Donaldson Crew Adventures

This past weekend, I climbed Mt Hood - Oregon's highest mountain, with a couple of friends from work - Matt H, and Zak C.  Last time I was up it was 2011 also with Matt H about a month later in May of that year.   The weather this time was spectacular, however with the low snow year, the climbing was much more difficult.  We left Bend about 12:30 AM friday night, and left the parking lot at Mt hood at 3 am.  We hit the summit in 5 hours around 8 am.  We were back down by 11:30 for lunch at the lodge before driving home.

In the pictures, if its not obvious, I am in the red jacket (blue in one sitting), Zak has the green jacket and Matt has the brown jacket.  Notice in some of the pictures how blue the sky is.  No camera filter - just shot with my iphone.  

We have purchased a new 4 acre parcel just outside of Bend that we want to build on. We are all super excited. The kids will continue to go to the same school.

Jason and his family are friends of ours. He does firearms training for the forest service. His wife and son were out of town so he offered to take me out and try some shooting this afternoon. Here I am firing an AR-15 semi automatic. I did ok with this gun. The high caliber hand guns I tried later were a little more challenging to hit the target even when standing much closer.

This weather has been way unseasonably warm.  It hit 66 degrees this afternoon on the car temp reading, which is incredible for March 8.  We did a family outing to Fall River today.  Drove southwest of Bend to the Fall River Campground.  From there we simply hiked upriver along the fisherman's trail along the water returning the same way.  Red came along and enjoyed playing in the water, as did the kids.

Today we had another spring skiing day at Bachelor with temps in the 60's and no wind.  I convinced the boys that we could do the Summit today.  We ended up doing it about 5 times.  Boys loved it.  It was the first time for both of them to get to the Summit runs.