A Week In Photos

This past week or so we've kept really busy with several exciting things besides just work. Last Saturday we hiked to Lucifer Lake, which is the lake above the waterfall that we've hiked to several times here in St. Ignatius. It was about a 4 hour hike in, then we stayed at the lake and fished. We caught several cutthroat trout, which John fried up, and Elvan, a friend who went with us fixed some elk steaks over the fire. Yummy. Right before we got to the lake we came across a young black bear right on the trail. We didn't see it until we were about 10-15 feet away. Actually, I was in the back and I didn't see it until John and Elvan both had their bear spray out. Fortunately it just ran off, and we didn't have any more encounters. It was pretty exciting and scary at the same time.








Thursdays during the summer the ranch takes the groups of visitors up to Glacier National Park. This week John drove and I got to go with him. It was the first week that the road was all the way open. We saw lots of goats and sheep and even a bull moose! It was a really good trip.





Saturday we drove up to camp to do some salmon fishing out on the lake. One of the houses from the ranch was there for house camp, so we took the boys out with us so they could do some fishing too. We caught about 10 that we kept on Saturday, then on Sunday we only kept 4 more. They were going to fry them up at camp for dinner but we had to leave to get home. It was a fun weekend.




And of course, we have an update on our dog. Last week some of the group members were working on painting the red fence that goes around the property on the ranch. Scout was out with them and decided he needed to be on the other side of the fence, so he ran right under the wet paint. He got red paint on his back, and it kind of looked like a mohawk.

The Grand Tour

Finally, some pictures! Today I got around to taking some pictures of the apartment and actually got them loaded on to my computer. We love the new place. It feels so nice and homey. We are really starting to get settled in and we are working on getting everything put away and decorated the way we want it.

Its finally summer! Or is it?

We have been pretty busy since school got out a few weeks ago, but we have been having fun. We moved in to our new apartment, which we love. I still need to take some pictures to post on here, but now that things have settled down a little I should have some more time to do that. We also had a good visit with John's parents when they were here a week ago. We went to Philipsburg, which is an old mining town. We also drove up into the mountains to see a ghost town. It was pretty cool, but we wish we would have had more time to hike around and see all of the buildings since you couldn't drive to all of them.
The weather has been kind of nasty the last couple of weeks. It rained almost every day for a week and was just cold, and then last week it got REALLY cold and snowed 4 inches overnight. It stuck around for most of the day, but the next morning it was gone and it started to warm up right away. Now its about 80 and it looks like summer might be here to stay, at least for awhile. We had vacation bible school last week. It went pretty well. It is by far the biggest outreach our church does. We have close to 100 kids I would guess, and only about 30 of them are from Pinehaven, and there aren't very many kids in our church other than PH, so most of those kids are just kids in the community.
This week summer school began. Summer school here is a chance for the kids who didn't get their work done during the school year to get caught up. I am teaching the girls class, and I have 10 girls right now. It has been busy, so I'm glad its only a half day of school. John is working up in the woods with the logging crew this summer. He is cutting down trees for firewood for the winter. Now that summer work groups and school have started we are settling into our regular routine. That is until camp starts at least.

School is Out

We finally got around to moving into the new apartment last week, but we haven't taken any pictures of it yet. It looks great though! We are so excited to finally be in the new apartment instead of the huge old house.

We've been really busy the last few weeks with finishing school and all of the extra stuff that goes along with that, in addition to moving into a new place. We had roundup on Memorial Day, so I will be sure to get some pictures posted from that soon. It is always a lot of fun to watch the kids tackling calves. And this year no one got hurt, so that was good. We had to finish grading book reports and finalizing report cards all week, I was making a slideshow for graduation, a scrapbook of my class for my classroom helper who is graduating, and John was working with the seniors on a song they sang at graduation.

Last night was graduation. We had 7 seniors graduating this year, which is a pretty good sized class for our school. It was a wonderful ceremony. The song that John led the seniors in (Mountain of God, by Third Day) sounded great. The kids did a really good job, and one of the girls played guitar with John. They all did an awesome job. Since we have so few students, all of the graduates give a speech each year, and they were all very well done.
Well, John's parents are here, so I should be getting back to the house. They also got us a TomTom GPS system for our car, so I'm playing with that right now. Its pretty cool.

Hot Springs, Bike Rides, and Bears

This weekend we went to Lolo Hot Springs to celebrate our 3rd anniversary. This is the first time that we actually went away for our anniversary and we had a good time. We rented a cabin, did some hiking in the mountains behind the resort, and soaked in the hot springs, which was wonderful.
We also took our bikes with us, and Saturday we drove to Lolo and did a forty mile ride on a pretty nice paved trail. It was only supposed to be a 30 mile ride, but about 5 miles in John asked me where my sunglasses were. I then realized that I had left them on the trunk of the car, so we turned around to get them before someone else decided they liked them. We have been doing quite a bit of riding this spring since it has warmed up. We ride often in St. Ignatius, but we also did a 50 mile charity ride in Missoula last weekend which was a lot of fun. We love riding with groups, so it was nice to be around so many people riding. Cyclists are great people.

After we got home Saturday evening, we planned to just hang out at home Sunday afternoon to get some stuff done around the house. We have a group from Lincoln Christian College here right now, and they were going on the hike to Mission Falls, so we decided to go too. (We've only been once before today since we've been here. Unbelievable.) I'm really glad we did. We took Scout and he stayed right with us. He was great. We also spotted a bear and a cub on the next ridge. We had binoculars with us, so we could see it really well, all from a safe distance. The cub was so cute and little. It kept running around back and forth behind the mom. (The picture is a little blurry because I had to zoom it in so much.)

Altogether it was a wonderful weekend. We have 2 weeks until school is out, and a few of those days we have off from school, so the time is going by pretty quickly. We are excited for summer, and finally having warm weather (it was 90 yesterday! What happened to spring?)

Oh, and be looking for a post about moving to our new apartment any day now.

Kidnapped!

A few weeks ago was our friend Jeremy's birthday. He leads the youth group, so the kids wanted to throw a surprise birthday party for him. We helped them get it all together, but we couldn't figure out how to get him to our house. Sooo... the best idea we could come up with was to go up to the house where he was hanging out and kidnap him. John and two of the boys dressed up with ski masks and sunglasses and all black and stormed in and made him come with them. He of course knew who they were so he made it really hard for them and made them carry him up the stairs. It was pretty funny. They all had a good time.

Snowstorm in April

Yes, we certainly did get some snow on Saturday/Sunday. Our friend Jeremy said he measured 10 inches on his picnic table in the morning. That is a lot of snow for April 20th! Living in Indiana we always thought that the weather did some crazy things there, but I'm not sure I've ever seen that drastic of a change in such a short period of time. Thursday it was probably in the 60's and Saturday it got down to 18 and we got 10 inches of snow. Incredible.

I took the younger staff kids sledding in our yard yesterday. I'll try to post some pictures later. We had a lot of fun.