My garden is growing

In our backyard we have a holly tree, we are going to trim down a lot of it because it like almost everything else is a little out of control but I love it! What great decoration! Come Christmas time I am going to deck my house out in Holly!!!!

Black Beauty zucchini has survived the transplanting process, I think 4 of my 5 plants are thriving, the 5th is still touch and go.

Sugar snap peas! Also doing great, we are going to grow them up the fence.

Our pear tree is starting to grow!! Look at all those little green nubs! I am stoked cause for like 2+ weeks it didn’t do anything and I was a little worried.

Just bought this to accompany the vegetable bible book my mom gave me. So now I know what to do and when then the book my mom gave me a few years ago goes in depth on each plant. They work great together!

And I bought my first gardening hat. Currently I am only outside like 2 hours a week so I am not wearing it yet ( I need all the vitamin D I can get) but come summer this will be my skin’s best friend!

Can’t wait to keep sharing more with you!

Summer Hiking Series 2017: Silver Falls State Park

Hola!!!!

Another hike down this summer! The boyfriend and I went to the very popular Silver Falls State Park. This is a state park that is a little over 9,000 acres. The two most popular trails are the Rim Trail and the Canyon trail, also known as the trail of ten falls. The canyon trail is super popular because you go by and even behind some of the 10 waterfalls.  I would like to do that trail at some point but it is SUPER busy because its not a difficult hike and all the waterfalls, but also dogs are not allowed and the last two weekend adventures had not included Artemis, so she was coming on this one, so we chose a different trail.


Never trust the bf to take a picture, it will always be of your backside. 

We did the Rim trail to the perimeter trail to the rackett ridge trail to a road walk for about a mile.

None of these were the trail we had planned on doing haha. We had gone there with the intention of doing the Buck mountain loop but parked in the main parking area (as I said it is busy and parking is limited. And didn’t know where the trailhead was from there. So we pieced together a route from the map.

We started on the rim trail where we saw maybe 20 people in 2.4 miles, not too bad.


Then we turned onto the perimeter trail where, after we made the turn onto the trail, we saw no one for the 3.2 miles. It was wonderful and I was able to let Artemis off her leash.

We got to the junction of the perimeter and the rackett ridge trail, from here the perimeter trail was closed due to winter storm damage so we turned on the rackett ridge which is also a horse trail for 2.2 miles. at about this point it crosses a side road and weaves back and forth through the forest and over the road. We chose to just take the road at this point and walk the just over a mile straight back to the parking lot because my feet were killing me!!! I had done a good mile increase this week and my feet had just had enough. This was also more than double the distance of our recent hikes so I was tired. Even Artemis was dragging behind us.

She passed out hard core as soon as we got to the car.

She was snoring in minutes. 

I was so tired too

Overall:

The rim trail; you overlook a waterfall or two with plenty of streams and waterfall runoff around you. Busy but not too horrible depending on when you go, hardly any elevation gain, small rolling hills, very pleasant.

The perimeter trail; sparsely populated, 1000 ft elevation gain, slightly challenging at times for me, piece of cake for the bf. In the beautiful forest, because almost no people you will walk into a lot of spider webs crossing the trail, spiderwebs: 1000 spiders: 0. There are enough small streams crisscrossing the 3.2 miles of trail that we did that Artemis had enough natural water, I probably didn’t even need to carry a water bottle for her.

Rackett ridge trail: we did 2.2 miles of this and most of it was down. This trail is much wider because it accommodates horses as well, it also wasn’t as smooth as the others because there were less people and more horses who used it.

Silver falls state park is well marked and it is easy to piece together a hike here with almost any amount of mileage you could want.

All in all I enjoyed this hike very much, though I was dying a bit by the end, and would recommend silver falls state park as a great place to hike. You can choose how difficult or easy and how populated or sparse you want your hike to be.

 Here are some fun stats curtosy of my Garmin vivoactive

Until next time, have fun trailing the blonde…………

Have you even been to Silver Falls state park? If so, did you like it?

Tidbits from the week

Holy crap only 2 more weeks!!!! I am so excited for this quarter to be over, I feel like I am going to be swimming in oceans of time. Next quarter (summer) I am taking medical terminology online so I am going to have so much more time.

Food from the week:

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

The bf and I also walked to baskin robins and got ice cream. 

Friday

 

Last Saturday my great friend was in town for the quickest of visits, she was here for a funeral, my boyfriend and I met up with her and her friend after work Saturday afternoon. When your friend is in pain and drinking it away and asks you to drink with her, you do. So I did. I don’t drink much and when I do its usually a glass of wine or something (though I will be trying more wine soon but more on that later) but I try in general to limit myself to 1 glass of whatever it is. I wasn’t the best with my limits in college and I don’t ever need to go back to that. Anyways, I ended up drinking 4 cans of Mike’s black cherry hard lemonade, this is how much of a lightweight I am now, I got drunk off 4 cans basically fruity beer hahahaha. We were at a golf course and ended up just staying there so I ate a hot dog. Thankfully I was in bed by 10pm because I had to be up at 5am for work. But those 4 cans were too much for me, I woke up sick at 2:30am and needed to get something in my stomach, I ate a pop tart. I was hung-over the next day, hence the Mexican food on Sunday and Monday. I cannot believe how long it takes to recover from a hangover now!!!! Like the whole week to feel 100% again. Anyways that was my weekend lol.

Monday I relaxed in between classes but Tuesday I got my butt out for a walk and a run. The roommate and I did 1.3 miles walking then I did another 4 miles on the treadmill.

Wednesday the pup and I got out for about 1.5 miles walking in between classes

Thursday I went out for a run and got 3 miles in. This run was quite tumultuous and will do a whole post on it in a few days. Beware for TMI hahaha.

Friday the BF, the pup and I went for a little hike. 9.4 miles. I will do a more in depth review on the hike next week.

This was a pretty big jump in miles for me this week and I am feeling it in my legs and feet. But I am excited, this is how to get back in shape and lose weight!   19.2 miles total for the week between walking, running and hiking.

Can’t wait to see what next week brings!

How was your week?

Did you get any miles in?

What is the best meal you had this week?

Summer Hiking series 2017: Smith Rock State park

Howdy!

I mentioned last week that the BF and I went hiking at Smith Rock State park so I thought I would do an actual review and talk a little more about it.

Smith Rock state park is out near Bend, OR. Weather wise it was almost perfect, after many days of dark dreariness we entered the land of the sun! Bend gets a lot more sunlight than Portland and this particular park looks more like it belongs in Arizona if you ask me. It was probably about 70-75 degrees with sun and a few clouds so it was amazingly beautiful. Of course there was a storm rolling in and we hit the beginning of it but I’ll talk about that later.

It was a Friday morning and I happened to not have lab so we decided a hike farther away would be ok. We did get a little bit of a late start though, by the time we were up and ready, hit the grocery store for snacks and really got on the road it was about 10am.

It was just under a 3 hour drive for us so by the time we got there, got situated, bought a $5 parking pass and headed out it was about 1:15pm.

I took a few pictures of the area before we started. The surroundings were so unlike the area of Oregon we live in!

That is what we are about to hike up??!!!

It was an aptly named trail, at least the ups and downs were but I would say only about 1-1.5 of it was difficult. The rest was pretty flat.

Gotta get a nice picture before we get all sweaty and gross.

The view from the top was great, very pretty.

That is what we had just hiked up. There were actually quite a few stairs, it felt like I got a major step up workout hahaha

The information shop area place had a nice little map that was free that showed you all the trails.

We did Misery Ridge which was the most elevation wise but was only 4 miles. We would have added on a smaller hike but about half way through our 4 miles the wind started kicking up and the clouds started rolling in. We drove the rest of the way into Bend and had dinner at the Deschutes Brewery and restaurant. I had an amazing burger after all that hiking hahaha. I may have also had a beer sampler but being as I was tired and had worked out it only took 3.5 of the 6 to hit me so the BF finished the last 2.5 for me hahaha, I am so not a heavy drinker anymore.

On the way home the clouds really started rolling it and we even hit a little snow going up over the pass back to Portland. It was 34 degrees so the snow wasn’t sticking yet but it probably stuck later that night if it kept going.

Overall I really enjoyed this hike, I wish the clouds hadn’t rolled in so we could have hiked longer. There was only the one difficult part of the hike though going up and over the ridge, Brandon was a little bored the rest of the way and we even ran a little on all the flat parts. Maybe 3/4 of a mile to 1 mile. Smith rock state park is very big with rock climbers, there were A LOT of them, it was fun to watch them but terrifying to think of being up there. There is also mountain biking and on the flatter, rolling hills parts that could be fun.

As far as dogs go, they are allowed but sometimes Artemis pulls and I would have been terrified that she would have pulled me off balance and I would have fallen, there are some definite drop offs. Thankfully I did not bring her on this hike. Also I prefer to hike with her in less populated areas so I can let her off leash and she can go at her own pace.

Overall I enjoyed the hike but it is way to far of a drive for what we got out of it hike wise. I did very much enjoy myself though.

Until next time, have fun trailing the blonde…………