Surfin' Safari

The endless summer was re-enacted northwest style this summer...6 weekends of heading south of the border (well one was to tofino...) for cheap beer, weird groceries and more good times than you could shake a stick at....oh yeah and the waves too. So somehow we learned to surf, sort of...I now am no longer super stoked just to get my feet on the board, have learned what "drop in" "closed out" and "ground swell" mean and am not afriad to paddle out past the break (if the waves are small ) . Future goals include surfing on a board that weighs less than 50 pounds, getting to my feet without using my elbows and knees and finding waves that are warm enough to not freeze my extremeties to usless lumps.

home, sweet home

5 pm on friday and the weekend begins with anywhere between 5 and 10 hours of driving down the i-5 rocking out to Big and Rich in Chris' volvo....and then lovely campgrounds like these are our home for the next 2 or 3 days..notice on the top that we are camping in a gravel patch in a clear cut next to a airport runway. The one on the bottom is the lovely Neah Bay which we have made our home by spreading our gear in as wide a radius as possible

Beautiful Neah

This little place on the northwest tip of America is amazing. The picture on top is Shi Shi beach and on the bottom is Cape Flattery

pre and post surf session

3 feet of meat

Yes, that's right, that is a 3 foot long meat stick purchased from an even longer tube containing this meat stick's relatives. Shopping in America is always amusing.

God Bless Walmart

After a crisis involving a Big and Rich song skipping on our CD we were saved by a local Walmart that not only had a large selection of country music but also also many fine food products. I am posing with cheetos and doritos flavoured crackers that sell for 30 cents a pakage at gas station and even cheaper in bulk at Walmart. Chris is posing with the largest oil containing jugs of "juice" we could find.

Surfin' U.S.A

Lolo and Chris in front of the haystacks at Cannon beach in Oregon (for some live action haystacks footage watch "The Goonies")

Chris and I on our first day of surfing the beautiful coast of the American pacific northwest...notice the lack of sun. It was about 12 degrees that day and our hands got so numb we couldnt get our booties off but we were hooked anyways.

Superstar

Chris making friends with the local wildlife at Oswald state park in Oregon

Pile o' surfers

Emily, Jeff, Lolo, Jason, Chris and I in a pre-surf work out pose

Northward bound

Anna and I both had a couple of weeks free and decided that the Yukon was a mere 2559 km north of Vancouver and really must be seen. We caught a ride to whitehorse using craiglist rideshare and then hitchhiked around the yukon and a bit of Alaska. This lead to some random adventures, like riding in a car with 4 rifles, an axe, a chainsaw and a moose hide ( which i accidently put my pack on) spending an evening at a hunting camp with a group of middle aged men who made us dinner, and spending a night in a guy's trailer....who also made us dinner.

Logging road campsite

This is the sunrise and sunset at our first campsite on the way to the yukon...not bad for just drivnig down some logging road.

Misty mornings

Mist rising from the marsh at Liard hot springs. These hot springs (not in the picture) are wonderfully accessible (anyone who has tried to go to hotsprings in southern B.C. knows it usually invloves driving for hours down logging roads only to find out that you are on the wrong road) clean and surrounded by ferns.

Watson Lake signpost forest

Anna, Jinhee (the woman we found off craigslist who was driving up to whitehorse...randomly from guelph, of course) and me with the sign we spent 2 hours in a smoky gas station coffee shop making. This signpost forest is great....50 000 signs, like an ode to the roadtrip.

Autumn in the Yukon

This road is the dempster highway, it goes all the way to the arctic circle and then on to the Northwest territories, we only went about 80km up it but considering we got there by hitchhiking from Whitehorse and we were invited camping for the weekend by the guys who picked us up we were pretty lucky (although they did have the ulterior motive of needing more models from their tourism yukon photoshoot)

canoeing international waters

Anna and I decided that we should canoe to Eagle, Alaska, 150 km from Dawson city....sounds more epic that it is as the river moves pretty fast. It was supposed to take 3 or4 days but our fear of being eaten by a bear motivated us to do it in a day and half. Adventures included being heckled by the ferry to passes once a day, running aground a few times (neither of us knew how to steer, we went the whole way steering by switching sides to paddle) and being invited to a campfire at 1 am when we arrrived in Eagle.

Oh, the lovely tundra

We some how managed to arrive in tombstone park for the 7 days a year the tundra goes red and yellow...and got to walk in my first snow of the year. The beauty of hiking in the hills this far north as you are immediately above the tree line...no slog in the forest to get the views.

Tombstone park

Anna and I halfway up Golden sides mountain