Washington is TIGHT, Continued

Check out part one of this trip if you haven't read it yet!

I woke up super early after a night of little sleep. I unzipped the rainfly to see a big, fat bird looking at me with its head cocked to the site. Then it hopped backwards off of the log it was standing on and disappeared from view. It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen and immediately I knew it was a great start to a great day. There were three of these fat birds pecking around the campsite and a big squirrel was scavenging around for whatever he eats. I went out and took a picture of Mount Rainier, seen at the end of the previous blog post.

Justin slept for a good while and I wandered around the campsite and talked with a few people who were up and out on the trail already. I finally got to see a marmot, there were quite a few roaming around the meadow and digging around the streams' banks looking for food. Those dudes are so awesome and chill. Justin climbed up a huge rock field and up into the ridges above our campsite. He spent a good part of the day getting up to the ridges and walking down the big boulders following the river to get back to the campsite. You might be able to spot him in this picture.


I continued down Wonderland Trail to get a feel of what it was like. It turns out it was just a short walk to Panhandle Gap, which was the ultimate goal of the hike. I have never seen something so beautiful in my life, I walked around this rock trail to see a glacial pond at the base of a peak. The light was perfect at this time of morning and there was not a cloud in the sky. The sky was so blue, the ice was so white and the pond was a crazy blue-green color.


I wanted to get Justin to come see this. He was still playing around on the ridge, so I went back to the campsite to take a nap while he worked his way back to the campsite. When he got back, I cooked some dinner and we made our way back up to Panhandle Gap and a mile or two farther. I love this picture.


Justin:


There was still ice along parts of the trail. Justin:


Me:


I'm still not sure exactly what part of the trail we're on, but we decide to scramble our way onto the peak of a ridge above us. I'm so glad we did, this was the perfect way to end the hike. From the top we could see Mount St. Helens way in the distance and we were completely surrounded by the most amazing Washington scenery. Here are some pictures from the top of that peak.




Mt St Helens is somewhere in the background, just washed out.




The next day we packed up early and made the quick hike back to the car. We found a Denny's on the way home so we had some good eggs and pancakes and turkey bacon and whatnot. I cannot wait to go back to Washington. I want, no wait I NEED to hike the Olympics and the Cascades and more of Wonderland.

Big thanks to Jonathan for hosting us. He's the best dude, so nice and incredibly generous. This trip wouldn't have even been possible had he not offered to let us stay with him!

Washington is TIGHT

There's not really a better feeling than leaving your world behind for an entire week. I very much enjoy traveling to Europe because my phone doesn't get reception so I have absolutely no way to check in on anything, except calling my parents a couple of times from one of those cyber café stores with phone booths. However, this trip was across the country where my cell phone still works. But hold on one moment please, let me nerd out for a minute.

My BlackBerry is a corporate phone which is hooked up to my work's Microsoft Exchange server (aka I get work email and work calendar on my phone). Since I set up my out of office message and marked my calendar as away for the week, I think my phone automatically held back my emails. I didn't see one work email while I was out. I would have read them and I would have stressed about stuff I was supposed to be escaping from while pretending I'm an explorer and walking around in the woods and farting nonstop inside the tent because of those freeze dried meals.

There's too much text so far without a picture, so here's a chill ass marmot.


Anyway, rollerblading is such an awesome sport to be into. It can be the greatest tight-knit community. A fellow rollerblader Jonathan was very kind enough to host Justin and I during our trip to Washington when we were not sleeping in the woods. We explored and skated Seattle, which is something I've wanted to do for a long time. The skateparks in North Carolina do not even compare to the great Seattle area parks.

After a couple of days in Seattle, Justin and I rented a car so we could head out to Mount Rainier. The original tentative plans involved hiking around Rainier on Sunday and then spending a few days in the Olympics during the week, but bad weather made us stay in Seattle on Sunday and hike Rainier during the week. That is no problem, because it was the best weather anyone could ever ask for for those three days.

Day one we hiked a portion of the Wonderland Trail, from the Fryingpan trailhead to Summerland camp. The first couple of miles of the trail are a very easy walk through a beautiful and very vividly green conifers. There are log footbridges over creeks along the trail. Seriously, the entire weekend was picturesque and something I never thought I would see (I don't know why). I took some pictures of the bridges and the woods in this part of the trail, but they didn't come out because the trees make it dark and I suck at taking pictures most of the time. We finally walked up high enough to get to a pretty big waterfall. It was hard to find a good angle, so I just took a picture of the creek here.


And the trail at this part.


Shortly after this, we came to a really cool bridge. We saw a picture of this bridge online the day before when looking for trails, but it had a bear on it. I was very relieved to find this bridge (and the whole forest while we were there) bear-less.


When you walk around a curve to get to this bridge, this is the first part of the trail where Rainier comes out and it is so awesome. None of my pictures will do it justice, but it is really magnificent. Here I am, thumbs up with Mount Rainier in the background.


The trail starts going up up up, but it's made much easier with the switchbacks. I met a really cool guy on the trail who said that he heard that we don't have switchbacks in NC. I never stopped to think about it until he said that, but he's absolutely correct (in my experience of NC, anyway). The trails here just go up up up down down down up down up down along the ridges and your legs are about ready to fall off. Once we were up the switchbacks, the trail opened up to beautiful meadows and a great view of Rainier and all of the other mountains. Here's a meadow, my pack, and Rainier.


We finally got to the campsites, took a look around and checked out the bear poles. Bear poles are so much easier to use than trying to hang your food up with rope, I'm really really glad that the poles were set up. Justin was wandering around our camp area when he spotted a very curious little marten up in the trees. We had no idea what it was and didn't want to get too close, but I got a couple of OK pictures of him!




We also had a couple of other critter visitors that wanted to check out what we had. One chipmunk was running around our camp pretty much the whole weekend and a little turd mouse climbed into my stuffsack and got some of my trailmix! Here's a blurry, quickmoving chipmunk inspecting our gear and on my jacket.


We relaxed in the area for the rest of the day and had a sleepless night. Neither Justin or I could sleep (we were still on NC time), so we had a long conversation about this and that late into the cold night. Once we were ready for sleep, we heard some coyotes close by our site on the hunt and they definitely killed something. There was also something sniffing around outside of our tent for a couple of hours, but we were both too chicken to get out of the tent to check it out. Whatever it was, it peed really close to the tent and I did not appreciate it one bit, but I wasn't going to challenge it.

I will make one more post about days 2 and 3 out here soon. Here's the view from our campsite.


Make sure to check out part two of this trip!