Spring

Every time we drive down I-90 going into eastern Washington we pass a large bridge with a big sign saying “Palouse to Cascade state park trail”. Ever since I first saw it, I’ve had my eye on the Palouse to Cascade state park trail as an amazing adventure to do some day. Bit of background - It’s a 289 mile trail (350-ish including detours) starting in Cedar Falls near North Bend and going all the way to Treskow on the border of Idaho.

We kicked off our first backpacking trip of the season this weekend - the forcast 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.

Bryce canyon was our second national park of the Utah national parks trip. The park was much smaller than I was used to, but there were still plenty of things to see/do. Bryce is a hikers national park (vs canyoneering at Zion) and most of the things you want to visit are day hikes (although some of them can be quite long for a day hike). There was only one trail that we didn’t do (or at least not all of it) out of the the list of the top hikes in the park.

Welcome to Zion! When we had our Galapagos plans fall through, we decided to meet up with the family in Utah for a National park trip - starting with Zion National park. We only spent 3 days here, but we did get a good taste of the park through some canyoneering and biking. Zion is known for Canyoneering - which is where you climb up/down steep walled canyons often by walking through/in the water.

So - we had so much fun in hiking in the north cascades the last time that we decided to go back, this time with Kayaks. The plan was to drop our kayaks off just below Ross lake dam, right at the end of the Diablo lake trail, and then hike the Diablo lake trail to get to them and kayak across Diablo lake back to the Van - traveling down the long arm of the Diablo lake from Ross dam.

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.