Pictures

 Simon attempting to snowboard a couple weeks ago while we were sledding

 Dylan's birthday and some of his presents.

 Snowshoeing up on the Kettle Crest.

The kids with spider web facepaint

Skiing above the Kettle River Valley.  We started down along the river, and skied (and hiked some) to get up on this point.  It was all down hill on the way back on some old roads.  None of us can turn very well while going down hill, so we were all covered in snow and sporting some new bruises by the time we made it back to Landon's house.  The two guys in this picture are Jason and Landon, on Tuesday night we're going....wait for it....Bigfoot hunting!  In case you don't remember, in 2009 I posted a bigfoot story here, I don't want to retype it all, so if you're interested go read it.  It's about 3/4's of the way down the 2009 page.  Anyway, my friend Landon had a weird experience on a fire last summer, something was throwing rocks at trees when he was the only one around.  So he talked to some other folks around the area, another guy we know is dating a native girl and has heard some crazy bigfoot stories from the elders down on the reservation.  So Landon suggested a full moon nightime bigfoot hunt on skis.  It should be pretty fun, we're going to start out skiing up a ridge above where my experience happened, stay up there for a few hours then go up on to the Kettle Crest and ski back into a big roadless area and get up on a ridge there as well.  I think our plan is to just see if we can hear anything weird.  I'm bringing a digital recorder and a huge spot light.  And bear spray.  And a large caliber handgun.  Just in case, you know. 

Faith getting ready to push Dylan down the sled hill we snow shoed to a couple weeks ago.

For some reason the blog is centering all my typing now.  Oh well, that's about it.  I'll post the story of our bigfoot hunt next week hopefully, Friday I'm leaving for Tucson.  Due to "travel caps"  (restrictions on how much we can spend on non-emergency travel whether we have the budget for it or not) we've gotten rather inventive at finding ways to send people to training and stay under our limit.  For example, the way the agency is tracking travel spending, only the dollars that get put into our travel planning and reimbursement program get officially tracked as part of our travel cap.  So, if I drive rather than fly down to Tucson, it appears that we spend $1200 less.  I figured the out the cost of driving, it is actually cheaper by about $500 after you figure the cost of the ticket and a rental car.  So I get to spend three days driving down and three days driving back.  The class I'm taking is two weeks long, so I'll be gone for 18 days.  I'll stop in Idaho Falls on my way down on the 9th of March, then drive to Boulder City, Nevada to stay with a friend there, then down to Tucson.  On the way home I'm going back through Page and up to Idaho Falls, where I'll stay with mom and dad again.  That's about it, hopefully everybody's doing well.