Anniversary weekend (aka: moar hiking)

Raphael's nephew Milo is a little over two years old. Apparently he's a clone of two-year-old Raphael, so whenever I look at Milo I get this weird "woah, I'm looking at two-year-old Raphael" thought floating through my head. Here are some of Milo's favorite expressions:

"Where'd Uncle Raphie go?"
"I love Anna!" (<3 <3 <3)
"What is that?"
And when you respond with "that's ____":
"What's ____ doing?"

He's also proficient at waving bye-bye and making the correct animal sound when you show him a picture. Ex. if he sees a cow, he says "mooooooooooooo."

COULD NOT BE CUTER

anyway,

last weekend was Raphael and my anniversary! (Counting from our first date, even though at the time I was still panicking and calling Sumin and Sophie asking whether this was in fact a date and what should I do and is it really a good idea to get involved with somebody over the summer and what if he's a creep.)

Sine our first date was a brunch (Raphael had eggs benedict, I have noo idea what I ate, and half the time we were distracted because the table next door had an ADORABLE tiny black labrador puppy that was rolling around on the ground) we decided to get brunch before heading out for a hiking/camping adventure. Here I am with our meal:

After stuffing ourselves with French toast and Dungeness crab eggs benedict, we drove to the trailhead of the path to Heart Lake.

It was pouring. So, we sat in the car and read our books (I'm reading Carl Sagan's Contact and he's reading Isaac Asimov short stories) until the clouds cleared and the sun came out. Then we hit the trail.

At first, the snow appeared in clumps.

That seemed harmless enough, since it was a good distance from our trail. But with only those distant clumps as a warning, the trail suddenly turned into this:

SNOW EVERYWHERE. Snow up to our waists! In one particularly amusing incident, Raphael was standing on top of a snow pile talking to me when - WHOOSH - he sank down to his chest. That was unusual, though, since most of the snow was firmly packed (these were the remnants from what used to be something like 60 feet of snow earlier in the spring):

Finally, by following footprints and Raphael's internal compass, we found the lake.

We set up our backpacking hammock between two trees. We didn't pick strong enough trees, though, and by the next morning the trees had bent over so much that our bodies were awkwardly bent at something like a 40º angle. Oh well. At least we had this to greet us: