Quaking Aspen is a great wood to carve or whittle when it's green.  We're not going to be hacking up any live trees so we search for the trees that recently broke and fell from heavy snow loads.  A few years ago we found a dirt road that leads to Burnside Lake and is at a high enough elevation where the snow is really heavy and you can find green Aspen that has fallen. 

If you've ever seen some of Barb Post's great carvings then you know why Sharon, Kathryn, Lea and I took a trip out to Burnside Lake Road yesterday to get her, and us, some Quaking Aspen.

Sharon did most of the work while Lea shot some great high definition footage of the beauty, I shot footage of Sharon working and Kathryn ..... well .... let me just say that she's very entertaining to hang out with.  

Here's a short video depicting the day.

Cascade Falls Hike

Some people love to buy new clothes, jewelry, even cars but I love to buy ipods, video cameras and computers.  My latest "toy" is a Canon FS100 tapeless video camera.  It's just 5" long, 2.5" high,  2.3"wide and weighs just a little over 1/2 pound. It can fit easily in my pocket and can go anywhere with me.  So it went with me on Thursday for a hike to Cascade Falls.  It was the first time I really got to test it out and I'm pretty happy with it.  I'll be taking it everywhere this summer and good or bad, I'll be posting some of the clips here in my summer blog.  

So here's my first post, first video and first hike of the summer.  This was to Cascade Falls above Cascade Lake. An awesome hike with great views .... you will see Cascade Lake and a little bit of Lake Tahoe in the background.   Shown in the video is fellow hikers Sharon, Kathryn and Lea.