This week had some ups and downs. In the middle of the week, our kitty wound up spending a few days at the emergency vet with a bladder blockage. He's doing great now, but we had a stressful (and expensive) couple of days that almost led to me cancelling plans for a weekend camping at Mt Rainier for the Alpine Trails Book Club adventure. Thankfully Andy convinced me that a weekend away was just what I needed, and I'm so grateful he did. Instead of sulking at home, I spent a weekend in Paradise in the company of the most wonderful group of women. It's amazing to me that the combination of books and hiking seems to draw in such a diverse group of like-minded people. Over the weekend, I discovered many other passions I share with some or all of the ladies, and while discussing tea over breakfast, one woman mentioned she packs china teacups with her on hikes to up her backcountry tea drinking experience - something I'm totally going to copy! Somehow, we also managed to squeeze in three hikes over the course of our two days in the park, all of which were spectacular in their own unique way. I'll write more about the weekend soon, but it's certainly safe to say that Andy was right - the weekend was the perfect cure for several stressful days spent worrying about a sick pet!
Read moreIngalls Creek
Each year, by the time spring rolls around, I find myself struggling against a desperation to break out my backpacking gear, stashed away since the previous fall. After the darkness and rain of winter, I'm itching to spend the night camped out on some wild and peaceful trail. There are always many problems with this desire; spring is a busy time for me at work, and I have several family birthdays to celebrate, so a free weekend before summer is in full swing is a rare thing indeed. The past few years, I've even had a particular trail in mind when dreaming of my early-season backpacking trips — Ingalls Creek. While many other trails in the area are still heaped with a mess of rapidly melting snow, this meandering trail in Teanaway is typically snow free for at least the first several miles. In the spring, like many other trails in the area, Ingalls Creek is decorated with a colorful blanket of wildflowers.
Read moreLife: Week 22
Now that Memorial Day has come and gone, work has slowed down, and I'm finally starting to have the time and energy to do more during the week than work, eat a quick dinner, then binge a few episodes of Veep (which I finally got around to watching) before bed. This week, that left me with the time and energy to tackle our mess of backpacking gear so we could hit the trail over the weekend and finally break in the new tent we bought last fall! It turned out to be the perfect weekend for our first trip of the year - the trail we'd picked was bursting with wildflowers and inexplicably uncrowded. We even had the campground where we set up camp to ourselves! Raging Ingalls Creek may have been loud enough to wake me up a few times over the course of the night, but the view from our campsite was well worth it. With such a short hike back to the car, we even made it back to civilization in time for a late lunch at the soft opening of a restaurant in Duvall that will certainly be a new favorite! My summer weekends are quickly filling up, but I'm hoping for at least a few more weekends like this one!
Read moreLife: Week 11
Every year in early spring, I find myself surprised by the return of birds, and the constant music of their chirps, squawks, and trills, especially on rainy mornings. Along with unpredictable weather and the scent of early blooms in the air, it's one of the sings of spring that I've come to enjoy the most. After not hiking for several weeks in a row, I was determined that Andy and I would manage to fit in a hike this weekend. With unstable snow conditions in the mountains, I decided on a nearby lower elevation trail. Built in 2017, the trail to Heybrook Ridge is still pretty new, and this was our first visit. On a misty Sunday morning, we were one of only three cars parked at the trailhead, and we only passed a handful of people on our short hike. After an easy climb up to the ridge, we even had the viewpoint to ourselves! Even if the tops of the surrounding peaks were obscured by a blanket of grey clouds, this was level of solitude on such an easily accessible trail was astonishing. I'm sure this trail would be packed on a sunnier day, but this is definitely a hike I'll want to revisit in the future!
Read moreLife: Week 6
A sunny weekend in February is a rare and marvelous thing. After a week of grey skies and cold, damp weather Andy and I absolutely had to get outside to make the most of the glorious weather! We spent Saturday catching up on all the boring errands adult life entails, but Sunday morning, we headed out for some hiking. Rather than brave the crowds that would surely be swarming every snowshoeing route in the mountains, we decided to hike the nearby Middle Fork Snoqualmie River. Our strategy worked surprisingly well, and we saw only a handful of other hikers as we followed a lovely trail through sunny, frozen forest. The hilight of the day for me was finding hair ice in multiple places along the trail. After reading about hair ice in a WTA article late last year, I'd been on the hunt for this strange and uncommon phenomenon. Now that I know this is a good trail for spotting hair ice, I'll definitely be returning for more cold weather hikes in the future!
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