...all the beautiful pictures we took this weekend.

Unfortunately, in a particularly egregious and frustrating display of EBCAK, I deleted all 42 of them, instead of just the 1 that I meant to.

You shoulda heard me HOWL last night when I realised it... I was so tired from the long drive home, I wish I'd just waited til today.

Sigh.

I guess the pretty memories of fires and roasting hotdogs, marshmallows and toes will have to stay in our heads. Along with the wrestling in the tent and the chillin' in the waterfall and excavating HUGE rocks from the river bank to tumble into the Stillaguamish...

Anyway, Sam and I went camping. Just the two of us.

Remarkable how much more companionable a 7 year old is than, say, a 4 year old...

He'd complained that he never got enough of Big Four Ice Caves, so I figured a camping trip was in order.

We staked out a pretty, mossy site at the Verlot campground, set up camp, played by the river and had a blast building our fire and roasting things(oh the sadness of the missing pretty pics!)...

Nice to snuggle up in the tent and read, just me n the boy.

In the morning, we packed it all up and headed out to Big Four. We stayed up there all day, playing in the waterfall 'til Sam was good and ready to head back down and hit the river.

I scrambled over the edge of the bridge, using the undersupports as a stepstair, and then helped Sam through(he only has a little scrape on one leg to show for it-well, he says: "A LITTLE scrape? I think it's BIG!" from his wiggly audience on my lap).

Be that as it may, we loved our river afternoon... The Stillaguamish is gorgeous , wide, and swift and COLD. My favorite kind of river, with long banks of beautiful, smooth tumbled rocks... Perfect for building towers.

It was HOT, so I couldn't resist jumping in, with all my clothes on. Yes, I screamed... The people on the bridge clapped, some even climbed down, but couldn't bring themselves to jump in, so I felt all polar and brave.

:)

Meanwhile, Sam was engrossed in one of his famous excavation projects. He was digging the biggest(headsized and bigger) rocks free of the bank and toppling them into the river...

Rocks + water = SPLASH!!!

Oh for the beautiful splashes I captured... All deleted to nothing.

Just then a cloud went over the sun and I began to shiver, plus I was thinking a bit nervously of the long multiple-freeway drive home(for those of you who don't know, this is my first year as a driver and this trip my longest yet)...

So, when Sam had finished his works, we climbed back up onto the bridge and we hit the road.

It was a smooth trip.