Our latest trip was up to the North Cascades National Park - which was an amazing place, far more than I expected this time of year. It’s a national park, but they allow dogs to hike on trails and they don’t really have an entrance/exit. The place we went hiking was about 3 miles from the end of the road (where the close the north cascades highway for the winter) and right after the big dam/lakes in that area.
We left on Friday night (so I could go to a license appointment in Bellingham on the way) so we did both of our hikes on Saturday. The first was called the Trail of the Cedars:
This ended up being a bit more of a nature walk than it was a hike, but it was fun for both of us. The trail was a bit over a mile and it had a bunch of interesting things to see. I did not know, for example, that the heartwood is not alive on trees and some trees (like the PNW red cedar trees) a fungus can decay the inside of the trunk of a tree but leave the tree alive - with the inside of it being hollow!
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Here’s some pictures/videos from the trail of the cedars:
The next hike we did was to Pyramid lake. This one was really cool - given the time of year and the inclement weather - there was nobody on the trail and it felt really remote. There was also no service and I didn’t download the map ahead of time, so I didn’t know exactly how far it was to the lake. Turns out, we turned around just a couple of min too early… :)
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Here are some pictures from the trip:
Pretty cook picture of our van from above… :)
Finally, we did some camping. We have a pretty good system going, but this was the last trip without the house battery - so we have some serious comfort coming in our future. This trip involved a lot of very beautiful driving and the camping was amazing - especially the first night at the national forest camp (nobody there because they close down the ammenities for the winter (no water, bathrooms, etc).
Some views from the road:
