Rediscovering My Environment

For the past several weeks I have been on a mission to freshen up the appearance around the outside of my home.
I decided to take down the fence (which wasn't really quality to begin with) to open up the area.

Wow!  What a difference that made!
Then I moved on to trimming up the brush along the borders of my property.

That lead to a grand adventure on the small hillside behind my house.  This area is very over grown and wild.  Some big trees were removed in the late 90's when the mobile was brought in, and the area had only been trimmed up once, in about 2005.

Needless to say, many weedy pines grew out of those old tree stumps, not to mention the ever expanding huckleberry bushes.  It was a jungle and all the trails were over grown.

In two weeks, during my days off, I methodically removed the pines and forged new trails.  I discovered lovely old stumps with moss, uncovered crowded wild rhododendrons, long needle pines and trimmed up those six foot tall huckleberries.

What an improvement!  I feel like I just got a whole new yard to play with.
My future goals are to clean up the trails a little more and place some benches along the way.

This slope, on my very small piece of property, is the only place you can really see the sky - to the Northeast.  It would be great for star gazing I think.

I'm not sure what caused my latest surge of energy, but it always seems to happen at this time of year.  I'm thinking all that late summer sunshine contributed its dose of serotonin!!

Meanwhile, the local deer have returned and are thoroughly enjoying the huckleberry harvest.

A handsome coyote stopped by last week, checking out the bird feeding area (for a meal I imagine).
I got this video of him (or her) gobbling up the bread crumbs I had just put out for the gray jays.



The rains have finally arrived here in the Olympics, ending our 77 day drought, and after about a week we're back to looking like a rain forest again.