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.

Rainier from the West 

Our campsite/shelter the last night on the trail

Mowich lake, where we began and ended our hike.  Yes, it was just this color.

Victory jump and (very brief) swim in the very cold lake.

Final victory shot back at the car.

Like I said, I'll follow up soon with all of this things I did before this.

Love you all very much!

Alyssa

Astoria

 Last week we went swimming at the bay with some friends in Astoria.  Even though the images didn't stitch together quite right for the panorama, you get the picture.

Snapped this lovely sunset walking back to Sarah and Gordon's place from town.

Book Reading

We’ve been spending time in Astoria and Portland the past week, helping Sarah and Gordon move into their new place, and we caught a really cool event in Astoria the other night.  Gordon called us from work to tell us that Ken Babbs was doing a reading at the coffee shop that shares the lobby of the hotel he works at.  Ken Babbs is one of the infamous Merry Pranksters; if you’re not familiar they were the group of revolving around Ken Kesey who are the subject of Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” the movers and shakers of 60s subculture.  It was  really interesting and a little surreal to meet someone who was a character in a book I’ve read.  The readings that he did from his book were great: colorful and captivating.  It’s based on his experiences flying helicopters for the USMC in Vietnam, written in 1962 before his days of psychedelic bus trips (but just published recently).  It was great to hear something on that time period from a first person perspective, written with a sense of humor and lightness that makes a heavy subject a little more digestable.  Astoria seems to get some really cool things in the way of music, speakers, etc. for being a fairly small place.

Also, this came in the mail the other day, and I thought you all might like to see it.

XOXOXO

Tree Climbing

Today I was feeling a little less under the weather and I decided to go catch the second half of the tree climbing class that our/Sarah's friend Josh is teaching (the one that Seth went to yesterday).  It was at Shively Park, which is at the top of the hill in Astoria.  Tree climbing has a lot in common with rock climbing in the way of gear, knots, techniques, etc. so some of it was really easy to pick up.  Basically, you use something heavy to sling a rope over a sturdy branch (or, in our case, someone more experienced has already been up the tree and set an anchor way up there) and then you climb on a fixed single rope.  You have one line that connects your harness to the rope above you and one line that connects a foot loop to the rope, and you basically shimmy up it by moving one at a time: sitting in your harness while you slide up the foot loop and then standing up in it so that you can slide your harness line up.  Then repeat.  A lot.  Once you get up to the branches you can climb within them by a different method, where you have two slings attached to branches around you, moving them up to other branches one at a time with you as you climb (this way one is always connecting you to a sturdy branch).  It was tons of fun, and I'm really looking forward to getting to climb again with Josh.  He hasn't done much rock climbing but is interested so it should be a cool set of skills to swap.  No pictures, just having a great weekend and thought I would fill you all in!

Hood River and Mt. Hood

Last week, in between spending time in Portland, we followed the Columbia further east to Hood River, which is kind of the gateway to the Mt. Hood area. Along the way we stopped to check out the swaths of waterfalls that speckle the gorge east of Portland.  They were beautiful, but mostly too crowded to stay and enjoy for long.  Hood River is a cool little town, and we stopped in to visit one of their multiple micro-breweries before we headed up into the mountains to camp.  It feels like a little slice of Colorado dropped right in the middle of Oregon.  It's super sunny there and the town has that iconic Western look to it, with big blocky brick buildings lining the streets.  

We also stopped in at an outdoor store to chat up some locals and get some info one where the best camping is.  The guy we talked to gave pretty sparse detail on the place he sent us to, saying simply, "It's really pretty up there."  Heading up from Hood River, the hillsides are covered with orchards, and views of Mt. Hood reveal themselves as you turn around the hills.  My apologies for the rearview mirror cameo in this photo.  It can be hard to take pictures from a moving vehicle!

When we found the campsite that the guy at the kayak shop had recommended to us, it was indeed pretty, and free to boot.  This is our campsite there; it was mostly an equestrian site with trails for horses and mountain bikes, but I think we might have enjoyed it more on foot.  When we got out for a serious hike our second day there we discovered that "pretty" had been an immense understatement.  Coming up to a ridge, we found views of Mt. Hood towering above us, St. Helens, Rainier, even the Cascades, and some other snow capped peak (which I have yet to identify) laid out before us.  Unfortunately, the sun was in full force that day, making my camera totally inept at capturing the view (sun-baked ice comes out more than a little washed out without the time and a tripod to pick it up).  Other parts of trails there were lovely too.

There were all sorts of wildflowers along the trails (and along most of the roads we drove).

I now understand why Oregon is the "Pine State." I think I've seen more
pine trees this past week than the rest of my life combined.

I promise this raven was more impressive in real life (mostly bigger).
It was darn hard to take a photo of too!

It was beautiful weather while we were there, sunny the whole time.  Seth started to come down with a cold, so we retreated back to civilization.  We stopped in Portland for a few days, and helped our friend/Sarah's roommate Gordon move some things from his apartment there to he and Sarah's new place in Astoria.  Seth is recovering from the cold and is at a big tree climbing class today, and I'm taking it easy as I'm (of course) just getting the cold.  More soon! XOXO

Driving back through the Columbia River Gorge