It's pear picking time! Collectively, our family has spent more than 60 hours this week picking pears at our church welfare farm. With 18,000 pear trees, it takes every available person to pick the pears before they ripen too much to be usable.
We saw this gorgeous dragonfly one morning.
On Tuesday night, Sofi and Becky went to an outdoor concert at the Britt. The rest of our family was picking pears.
The orchard is experimenting with growing peaches and this is the first year they have enough peaches for a commercial crop. Sofi and Becky met some friends Friday morning and picked peaches for a couple of hours. The peaches were a beautiful color and a nice switch from pears.
Here is our group of friends: Jen, Jodi, Sarah, Callie, Becky, Kristi (and her sister-in-law), Kate, Beka, Allison, Kylie, Sofi and Tiffany. Friday was Beka's birthday and she wanted to celebrate by giving service!
On Saturday we hiked Mount Scott, the highest mountain in Crater Lake National Park. We've wanted to hike it for a while, but the smoke from wildfires has been so thick the past two summers that we haven't been able to. The area around Crater Lake has 2 seasons: winter and August. The park rangers don't even finish plowing the roads until July. Between the climate and Sofi going back to school, we had a narrow window this year to climb it.
This is a photo of Abe standing on a signpost at the trailhead. The photo also shows how beautiful and blue the sky was when we started our hike.
Storm clouds and fog rolled in and we couldn't see anything when we got to the top. We should have had vistas in every direction, including the best views in the park of Crater Lake. Sofi liked the sensation of hiking through fog, not knowing what was ahead of her and being surprised we'd reached our goal. We got hailed on a bit at the top and heard distant thunder. It didn't seem wise to stay on top very long.
Here's the geological marker on top. We were 8929 feet above sea level which is quite a bit higher than the elevation where we live (1200 ft.)
The fog lifted on our way back down and we could see the lake. 
Before it was Crater Lake, this was an enormous mountain named Mount Mazama. It's estimated Mount Mazama was 12,000 feet tall before it erupted, leaving a giant crater behind.
There was a road race at Crater Lake National Park the day we were there so traffic was limited to one direction. This meant we got to drive all around the perimeter of the lake, something we haven't done since the first summer we moved here. We enjoyed the scenic drive.
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