"She had a blog only a mother could love...": Wonderland Trail

Whew! Here's the first post to catch up on what's been up the past... two months. Since we've been in less contact with some than others, here's the life of Alyssa and Seth, August and September 2011, in fast forward: In August Kat visited with us for the first half of the month, Seth and I went on our first backpacking trip (3 days on the Pacific Crest Trail), when we got back we looked for an apartment and found one in Astoria just in time to be able to join our friend Lenny for the Wonderland Trail backpacking trip (10 days!!). When we got back from that, just after my birthday, Dad came for a visit (and we climbed Mt. St. Helens), and then Grandma and Pa visited right afterward, which brings us up to about a week ago.

Pictures from the PCT hike and all visits are yet to come, as I still need to sort through them. I'll cut right to the chase and start with the most epic set of photos I have. So prepare yourself for a long sit; without further ado, The Wonderland Trail, and perhaps the most badass 10 days of my life:

Dividing up food and packing our resupply box

Testing out the extra-light tent that Seth and I made for this trip

We had lunch by this river the first day

Lenny instructed us to "frolic" in the first meadow we came to

Rainier from the NorthWest, where we started. The trail is a loop that goes the whole way around the 14,000 ft. volcano. It's about 100 miles long; in this photo I'm about 3 miles into it!

Seth and Lenny

Rainier from the North

We crossed two suspension bridges like this on the trail. Fun, but very very wobbily!

Mystic Lake, where we camped on night 2

Roasting marshmellows over the camp stove

Mountain Lupine is the purple flower in this picture; it was everywhere

We came across this city of rock towers after crossing a river. We each added one.

Some off-trail slab climbing for fun

Our awesome campsite at Summerland Pass

Rainier from our campsite at Summerland

Grouse that was running around near camp that night

Seth and a marmot!

We saw this herd of mountain goats in the morning after camping at summerland. Apparently it's very rare to see so many at once; usually they're found solitary or in very small groups (2-3). They were grazing together by a little glacial lake near the snow with some kids in tow too. They were quite close to us but didn't seem to mind.

Beginning of the high, snowy section of the trail. There are a disproportionate number of photos of this part; we were only up in the really snowy stuff for a couple of hours, but it was one of the coolest looking (and most fun) parts of the trail, so it got lots of photos.

Seth doing some off-trail glissading

Amazingly, the snow fields bled out into wildflower fields around them. There were lots of wildflowers on the first day too, but nothing like what was to come after the snow.

I led this steepest section up the snow, kicking steps into the slope. It was tons of fun (and not scary at all, though it looks really steep here!)

Coming down from the snowy pass

This was a day of much excitement. After the snow we stopped for lunch at a shelter at a campsite and saw a bear from across the river!

The shelter where we stopped for lunch

No, Seth didn't really leap across this terrifying raging river, but it was fun to stage

Wildflower fields! After the snow, this is all we hiked through that day: miles and miles of wildflowers

Mirror Pond (aptly named)

We hiked by several super-blue lakes this day

Buck just barely growing back his antlers

We stopped about halfway through the trip at the main lodge and visitor's center, where we giddily sat down to a hilariously fancy and pleasantly enormous dinner.

We encountered this tree while hiking in the woods that seems to have turned back around and grown right back into the ground.

A very tenuous section of trail

Rainier from the South

This area was beautiful, filled with these sun-bleached sparse trees and logs, surrounded by huckleberries.
I nearly made myself sick on berries, there were so many and so many different kinds.

Huckleberries

Ranger's cabin at dusk

I've never seen anything like this before. It's unfortunate that there isn't a better sense of scale in this photo, but this wall of granite is probably 100 ft tall, with each of these "rods" being a couple feet in diameter. Apparently granite takes this form when cooled extremely quickly. It looked like the most giant bowl of spaghetti ever.