South!

We went camping in northern California, to Redwood National Park. It was a beautiful, sunny, fun weekend getaway.  We got really lucky with the weather, it was nice every day until the drive home when it started raining around sunset in Oregon. The coast area gets a lot of fog, sometimes all days at the coast, sometimes only at night. At night it was such thick fog it would drip from the trees on our campsite. 

On the way down, we stopped at the Tillamook Cheese Factory, watched the staff process cheese for quite a while, sampled all their cheese, and bought some to bring home. I think I should have gone into some sort of food science field - combine my love of cooking and interest in science into a job. It was really fun to watch them work and try to figure out how everything worked.

We lucked out on this sunset - we were in the perfect place at just the right time.

The trees in the parks (there are several State and National parks in the area) were so huge, it was hard to wrap our heads around their size and age.

Beaches!

There are three herds of Roosevelt elk in the area and we saw all three. These were the northern-most herd., close to our campsite.

We also saw lots of birds, deer, a porcupine (really really close!) and an owl!

This is trillium falls. We went on a 3 mile loop hike through giant trees and tiny creeks.

Steve, enjoying some cheese and a sunny lunch spot.

And a little scenery on the drive home too. This is the Smith River, middle fork.

 

A short hike in Rainier

I'm post-dating this - we went hiking last weekend before I left for a work trip to San Diego. About noon on Saturday we decided it was too nice out to stay indoors, so we shoved a few things into a backpack and headed up to Rainier. It was cloudier (and rainier) up the mountain, but we still did a short 3 mile hike to a couple of waterfalls then headed further up the mountain in the car to view another waterfall. By the time we headed home it was definitely raining instead of 'spritzing' (Steve's word).

To get to the trail we had to cross a loud, rushing glacier fed stream (thus the milky color).  There's no way we could have crossed this safely without the bridge. Thankfully, the bridge was very sturdy, but you could see the previous two bridges a bit further downstream, where they'd been washed in past flooding. The trail we hiked was a short section of the Wonderland trail, which is a huge loop circling the base of Mt. Rainier. 

The trail to the waterfall looked flat on the map, but in reality it was a pretty steep uphill hike for almost all of it. This is the second of the two waterfalls on the trail:

 This is the waterfall we took the car to see. It's only a short distance from the main road, and quite pretty. By this point it was raining pretty steadily so we didn't linger.

Happy news

Steve has a new job! He's been hired as a personal trainer at the athletic club we where we're members, and he starts on Monday.   :)   It's a bit different from the place he worked at in Alaska: It's much larger - 11,000 members and a much larger gym (space-wise), they don't do training packages where you have to buy a set number of sessions with a trainer, and he'll have fixed hours to start. He's excited to start tomorrow!

Steve the earthworm and the WA state fair

What is it about the name Steve? There's "Steve was delicious" from the Snickers Squared commercial...probably my favorite commerical EVER...and now I introduce "Steve the earthworm".  Thank you WA State Fair arts show:

We met friends at the WA State fair and it was pretty darn fun.  They have a two-year old daughter, who really just wanted to run around and play with the bark around the trees. But as a diversion from that we did go see the draft horse show, which was really cool. And blurry, apparently. I only had my cell phone for pictures, sorry.

 Even the goats in Washington are Seahawks fans....

And there was also the worlds cutest baby Scottish highland cow, er, calf.  He was born Sept 2, and you can't tell from this photo but he has the most adorable little face. I was very tempted to calfnap him and take him home.

We did it!

Yesterday Steve and I, three friends from Juneau, and two of my new coworkers (and 5 of their extended family) participated in the Seattle Tough Mudder. It was 10.1 miles, 20 obstacles, and lots of dirty. So, so much dirt, everywhere. It was really fund, and yes, also really tough.

There will be official course photos coming out later, but for now we have one from before the race (the clean pic) and a couple from after. It was the perfect weather for the day - about 70 for a high, 53 at race start, overcast but no rain.

My favorite obstacle (and everyone else's least favorite) was called Arctic Enema. You climb up to a platform then slide down a shoot into ice water (with a slurry of ice cubes in it) where you have to go under to get out of the shoot, then have to wade a couple feet though chest deep ice water, climb over a wall, then wade again to a ladder at the far side. It was incredibly cold. But I mostly felt bad for the lifeguard standing on the side, wet because she'd obviously been in at one point or more, and shivering because she couldn't keep going on the course to warm up. In my opinion, it wasn't as bad as the polar plunge we did in Juneau, and it was a nice chance to get some of the mud rinsed off for a bit and cool down (way down) from being warm from exertion.

At another obstacle we had to first walk, then crawl through a long muddy field. You had to crawl because the mud was too soft and loose to support a full body weight on feet, and there was a guy who'd gotten stuck (scary stuck) to ~mid-thigh when we were there and had a crew of about 6 people around him working to get him out. As we were headed up the hill away from the obstacle we heard the cheer signaling that they'd gotten him free finally.

Will I do it again? Probably, but not for at least another year! I need to recover from my nasty bruises and cuts first.

What the heck? I look like I've been eating dirt then drooling!  Oh, wait....I pretty much was doing just that...

Olympic Peninsula explorations

This weekend we were camping in Olympic National Park. Steve wanted to go to the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, so we found a campground nearby (ish - it was about an hour) and camped Friday-Saturday nights.  Saturday morning we drove up the Hurricane Ridge Road before heading into the festival. We did a short hike, and saw three blue grouse (or maybe ptarmigan?) that were completely unafraid of us.

The other day, I asked a coworker when it would there would start to be snow on the Olympic mountains again, because we can see them from our offices...and he said there's usually snow visible year round! Not this year, yikes. They're pretty dry.  We did see a few places with lingering glaciers, but otherwise, it's all gone. I think it would be pretty here when the wildflowers are blooming.  This is near the top of the road:

The wooden boat festival was Steve's dream come true. I had fun too, but not as much as him. There were demos, lots of boats you could tour, classes, vendors, food stalls, and boat rides too. Many of the wood boats were small kayaks and small sailboats. This one (below) was absolutely gorgeous.

 The marina was full of boats though! And Port Townsend is a great town with lots of history.

After the festival we went back to the campsite for dinner and a campfire.  Then Sunday morning we got up and headed home. But we went home the long way, around the rest of the Olympic Peninsula. We stopped an hiked at Hoh rainforest, where there were trees covered with lush mosses and ferns. We want to come back here and go backpacking.

 This one is a maple tree covered in mosses.

When a giant douglas fir dies, it leaves a big hole in the tree canopy and a huge trunk on the ground! This one was more than 190 feet tall!

We also stopped at Ruby beach for a walk. It's early for winter storm season, but the wind was blowing pretty hard today.

These rocks were under a cliff face, and the rusty colored ones were being stained by the water dripping down. 

Snow already!

There's fresh snow on Mt. Rainier!!  I suspect this is not unusual timing for snow, but we were startled to see it when we drove up to the Sunrise visitor center portion of the park. We've been up to the Paradise section of the park before, but this is our first time to the Sunrise section. It is a beautiful area. We got up this morning and drove to Packwood, a small town just south of Rainier that hosts a HUGE flea market on Memorial day and Labor day weekends. There's a few things we're still looking for for the house (like a nightstand for my side of the bed) and thought it would be a good place to find one...but it wasn't. So after strolling around for a couple of hours we headed up to Rainier.  It was so cloudy on parts of the drive up to the park that sometimes we couldn't see 20 feet in front of the truck, so we were worried we'd get to the top and and see absolutely nothing. But, we popped out of the clouds on the northeast side of the park and the views were spectacular.

On the map, this lake looks like an easy 1.5 mile stroll...but in person, it's a steep hike! We weren't prepared to do it today, but we will next time!  It was super cold and just enough breeze out to make your teeth chatter when walking around, even though we were wearing pants and a couple of layers on top.

 The view at the top - the Sunrise Visitor Center and Day Lodge (Day lodge in the center, visitor center is at our backs).  Brrrr!