Index Bash

I'd been saving up for this one since October; Mount Index the imposing sentinel of the Skykomish Valley. It's an impressive sight from Highway 2. Here's the view from our pre-dawn approach.

In addition to the impressiveness of the objective, this trip require a particularly hardcore route to the summit. It started with a six-mile mountain bike. Here's what that looked like.

After that there was a three-mile stretch on an abandoned logging road. It was more like a jungle bushwhack with plenty of washouts to boot. See for yourself. Yes Brandon and Chris are in this picture. From there it was up onto the alpine slopes where the snow was deep, the skies blue, and the views incredible. The one downer on the trip were the avalanche chutes blocking all routes to the actual summit. But it's hard to complain when we got in 20 miles with 4,500 feet of elevation gain and a whole lot of awesome terrain.

Tulip Time

The news got around. Due to our unusually cold spring the Tulip Festival in the Skagit Valley was prolonged an extra week. Time to grab the kids for an impromptu photo-shoot. We met the Robecks and Maxfields from our ward for optimal good times and to have a few more cameras on hand. It worked. Luckily their cameras were much better than ours. We came back with 300 or so pictures, just of our kids. Here are some highlights.

Here's Ginny and Violet in a pristine floral setting. Note the flowers in Violet's hands were found on the ground, not picked! Here's me carrying Ginny from the pink flowers to the purple flowers. It's a good thing all the kids involved were girls, there weren't many masculine colors around.

Bri took some time to introduce Violet to the power of her namesake color.
The whole family had a great time. This was all of our first times at the Tulip Festival. It did not disappoint!

Gunnar's Birthday (April 24th)

Gunnar came up on the train from Vancouver to stay with us for two nights for his 14th birthday celebration. We met Grant at The Cheesecake Factory and ate a great dinner. We even got the birthday boy a cheesecake.

I bought ice cream cupcakes from Haagen Daz for him. Appantly the one on the Ave is the only one that sells vanilla chocolate chip ice cream, they said they dont even sell it in stores anymore. Lucky Gunnar! They are pretty cute! The cupcake paper is soild chocolate.

Happy Birthday to Gunnar!

Enjoying the cupcake

Ginny enjoying a cupcake

We played lost of settlers of catan inculding seafairers and citys & knights expansions. Thanks Maxfields!

The next day we went bowling and played pool at the hub. Then Gunnar and I saw "17 again" it was pretty cute. Then more Catan was played. Then we had to say goodbye to our Gunnar. Ginny was so sad when we put him on the train. I've never seen her lip stick out so far. Thanks for sharing your birthday weekend with us Gun!