What do you do when your grandson from South Carolina is visiting, his uncle has the day off from work, his cousins want an adventure, and the temperature is nearly 80 degrees? We could have headed for the beach. We might even have gone for short dips in the ocean though the water temperature is still below 60 degrees, which feels chilly in a swim suit. Some of the folks serious about water sports wear wetsuits year round in our bay. We might head for the water and may do so this afternoon. After all, their grandpa went swimming in the ocean on New Year’s Day as part of the annual Polar Bear Plunge.

Yesterday, however, we took advantage of this amazing place where we live and drive 75 miles up to Artists Point near the top of Mount Baker so the kids can play in the snow. We live in this truly incredible place where we can walk to the beach and still have mountains with year-round snow within reach for an easy day trip.

My style of being a grandpa is to take our grandchildren on adventures that build memories. I get a lot of help in that from their grandma. And since the two of us are that way with children, we have raised children who also want to make memories with their children. Yesterday’s adventure was an easy one for us as grandparents because we had both of our children with us to help shepherd all five of our grandchildren. Of course the parents are perfectly capable of caring for their own children without us, but we get to go on their adventures with them and the ratio of four adults to five children, and one of them a teen, makes it easy to keep everyone safe.

Our Washington grandchildren get to see and play in snow every winter. Though it doesn’t snow much here, we always get a few days when the snow sticks to the ground enough for them to make snowballs and a snow man and get in a bit of sledding. And here almost any amount of snow means a day off from school. Our South Carolina grandson, however, doesn’t get to see snow where he lives. He was born in northern Japan where there is a lot of snow, but he was only two when they moved to South Carolina and he doesn’t remember that part of his life very much. When he thinks of snow, he thinks of his trips to Washington and when he comes, he wants to make driving up to the snow one of the adventures. Last year when he visited, we had a lot of family adventures and we didn’t manage to squeeze a snow adventure into his visit, but this year he is with us for a bit longer and we’ve been planning to head for the snow since he arrived.

I grew up with plenty of snow. There were some winters when snow stayed on the ground from late October through March. And we lived close enough to the mountains to have places we could visit in the summer where the snow stays year round. These days, however, most of those places no longer have snow year round. The glaciers are melting and many of the places where we used to be able to count on snow are no longer snow covered year round.

This adopted home of ours is amazing on that score, however. Whenever the weather is clear, we can view snow capped mountains from our home. And Mount Baker, also known by its Nooksack name, Kushan, is a sentinel that stands to the east that we can see as we go about the usual activities of our lives.

Snow is just one of the wonders we have to share with our grandchildren on a visit to Mount Baker. Yesterday we also were able to take them for a walk in old growth forest among giant trees. Although a great deal of the Pacific Northwest has been logged and there are still great patches of clear cut in our mountains, there are a few truly wonderful places where we can visit old growth forest. Part way up Mount Baker is a pull out with room for three or four cars to park and from their a trail that goes directly into a stand of giant Douglas fir, hemlock and cedar rising over 100 feet in the air. The undergrowth is lush with the trunks of fallen giants giving nurture to thousands of seedlings. The path winds around giant trees and requires scrambles to go over and under deadfall. There are places where you can climb up on top of giant logs and walk comfortably for a hundred and fifty feet on top of a giant log. Like the glaciers, old growth forest is shrinking in this world and it is a privilege to live in a place where I can share these wonders with grandchildren.

Fairly early in my career, I once considered moving to this part of the world. I was briefly in conversation with a congregation that is just a few miles from where we now live. However, we ended up accepting a call from a congregation in Idaho and ten years later moving to South Dakota where our children graduated from high school and from where they launched into their adult adventures. I don’t think we could have imagined back then what it would be like to be retired and living in this place. When I imagined retirement while still working, I didn’t really consider what being a grandpa might be like. It is definitely far more wonderful than I could have imagined.

Our grandchildren will tell their grandchildren stories of throwing snowballs on a hot summer’s day and going on adventures through the forest giants while their grandpa goes on and on about nurse logs and fungal networks in the forest. They might even remember sitting at the picnic table on our back deck and eating watermelon and fried chicken while watching a hot air balloon drift overhead.

I don’t believe in magic, though magical is a word I might use to describe these times with our grandchildren. I am aware how fortunate I am to live where I do.