I also spent time growing what could be roughly called a beard, in some half-hearted cargo-cult attempt to stay ready for the cold of some winter skiing -and so hope that more snow arrived.
In the background you can see the child I own embracing his Oregonian birthright by holding an orange chainsaw. It wasn't switched on, but later that afternoon he did go out to the woods and cut down a tree for Christmas.
Just as every French village has its patisserie, every English village a former pub converted into four authentic rural-look flats, every small town in Oregon has a store with a bright orange logo above it: Stihl. They are the official vendors of deforestation tooling in the PNW.
The good news: there are still a lot of trees left -if there is one thing that hits you when you return to the state is just how many trees there are left.
That's probably despite the best efforts of the inhabitants, rather than because.
That peak in the background: Mary's Peak. 4000' of ascent; on-road from the south, off-road from the north, and something I used to train on. Not having something like that within day-ride range makes you lazy, so it's nice to see it again, even if I didn't manage to get back up it.
The price of taking three weeks offline is the vast amount of emails to be flicked through. It's taken two days to clear the backlog and sit down to do something vaguely useful. Time to get busy.
