In the short term, I really want to submit a story to the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest, which is specifically geared toward optimistic, near-future science fiction. I feel like my space-based science fiction short stories have, in general, been some of my strongest writing to date, so any excuse to write another space-based sci-fi story is a good one! The deadline is the end of the month, and I only have a few vague plot ideas, but no worries. I’m taking a page from the book of Calvin:

I’m also taking a class on novel revision at Bellevue College, in which I finally buckle down to the work on writing a second draft of my fantasy novel, In a Land of Wind and Sky. It’s not an easy task; the novel is 175,000 words and 600 pages. The read-through, in which I build a detailed outline and annotate what I do and don’t like, is probably going to take a solid twenty or more hours or work (I’m about 350 pages through, after spending four long evenings at Bauhaus Coffee last week). But the class is already giving me some good ideas, and helping me focus on the task. No doubt about it, though, it’s going to be a lot of work. And I’m not sure how much time it’s going to leave for me other things, like, say, writing a new sci-fi short story.

As far as long-term goals for the rest of the year, I want to completely finish the second draft of In a Land of Wind and Sky, as well as write a second draft of Ghostrunners (the urban fantasy I wrote for NaNoWriMo last year). I also hope to write a third novel, either for NaNoWriMo or sooner. And, amidst it all, I want to write at least one new short story every quarter.

There’s other cool stuff coming, too. In March, I’ll be going to the Rainforest Writers Village, in which I get to spend five days hanging out with cool writerly folks amidst the rainforests of the Olympic Mountains, and hopefully getting a lot of writing done in an awesome setting. And in April, Norwescon rolls around again. A good chunk of my travel budget this year will probably go toward trips back to North Carolina, so I’ll just have to see how things go as far as attending non-local cons, like WorldCon in Chicago, or Dragon*Con, or World Fantasy in Toronto. Hopefully I’ll be able to attend at least one of those. We shall see.

Between family, writing, work, and personal life, 2012 is shaping up to be a more challenging year than 2011… though possibly a more fulfilling one.

It’s gonna be an adventure.

Then, on the evening of Wednesday the 29th, my mom called. She had suffered a seizure and was in the hospital. Preliminary tests had found a lesion on her brain, and the doctors suspected it was metastasized breast cancer.

By Thursday afternoon they had confirmed the lesion was a tumor. They found cancerous growths in her lungs, too.

Thursday night, I caught a redeye flight from Seattle to Raleigh.

Friday my brother flew down from New York, and my uncle drove down from Virginia. In her hospital room, Mom had a long stream of well-wishers from her work, her church, and her neighborhood.

Saturday she had brain surgery, and the tumor was successfully removed.

I write this on Sunday, New Year’s Day, with a pen and a pad of paper, sitting in the ICU. A few feet away, the strongest person I know has been laid low by a few tiny clots of cancer cells and the prospect of another excruciating round of chemotherapy. And that long blog entry I wrote about 2012 seems rather trivial. What comes will come; hug someone you love, because in the end, that’s what matters. Of all the problems and obstacles you can run into on the road of life, rejection letters don’t even count as pebbles.

But I may still post that blog entry at some point. Because in cancer, there’s another reminder: strive for your goals now. Don’t put things off. If you have your health, take advantage of it. And just don’t say you’ll do things “one day.” Because that “one day” may instead be the day that you wake up with a healthy, normal life, and end the day in the hospital with a brain tumor. Cancer doesn’t give warning. It just happens.

It looks like Mom will get past this. But that’s what we thought back in 2009 when she first beat breast cancer. There’s no way of knowing for sure. All we can do is trust in modern medicine… and god, if that’s your thing. Although, for the record, if there is an all-powerful God out there who’s in charge of the world, then cancer is a really, really, really shitty thing to let happen. I don’t think you can appreciate how truly, awfully shitty it is until you see it up close in all its painful reality, until you see someone you love get struck down with it multiple times, or watch someone, like my grandmother, die a slow and agonizing death as it eats away at her. Seriously, fuck cancer.

Admittedly, it could be worse. The tumor was small and discrete, and easily removed, and there have been no side effects from the surgery. Mom has a wonderful network of friends and family who are supporting her, and will help her get through this. The family’s been brought closer. But looking for a bright side in this is a bit like the old joke: Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

I hope you and yours have a happy 2012 and beyond. We may too, yet. But from where I’m sitting, I mainly just want to get past the next few days. Then we’ll see about the rest of 2012.

It’s a question that I sometimes hear asked of writers: “how do your beliefs influence your stories?” It’s usually asked in a religious context, but even so, it’s still a broad question. And there are various ways to interpret and answer it, not to mention all the corollaries that spin off, like:

-”Do you let your beliefs inform your works?”
-”Do you try to avoid any appearance of bias toward your own beliefs?”
-”How does an atheist author write a Christian character, or vice versa?”

I generally describe myself as “nonreligious,” which is a more polite word for “atheist.” I’m not a strident atheist; my beliefs are my own, and I don’t begrudge anybody their beliefs as long as they don’t try to foist them on me (see: the religious right). In fact, my own beliefs tend more toward what most people would call “agnostic.” I don’t believe in a lack of god, so much as I lack a belief in god.

But I’m not writing this to debate labels, or to debate the wisdom of my own viewpoint. Rather, I’m writing this so you know where I’m coming from when I talk about how we tell stories.

When I first moved to Seattle, I dipped my toe in a few organized atheist and skeptic groups, looking to meet new people. But I realized that I didn’t relate to most folks there quite as well as I thought I would. Having more or less dedicated my life to creative writing, I was no longer as captivated by the facts of reality, as by the possibilities of reality.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that there are people interested in the rational study of how the world works. They become scientists, and researchers, and are responsible for a large chunk of modern progress.

But I’m a writer, and moreso, a writer of speculative fiction: I don’t write about how things are, I write about how things might yet be, or how things might have been, if the world or the universe had been a little bit different. My stories are mostly fiction, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have truth in them. I think fiction, in its highest form, is merely a tool to tell the truth about something: whether about the world, or our own humanity, or love, or… anything, really. All fiction does this to some degree– you can’t write a story without saying something– but in my opinion, the best fiction recognizes and harnesses it, and even amidst the elements of fantasy, it reveals truth.

A lot of religious writing– the parables Jesus tells in the Bible, for example– are fictional stories designed to tell truths. But unfortunately, most religious writing doesn’t present itself as fiction. It presents itself as history. And so the truth of the writing gets lost in a debate about the facts of the writing. Which, in the end, partly helps to explain why I’m not religious any more. Some religious stories do have truths to reveal, but to subscribe to a religion means not just to enjoy the stories it tells, it means buying into an entire worldview, and subscribing to various “facts” that are often only peripherally related to the truths within the stories. I’d rather leave facts to the world’s scientists, and truth– well, I’ll leave truth to the world’s storytellers.

One thing I often do as a writer is to change the nature of reality within a story– perhaps in one story God is a biological entity; perhaps in another God is a pool of consciousness, from which individual souls split off like droplets of water; and perhaps in a third story God doesn’t exist at all. Perhaps in one God is a bad guy. I love to experiment, to change these “starting conditions,” as it were, and see how the people and worlds in my stories are affected as a result.

I suppose, in a sense, this is my own exploration of reality, sort of a hybrid of imagination and rationalism. In the crucible of fiction, I perform experiments with the characters, and my scientific and creative sides blend. Each story is like its own little trial run of reality, a petri dish where I can add a mix of ingredients and see how they grow. And hopefully, in the end, each one will produce a truth– not facts, or beliefs, but little nuggets of truth.

At the highest level of storytelling, that’s what I strive for. Even when I’m throwing chupacabras in the petri dish.

So, if you ever want to have a discussion with me about truth, I’d rather you didn’t talk to me about beliefs. But tell me a story, and listen to mine, and then perhaps we’ll be a few steps closer to understanding each other.

My original idea, when I first envisioned the novel, was “Sliders meets Ocean’s Eleven with magic.” I set the story in modern day Seattle, to minimize the worldbuilding I needed to do; I developed some good characters; I came up with the outline of a magic system. But I didn’t come up with a plot that really inspired me.

So when I started NaNoWriMo, I was discovery writing. I knew my characters; I knew the setting; I knew some of the conflicts that the characters were involved in at the start. And from there, I was pretty much inventing stuff from scratch every time I sat down to write. Characters often made decisions for which I had only a marginal idea of the ramifications down the road. And they reacted to each other naturally, without regard for whether it would serve the plot. Heck, I didn’t even know what the plot was.

It was a stressful, terrifying, and occasionally exhilarating way to write. When things did come together into a genuine emotional moment, it was unplanned, and in those moments, it was almost like I was reading a good book, except I was typing as I read, wanting to see what was going to happen next. But that exhilaration was tapered by the ever-present fear that I would suddenly lock up, run out of ideas, and the words would stop coming.

When Writer’s Block did hit, I put myself in the characters’ shoes, and thought, “Okay, something has to happen next in their lives. What happens next? Write it.” And I did, without much regard as to whether it would make for a readable story or not.

I did, on occasion, resort to the old ninjas-kick-down-the-door trick: once with police, once with chupacabras, and once with rogue Secret Service agents. In every case it made the book better– especially the chupacabras, who more or less saved me at a point where the book was desperately searching for conflict and I felt like the plot wasn’t going anywhere. In a second draft, of course, they probably won’t be chupacabras: they’ll be creatures that wander between realities, for whom I will probably have to think up another name. But for this draft, and in the spirit of NaNoWriMo silliness, they did perfectly well as chupacabras. Lesson One from NaNoWriMo: Sometimes it pays off to just throw in crazy stuff and try to make it work.

My first novel was a massive, wide-ranging epic fantasy; this novel was a fast-paced action story. And my authorial role model for this type of story was Jim Butcher. In the Dresden Files, he drags his characters through serious pain and torment in every book, and doesn’t pull punches– he’s not afraid to make things worse, or pile even more problems on the characters. And if it all comes together at the end, if connections are made that you didn’t expect and the protagonists win despite everything that was thown at them, the result is often a really, really good book. And I tried to do the same thing with Ghostrunners. Lesson Two from NaNoWriMo: Don’t be afraid to throw your characters into the fire.

Ghostrunners is in very rough form right now– there are a few gems, but most of it is just plain old dirt and rock. A second draft would be like mining the diamonds from the ore; all the discovery-written ideas that didn’t work would need to be discarded, and the ones that did would need to be strengthened and polished until they shone. I’d like to do that with this book– and if it ever reaches “final draft” stage, it will probably only bear a passing resemblance to what I have now.

I haven’t decided what my next project is; I’d like to write a short story, and edit another one, and go back to my first novel and start revisions on that. I also had ideas for about five blog posts that I didn’t write in November because I didn’t want to get distracted. So I’m hoping that I can keep up the writing momentum even with the end of NaNoWriMo upon us. Because in the end, to be a professional writer, it’s not enough to write one month of the year– you’ve gotta keep at it year-round.

So it goes.

So far, writing the novel has been a process of discovery writing: I have no outline, so I’ve just been writing scenes as they occur to me. This has been both good and bad. On the good side, I’ve come up with some ideas that I probably wouldn’t have come up with otherwise, and for the most part, they’ve been ideas which flow naturally from the story instead of being forced onto said story. But there’s also been a lot of ideas which don’t work, and I’m still sort of searching for the main conflict. I have a few threads here and there, but nothing has really leaped out at me as being the primary overarching plotline of the book. So my novel writing thus far has been: write several thousand words over a couple of days, take a few days off because I’m not sure what happens next, then realize I’m falling behind and hurriedly write several thousand more words… rinse and repeat. We shall see if I actually make it to 50K, and whether I like the result enough that I end up writing a second draft.

In other news (which you probably already know if you follow my Twitter feed), one of my short stories, The Talisman of Hatra, got accepted into the Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations anthology! I’m really happy about this. The anthology is edited by Eric J. Guignard, and of the authors who will be represented, one is Joe R. Lansdale, who is one of the best-known horror and dark fiction writers around today. I’m honored to share a Table of Contents with him, as well as with the other authors, including a fellow member of my writing group, Folly Blaine. It comes out in March of next year– needless to say, I’ll post details when it’s available.

When I planned In a Land of Wind and Sky, I started with a basic idea for a plot, then came up with characters who could play the roles in that plot, and then came up with a setting in which that plot could play out. So essentially, I built the novel in order of plot, character, setting. In retrospect, I may have done things backward– if I had done more worldbuilding first, and let the characters be born from that setting, it might have felt more natural to me. Instead, it often felt like I was crafting a world to match what the plot needed, and for some reason that felt like cheating to me. In my head, the world felt less real because too often I was trying to finagle things to match what the plot needed.

This time, I’m not actually starting with a single idea or plot point as inspiration. Instead, I’m starting with a general concept that seems kind of cool. So far, it’s shaping up to be sort of like Sliders meets Ocean’s Eleven in an Urban Fantasy setting.

After writing a very complicated plot, with several intertwined character arcs, with In a Land of Wind and Sky, I decided I wanted to write something simpler and more straightforward. My idea was to write it in first person, and setting it in the contemporary world in order to minimize the amount of worldbuilding I needed to do. Immediately, I thought “urban fantasy.” Plus, I’ve read a lot of urban fantasy in the past year (most notably the entire “Dresden Files” series), and something along those lines seemed like it might play to my strengths, as well as be fun to write.

With that thought, I began to let my mind wander, and began building a world and magic system. That in turns suggested possible character quirks and backstories to me; in addition, I found characters from a couple of stalled short stories years ago who fit nicely into this new world. I’m still looking for the plot, but I do see a lot of possibilities, and as I flesh out the magic and the characters more, I’m letting those be the guide for my muse. So in essence, I’m building this novel backwards from how I built my first one: this time I’m going setting, character, plot. It’s a little more touch-and-go, and I feel like there’s still a risk that I may tear up the whole thing in frustration, but if I can get it working, I think the novel will come together more naturally than my first one. Of course, I already have ten characters just on the good guys’ side… and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna have to write it in third person… so it’s probably going to end up more complicated than I originally planned… oh, well.

But even if I finish planning this novel and come up with a plot that inspires me, that doesn’t mean that I’ll be successful at NaNoWriMo. I’m on course to start a new full-time job on November 3rd, after a summer of fun-yet-increasingly-broke writing and travel. It remains to be seen how the new job’s going to affect my writing time– since I usually do my writing in two-hour evening spurts at Bauhaus Coffee, my hope is that it won’t affect my writing life too much.

It’s been a crazy past few months. I’ve done the Clarion West Write-a-thon, finished the first draft of a novel, written four short stories, and gone to three weekend conventions. In non-writing stuff, I’ve driven the North Cascades Loop, hiked in Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks, spent a weekend at Mt. Baker, and conducted and finished a job search. It’s been a productive four months– unfortunately, not the sort of productivity that anyone is paying me for yet. So it’s back to cubicle world for a while, starting right around the time NaNoWriMo begins.

Yup. Gonna be interesting.

GeekGirlCon was set up to promote and celebrate the role of women in geek culture. In a perfect, equal world it would not be necessary– however, the world, especially the world of geeks, is neither perfect nor equal. I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of sexism in geek culture– just check out the latest brouhaha over DC Comics’ reboot of Starfire, in which women’s sexual liberation gets twisted into male wish fulfillment– probably because almost all of DC’s writers and artists are male.

On other fronts, Internet culture is horribly sexist, and often claims “irony” as an excuse to be not just blatantly sexist, but racist and homophobic– this is Not Okay. And things are arguably even worse in online games.

There are serious problems outside of pop culture, too: for example, women are still very underrepresented in STEM careers (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). And even outside the geek realm, societal norms aren’t helping matters.

Given all this as context, yes, we need a GeekGirlCon.

I heard a fair amount of speculation prior to the con that the attendees would mostly consist of lonely guys trying to pick up geek girls (hey, more sexism!), but in actuality that was not the case. In fact, I’d say the guy-girl ratio was about 30-70, based on a few rough counts I did at panels. Admittedly, it was kind of a nice change from normal cons, where the ratio is sometimes almost reversed. The panelists were almost entirely female (again, a reversal of the norm) and the panels were some of the most interesting that I’ve attended in years: possibly because the topics and perspectives were ones that often don’t get discussed at cons.

I attended a couple of panels: one was on Writing Urban Fantasy, hosted by Yasmine Galenorn. It’s not exactly a new topic, but it was presented in a much more systematic way than I had ever seen before, complete with a handout describing the basic formulas that a lot of Urban Fantasy is characterized by, do’s and don’ts, cliches and tropes, and the interplay of reason and magic. And I walked away with some good ideas to work into my NaNoWriMo novel next month.

I also attended a panel on Geek Girls in Culture, talking about the role of geeky women in TV and movies and books, and the good and bad sides of their portrayal, and which ones have geniunely inspired the panelists over the course of their careers. By and large, the panels I attended were some of the most fun, informative and entertaining that I’ve seen– and I’m not just saying that because I want to suck up to the geek girls. I think we did get to see things presented from an angle that is often lacking or underrepresented in “mainstream” geek culture.

By and large the con was well-organized for a first year con. There were some hiccups– like long lines in the narrow hallways prior to the panels, which occasionally intermixed. There were also some quirks to the venue– the con was held in the Northwest Rooms of the Seattle Center, except for larger events, which were held at the EMP Museum about a five or ten minute walk away. The EMP is a big place, and things were sometimes difficult to find– notably the Masquerade line, which unlike almost everywhere else didn’t seem to have any volunteers around. Someone told me that it was the line for Masquerade participants, not spectators, which meant I ended up doing another lap around the building before I figured out that yes, it was the right line after all.

Speaking of the Masquerade, this is pretty much the only area of the con I had any actual complaints. It was held on a stage at the EMP, however, the lighting was the worst I’ve ever seen at a Masquerade. The spotlight overhead was dim and orange, which made photography a total pain and certainly didn’t flatter the costumes. And despite some quick instructions from the MCs, most of the participants simply walked up, did a quick turn, and back off the stage without so much as a pause. Again, tough for the audience to appreciate your costume (or photographers to take pics) if you don’t actually stop for a few seconds. That said, there were some great costumes, particularly in the kids’ division– it’s good to see such a promising next generation of geeks.

But all in all, it was an excellent con, particularly for its first year. It’s filling a unique and (unfortunately) needed niche, and it was definitely a hit with the community. Saturday-only tickets sold out before I got there, so I had to buy a two-day pass. I had hoped to make it back on Sunday, but didn’t– probably because I stayed up until 3 am writing, then slept in until 2 the next day. Hopefully it’ll be bigger and better next year. And hopefully it’ll give more girl geeks (and young geeks in general) a taste of the community beyond what they see online.

Full set of photos from the con here.

On previous trips, I’ve blogged and documented almost every single day, but given the vagaries of connections in the Montana wilderness, not to mention the difficulties of carrying a laptop into the backcountry, that just wasn’t possible this trip. So now I sit here, in the aftermath of it all– endless fascinating stories that don’t really connect unless I want to write something novel-length; several hundred pictures; a few amusing and/or weird videos that do not really belong on the planet Earth.

Heck, I’ll start with one of those. When people think of Yellowstone National Park, they think of bears, or crowds, or Old Faithful, or a volcano that will one day kill us all. But when you’re standing in or near the caldera, in one of the countless geyser basins that litter the area, the utter strangeness of the landscape makes it difficult to remember you’re still standing on our own planet. The stark muddy landscape, with orange and brown bacteria mats spreading as far as the eye can see, and bubbling hot springs that throw up a field of steam so dense it’s like you’re walking through sulfurous London fog… well, it’s not planet Earth. It’s the sort of place you’d expect to find Captain Kirk fighting a guy in a lizard suit, is all I’m saying.

While we were at Yellowstone, we walked around Shoshone Lake, which is believed to be the largest lake in the lower 48 states not accessible by road. Only hand-powered watercraft (canoes and kayaks) are allowed on it, and when you reach the top of a hill on the lake’s edge, you can essentially look out and see miles and miles of scenery– water, forests, and marshland– that looks no different than it would have to a fur trader in the area three hundred years ago.

On the southwest corner of Shoshone Lake is the Shoshone Geyser Basin, which is a prime example of one of those alien landscapes I mentioned. It has eighty geysers in a 1600×800 foot area, and, well, you’d best watch your step if you’re walking through it. It’s a landscape that smacks you in the head and says, “Why, yes, you ARE standing inside a 45-mile-wide volcano. Have a nice, non-terrifying day! Muwahahaha.”

Both Yellowstone and Glacier National Park are also famous for their wildlife. Before either park lets you camp in the backcountry, they subject you to a fifteen-minute video detailing how to avoid bears, and what to do in the event of a bear encounter (answer: not be an idiot). In fact, a large swath of Yellowstone was closed to hikers, thanks to a recent bear attack that resulted in a fatality. So we followed the advice in the video, but despite that (or perhaps because of it), we didn’t even see any bears at all. Darn it!

We did see plenty of bison, and chipmunks (see right), and one eighteen-inch long critter that looked sort of like a red fox, except that red foxes don’t climb trees.

There were plenty of elk, too, including a few lounging right in the middle of Mammoth Hot Springs Historic District, aka the biggest town in Yellowstone.

So Yellowstone was pretty awesome. Glacier National Park was pretty awesome, too– I’ll add a few pictures to the post, but otherwise I think my previously-posted poem about Glacier National Park speaks for itself. Yellowstone wins as far as weird scenery and wildlife, but Glacier wins when it comes to sheer, raw nature. (Until the day Yellowstone erupts and kills us all, that is.)

As for Grand Teton National Park, we only got to spend one night there, unfortunately, and didn’t get to hike in the mountains at all. But they were still darn impressive. Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to spend more time there. They’re only… fifteen hours away… through some of the most monotonous scenery this side of Texas. (Montana and eastern Washington are cool and all, but the driving does get old after a while.)

If you’re interested, here’s the full set of photos from the trip.

And, for one last obligatory video, I leave you with Old Faithful erupting. (Skip to 1:50 if you can’t stand the wait.)

It’s pulled straight from events and sights on our backcountry trek. It’s also the first poem of any length that I’ve written in years. The muse strikes in weird ways sometimes.

My thumbs got a workout typing this up on my phone. Forgive any typos- I’ll go back and fix them later, and pretend they never existed.

Update: Now that I’m back in Seattle, I did add some cool photos.

——————————–

Some see the kingdom of Faerie
In the mountains and vales of Scotland,
Others in the forests and glades of Eire,
Or the dark and brooding
Woods of Eastern Europe,
The lands from which the gypsies hail.
But to me, the greatest Faerie Queen of all
Lives in the wilds of Northern Montana.
She is not a gentle mistress.
Her arms do not offer
Titania’s warm embrace.
She is perhaps a relative of Mab,
Agent of Winter,
And her beauty is ferocious and cold.
You can see it in the ragged rocky peaks
Thrust toward the sky like
Turrets of the greatest castle
In the world,
In clear green lakes
All but glowing with magic,
Their pristine, icy waters encased in
Shrines of pine trees
And protected by rock walls
Soaring half a mile high all around.
If you dare to climb her mountains
You can feel her anger
In the gusts of wind that tear at you
With hurricane force,
As if to throw you off the high passes
And back from whence you came.
But the chance to see her domain
From on high, to see the cliffsides
Thousands of feet sheer
Surrounding the forests below,
The glaciers that shroud the slopes
In blankets of white,
And to see it all from the level
Of her eyes,
It is a sight worth incurring
The wrath of a Faerie Queen.

Yet she is not entirely
A Mistress of Winter.
For if you travel the lush forests
And alpine meadows,
You can see her beauty in the
Yellow and purple flowers
That line the trail,
Taste her essence in wild huckleberries.
Bears, elk, and mountain goats
Are her agents and her friends,
And if you sit on a log
And talk for a time with a chipmunk,
Perhaps he will tell you of her secrets.
But beware, if you set your tent
In her lands on a cold autumn night,
You can hear her roar,
Her and her army of Night Chills,
Roaring overhead with the force of a gale,
Roaring at the interlopers who have
Dared disturb her domain.
You can hear her coming,
Hear her getting closer,
Then she slams into your tent
As if throwing herself bodily against it.
Be assured she is not happy
To have you here.
Yet her ferocity and her wild nature
Only add to her beauty and allure.
Keep your pixies and your changelings,
Your sprites and woodland elves,
My heart belongs
To the Faerie Queen
of North Montana.

On Saturday we did a five-mile hike to Heliotrope Ridge. It felt a lot longer than five miles, thanks to a long uphill climb at the beginning and several streams which took us a while to ford. The trail took us up through dense, lush pine forest, into the streams and past meadows of wildflowers, to the edge of the Coleman Glacier. The glacier is the biggest on Mt. Baker, and even though it was at its smallest size of the year, it was still an impressive sight.

The weather was perfect: sunny, mid-70s, and not too hazy, which made for some very nice views, both of Mt. Baker and the surrounding scenery. Far up on the slope, where the snow and glaciers still reign supreme even in summer, we could see hikers and snowshoers making their way across the slope.

After a soak in the hot tub at the rental cabin, a huge and excellent dinner, and a night of games and conversation, we headed out again the next day, and stopped at Silver Lake near the Canadian border for lunch. Afterward, most of the group headed back to Seattle, but a few of us stuck around for a bit. I had originally planned to join the group heading back to Seattle, but I’m glad I didn’t. We got some excellent views of Mt. Shuksan (ninth-highest in the state), and made it up past the snow line to the Mt. Baker Ski Area. We had hoped to drive even higher, up to Artist Point, a viewpoint with a 360-degree view of both Mt. Shuksan and Mt. Baker. But the road was closed, and hiking there would have been an 8-mile walk. At that point, it was 4 pm, so we piled in the car and headed back to Seattle.

Now I’m in the middle of a two-day break between trips. Tomorrow, I’m meeting a friend from Texas, and early Wednesday morning we’re due to embark on a driving, hiking, and backpacking tour of Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks. There probably won’t be much tweeting or blogging during the trip, but there will hopefully be some excellent photos and stories when I return.

(For those interested, here’s the full set of Mt. Baker photos).