Greetings from Washington

Greetings from the sunny Pacific Northwest, formerly the dreary Pacific Northwest. Right now we’re in Burlington, WA spending in last night in the Continental US for the next month or so. Tomorrow we enter Canada, then Alaska, then some more time in Canada. We won’t be back to the lower 48 until the end of July. Phase two of our trip will be beginning. We’re expecting longer days, bigger bugs, and more rain.

Me and Delicate Arch

Oh so long ago was Monday a week and on Monday a week it was 95 degrees and sunny. We got up and prepared ourselves for a day at Arches National Park. We filled up our camelpaks and headed into the red butte and arched desert. The Arches drive takes you to and through a few neighborhoods in the park. The first stop being Park Avenue. From there we hiked a little ways and got excellent views of eroded rock formations. After Park Avenue is the Windows section which gave us our first up close experience with arches. The arches in this region were formed because salt from the long extinct seas that used to cover that area forced its way up causing the rocks to jut out. Erosion formed many of the jutting rocks into arches. At the Windows we hiked up to and hung out under the giant arches. Next up was Delicate Arch, the most iconic arch in the park and the arch that was on many signs and pictures in the Moab area. It’s even on Utah’s new license plates. There’s a three mile round-trip hike up to Delicate Arch, but Alicia and I decided to view it from the viewing area instead. From there we hiked up an escalating ridge to get a great view of it from across a gulch. I’m not sure we were supposed to go up there, but it made the decision not to do the official hike worth it. The last stop was the Devil’s Garden which has a plethora of arches, including most famously, Landscape Arch. We hiked to the arch, took our pictures and got out of the scorching sun with only slight sun burns to our name. We then drove back through the park, took a scenic drive along the Colorado River through a canyon and then went back to the campground to relax by the pool. For dinner we went to what we thought was a roadhouse right next to the campground only to find out it was a fine dining roadhouse. So classy was it that they used bandanas for napkins. Alicia had the duck bacon tamales and I had the Mole Turkey Enchiladas. We finished dinner as the sun was beginning to set and decided to go back out into the park to take sunset pictures. We did and some look pretty cool. We watched the sunset from Balanced Rock.

Canyonlands!

Tuesday was a trip to Canyonlands, Moab’s other National Park. Canyonlands is a little further away and split into two parts, Islands in the Sky, which we visited, and Needles, which was a hundred miles in the other direction. We planned on going to Needles but we were exhausted from the first part and chose to spend another afternoon by the pool. Islands in the Sky was definitely worth the visit. We climbed the mesa leading to the park entrance and were greeted with a grand view of a canyon that was carved by now non-existent water. Alicia and I took photos from precarious places and saw more epic vistas of the water formed canyons. I climbed up Mesa arch which overlooks a canyon probably over a thousand feet down. The canyon floor looks like fingers carved into the ground, or maybe like cracks caused by ice. Alicia is family geologist, so you’ll have to ask her about all of the layers of rocks exposed on the walls. All I can tell you is that the ranger giving a lecture on the canyon geology named all of the “neighborhoods” at our campground. Layers like Moenkopi and Morrison. After the pool and a shower we went into Moab and got some ice cream and went into a few shops on the strip. Moab is kind of like Jackson, Wyoming only red instead of green and not as classy. Nice none-the-less.

Petroglyphs at Capitol Reef

Wednesday we packed up camp and headed on our way to Idaho with a stop at Capitol Reef National Park along the way. Capitol Reef is probably Utah’s least known national park and it doesn’t help that it’s in the middle, with Arches and Canyonlands to the east and Zion and Bryce to the west. We could see many of the same geographic features from the other four parks in Capitol Reef: the white rocks and swirls of Zion, the intense redness of Bryce, the arches of Arches, and the long vistas of Canyonlands. We took the scenic drive, but like I said, it wasn’t anything new, though the trek through Capitol Gorge was pretty cool. Capitol Reef does have Native America petroglyphs from about 800 years ago still etched into the walls of the cliffs. It has 19^th century graffiti from Mormons who went through the area. After that we drove north through Utah, getting to Salt Lake City right at five. Fortunately they have an HOV lane so we basically cruised up I-15. Not far across the border into Idaho is Preston, the town where Napoleon Dynamite was filmed. If you knew me in 2004 you knew I was somewhat obsessed with the film. I took pictures by the town sign and in front of the high school. We took a picture of what may be Pedro’s house and were disappointed not to find any tetherball poles in town. Our destination for the night was Pocatello, where we found a cheap, but nice motel across from Idaho State University (Go Bengals) ate at a diner and went to bed.

Alicia blowing away at Craters of the Moon

Thursday we drove deeper into the heart of Idaho. First up was Craters of the Moon National Monument. CotM was the site of a volcanic eruption a few thousand years ago, so the landscape is covered in jagged volcanic rock, which looks like a blackish-red version of the moon. The Oregon Trail went through the area. We hiked a few trails where we learned how humans destroyed a lot of the rocks and hills and cones by walking on them, then summited a large hill common to the area that was covered in volcanic rock. The entire area was windy. Maybe not as windy as Kansas, but the top of that hill definitely was. We planned on cooking hotdogs on our stove but we would have never gotten the stove lit in that wind. We then made our way north to the Sawtooth Mountains and just like that we were back to snowcapped peaks and alpine forests. After driving up and through the mountains we found a campsite by ourselves by a roaring river. I made a fire and we enjoyed a quiet evening alone.

The Sawtooths

Hell's Canyon

Friday, with rain threatening, we packed and headed into Boise to give it a look, then headed northwest towards Hell’s Canyon, the deepest Canyon in the US. The yellow rolling hills gradually get darker and higher as you drive down a narrow winding road, avoiding fallen rocks and other cars riding the yellow line. They say that in parts of the canyon, the rim is over 7000 feet above. They don’t let you drive down that far and neither Alicia nor I are known for our maritime skills, though I did earn Canoeing Merit Badge, so we settled seeing at not at its most hellish, but it’s an impressive canyon and the dark rock only makes it more imposing. From there we drove back the way came in and then crossed over into Oregon, took a winding mountain road over a mountain, met up with the rain, and arrived at our destination for the night, Wallowa Lake State Park near Joseph, Oregon. Wallowa Lake is a picturesque lake overlooked by snowcapped mountains. It was a busy park, which was a complete flip from the night before. We found our spot, set up the tent and the awning and prepared for a soggy night in the Northwest. During dinner it cleared and we drove around the lake taking foggy, cloudy, good light photos. We then went to bad as the rain began again, making for a wet morning.

Lowering Sun at Wallowa Lake

Unfortunately, Friday was dryer than Saturday. The day actually began overcast, cleared up as we drove through Washington, then began to cloud and then rain just after Yakima, less than 60 miles from Mount Rainier National Park. We drove up and over mountains only to find foggy, rainy conditions with zero visibility. I mean, we’re camping on a huge mountain, one that is clearly visible and a noticeably imposing view on the skyline, and we can’t see it. We’re driving through beautiful snowcapped peaks, with partially frozen lakes only a few days before July. We came upon pullouts without trees that certainly held majestic views of this gargantuan mountain. We saw absolutely nothing. When we arrived at the campsite it was soggy and drizzling, so we set up the tent under the awning and made a tarp awning that draped over the picnic table and a large, fallen tree. That came in handy as it began to rain harder. It allowed us place to hang out that wasn’t in the car on lying down in the tent (we have a small tent). By the next morning the rain had stopped but it was still damp and overcast. We packed everything up fairly wet, so good bye to the curious chipmunks, and left the park, hoping to catch a glimpse of the behemoth, unfortunately, it was not to be.

We drove on through Washington, which was alternating between rainy and overcast, bought some Bing and Rainier cherries from a road sign stand, and headed east towards the Olympic Peninsula. Then, a funny thing happened after we passed Olympia – the clouds went away and the sun came out like “What? You think I went away forever?” and the temperatures went into the seventies (from the lower forties earlier in the day) and we arrived at the Pacific Ocean. Did I mention it was sunny for real and pleasant? We had plans to camp in the Hoh Rain forest, but said no thanks and found one of the last available spots at the Kalloloch Campground. The site was still very wet from an earlier shower, but with no threat of rain, who cares. This was National Park land and their aim was to preserve the coastal forest, and since they get a whole lot of rain, the forest was lush and mossy, and the ocean was about 100 yards away. We could hear the crashing waves from our site. After dinner we drove down to Ruby Beach, a pebble beach that overlooked a few rock outcroppings in the ocean. It was sunset, so Alicia and I drank some wine and snapped a lot of photographs of the islands/outcroppings silhouetted in the waning sun. I was kind of looking forward to the rainforest, but this was way better than the forest would have been. It’s amazing what a little sun will do for the spirits.

Sunset over the Pacific at Olympic National Park

Monday we got up and prepared for our day on the Olympic Peninsula and it looked like another great day of weather. We first went to the Hoh Rain Forest, saw some enormous Sitka Spruces, Cedars, and Hemlocks, many covered in moss. The bright greens were illuminated by the bright sun. We walked the Hall of Mosses, saw the biggest maples I’ve ever seen, and marveled at some massive trees. On the last trip we went to the Redwoods and saw a few Sequoias, and while these trees aren’t as big, I do enjoy being around the large trees. I’m glad we didn’t do both the Redwoods and Olympic on the same trip because I feel like the bigness and grandeur of these trees would have been diminished by the Redwoods, but on their own, they were one of my highlights so far.

After Hoh we began Alicia’s Twilight tour by visiting Forks and La Push, two major settings in those books. Forks had Twilight stuff in all the stores and many businesses and ads were still on the bandwagon. We crossed the Vampire/Werewolf treaty line on the way to La Push and bought Twilight postcards from the grocery store. It actually wasn’t too overdone, but then again, we didn’t take the Twilight tour. From La Push we continued on the 101 and drove alongside Crescent Lake and marveled at its blue waters before driving through Port Angeles and setting up camp at Heart o’ the Hills campground. We had a clean-out-the-cooler dinner before driving up to Hurricane Ridge, a grassy mountain top that has a commanding view of the Olympic Mountains, including Mount Olympus as well as distant Mount Baker in the North Cascades and Vancouver Island, on the other side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We took a short hike and had close encounters with grazing deer and some noisy ravens before heading back to camp for a fire and card games.

We woke up today and it was still sunny – two and a half days bright and sunny days in the Pacific Northwest.

We packed up and headed to Bainbridge Island to catch the ferry into Seattle. About thirty minutes into the drive we got up in traffic. An hour later, we had traveled about a mile and passed what was causing the delay, which was a Semi which did its best to run over a minivan which it seems had pulled out in front of it. The EMT’s were gone but the cops weren’t exactly sure, it seems what to do about the wreckage. Fortunately, it was smooth sailing after that. We rode the ferry across the Puget Sound and got our first real view of Mt. Rainier, hulking off to the southeast,went to Pike’s Market, the large market, tourist area in Seattle. We watched the fish mongers toss fish, marveled at other massive, delicious looking seafood, veggies, and flowers and squeezed our way through throngs of tourists. We then walked the mile to the Space Needle, rode the forty two second elevator ride to the top, and spent some time circling the top of the needle, taking pictures of the clear vistas that it provided. On the elevator ride down we learned that Mt. Baker, the second largest mountain in sight was only visible 70-80 days out of the year, so we were lucky to have received such good weather. We then walked back to the car, left Seattle, and are now about an hour south of Canada.

Hey, it's Mt. Rainier! (From the Space Needle)