Bruce Letters: Montana Lake People

This month’s pictures tell a story most of you already know, since most of you were there. But I’m telling it anyway, since most of the pictures I have this month are from that story.

A couple of years ago, flying back to Australia after a visit to Montana, this girl gets an idea:

(Sister Sue for those who didn’t recognized. She is the one on the left, ignore the one on the right).

Her idea is for us to all gather together on a camping trip to celebrate her 50th and Mom’s 80th bday. So a venue is found (beautiful Hyalite Lake near Bozeman):

And the local natives are enlisted for coordination. Brother Scott:

(again ignore the one on the right, he had nothing to do with organizing this event … I don’t know how he keeps sneaking into these pictures).

Another Sue:

And the master Officiate and lake expert, uncle Tim:

Put that all together, and you get this fun crew:

And a couple of happy birthday girls:

We went on hikes:

Absorbed bountiful waterfalls:

Did lots of boating:

Including paddle boating:

And boat rescuing:

And coxswain training (Shiana, you may want to wiki that one):

Other sports included slingshots:

Fly fishing:

Swimming, inspired by our youngest camper:

And less conventional sports like flying tent catching:

And Bruce Glasses wearing:

Cameras were wielded in a variety of different ways:

Some photographers went to extremes:

To get good shots:

I deleted lots of blurry shots, but kept this one, as somehow Brad commanded the camera not to blur his face:

Somehow I couldn’t delete this one either, even though she was not part of our crew (Mike took this one, not me, really):

Fires were built:

Food was cooked:

And Smores were consumed:

Visits were had:

And pranks were pulled.

Paul got revenge for this one, those girls got dunked:

Finally, an interesting bit of Science. Tim and I recently read a National Geographic article about the Sun that noted it takes 100,000 years or more for photons, once created in the core of the Sun, to escape thru the hot and dense Sun plasma, then only another 8 minutes to travel at the speed of light the 90 million miles to earth. So these poor photons, born back when we were mating with Neanderthals, had 8 minutes of freedom, then ended up being absorbed by some random thing on Earth.

In the case of the photons captured in this photo, the most privileged of these photos had the pleasure of warming up my Mom:

(Technically, those specific photons actually got absorbed by my camera sensor, but I would rather give them the honor of remembering them as warming up my Mom).

Once we got back home, we started on our next house project, a deck with stairs to allow us to travel from our kitchen directly out to the back yard. It will mostly cover the triangular to the right of this sidewalk:

We will replace that window with a hinged door. I had fun learning a free 3d program called Sketchup to make this model:

I’ll do some of the work, but have contracted out most of it, will start in about a week. Last weekend I did some prep work, moving rocks, dirt, and plants. Here are before and after photos of what we have so far: