies. 

A cool creepy-crawly.   Also known as a centipede--wait, or is it a millipede?

The butterfly that I "saved." Caitlin was going to keep it, but I took pity on it, and she let it go.

Tiger Lilly

Paintbrush

I should mention that one of the main goals of the trip was for our two "butterfly people," Caitlin and Braden, to catch lots of butterflies.  It was a perfect place; there were butterflies everywhere.  

The view from the summit is amazing--you can see four, maybe five, white-capped peaks.  It was a little hazy and the clouds kept covering up the peaks, so they're kind of hard to see in these pictures.

They're hard to see, but on the horizon are, l. to r. Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Rainier, and Mt. Adams 

Mt. Hood

Mt. Adams

The whole group together

Moon and Fireworks Pics

Saturday was a pretty uneventful 4th of July for us, but I decided to play with taking fireworks pictures.  I took tons of pictures, and some of them were pretty neat.  A lot were not that great.  Here's some of the most interesting ones.

Actually, first I tried taking some pictures of the moon that was nice and full.  If you've ever tried taking pictures of the moon, you know that normally it just ends up looking like a bright white blob; none of the detail that our eyes can see.  I think I've figured out why, and how to compensate for it.  Cameras automatically assess the lighting in any particular scene, and decide what aperture and shutter speed would be appropriate.  With moon pictures, your camera "sees" all the dark area around the moon, and thinks, "This seen is so dark, I need to let as much light in as possible!"  The aperture is wide, the shutter speed is long, and the moon ends up being totally washed out.  To get good moon pictures, you have to override that and use the manual setting, make the aperture smaller, select a faster shutter speed , and then you'll have more detail.  Afterwards, I did a little photo-shopping to bring up the brightness and contrast, and sharpened it all a bit. Sorry for getting technical.  That may have been a really boring paragraph. 

Fireworks from our back porch.  For fireworks, I found that a wide open aperture and a shutter speed of over a second worked well.  I definitely needed a tripod.  The lights on the horizon are mostly some parking lot lights, but also some farther away fireworks. 

Hiking on the Lewis River

We spent Thursday and Friday nights camping out at Lower Falls Rec. Area, which is roughly 2 hours away from us, up in the forest between Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams. It's gorgeous up there, and the weather was wonderful, so we had a great time exploring the area.

Lower Falls Rec Area is named after--what else?--Lower Falls, the third of three big waterfalls on the Lewis River. They're all fairly close together, so it's easy to hike past all three in a few hours. The campground by Lower Falls isn't amazing, but nice enough, and with the falls so close, it's hard to complain. They've done a nice job of making the river and the falls really accessible; there's multiple viewpoints and stairs down to the river.

Looking down the river to the edge where the falls begin. The water is really smooth in places, but the current is quite strong.

A rainbow created by mists from the falls.

Lower Falls

Middle Falls

At places, the trail was overhung by cliffs. It was weird to look up and see all that rock and vegetation hanging over our heads.

A huge, really tall tree. Maybe it was a survivor from an older forest.

Upper Falls

There was a viewpoint at the top where you could get really close to the falls. This is zoomed in on that. It's amazing to see how powerful these waterfalls are!

One of the bridges over a creek was broken, so there were signs posted on the trail in either direction to let people know that it was "closed."

Still passable.

Experimenting with campfire pictures. I set my camera up on my tripod, and did a really wide aperture and slow shutter speed.

Mt. St. Helens on the way home.

Summer Begins

Even though I didn't do nearly a full load of classes this past quarter, I still find myself glad to be finished with them for the summer. One thing I didn't complete was a Whitefield course. That will wait to be completed until whenever I feel ready to get back into some school work--fall at the latest. Right now I really just want to enjoy summer. Hopefully I'll be able to put that time to good use by doing some good reading and catching up on stuff that gets dropped behind when there are higher priorities like finishing assignments on time.

This past week we got to spend time with some out-of-town guests--some very good friends and my grandma. One of the highlights of the week was going to the Coast on Saturday with Grandma. We went to Seaside for the first time, and in our opinion it's definitely not as good as Cannon Beach, which we also went to. The two towns are just fifteen minutes or so apart. Seaside doesn't have the same artsy, quaint feel that Cannon Beach does. Its beach is bigger, but I don't think that really makes it better. I love the Coast; it was good to get back again.

End of the Trail Monument in Seaside

The beach at Seaside

Haystack Rock