Lisa and Chris' Wedding

Here is the story of Lisa and Chris.
One night in her wild child days, Lisa got all liquored up on Boone's Farm (Wildberry flavor) and woke up the next day with a ring on her finger and a tattoo of the name "Chris" encased in a heart on her butt. And the rest is history.
Or she met this really upstanding fellow Chris at her previous job, and after a long friendship and carefully considered courtship they got married in an intimate yet tasteful ceremony at her suburban baptist church (with her parent's permission of course). I can't quite remember which way it happened.
And these pictures certainly aren't helping my confusion!
Not only was our present the best, it was also the most elegantly wrapped.
I want to put that in my mouf.
I will bite that right out of your hand mister!

Mr Marmot

We spotted this little guy chomping along the trial up Eagle Peak. A marmot is kind of like a beaver of the mountains with scruffier hair and no flat tail.
And he was not afraid of us one bit. He blocked the trail for a good ten minutes before he let us pass.
It was hard to get good pics since these things lay so low to the ground. I wasn't about to get my face in marmot chomping range for the sake of my art. Think about you pet gerbil's big yellow chompers, multiply that times 100, and you've got marmot teeth.
Cute though!
From Wikipedia:

Marmots are generally large ground squirrels. Those most often referred to as marmots ten to live in mountainous areas such as the Alps, northern Apennines, Carpathians, Tatra, and Pyrenees in Europe, the Rockies, the Black Hills, and the Sierra Nevada in the United States, Northern Canada, Deosai plateau in Pakistan and Ladakh in India. However, the groundhog is also properly called a marmot, while the similarly-sized but more social prairie dog is not classified in the genus Marmota but in the related genus Cynomys.

Marmots typically live in burrows, and hibernate there through the winter. Most marmots are highly social, and use loud whistles to communicate with one another, especially when alarmed.

Marmots mainly eat greens. They eat many types of grasses, berries, lichens, mosses, roots, and flowers.

Thanks, Wikipedia! Way to go ground squirrels!
This guy definitely was not whistling any alarms. We were extremely low on his priority list. And as you can see he was going to town on those greens.
However, Wikipedia, I do have to say that this was our second marmot sighting, the other being near Estes Park in Colorado, and as an marmot expert I do have to say that on neither occasion did we spot these highly-social ground squirrels with a buddy in sight.

Check Out This Chipmunkersons

I took these pictures near the top of Eagle Peak while he was stuffing his pousches.
He totally wasn't afraid at all!
He was hanging out with Mr Marmot.
Cute little guy.

Bridge Over The Nisqually River

To get to the trailhead for our hike up Eagle Peak, we had to cross the Nisqually River on this pretty suspension bridge. Great view of Tahoma from the other side.
My hiking buddy.
The river is created by run off from the Nisqually Glacier on Tahoma (Rainier).

I made the trek in my VFF's.

Nurse Log

From Timothy Egan, The Good Rain

In the rain forest, few opportunities are lost; a host of young alders, some as tall as ten feet, have taken root in the slow-dying flank of the snagged tree--a "nurse log," in the terminology of biologists. The seedlings are nurtured on the moss of the nurse log, sucking, searching, probing until gradually the old tree is compost and the new tree is king. Only one of a thousand small trees ever lives to maturity. But when they finally settle in, they're here for centuries

Mixed feelings about this (as a nurse).

Eagle Peak Trail

Trailhead, near Longmire, view of Tahoma.
Hobbit.
Nurse log on the trail. See "old growth," aka "ancient," "primeval."
Moss makes some trees look furry.
Everything grows.
At higher altitude, forests give way to alpine meadows.
Blue mountains emerge.
Our final destination.
Near the top.
Like mountain goats.