the mother lode

We had that one day of rain here and guess what happened to the raspberries?

Jane and i planned to go on a big hike today, for smoke and reasons we did not.
But did we ever had a wonderful day.
First we go to Stony to pick berries, as we are commenting how good the berries are after the rain, we hit the mother lode. we pick, pick , pick.
My(ice-cream)bucket is soon full. We leave hesitantly and i had to drag Jane away from those berries.

As the smoke is clearing, mountains are appearing
the sun an orange dot, now burning hot.
(i didn't mean to rhyme:)
We set of to find the end of Stony creek. The mouth of the creek, where it flows into the Takhini river. Jane paddles that river a fair bit, and never quite knows where Stony creek flows into it.
Well here it is:


The hike towards it. is surprisingly beautiful and surprisingly easy.
We started off on the west bank, and on the way back we find out that there actually is a trail coming right out at the highway (in the spruce trees on the high bank).
We follow the bank and as we come to a big dip, as in another fold of the land towards the creek, we take an elk trail going down into the creek valley, which is rather wide here. It has lots of bush, but also tin little grass openings and fields of Grass of Parnassus, lovely white flowers.
The elk trail goes up the bank again, and we leave a marker for ourselves to find the trail on the way back. We cut a bit through this Takhini Burn landscape, small poplars and lots of dead fall (60 years old).
Soon we come out by a wide open bank, with rustic old fallen down fences.
And we see the Takhini river bank and.. water.
We look at the map, to see where it shows the creek coming out. And walk to the west side of it, where the bank we are on comes close to the river.
And in the river close to the shore....
a big rock, just for us.
Forget about the hermit thing, we are mermaids.