I have never seen a rabbit here before. I felt a bit sad because they are cute, but I also don’t want them in my garden. The bunny was about half Jack’s size, so who knows how she caught it. Lee and I have been clearing out a blackberry patch so I wonder if it was displaced. The picture below is Jack playing with a mouse she caught while we were clearing blackberries. She released it eventually, but I found it a day later dead in a nest further into the blackberry thicket. Nature isn’t kind.

Arion rufus

The fields are brown with Queen Anne’s lace and dried grass. I guess winter is on its way.

I feel like I need a machete to get through parts of the field.

It makes me feel bad that we don’t have a use for all this grass yet.

There is a thicket of Hazel nut trees on the back part of our property. It is so dense that light doesn’t get through and the ground is mostly bare.

This last picture scares me, as it shows a lot of the Himalayan blackberries that are trying to take over. If we didn’t mow and try to control the invasive blackberry mess, I imagine that in 10 years most of our fields would be covered in them and the grass would be gone.

In parallel with our other summer projects, Lee and I have been working on getting in better shape. We have been doing a lot of hiking and exploring new places. There are some pretty amazing vistas within a few miles of our house, but today’s hike really raised the bar for sheer beauty and left us astounded.

The Little Cowhorn Mountain hike was suggested by a couple new friends and they thankfully handled navigation to the trailhead, located up 15 miles of winding logging roads. The hike was a mile long and went 850′ uphill for a final elevation of 4250′. Just a little steep.

At the summit there was a fire lookout on a rocky outcrop. It was built in the 1960s to observe wildfires in the lower Cascades, but has been abandoned for many years.

Once we made it up to the top, the view was just glorious.

You could see from the coastal ranges to central Oregon.

Basically there was a 360° panoramic view of mountains as far as you could see. I really wanted to spend the night in the fire lookout and watch the sunset and sunrise.