Backpacking

Sara and I decided to take a backpacking trip for the long weekend - probably our most ambitious to date. After some deliberation, we decided on Ross Lake - which is just north of Diablo lake in the North Cascades National Park. We arrived on the night of Aug 31st to pickup our permits - only to discover that they closed at 4p and weren’t going to open til the next day. No big deal - we slept in the van at a beautiful boat launch and then headed over at 7a to pickup our permits. We were planing on staying at Roland creek camp and then rainbow point the second night. This was going to be a 7 and 9 mile push with over 1k feet of elevation change in two separate days (with a shorter day in the middle) - and Sara was carrying some of her stuff now… We will see how this goes!

Taking advantage of the long weekend, Sara and I went for a backpacking trip on Sunday/Monday out to the Ozette triangle on the Olympic Peninsula. As expected in a rain forest, it rained the entire weekend - but we still had fun. The Olympic coast is a wild place and it’s amazing to visit in sunny weather and not. 5/26/2024 Ozette Triangle After a change of plans where our sailing trip was cancelled, Sara and I decided to go on a different kind of adventure. I’ve been wanting to do some more backpacking this summer - having fond memories of the few trips we have done in the past. This weekend, we did the Ozette triangle - a trip that I have been meaning to do for a long time. Back in 2012, I did a solo 4 day trip along the Olympic coast from the south end of the Ozette triangle all the way to oil city - which is the entire length of the trail, with the exception of the coastal leg of the Ozette triangle. I found the Olympic Coast to be magical back then, and it still is today.

We kicked off our first backpacking trip of the season this weekend - the forecast was for rain so we decided to embrace it and head out to the rainforest. We had done the Bogachiel river rainforest last year, so we opted for the Hoh river rainforest this year. We were destined for rain, but we had all the right gear so we were ready… :) But first, we headed out on a Friday afternoon and stopped for dinner on our way to the trip. We stopped for pizza about 2 hours out of Seattle and got a great pizza with some ice cream and cobler for desert. Just the right dinner for a big/strenuous trip into woods.

Sara’s first backpacking trip! It was amazing for everyone - Sara had a great time and it was an overall positive experience. Even more impressive, our little 4 year old hiked 12.5 miles over 2 days!!! I will admit that I didn’t plan it that way - we had to hike a bit longer to find a campsite than we had origionally planned, but mostly Sara wanted to go find blackberries and hiked over 3 miles to find them… Anyway, here’s the story.

Backpacking Trip Report Your browser doesn't support embedded videos, but don't worry, you can download it and watch it with your favorite video player! The third (and final) installment of our Yellowstone trip was the backpacking trip. What an amazing trip it was… We went to a pretty remote part of the park which actually crossed out of the national park and into the national forest twice during the trip. We saw some wildlife, some of it got a little two close, and we saw some amazing scenery, flowers, animal sign, and most importantly - we found the remoteness that recharges me. Sara was with her grandparents for this one, so it was just Angela and I.

The Wonderland Trail! This was the most amazing backpacking trip that I’ve ever had (so far) and while it’s several years later as I write this, many of my memories of the trip are still very vivid. This is my first post of an adventure from before I started this blog - hopefully one of several to come. To start, I thought some background on the wonderland trail would be useful. The trail is anywhere from 93 miles to 102 miles (depending on route choice and detours) and a cumulative 22,000 feet (6,700 m) of elevation gain. It was first built/hiked by the mountaineers in 1915 and was considerably longer (130-140 miles) but took hikers an average of 3-4 weeks to hike it. For us, it took a total of 10 days and our final distance was a little over 100 miles.

Back in 2015, with Oakley being only a few months old, I craved some adventure. For some reason Angela wasn’t able to come, so Oakley and I headed out to the Okanagan to a place called Eagle lake. This place really was the middle of nowhere - as I discovered painfully… 2015-03-18 We had a very long drive to get out to Eagle lake - almost 5 hours. I left on Friday morning and we didn’t end up getting to the trailhead until afternoon. The final stretch of road up to the trailhead was covered in snow - which did not bode well for our hike - but we went ahead anyway.

This one is taking us way back. In Aug 2014, Angela and I had only been dating for ~9 months and this was the second backpacking trip we had been on together. The plan was kinda simple - park at the drop Sol Duc hotsprings, pay a van to take us to the Hoh Rainforest trailhead, and then hike from Hoh to Sol Duc over the next 3 days. Our van driver mentioned something about why are you doing it this way, most people do it the other way - not sure what he meant.