A different sort of reason for living here.
I'll never forget this trip to the North Cascades. Sefton was seven months old and we wanted to take him backpacking. Granted, we had already backpacked a bunch with him up in the Canadian Rockies for my 15-year sabbatical from REI. But we hadn't taken him to the North Cascades. So, leaving after lunch on a Friday, we headed north.
What should have been a maybe-three-hour drive, allowing us plenty of time to hike in to where we were going to camp beneath the southern flanks of Mount Baker, turned into a seven-some-hour slog through the H-E-double hockey sticks that is the traffic snarl of Puget Sound.
By the time we pulled into the trailhead it was getting dark. We ended up pitching our tent right behind our little RAV4.
From that day until the day we moved, our circle of where we'd go hiking began to shrink. We'd never go back to the North Cascades from our house in Puyallup.
We did enjoy the next day after a leisurely morning camping behind our car, making our way to setting up a little rest stop in the same place J and I had camped on our second backpacking trip ever. Now twenty-one, J was seven at the time. He looks really small.
For us, ten years later, setting up a rest stop meant pulling out a hammock and kicking back in the mountains for a couple of hours. Good times.
J and I had hiked up a trail called Railroad Grade toward the Easton Glacier. It was drizzly but I remember us being above the clouds. K, S, and I on the sunny afternoon we had went a different direction, toward the old fire lookout atop Park Butte.
As with all fire lookouts, the view from its perch was fantastic in every direction.
The view west looked toward the Twin Sister range.
Just right of center is North Twin, and smack dab in the center is the taller South Twin. Many years ago, I climbed North Twin with my buddy Matthew. The west ridge is a classic climb. The valley that runs on the righthand side of the frame is the Middle Fork of the Nooksack River. The Nooksack is a classic North Cascades river. Beyond are the waters of Puget Sound.
Rather than stay the night, we bid farewell to the North Cascades and hiked back to our car.
It was bittersweet, but it convinced us we needed to move. To live closer to the mountains, where it wouldn't take us seven-plus hours to go for a hike.
A year later, we started looking at houses in Wenatchee. Six months after that, we met our realtor Matt at Mela Coffee to look at a few. That afternoon, we put an offer on our house. Not entirely, but partly because we never wanted to have to drive through that sort of traffic again to go do the thing we loved most.
