Memorial Day hike

Beautiful Frazier Meadow, at the top of the trail

B and I took my friend Nia for a hike on Monday. Nia is here from Indonesia. She's on an amazing fellowship program that includes people from 90+ countries. She spent two months at the University of Oregon studying English, then eight months at the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, and she's winding up her year in the U.S. with a two-month internship in my office. She's wonderfully friendly and fun to talk to, and is living in an apartment near the office by herself. I knew she wanted to do some hiking, and it just didn't seem right for her to spend the whole three-day weekend on her own, so I invited her to go with B and me and then come to dinner at our house afterward.

We went up to a state park that's only about half an hour from our house, and is so lush and green that you'd never imagine a place so beautiful could be a mere half-hour from our bare, arid backyard mountain. We stopped in at the visitors' center before we set out on our hike, and read that there had been a black bear sighting that very morning half a mile up the trail we were headed to. We kept our eyes open the whole time (and B kept his squirt gun at the ready, just in case), but we never did see a bear. We got rained on for the first half hour and got pretty wet, but after that, the weather couldn't have been better for a hike. It was overcast and cool, and just a lovely day to be in the woods.

Nia is here for one more month before she goes home to the four year-old daughter she hasn't seen since January (I can't even imagine!), and has told me she'd like to climb a mountain.  If any of you locals have a suggestion, shout out.  Keep in mind that this is a woman who has lived at sea level all her life, so it probably doesn't need to be a fourteener, and should probably be a relatively short & easy hike.  Twin Sisters, maybe?

B takes aim at a shadow that could be a bear

Fearless

Checking out the ruins of the homesteader's cabin in the meadow

B and Nia near the end of the hike

B and Nia on the trail

On the way down, in an aspen grove