North Cascades

In September Jared and I went to Washington to backpack in the North Cascades. This was our first backpacking trip where we needed to take our gear on an airplane. I was a little worried about losing my gear or something getting ruined, but it all worked out great. We bought pack bags from REI, which had enough space for my packed backpack and other items I needed when we weren't backpacking.

Our backpacking trip was three nights and four days. We started out with a short 3 mile hike in to a boating site along Ross Lake. We had a bear locker for our food and we saw a rainbow before the rain came in. The rain didn't last long, and the evening ended with a really colorful sunset.

On day 2 we took a 15 mile water taxi ride along Ross Lake to a spot about 5 miles from the US/Canadian border. We thought we had 10-12 miles of hiking planned for the day. We had a good hike with a variety of elevation gain and loss. I fell in a river and had to dump water out of my pack, but luckily most things stayed dry. We couldn't find our campsite that night, so by the time we decided to stop hiking we had hiked almost 16 miles. We did double back a few times trying to find the site. The next morning we found the trail to our site quite a ways down the trail, which was farther than what was marked on the map of a few different apps we were using.

Day 3 had the biggest elevation gain of the trip with over 1000 feet occurring all at once with constant switchbacks until we reached the top. Jared stopped a few times to rest, but I just kept going because I knew if I stopped I would have a hard time starting again. We hiked in an area that looked like it had a lot of heavy wash out from a previous storm. Some of the wash out areas were large dried up rivers. I would not want to be hiking when all that water was rushing through! We ran into two other hikers who were staying at a site for two nights and doing a day hike for the day. They were the first people we saw other than hikers close to the parking lot on the first day. That night we found our site easily, but the water source was at least a half mile away. The water was cold and very clean, so that made up for the longer walk. Our mileage total for the day was around 13 miles.

On our last day in the North Cascades, we got up extra early since we had at least 11 miles of hiking and a three hour drive back to Tacoma where we would stay with my friend for a few nights. It was foggy in the morning, which was neat to see with the mountains. We had more scenic views as we got out of the dense forest a bit and hiked along some cliffs and Ross Lake. We ran into two more people and when we told them we'd been out there for four days, they said "It's Wednesday in case you didn't know". I wasn't thinking about the days by their names at all, so it definitely felt weird to talk about what day it was.

After the North Cascades trip, we did a day trip to Mount Rainier. When we arrived, we stopped close to the entrance at a short trail with a bathroom. We could see Mount Rainier from the end of the trail, and that was the last time we saw it all day.

Once we got to Longmire the clouds had rolled in and the ranger didn't think it would clear up for the rest of the day. We went up to Paraise to check out the visitor center and then did a short hike to a higher elevation. We were hiking in amongst the clouds and had good views of the mountain below us, but nothing above us.

After hiking around at Paradise, we went back down to Longmire. We decided to do a hike that went up to a lookout point. The switchbacks started almost immediately and Jared decided he was more interested in drinking coffee at the restaurant than hiking switchbacks, so he went to do that. I kept going and hiked up 1400 feet to a point looking down at Longmire and the surrounding area. My pace going down the trail got up to 4 miles per hour at times and I think I hiked down in a third of the time it took me to hike up!

As we were leaving Seattle, the sun was setting and we had a great view of Mount Rainier. This made up for what we missed the previous day. Overall we had a great trip and it was a lot of fun hiking somewhere new.