~John
Our final two days in Seattle we ventured out away from the city to do some hiking. In the cold. In the snow.
Yes, we’re crazy.
Our first hike was Mt. Si in North Bend, Washington. It’s an 8-mile round-trip hike that has a 3100 foot elevation gain. So, it’s a pretty steep hike. And we haven’t done any mountain hiking since we were in Colorado last summer. And, due to unhappy circumstances, we were only able to be in Colorado for a couple days and only did one short, fairly easy hike.
So, even though we do work out on a fairly regular basis at a gym, we live in Texas: the flat land of no trees. The hike was not a piece of cake for us.
Even so, we thoroughly enjoyed the scenery on the hike. Apparently Mt. Si is one of the most popular hikes in the state (OK, maybe just in the area), but since it was cold and snowing we didn’t really feel like there were that many other people on the trail with us. Add some ice and snow to the steepness of the trails, and it was a challenging hike that has motivated us to work a little harder at the gym in preparation for Colorado this summer.
Needless to say, after Mt. Si we just headed back to the hotel, took a hot shower, and ate leftovers while watching a DVD. (Two Weeks Notice, if you must know; John was adequately exhausted to not even care that it was a chick-flic, though, in all fairness, we watched Gladiator the next night.)
Our second day of hiking was a combination of shorter hikes to see some waterfalls: Snoqualmie Falls (which is really just off the highway), Twin Falls, and Coal Creek Falls. Again, it was cold and snowy, but really beautiful. The Twin Falls trail is pretty easy, and actually included a few smaller falls as well as the big Twin Falls.
Before Coal Creek Falls, we attempted to visit Franklin Falls. Although it had been snowing pretty consistently most of the day, none of the roads we had yet seen looked anything like the road leading to Franklin Falls:
We decided to just drive down to the trail parking lot and see if we could even hike very far without snow shoes. Shortly after passing a snowed-in house complete with a truck in the driveway buried in an avalanche of snow, we came to this:
And that’s when we decided to turn around in our little compact Pontiac G6 rental car. We also had a conversation at this point about snowmobiles and how it would be nice to have one and that both of us agree it would be a fun thing to do, especially if we could find a way to do it for free.
If you haven’t noticed, we’re really all about "free".
So on we went to an alternate trail: Coal Creek Falls. The park where this trail is located consisted of multiple trails, not always well marked. We scrutinized the map for a while. I had printed what I considered to be pretty detailed directions on how to make a loop trail and see the falls. Off we went.
We got to the falls with no problems, and, thankfully, no more rain or snow! The problem came when we hiked another mile or so past the falls and got to a split in the trail that was marked with names not on my detailed directions for the hike. After some discussion we decided to just turn around and go back the way we’d come from.
We probably hiked longer than we planned and ended up going up and down and up and down a hill that we probably should have bypassed completely, but, on the bright side, we got to see the falls twice.
We consulted the map again when we got back to the parking lot to see where we went astray. That’s when John got the brilliant idea that we could have just taken a picture of the map, like so:
Then we would have had the map with us on the trail. Ummm, maybe next time.
We really had a lot of fun on our trip. Having to sit in separate rows on the fully-booked flight back home was not the greatest way to end the trip, but we took comfort in the fact that the flight was free…and then we treated ourselves to pizza for dinner once we got back home.
Mmmm. I might be able to eat pizza every day.
But not tonight. Tonight is leftovers night, and having leftover pizza in this house is rare.
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