Return from the Lake

No, it's not a horror movie... we're actually back from vacation! There will be several posts over the next couple of days (two book reviews, vacation and a concert review) because we've been so busy!

Lake Almanor was fantastic! The weather was beautiful - warm during the day, chilly at night. As is my usual tradition, I pretty much spent the first two days reading and napping. I like to call it recharging, but I've been told by some that it's letdown. Whatever you want to call it, I had a great time doing it. We fished every single morning that we were there and ended up catching around 40 fish! They ranged from big to very small (Mike set a new record on the boat!) and we had a fantastic time.

One of Mom's fish:

Dad's monster fish:

One of my fishies:

One of Mike's bigger fish:

And, finally, Mike's record-setting fish... that's right, the smallest ever caught on the boat:

Mike and I also got a great hike in... we had wanted to climb up Mount Lassen, but the trail was closed for the entire week due to helicopter training and work going on near the top of the peak. Instead, we climbed up Mount Harkness, which is about 2,000 feet shorter than Lassen. The hike was beautiful - right near the middle there were some fantastic meadows full of wildflowers and beautiful views of the surrounding lakes and mountain peaks. Once we got up to the top, we discovered that there was a fire lookout... meaning we had a spectacular 360 degree view of the entire area. It was awesome! Here are some of the pics:

Juniper Lake:

The view of Lake Almanor from the top... I've never seen it from above and was a little shocked at how big it is:

Here's the lookout tower:

It was also our week of seeing things that we'd never seen before. One of the days that we were out fishing, I looked over at the rocks (we troll at about 2 miles per hour, about 25 feet off the shoreline, so we can definitely see the rocks) and saw this sleek black looking thing. I thought it was a cat, but it turns out, it was an otter! It had pulled something (a fish?) up onto one of the bigger rocks, eaten it and then was getting ready to go swimming again. It dove off into the water and swam away before I could get a good picture, but in all of the 15ish years that we've been going to the lake, we have never seen one of those! Also, all along those same shores are falcon nests... they're constantly diving down to pick fish off the top of the water to take back up to the babies. We saw one go after a fish that we were not able to revive after catching it when all of the sudden another falcon swooped in. The second falcon was apparently very angry that the first was hunting in it's area because it smacked into it like a linebacker! We could hear the crunch from 50 yards away! The second bird sort of splashed down into the water, collected itself and then flew away. It was spectacular:

We also had some spectacular water skiing and jet skiing days... it was a wonderful trip! Tucker and Gracie also had a wonderful time... they loved swimming and running around on the grass! Gracie really took to the boat and had a fantastic time!

The rest of my pictures are up at Facebook... if you want to see more, head on over!