A couple weekends ago, Tyla and I headed to a new (for us) park in Bellevue. It’s small but it has a nice little swimming area with life guards. Mandy and Ike joined us for the sunny fun and I snapped a few photos. You can also check out my quick Photosynth from the park. Well, technically it’s the view FROM the park. I didn’t want to look too creepy photographing other people’s kids.
We purchased a used hiking backpack earlier this year, but aside from walks around the neighborhood and working in the yard, we’ve never really used it. Now that the yard is finally done, we are able to spend more time together as a family so this past weekend, we headed out on a more legitimate hike.
Since we didn’t know how Elijah would react to the adventure, I picked a hike that I’ve been avoiding throughout the years because of it’s simplicity. Simple is good in this case though. So we headed for Cougar Mountain to hike around the Anti-Aircraft Peak area (hike #3 in the Beyond Mt. Si book.)
This area was the site of some post-WW2 90mm anti-aircraft guns to help guard the Puget Sound Area. They were later replaced with a site for the Nike Ajax Missile Defense. None of that stuff is still operational or even present on the mountain anymore.
The hike itself went pretty well. We made it about 1.4 miles before Elijah decided he wasn’t loving it. We stopped for a break, but given how unhappy he was when he got back in the pack, we decided to take one of the shorter options to finish the hike at around 2.2 miles. He was almost falling asleep at the very end so we probably could have completed the entire planned hike.
I’d call it mostly a success though. I want to make a few modifications to the backpack to help hold him in place better. I also need to avoid wearing a hat with a big long string that he can pull on! Assuming that he gets more used to riding back there, I think we could tackle some slightly longer trips.
Back when I used to have time to go hiking, I was constantly amazed at how predictable my hiking speed was. This takes a little practice, but here are some rules of them. I didn’t invent them but everyone needs to tweak them a little bit to their own habits.
To calculate the time it will take to do a hike:
That’s it! So if you’re going on a 4.5 mile round trip hike that goes up 2000 feet and then returns to the starting point, that would be 4.5 miles * 20 minutes + 2 thousand feet * 30 minutes = 2.5 hours. You don’t need to count the down part. The 30 minutes that you add for going up takes the down into account.
The flat ground timing is extremely accurate. The elevation can be more variable depending on the steepness of the slope. And of course you need to factor in how much time you’ll spend enjoying the view at the top.
I wonder how this will apply with an 11 month old boy on my back?
Last year, Tyla got a bike for her birthday, and we’ve been hoping to do some family bike rides this summer. Elijah probably won’t be riding a bike yet so we decided to get him a bike trailer. When I hopped online to do some research I was amazed at what you can buy for a bike trailer! We opted for the lower end of the spectrum until we prove that we actually need something fancier and settled on this very well reviewed model from InStep.
Assembly was quick and easy. Elijah fits into the straps just fine so we decided to give it a shot. He did ok on a very quick ride around the cul-de-sac. He’s a very curious kid and his curiosity was definitely winning though he wasn’t laughing or smiling. We decided to go for a ride around the neighborhood but after about a quarter mile, he decided he was done.
It’s generally too cold and/or wet for this kind of activity right now anyway. I’m guessing that by the time spring rolls around, he’ll be loving this!
We’re starting to get some beautiful summer weekends so I thought I would like out a few of my favorite day or weekend trips.
This is by no means a complete list, but maybe there are a few on here that you haven’t tried yet. Whatever you decide, get outside and enjoy the incredible Pacific Northwest!
When you hang out in the same groups and same areas for a long time, it’s easy to think that you’re getting to be a pretty good skier, hiker, etc. Skiing at Crystal always reminds me of this. You can ride up the Forest Queen list and hear people talking about how incredible they are (on blue and green beginner runs), but if you head out to the Northway lift, you’ll see people throwing backflips off cliffs and not bragging at all. Living in the Pacific Northwest, there’s always someone nearby who is infinitely better than you. We have some incredible outdoor athletes around here!
I bring this up because someone just forwarded me an article that blew my mind. When I hiked up to Camp Muir at 10,000 feet on Mt. Rainier, it took me 4 hours and 10 minutes to get up there. We have a guy in our church who is in great shape and can get from Paradise (5400 feet) to the top of Rainier (14,400 feet) and back down in less than 24 hours. The guys in this article did that whole route from Paradise to the summit and back in 4 hours, 19 minutes and 12 seconds! So in the time I went from Paradise to Muir (halfway to the summit), they had done the entire trip. Unbelievable! You can read their full writeup on coastmountainskiing.com.
PS. While writing this I also learned that there is now a web cam at Camp Muir!
Usually by now the weather is cool and rainy and it would stay that way through next spring. We’re still completely dry (dryest Aug-Sept on record and second dryest July-Sept!) so Tyla’s parents decided to take advantage of the bonus sunshine and go camping. They headed up to Bay View State Park for the weekend, and Tyla and I visited them for the day on Saturday.
We let Oskar play in the water and went for a walk along the bay. It was a nice lazy day in the sunshine. Photos are in the photo gallery. Apparently it was an Oskar photo shoot.
My parents were out over Labor Day for their annual visit. I’ll have a couple posts about our activities from the weekend, and this first one is about our trip to Crystal Mountain. I don’t get down there in the summer very often since we usually drive past and head to Rainier.
After a delicious breakfast at the Brown Bag Café in Kirkland, we headed to the mountain and purchased tickets for a gondola ride. The ride up was beautiful and the skies were perfectly blue. Mt. Rainier was there in all it’s glory. We paused at the top for a while to marvel in the view and for me to attempt another panorama. I attempted this one at maximum zoom which is more difficult, and it didn’t come out very well. There were quite a few gaps where I didn’t overlap the pictures properly. You can view it on the Photosynth site. While the overall image isn’t that great, it is pretty neat to see how far you can zoom in. I also added a marker (look on the right side of the page for the link) to the Mount Freemont Fire Lookout. I hiked there with my parents years ago and earlier this year with Tyla.
We decided to hike our way down heading around the backside of the gondola, under Powder Bowl, across Bear Pits, under the Forest Queen lift, along the southback border, and then over to Gold Hills and down to the base. Its somewhere between 5 and 6 miles and 2400 feet down. It’s a wonderful hike that shows a lot of different parts of Crystal. You start off with great views of the mountain, then go along some steep open hillsides, pass by a lake, and then walk through an old growth forest complete with an old gold mine.
As we were nearing the end of our hike, I spotted a couple up ahead that looked familiar. It was my cousin Jared and his wife Gayla. They live over in Moses Lake! We had no idea they were going to be at Crystal and the odds of bumping into them in such a huge area are astronomical. They were staying the night and having dinner at the Summit House. They must have had a wonderful view with the sun setting behind Rainier while they ate!
Kudos to Mom who did this all on a healing broken toe! Photos are posted in the photo gallery.
We headed out for a last minute camping trip to La Conner, WA with Tyla’s family a couple weekends ago. We’ve been to that campground once before, but the last time it was cold and rainy the whole time. This was a quick trip, but the weather was good and Oskar had fun playing in the water. I, of course, had fun playing with the camera. I finally succeeded in getting shots of Oskar shaking off where the sun was at the right angle and he wasn’t blurry. A shutter speed of 1/1000th is just barely enough to freeze most of him. I also attempted a timelapse of the sunset. That’s fairly difficult since the exposure changes so rapidly but you have to leave it fixed or else the sky never gets darker. This one is pretty short and not stellar, but I embedded the YouTube video anyway. More photos are available in the photo gallery.
Mt. St. Helens is an amazing National Park. The volcano blew in 1980 and experts thought it would be a complete dead zone for 400 years. Within 3 years, life started reappearing in the desolation. Science has rarely had an opportunity to study a spot like this up close. So it’s understandable that they don’t allow very many people on the mountain! Nobody can go inside the crater or along the north side of it where most of the devastation was. You are allowed to climb up the south side, but you need a permit and during most of the year (except the dead of winter) only 100 people are allowed to climb per day.
Last year, AndyD and StehanieW climbed it with their family, but since you have to pick your climbing day months in advance, they got unlucky and climbed in complete fog. They wanted to do it again to see the sights so on Feb 1, Andy snagged some climbing passes.
The climbing group was to include myself, Tim, Chelsea, Andy and Stephanie. Tyla really wanted to come along, but her knees don’t do well on long hikes so she reluctantly abstained. A couple days before we were to head out, Andy and Stephanie had to back out for personal reasons. Tim, Chelsea and I decided to carry on so on Saturday afternoon we headed around to the south side of the mountain. The plan was to stay in a campground the night before so that we could get an early start. Our campground was in Cougar, WA which is about 20 minutes from the trailhead. There are also free campsites (if you have the climbing pass) right at the trailhead but those are first come first serve.
We arrived at the trailhead on Sunday morning around 7:30am and by 8am we were on the trail. This trailhead is called Climber’s Bivouac. At 3900 feet, it’s the highest point that you can drive on Mt. St. Helens. If you’ve driven to the mountain before, you most likely drove to the Johnston Ridge Visitor’s Center that is north of the mountain. There’s also one other smaller Visitor’s Center on the east side. Neither are as high as this trailhead.
The route begins with a 2 mile stroll through the woods. It goes up about 1000 feet. This part flew by on the way up as we were fresh and the trail was simple. At 2 miles, you abruptly come to the end of the tree line and reach a sign saying that you must have one of the climbing passes to carry on past that location. No one is allowed above 4900’ on the mountain without a pass. We had broken out of the clouds a during the hike through the woods and as we continued, we were in blue clear sky with a blanket of clouds below. We could see Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood sticking proudly out of the cloud layer. Quite a sight!
At this point, the trail completely changes character and head up an old lava flow (from an eruption before the 1980 eruption.) This stretch lasts about 1.5 miles and it’s tough. The rocks will rip up your hands so gloves are recommended. There are many points where you have to climb up on all fours. Climbing over these huge boulders is tough to begin with, but to make it even worse, there’s no specific path to follow. There are route markers every couple hundred yards and you just have to make your way to the next one. Sometimes you can see a good route to take and sometimes we seemed to end up taking the hardest possible route.
The lava flow boulders end eventually and now it’s on to the ash! The last mile is a slog up an ash field. For every step up, you slide have a step back. And by this point, you’re really getting up there so the oxygen is a lot thinner than you are used to. This is the point where the wind can also be whipping the ash around so general advice is to make sure you can cover every part of your skin (long sleeves, long pants, and a bandana for your face.) Thankfully the wind was calm so we stuck with gaiters to keep ash out of our shoes and our hiking poles to give us extra stability.
We made it to the top of the mountain (8366 feet above sea level) in 4 hours and 40 minutes. We did get passed by about a dozen people, but looking through other trip reports, this is a respectable amount of time. We said from the beginning that our goal was the top, not the amount of time it took so we took plenty of breaks for photos and rests.
You can walk all the way up to the crater rim and wow, what a view! It’s so unlike anything I’ve ever seen before (and I’ve been to the visitor’s center many times.) The sheer magnitude of it is readily apparent. We stayed up there for about 30 minutes taking in the views of Rainier, Adams and Hood in the distance and watching steam escape from vents in the lava dome in the center of the crater. I hastily snapped a bunch of photos for a panorama. There are a few problems from where it was stitched together and I should have taken more photos, but I had to stand uncomfortably close to the rim and the wind was blowing pretty hard trying to push me in.
As we began our descent, the ash field was pretty simple. You could keep a good pace with a controlled slide on the heels of your feet, and before no time, we were back at the lava fields. Ugh. Going down was harder than going up. We were only about half way through when I could tell my legs were shot. Your calves take a beating going up and the thighs take the brunt going down.
After what seemed like ages, we made it to the tree line. The smooth trail was glorious, but even the gentle downhill slope was super painful on the thighs and knees. Tim and Chelsea definitely set the pace for this part of the hike as I lagged behind. At one point near the end, I had stopped to get something out of my pack and thought I was standing next to a pile of poo. I realized it was my own B.O. The trees seemed to last twice as long as they did on the way up, but we made it to the parking lot, thoroughly beaten and completely covered in ash and sweat.
One big decision on a hike like this is how much water to take. If you’ve ever run out before (as Tim and I have), you want to err on the side of bringing too much. But every liter weighs 2.25 pounds and you don’t want to be carrying any more weight than necessary. I took a 3 liter Camelbak full of water and a 2 liter one full of Gatorade. The Gatorade ran out right at the crater rim and I finished the hike with 1/4 liter left. Perfect!
It took us 3 hours and 20 minutes to get down which means we were hiking for 8 hours plus 30 minutes at the top. Even though we were so tired, the lure of our beds was strong. We went back to the campground, took showers, and packed up the campsite while we were cooking food on the fire. After eating a delicious meal (anything would have tasted good at that point!) we hopped in the truck and headed home.
It was a long day and I don’t know that any of us are jumping to do it again soon, but we’re all thrilled that we did it!
I owe a special thanks to my wonderful wife who was supportive of me going even though she was staying behind. Thank you Tyla! I love you!
Chelsea and I both carried our little cameras up which were easily accessible during the hike. TIm and I both carried our dSLRs to the top, but his was much easier to get to than mine. We took quite a few photos but it’s really hard to show the scale of the hike in these photos! Nonetheless, I’ve included some of my favorites in this post and put more in the photos gallery. You can also view a big panorama from the top of the mountain. Drag your mouse around and zoom in and out to get the full effect. Also notice the thumbnails on the right side of the panorama. If you click on them the page will reorient and zoom in to points that I’ve marked on the photo.
