Neighbor
My niece Jaclyn is in town from Idaho for our grandson Dean’s 1st birthday party. That was yesterday, 6/24, and it was fun.
Jaclyn and I had planned to hike in Olympic National Park to Pyramid Peak. We wanted to take the 5:30 (first) ferry across the Sound to Kingston and drive from there. But when we pulled up to the ferry waiting area it was dark. A quick search on the phone revealed the first two ferries had been cancelled and the first one was scheduled for 7:13. Doh!
We quickly came up with a new plan – Jaclyn wants to visit as many National Parks as possible and North Cascades National Park is on her to-do list so I headed to I-5 and went north while Jaclyn started researching hikes in that park. She came up with the famous hike Cascade Pass. She had read that the last 3.1 miles of forest road to the trail head was closed so we were prepared to do a road walk.
Little did we know that those 3.1 miles are uphill all the way. By the time we got to the trail head I was bushed. I handed off the bear spray and Garmin to Jaclyn and told her to head up. I was going to just hang out in the parking lot. And the views there are amazing:
Ho-Hum
But after about 30 minutes I felt fully recovered so headed up the trail because I could not help but run into Jaclyn on the way down. And indeed, about 2 miles up the trail there she was, on her way down, having hiked up to almost the end of this section of trail.
I wound up doing just over 10 miles and she did about 12.5 miles. The track below represents her progress – great job to Jaclyn!
On the way up, while we were driving to where we could park we encountered an enormous black bear:
Yogi?
Glad we didn’t run into that guy on foot.
Track below.
Track
Looks like the Cascades have a volcanic history. They are beautiful.