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Upon hearing about our decision to get married in San Francisco our friends Heather and Mike informed us that they would be attending, no if ands or buts about it! Heather and Jen have been friends since kindergarten. Initially our idea was to do it with just the two of us (Plus the officiant, of course). Neither of us are comfortable with fanfare or have any illusions of the “perfect wedding” other than one that makes sense to us both.  I’ve got to say, though, we both are extremely glad they came out!

Just north of San Fransisco is this majestic stand of huge Sequoias with a babbling brook running through. It seemed the perfect place for Jen and I to get married. Unfortunately the park service wanted to charge something like 800 bucks just to have it there! Our officiant, up for a bit of mischief in the name of romance, suggested we just keep a low profile and have the ceremony on the sly. So that’s exactly what we did. The five of us hiked into Muir Woods for a mile or so, found a beautiful out of the way spot, in a place aptly named “Cathedral Groove” and proceeded with the hitching. By the time the ceremony concluded a crowd of hiking strangers had gathered and gave a roaring applause. Not exactly the plan, but pretty cool none the less. A rogue ceremony in a forrest of ancient Redwoods next to a coastal stream with great friends…perfectly Jen and I!

The Moodys also spent a few days in San Fransisco with us. Heather and Jen both have this intense conquoring mentality when it comes to visiting new places so we took the city by storm and squeezed in as much as possible in the time we had. A non-exhaustive list of planted flags include Fisherman’s Wharf, the historical City Lights bookstore,  Muir Woods, the Ferry Building Market, the Exploritorium (one of my new favorite places in the world) Sausalito, Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, Japantown the Castro district, a handful of Sonoma Valley wineries, writhing Lombard Street and the Full House house. (The last two were on my insistance and I was duely made fun of, but were totally worth it!) SF is a ethnic food lover’s dream, too. We had killer Thai, Chinese, Korean, Seafood, Sushi and spent one evening at an insanely tasty food truck roundup.

Our Vows:

All that I am and all that I have, I offer to you today in love and in joy.
I promise to encourage and inspire you,
to laugh with you
and to comfort you in times of sorrow and struggle.
I promise to love you in good times and in bad,
when life seems easy and when it seems hard,
when our love is simple and when it is an effort,
I promise to cherish you and to hold you in the highest regard, prizing you above all others.

I’m a sucker for processes. The more complex and impossible to master the better. Between farming, fly fishing, beer making, photography, sustainability, geological and biological processes this trip has been a wonderful way to tickle that particular fold in my brain.  The Buckner’s farm was no exception. They manage a small organic vineyard and hundreds of free range acres for their cattle. The place is crawling with interesting processes. I knew next to nothing about wine and/or winemaking.  I know slightly more than nothing now but what I have picked up has shown that it’s pretty stinkin’ interesting.  Brix readings, cordons and spurs, rootstock, harvest methods, sulfate use and noble rot.  I even learned a bit about meteorology helping with the meticulous records gathered from their weather station equipment.

After experiencing the grape harvest (from two posts upstream) our first day there, it was great to learn some of the back story that leads up to that craziness.  There’s a lot to it and the Buckners were fantastic hosts to show us the bigger picture. Much of our work there was winterizing the farm and thinning rows for harvest. This thinning involved dropping a good portion of the vine’s grape bunches to allow the remaining ones the nutrients and attention it takes to make ultra premium wine. Out with the weak, leaving only the best to develop to full potential.

In addition to the vineyard the Buckners also manage a huge free-range cattle farm, have a growing jewelry making business and spend countless hours working on habitat improvement and riparian restoration of the nearby Russian River. The farm was an fantastic place for watching wildlife with turkeys, quail, coyotes, various birds of prey, hummingbirds, rattlesnakes, and jackrabbits at every turn.

We also spent a day on the nearby coast checking out a beach made up of colorful smooth glass, whales spouting in the distance and enjoyed some Old Rasputin at North Coast Brewery.

Side notes-
-Thanks to Will, our shit-shoveling restless romantic friend we met back in Utah, for suggesting we WOOF at the Buckner’s. All of the great things he said about his time there was absolutely accurate and then some.

-On top of being amazing hosts, the Buckners were gracious enough to allow us some wedding planning time and send us on our way with a very generous wedding gift.  Not to mention they just up and gave me this great old manual Pentax lens they had laying around.

-The glass beach we visited used to be the place that everybody went to throw their trash into the ocean. The thousands of glass bottles discarded were smoothed down over the years by the constant tides and sand. A beautiful outcome to some truly disgusting practices of the past.

-We drove through the coastal Redwoods on the way to the next farm. The Redwoods and Sequoias are close cousins but the Redwoods are taller and the Sequoias fatter. The 30 mile coastal drive is aptly named “The Avenue of Giants” and is as grand as it sounds alternating between ancient Redwood groves and amazing coastline vistas.

-Jen tried to get our car stuck inside of a tree! It’s that famous one from postcards that people drive through. I was in charge of making sure the hole was tall enough for our car to fit through.  It looked like we would clear it easily until I heard the scraping. The next few minutes involved a frustrated claustrophobic Jen trying to maneuver the car back through the tight quarters without damaging anything. There was a growing line behind us watching the whole thing go down. And yeah, I know it was my 100% my fault!

-The road from Oregon southbound was lined with road kids hitch-hiking to Northern California for the annual “trimming” done on legal and not-so-legal agricultural endeavors. We’d heard about this phenomenon throughout our travels but had no idea just how many people flocked to the area in the fall to make enough traveling cash for next year.  Needless to say, Jen and I didn’t do any hiking in the abundance of wilderness areas that surrounded us lest we inadvertently wander onto somebody’s “farm.”

-After much ado, we were able to get our wedding reception invitations out. The original plan was to use post cards we had gathered throughout our travels, but were told wrong all along and that it just couldn’t be done due to copyright issues and printer limitations. We had to scramble at the last minute to make postcards out of our own pictures. It turned out all right in the end, but what a headache!

-On our way from the farm to S.F. Jen and I spent a couple of days in Santa Rosa for no other reason than Russian River Brewery is there. I got to geek out on Pliny the Elder, Blind Pig and Supplication on more than one occasion. It’s amazing the number of world class beers RR pumps out of a single small operation.  It was easily at the top of my list of breweries to hit on this trip.

Our next host in Northern California contacted us and suggested we come a day early to help one of their neighbors harvest and crush Zinfandel grapes. I’m not as much of a wine drinker as Jen but am always up for new experiences so we went. Long story short, it was a fantastic time! Lot’s of lifting and hard work, but fun to watch unfold. Chiarito Winery is small ultra traditional vineyard/winery run by Jon. I’m told he’s intensely focused on the details it takes to do things the right way. I can get behind that.

At any rate, the sugar levels and acid ratios and whatever the other 1000 factors are that make this particular variety sing were just right. It was time to pick. A crew of 10 workers came out at sun up and began harvesting.  It was an impressive hurricane to watch. You’ve got a crew of guys running up and down the rows quickly but gingerly cutting bunch after bunch of grapes off the vine with razor sharp knives filling up 30 lbs baskets in just minutes. They must have been paid by the pound because they hauled ass! It was exhausting to just watch. The skill and work drive! It’s a wonder nobody came out short a finger or two. I just stood on the wagon and stacked baskets for the crusher and could barley keep up.  They had the entire 6 tons of grapes hand harvested by lunch.

Speaking of lunch, the owner had a wonderful meal prepared for us. He even took Jen and I on an informal tour of the winery cellar. On the way out he gave us a bottle of the Zinfandel ’09 vintage to thank us for helping with the ’11 vintage.

Side notes-

Between high school and college I took some 5 years of Spanish. It’s concerning to me the embarrassing number of words I understood from the cutting crew. Seriously, it was like 3 and I even know most of the fun words! Had a blast joking around with the foreman’s 4 year old son even without a common language.

I snacked on wonderful grapes for most of the day during the picking. Later one of the old timer farmers told me to take a drink from the pressings. I’ve never had grape juice, or any juice for that matter, be so delicious and clean and perfect….then he told me not to drink too much of it or I’d get the trots! He should be the grape council spokesman.

Apart from one actual huge event, Anne’s farm in Corvallis Oregon was uneventful in the best possible way. It was a perfectly apropos manner to get to know a place like Corvallis, home of the OSU Beavers and known far and wide as a bastion of political progressiveness and and all around laid back place to find oneself. Anywhere in the Northwest that we’ve mentioned going to Corvallis has resulted in looks of jealousy and exclamations of the area’s beauty and overall feel. It did definitely live up to the hype.

Anne’s farm is a beautiful house and grounds situated some miles outside of town and smack dab in the middle of a thousand Christmas tree fields. Anne had us spend a couple weeks at her place helping out in the gardens and odd jobs around the farm. It was casual and a perfect way to begin winding down our trip. She even set us up with her neighbor who was going out of town and needed some cat and chicken sitting done. A little side money is always welcome.

Our main job, however, was to help her prepare for and pull off a huge party at her house. The party was to celebrate the world shaking (to borrow a term from Cool Hand Luke) her friend Barbara had done in the past few decades politically and otherwise.  She was relocating to Portland, and judging by the turnout and the words spoken, there’s not many people in the area whose lives haven’t been directly affected by this lady.  It became very apparent that she would be missed by Anne and the rest of the community. With that said, the party was a success and went off without a hitch. A load off of all of our minds.

Side Notes-

Anne’s property can park at least 68 cars without congestion or wrecks. Not important to anybody other than the guy who’s never been a parking engineer or attendant and was very nervous about the whole affair.

Anne and her ex-husband (who was often around) are both retired PHd level chemists and had all kinds of interesting insight on topics ranging from fossil fuel molecular chains to rust removing products. Most of it was way outside of my wheelhouse but interesting non-the-less.

Ernie is Anne’s golden retriever puppy that was like the farm’s ever-present little brother. I had fun annoying Ernie and Jen enjoyed snuggling with him. It made being away from Zooey a little less difficult.

I was on a Beatles bender for awhile after seeing the Cirque Du Solei show “Love” in Vegas a few months back.  I thought I could put that all behind me until Anne’s daughter Bridget came along and talked up the movie “Accros the Universe.” one night over her home-ade tiropitas.  So, I finally watched it and fell clean off the wagon again.  For the record, I still think the second side to “Abbey Road” may be the closest thing to musical perfection the human race has put forward.

Jen and I decided that we would definitely be getting married on the trip and decided to do it in San Francisco the next month. Anne was fantastically gracious in allowing for us to spend a good chunk of time making arrangements and preparing invitations for the reception. The real kicker was that on our way out the door, she gave us a wrapped gift she prepared for us, insisting that we must to have something to open on our wedding day. Of course that means that we aren’t allowed to open it until then.

I love the Northwest. Plain and simple. I’ve always felt drawn to this area and thought it would just make sense to me. We’ll it does. I can’t really explain it, but I definitely love it here. Temperate climate, beautiful scenery, overflowing with steelhead rivers, a fantastic beer and food culture, lush green mountains, a rugged beautiful coast and progressive thinking people…..not just in small pockets, but everywhere I’ve been. It’s a really refreshing place to be.  If only the damn sun would come out once in awhile! I can see myself being reduced to a depressive blob if I lived here. Some places are better than others. There were like 5 minute windows in Long Beach where the sun would peak out between clouds and we’d all run outside to soak in the glorious Vitamin D while we could.

Short & sweet impressions:

Seattle was a cool town, but it was way too big for me to be comfortable in. Touristy as it is, the market there was cool and I loved watching the fish mongers throw fish.

Olympic national park was like stepping into a child’s storybook about elves and gnomes and such. It was green and mossy and really quite stunning. Coudn’t catch a fish to save my life there.  At one point I was fishing the Hoh river and noticed cars were starting to stop alongside the road to take pictures. Seemed weird because there’s fly fisherpeople all over the west but I held my shoulders high and tried to make the best casts possible so they could could capture the beauty of a technically impeccable unfurling loop under the backdrop of the Hoh’s turquise flow.  It was going to make a killer picture for those travelers to post on facebook! Eventually I turned around and saw two majestic Rosevelt Elk grazing right behind me! The jury is still out as to what everyone was actually taking pictures of.

Vancouver, BC was as beautiful as as advertised. Also as expensive. The aquarium was well worth it. We got our car searched on the way back into the states, probably because we’d been into Mexico a few months back. We shot the breeze with the friendly border officer for awhile. He cut his search short because he saw “Confederacy of Dunces” sitting in the backseat. “If you’re a Toole fan you can’t be all that bad!” The car beside us had both of it’s bumpers removed and everything inside was strewn about.

Astoria was the closest big town to Long Beach, WA. We spent some time there with our fellow WWOOFer Amanda. I really loved the town. It was small and and had that past-it’s-prime industrial feel, but charming all the same.  I got my haircut by a spacey lady from Toas who told me that she could sense that I’d almoast certainly someday live there. Something about vibrations and auras and the like. It reminded me of how glad I am that I’m no longer in Toas! Either way, it wouldn’t upset me too much if she turned out to be right.

North Cascade National Park is the second least visited NP in the lower 48. I thought it was lovely! Lack of people often makes things lovely. The fact that it was gorgeous and lush didn’t hurt either.

I did a heck of alot of fishing for steelhead, sea-run cutthroat and bull trout without ever actually catching anything! (I see a pattern developing here.) There’s something very romantic about traditionally swinging beautiful classic streamers on the legendary Skagit, Metolious, Hoh and Cowlitz rivers. Didn’t catch squat, but it felt right. I’ve decided I need a two-handed rod!

Portland may be the coolest city I’ve ever been to. I’m sure it has it’s drawbacks, but I sure didn’t find them. There were a lot of hipsters riding around on bikes with fashion sensibilities I didn’t even understand a little bit. It seemed like a giant step towards inevitable old age squareness. With that said, really people?! Is it the goal to wear the least flattering things available!? Skeezy mustaches, greasy hair, tight euro-trash jeans, frumpy 80′s dresses and shoes that just look stinky.

Eugene seems only second to Portland in the perfect city department….minus the hipsters.

I’m getting way behind schedule on this stuff. In my defense things have been extraordinarily busy, Jen’s started a new computer-hogging online job and honestly these farm posts are getting a touch monotonous. Truly each one has been fantastic and interesting and enjoyable and educational in thier own way but ultimately I fear it’s somewhat boring to read and write about. Short and simple though.

We spent a couple of weeks at Larkin’s farm in Long Beach helping with the CSA, farmers market, roadside stand and a farm-tour event. Overall it was a good place, if not tinged with a touch of sadness because our host has been struggling with keeping the place afloat…a common thread amongst many of the farms we’ve been to.  It’s really hard to make a living at this organic farming game.  He does some well known work in bio-intensive farming; a technic used to grow lots of food in a small area. He has this 500 square ft garden plot that grows enough food for a person to live on for 6 months while actually improving the soil. It’s a process invented by John Jevins and used by the Peace Corps in helping 3rd world countries grow food.  There was also an outhouse and an indoor composting toilet for humanure fertilizer…so there’s that.

After leaving the Lopez Island flaky farm without a place to go Jon and Elaine Stevens of the Open Gate Farm on Camino Island were nice enough to let us WWOOF there last minute. It is the first farm that we’ve been to that is actually economically sustainable. It’s something that has bugged me so far WWOOFing at all these various farms. Not a single one of them have been able to stand on thier own. Everyone that has been trying has also had to have one or two side jobs just to stay afloat. Like I said, Open Gate has done it though, but it’s clearly not easy. These guys live simply and work tirelessly to make it happen! There’s the standard acre or so of gardens to stock the roadside stand, daily fresh bread and cinnamon rolls (ahhhhh, the cinniman rolls!), a growing nursery business and weekly newsletters to clients. Days were very long for them, often starting at 2 or 3am and ending well after the sun goes down. They still made sure to prepare three healthy meals a day, complete with full table service and hand washing the dishes. (All a part of the slow food movement.)  They are busy but happy people. They are business minded too, always looking at and revising thier business plan to grow. They’ll never get rich doing this, but they can survive because they bust thier butts all day and are approaching it it from a business standpoint. Fledgling farmers looking to make a run at it would be wise to spend some time with Jon and Elaine. They are more than happy sharing their strategies and experiences.

Side Notes-

Long Beach’s most famous resident is Jake the Alligator man. Who is honored every year with parties and a festival and such. He resides in a touristy novelty shop and appears to be a mummified human top half stitched to the mummified bottom half of an alligator. It’s graced the cover of many fine National Inquiror type magazines so it’s obviously the real deal.

Larkin is a well known, in some circles, flute player having released a number of albums over the course of several decades.

The Open gate farm had a handful of free roaming chickens and ducks wandering around. Each with a name and Jon and Elaine would talk to them all the time.  Jon puts alot of effort on his newsletter telling stories about those birds.  It seemed kind of weird at first but as the week progressed I became interested in what Parson Dudley Brown and his ladies were doing. Every one had their own personality…..and yes I realize how silly that sounds.

Fresh duck eggs are fantastic and make for fluffy wonderfull pasteries and french toast or whatever. Plus they are mad about eating the plant killing slugs that are so pervasive in the Northwest. This explains the farms picture-perfect lettuce.

One thing that Larkin had on his farm that I will definitely be building for myself is a solar heated “pre-water-heater” So simple, yet so brilliant. It’s just a hot box with a black water tank inside of it. It heats the cold incoming water to 100 degrees or so (for free!) before it ever reaches the actual water-heater. You can buy them for like $300 or build one for cheaper. I can’t imagine how much money it would save over the course of a lifetime.

Jen and I got to go crabbing. One of the most memorable things we’ve done. It’s kind of a long back story involving a psychically charged yet physically absent farmer, 4 ferry rides, a night on the Skagit and a ninth inning call from Kevin. He and his wife Greta had spent some time on Lopez Island a few years back and on a fluke got to go out and help an old timer named Larry pull crab pots.  Kevin made a few calls when he heard we were in the area and was able to convince Larry to take us out too.  Apparently he’s very picky about who he’ll let on his little rowboat.  Kevin and Greta being the intensely likable human beings they are,  just knowing them was good enough.  He even tooled around the islands a bit giving us an informal tour.

So we went out twice, learned to to pull pots, set pots, identify keepers, not get pinched, bait traps, clean and cook the crab. It’s getting late in the season and Larry said he and all of his friends have had their fill of crab already, so he gave us the entire catch for the day! At a decrepit campsite picnic table covered with newspaper, using my Leatherman as a cracker; we had maybe the best food that has ever crossed either of our lips.  No butter, no seasoning,  just fresh Dungeness only an hour out of the water. Spoiled for life on crab.

Yellowstone, Tetons and Glacier…what can I say!? They were fantastic and huge and beautiful and ridiculous each in their own way. Sometimes I think this whirlwind approach to traveling isn’t ideal. Sure I get to see alot of crazy cool things, but I also start taking “crazy coolness” for granted.  Glacier is an amazing place, no doubt about it, but I couldn’t help but to stack it up against other places I’ve been.  To make sense of the beauty I had to think of it as Quetico with mountains. Sure there are similarities, but I could spend an entire lifetime exploring the nuances of Glacier and only get to the tip of the iceberg…pun completely intended. But if I look at it that way going in, its overwhelming…cripplingly overwhelming. We’ve been in something like 15 national parks now and each of them could be mined for amazing discoveries for a lifetime. The detail that you find after you’ve chipped away at the obvious stuff is what I find the most value in, but you can’t really get to that if you’re only around for a couple days. Seems obvious, but it’s been a tough pill for me to swallow.

So I’m left with these tiny snippets from a very me-centric context to extrapolate an idea for a place.  It’s too small of a sample set to form an actual understanding and it drives me nuts sometimes! Here’s what I got:  Yellowstone was fantastically beautiful and interesting and crowded all at once. One of our best campsites so far. The Grand Tetons were big and beautiful too, but it’s known as a famous fly fishing destination and all the rivers were blown.  So I have some buffalo and a shitty mosquito-infested campground to remember it by. Glacier was cool, not usually a fishing destination, but full of stunning turquoise water that looked fake like Bob Ross painted it. The campground was nothing special.

That’s it, that’s all I’ve got room for in my tiny little memory to take with me.  These pictures too.  It’s what my memory of this trip will be distilled into…whatever I can document here.  It’s better than nothing, way better.  I also know the places I would like to come back to and explore deeper someday. Problem is that most everywhere I’ve been fits that criteria. I’m gonna have to find a job with a killer vacation plan!

Side Notes-

We spent a lot of time in Glacier with our jaws on the ground staring at beautiful overlooks.  At one point Jen said, “Wow, you need to get a picture of that!” I stood there silently for awhile thinking about how I would even start to do that and realized that I was having trouble enough figuring out how to look at it with my own eyes, let alone capturing it in a photo.

One morning after many days of traveling and camping I was looking particularly haggard. Jen made joke about me looking like a homeless dude. It was fun to watch her face the next few seconds as she realized and processed the fact that I am actually a homeless dude.

Yellowstone was full of idiot fly fishers flogging famous water that happened to be about 10 degrees to warm to fish ethically. You may kill some trout in the process but at least you are able to say you fished the Firehole! Good job. There was plenty of fishable water that doesn’t have name recognition.

The Subaru has earned it’s right of passage for being in the west. A full on crack in the windshield that runs from one side to another.  For some reason every windshield out here is cracked. Oddly I wasn’t mad when it appeared. I’m sort of proud of it.

The main, and almost only, road running through glacier is called Road to the Sun. It may be the most beautiful streatch I’ll ever be on. Can’t even begin to explain it.

Jen just left the car door wide open one time when we hiked to a geyser in Yellowstone.  We were gone for like an hour…just sayin’

When I set out on this trip I had a few fishing goals. Amongst others were to fish the fabled Montana Salmonfly hatch and catch a fluvial Grayling. Check, sort of, and sort of check.  I saw a few Salmonflys but the hatch never really materialized and the Grayling were adfluvial.  I thought it was appropriate, however, that I hit the 10,000 mile mark for the trip while chasing these goals.

For the longest time the Arctic Grayling has been on my “bucket list” of fish to catch. The only live in the coldest, cleanest water and have these huge sailfish-like dorsal fins and take on really great reds and turquoise shades.  The lone fluvial population in the Lower 48 lives in a nearby river but, of course, it was unfishable. As with most of the west, seasons were running late and water flows were high due to snow runoff.

For the first week I was there I did no fishing or even thinking about fishing, I just couldn’t. There are so many world famous rivers close by that it became paralyzing to even think about doing the research that it takes to whittle down the options and figure out where to go.  I’ve gotten quite good at swallowing my pride and flat out asking fly shops all the touristy questions. It still makes me cringe to be that guy.  It’s all formulaic, the more you buy the better the information. Them’s the rules and I’m not made of money so good intel is hard to come by.  Luckily our farm host, Sean, was once a guide in the area and was able make some calls and point me towards good water as things cleared.  I fished tiny creeks, then tributaries, then tailwaters and eventually actual rivers. I did a lot of driving, a little bit of catching and a lot of being blown away at amazing water.

Side Notes-

If I lived in Montana, I think I might give up fly fishing. Seemed like every third car was pulling a drift boat and most guys had on what Jen calls “flappy fishing shirts.” It’d be annoying to do the exact same thing as everybody else. There’s definitely something nice about being of only a hand full of people in Indiana fly fishing.

The latin name for Grayling is Thymallus, meaning “thyme smell” because freshly caught Grayling ares supposed have the scent of wild thyme. I think I found the lunch table where all the stinky kids sit because mine all smelled of no herb or spice I’d recommend…also, I think I got caught sniffing a fish. It was awkward.

I came within a couple of feet of a Montana grand slam in about an hour’s fishing at Yellowstone (under the watchful eye of a grazing buffalo no less).  Browns, Rainbows and a Brookie with a hooked and nearly landed Cut holding me back.

There are a few Golden Trout lakes in the Bozeman area that I wanted to hike into but they were still frozen over in July!

I understand why this place is considered the “holy grail” for fly fisherpeople. Picture perfect rivers are abundant and chocked full of gullible big trout. No #22 midges here.  Big foam monstrosities fool huge fish all day every day. Still trying to wrap my head around it.

I stopped by the Hyde factory on my way through Idaho Falls because I’m a nerd and wanted so see where my boat was born. They were closed, but I still tried to snoop around a bit.