Oregon in August

Pre foot surgery Dean and I took a 3 day trip to Oregon to visit my family and help celebrate my mother's birthday. The first day we all converged at my sister Vicki's house in the countryside of Cottage Grove. Normally August would be quite warm even by Oregon standards but morning on this day started out nice and cool with a forecast for mild. We decided to take a hike in the hills. This part of Oregon is always beautiful and interesting. In fact, when Dean and I took the short cut to Vicki's house over the top of Shoestring Mountain, we saw a black bear cub run straight across the dirt road right in front of us! No time to grab the camera damn it all but it was pretty exciting.

However, back to the hike. Our group consisted of my sister Vicki, her husband Tim, her daughter Beth and her granddaughter (my grandniece) Madison, plus my sister Lizzy and of course Dean and I. Tim lead us up into a mountainous area via our cars and then we unloaded at a spot someplace along a logging road. There was no shortage of beautiful wildflowers to take photos of. A brilliant purple Foxglove was my favorite. The Queen Anne's Lace was in full bloom and scattered all along the trail and beautiful wild daisies sprouted up everywhere. In fact one came complete with matching spider.
I have a habit of lagging behind to take pictures so I decided to get a big jump on the group and forge way ahead. I was moving along at a pretty fast clip and almost stepped right on a red-spotted garter snake. I'm lucky is wasn't a rattle snake because I literally stepped right over it before it registered in my brain what it was.
We hiked about 2 miles taking our leisure and just enjoying being in the great outdoors. The smell of pine was in the air and everywhere you looked was something interesting to take in. Spiders had spun their webs between branches with moss hanging from them or from tree sprig to tree sprig. We saw a perfect green leaf that seemed to be suspended in mid air except upon closer look, the magnified camera lens gave away the secret.
We saw a bush with a few sparse red berries which I think Lizzy said was a Huckleberry Bush. We didn't argue with her as she declared, "I know my Oregon berries."
The walk made for such a wonderful start to our day. We returned to the cool shade of Vicki's serene yard to play a match of croquet, but that is another story.