Sarah Ause / saussie.com »

The day after returning home from Phoenix, I was heading to Boston. I’d never been before, but it seems like a fabulous city. Cold, but fabulous. I was there on assignment, but snapped a few photos of my own while walking down the street…

70-degree weather in Phoenix was amazing… and so were the fresh-picked oranges. I am so ready for summer.

And so the clock strikes 12 and such a small, everyday occurrence brings an entire decade to a close. Suddenly, I feel like I have 10 years to reflect upon… but sadly, I wasn’t really paying attention during the first five. In the years I can recall, each one could easily be summed up in just a few words. 2005 was a step forward, 2006 a revelation, 2007 a lesson, 2008 a fresh start, and I as I pour over the details of 2009 in my mind, only one word seems to stand out: emancipation. This is not to be confused with independence or freedom… while I feel I have had both of these things down for many years, the emancipation is something I have only this year been strong enough to muster. The freeing, not the freedom. These are two entirely different things. How can you have freedom before the freeing? Just trust me, you can.

Each new year seems to provide me with an ingredient for what I can only assume is the perfect soup. And while it will never be finished, because I will keep adding life’s lessons until I die, it will simmer on the stove until the flame finally goes out. Yes, I just called my life a boiling pot of soup… lentil soup, of course. So I look forward to all the good, bad, and ugly that will inevitably occur throughout the coming year. It’s all these little ingredients, perhaps disgusting on their own, that when combined with the others create the glorious, rich taste of life.

This New Year marks the fourth on this blog, and if you’ve been reading it that long, you know precisely how I ushered in 2010… with some friends, a spoon, and a can of lentils. While each year brings welcomed changes and adventures, some things should always stay the same…

The dogs and I spent the last three days of our trip exploring Colorado. I’ve never really been before (unless you count passing through while sleeping most of the way), so it was nice to finally experience a little more. I left my parents’ a day early so I wouldn’t have to have all-day drives and the pups and I could take our time in that big rocky mountain state. We drove through national parks and monuments, stopped for hikes in gorgeous canyons along the way, and even hit up the local dog parks when we could. We planned to camp, but weather pushed us to motels instead, and that was okay with me. They are good travelers, my little ones. We had a good time.

I beat the weather this time. Well, sort of. Every year when I go visit my parents in the Black Hills, the weather wreaks havok on my plans. Two years ago, I spent the night in a community center when the interstate shut down from too much snow. With no intentions of letting that happen again, last year I chose to travel a month earlier, and by airplane. But of course, it snowed too much just before I arrived and the trails I wanted to hike were all closed. Then my flight out got canceled due to freezing rain and I was stranded at the airport for eight hours. This year, I would not let the weather win again. I opted to drive once more (for flexibility if the weather did plan to suck) and to leave yet another month earlier.

I arrived on Monday, promptly checked the weather report, and discovered I’d have one nice day of weather… Tuesday. So mom and I (and the dogs) got up early that morning and hiked Harney Peak (one of the hikes the weather thwarted me from last year), and I showed that weather who’s boss! Of course, the next few days were cold, windy, or snowy… but I had that one good day, so my trip was a success. The only incident that I hold any sort of contempt at the weather for is when I woke up at 3 am one night, about to wet the bed, and had to go piss outside in the freezing, snowing, wind. I should explain. See, my parents live in a tiny one-bedroom ranch house. They built a chicken coop last week and decided I’d get to sleep in it, rather than taking up their entire living room during my stay. So me and the dogs had our own lovely 12-foot cabin, equipped with an air mattress, space heater, and no chickens. Oh, and no toilet. I’d have gone inside the house, but their dog would bark and I didn’t want to wake up the house at that early hour. So I bared my ass and peed ice… for like two minutes straight. It was miserable. But peeing aside, the chicken shack was quite nice and will never actually house chickens now. It’s going to stay a guest shack… and a guest shack with no toilet. Let’s hope future guests remember to let everything out before they go to bed.

I know you’d all love for me to continue with stories of my peeing adventures, but here are a few photos from the week…

Zoe at Sylvan Lake after we hiked Harney Peak

Bill’s barn

Baby Shitty stalks like a lion when hunting horses

Clancy is cute

Bobert unloads hay while wearing one of the many hats in his new hat collection

Jackie and Jemma

Sue’s dogs

Zoe on the trail to Harney Peak

and Pumpkin

While it’s still 90 degrees down in the desert, and the trees are maintaining their springtime hues, up here in the mountains, the temps are cooler and the fall color is at full throttle. Not surprisingly, this photographer could not be happier. Yesterday, the dogs and I hiked Daly Canyon, and today Ecker Hill (with old canine roommate, Chloe), and with such brilliant colors everywhere, I had to post. I love fall.

I drank a cup of decaf coffee today, which I think was not actually decaf. Now it’s 1 a.m., I can’t sleep, and Terrah’s telling me to update this blog. So here’s a magic twig I saw this afternoon. WHOA, OHH, it’s MAGIC, you KNOWWWWW….

A couple days before I left for Jackson, Becky posted a photo on her Facebook page. It was a photo of Paintbrush Divide, and it made me desperately want to hike there. It’s a 20-mile hike, up to over 10,000 feet, but I didn’t care. We would go there. Nevermind that I’ve hardly been hiking at all this year, and it would be the longest day hike I’ve ever done. The way I saw it, who cares if it kills me? Why do a shorter hike that you’ll soon forget about when you can do an epic, back-breaking one that you’ll remember forever? And so last Saturday morning, with grand plans of waking up early and hitting the trail, we slept in. But don’t worry, we still hit the trail.

The plan was to do the entire Paintbrush Divide loop, which heads up Cascade Canyon to Lake Solitude, over the divide, and then back down Paintbrush Canyon to the car… but well, I puttered out from not eating enough on the trail and carrying too much extra water. We reached Lake Solitude, the resting stop before making the final uphill ascent to the divide, and I downed some Emergen-C and some carbs and instantly felt better. From there, we could see the trail to the top, and it looked simple enough, but it was getting late, and though I felt great, I wanted to keep feeling great. Heading up to the divide and down the other side would tack two extra hours onto our time, and so I had to make the hard decision to say no to the place I wanted to see so badly. We turned around, and headed back for the car. There’s always next time…

Several hours later, covered in dirt, we arrived back at dusk. In the end, we hiked 18 miles, which almost seems like a waste to not have just done two extra miles for the full loop, but those extra two miles are the most brutal ones… so I think we made a good decision. We picked huckleberries and rinsed off in the lake, changed clothes and headed out for a beer.

Becky in Cascade Canyon

a pretty red bird that let me be his friend and get really close

Becky shrinks her swollen feet in the chilly water of Lake Solitude

one of the many marmot friends we made

and a pika

and a moose

and as Becky is a plant biologist, we also made friends with all the flowers, like these paintbrushes and elephantheads.

the fresh huckleberries we picked and chowed down on at the end of the hike

and of course, my infamous bridge pose.

It’s been almost three years since I lived there, and two since I’ve been back to visit, but I finally got back to Jackson this past week and a half on my way to and from Montana for work. I opted to drive instead of fly so I could stop and see Becky, who moved there from Kanab a few months ago, and some friends in Park City on the way home. Jackson is so beautiful, but man, that town seriously sucks too. I have a love/hate relationship with the place… love the land, hate the people. SO MANY PEOPLE. Luckily, Becky lives out in the middle of nowhere in Kelly, with the grandest, unobstructed view of the Grand (and the rest of the Tetons) from her window. I spent the weekend hiking my ass off and photographing wildlife before heading up to Montana for a couple days, and then back to Jackson for a few more… before continuing south to Park City, and finally home last night. I wasn’t due to return until today, but sometimes home just beckons you and everything else takes a back seat. Road trips give you so much time to think that my brain is pretty fried, and I just wanted to get back into the mindless drill of everyday life so I can stop thinking for a little bit. It’s not really working for me yet, but at least I’m home with the furry family, getting my snuggles on with Haley and co…

My broccoli is ready for harvest!

My bell peppers are getting huge!

I have hundreds of grape tomatoes!

But sadly, it is not all good news… my two favorite tomato plants (green zebra and ananes noire) succumbed to verticillium wilt and had to be ripped from the earth to spare the other plants from the same dreadful fate.

Other news not pictured: my cherry tomatoes are finally turning red! And my strawberries have tapped into their inner zombie, coming back from the dead! This morning, the blossoms that had disappeared for so long rose once again, and my heart filled with joy at the thought of not having killed everything.