hopeful

There are lots of different reasons that I take photos. I take them to capture the way I see something. I take them to record moments in our family. I take them because the light strikes me or because my kid is cracking me up or because I want to print a photo for someone. I occasionally take photos with the intent...

We got our first big snow of the year on November 1st. It was crazy - on the evening of the 31st we were all over the neighborhood trick-or-treating, it was fairly mild, and the streets were dry. Twelve hours later it was coming down fast and furious. Now, as I've mentioned previously, I don't mind winter temperatures...

I'm a sucker for a Christmas tree, or really for all things Christmas (thanks, Mom), so I was perhaps disproportionately excited when I heard that the live evergreen tree destined for the U.S. Capitol was planning a whistle stop in Helena.  The seventy foot tree started in the Kootenai National Forest in western Montana...

(I started this post a few weeks ago, and it feels strange to pick it up now; the mountains and hikes described herein are now covered in snow. But that's a story for another post. For today, let me tell you about the mountains of Helena, Montana.) Helena, Montana lies just east of the Continental Divide, tucked in a...

As mentioned in an earlier post, I had the opportunity to attend a field trip with Finn's class to the Gates of the Mountains. Named by Meriwether Lewis, who, along with his expedition, passed through this area in 1805, the Gates are so named for the ginormous limestone cliffs that rise alongside the Missouri River: "'In...

I took 968 photos when we visited Montana in early July. At the time, Sean still hadn't interviewed for his position so we didn't know we'd be moving here. Things happened pretty quickly when we got back to Illinois, and while I managed to get those 968 photos onto my hard drive, I never went through them until today --...

The first time I went on the Gates of the Mountains boat tour, it was 2002. I was newly engaged to one Sean Morrison, and my parents were visiting Montana for the first time. Fun fact: we did not yet own a digital camera - ours still had film- but I borrowed one of these new fangled contraptions from the library where...