4th of July

Thursday I really didn't do much, worked on my blogs and cleaned house.  Joe on the other hand went hiking. He didn't get back to the park until almost 6pm.  He had a great hike, to read about it go to Joe's Trip Log.  The pics are great.

Now it is Friday the 4th, we are heading to Shelton WA.  We will be staying at the Little Creek Casino.  My sister in law lives about 37 miles from there in Yelm WA.  We will be spending the day with them.  I haven't seen my late brothers family in many years.  It was a great reunion.  It was so nice to get in touch with family again.  Everyone looks great!

Chris and girlfriend Kim

Andy and wife Nicole

Sister in law Linda

We had a great barbecue and fun talking over old times.  We were going to go see fireworks but we all were tired and we wanted to get back before all the traffic hit.
Saturday night we are going to the races in Grays Harbor.  As it turns out, Kim has family that will be racing there so they are all going to join us at the races, except for Andy and Nicole won't be coming.  I am looking forward to seeing them once more before we move on!

Trip to Sunrise (7/2)

I wasn't able to sleep very much last night.  My body ached so much but I feel better this morning and am ready for a road trip to Sunrise.  Sunrise is the eastern side of Mt Rainier and the highest point you can drive to at 6400 ft.  Mt Rainier itself is 14,410 ft.  It is right up there with Mt Whitney.  The drive through the park is breath taking.  There is so many sights to see and water flowing everywhere.  More waterfalls than I could count.  At at first view point the mountain was in the clouds with just the top of it poking through.  Joe tried to catch it but the clouds were moving fast.  It is a long drive to Sunrise and takes most of the day.  The views of Mt Rainier are so different from this side.

We had lunch at the snack bar, just hamburgers.  Then Joe wanted to hike down one of the trails.  You get such a different perspective from here.  You are looking down on everything instead of looking up.  He hurried back and said there is this great view you have to come see it.  So I changed to tennis shoes and off we went.  Here is what we saw.

 

These little flowers were purple but it doesn't show.  The lake you see in the picture was aquamarine in color and breath taking.  I went back to the
parking lot while Joe took another trail.  My knee was still hurting from yesterdays hike.

 This is the visitor center at Sunrise
In the picture to the left is the picnic area, it had a lot of kids playing in the snow.



Once Joe gets back we head for home, it is already 3 pm and a long drive back to Ashford where we are staying.
On the way back we have to go through Stevens Ridge.  It is a wonder how they built the road through here.
That is the road running along the side of the mountain and the drop offs were very steep, I don't like heights so I had a hard time.  I couldn't even look at the view out my window. There is no guard rail!!!!!!

Wonderland trail/Rampart Ridge trail (7/1)

What a beautiful  day for a hike, the sun is out and the sky is blue and it is warm out already this morning.  We make the short drive to the Longmire visitor center where we pick up the Wonderland trail.  For those of you who don't know this trail, it is a 100 mile trail around Mt Rainier.  This is a trail I dreamed of hiking when I was younger and thought I could do that big of a backpack trip.  Since starting hiking this morning I now know this is not a hike to be taken likely.  We are only on the wonderland trail for 1.8 miles before it joins the rampart ridge trail, but I can see that you either are hiking up hill or down hill, very little flat.  The first 1.8 miles isn't to bad, it let me get warmed up for the next 4 miles of up hill, some moderate some pretty steep.  But the scenery is beautiful.  There is nothing like the smell of the forest!!!!!!

 I was feeling pretty tired when we stopped for our first break.  It had been a really long up hill to get here.  It felt so good to sit down for a little while.  Once back on the trail we started to go down hill.  I thought this can't be good if we have to go back up it!.  It seems the ridge we were following drops down for a while then starts back up.  We came upon a beautiful little waterfall just where the trail starts to go up.


We start going up and before long we are in the snow, just patches at first then it gets pretty snowy.













We keep hiking but it wasn't long before the snow got pretty deep and we were walking on top of it, we were following someone's foot prints.  Then there were no foot prints, but we didn't let that deter us, we tried to go further.  It didn't take long before we knew we needed to turn around.  The snow is slushy and slippery and lots of steep drop offs not what we were ready for.  We retraced out steps back until we came to a switch back that we didn't remember taking.  Joe went a head and I kind of followed, but we both knew this wasn't right.  Again we backed tracked a little ways when Joe saw our mistake.  He stepped on something and in looking closer he saw it was the top of the trail sigh buried in the snow, no wonder we didn't know where we were!

We found a nice sunny spot with a spectacular view to have lunch.

Time to head back down.  I have never done such a long continuous down hill in my life.  You don't realize how steep the up hill was until you go down it.  My knees were screaming at me about half way out. I didn't think we would ever reach the trail junction. We finally made it and decided to go to the right and continue down the rampart ridge trail and make a loop out of the hike.  We were one the wonderland trail for .2 miles to the next turn off. I was not happy when I saw it said Longmire 3 miles.  If we had gone the other way it was only 2 miles.  I was happy that it was at least mostly flat for a ways.  There was a viewpoint at 1.5 miles.  This it the last view of the mt. for today.

We still had 1.5 miles to go and the down hill started.  I thought I'd never walk again by the time we got to the truck.  My feet, knees and lower back were screaming at me not to move. All that pounding down hill had taken it's toll on me.
Even with the ending pain this hike was well worth it.  To celebrate making it back in one piece I had a bottle of Moose Drool Beer.  It was actually pretty good.  At least I didn't lose my sense of humor!!!!!!

Mt Rainier coming up (6/30)

Monday morning was sunny and beautiful.  We get packed up and on our way by 9:30.  We have to go back the way we came to get to Mt Rainier. We usually don't like to back track, but it was the only way we could make the Dirt Cup Sprint car race in Burlington.  The traffic this morning is good not to heavy for a Monday morning.  We go from the 5 to the 405 to 167 to 161 to 7 and finally to the 706.  We are staying in the Mounthaven RV Resort.  It is less than a mile from the entrance to Mt Rainier.  We had a difficult time parking, our space is at quite an angle and the next sites sewer hook up is close to where we need to park to miss our electric box.  It took some maneuvering but we finally got it in. (after a lot of frustration from me).

We are in site 16, notice where hook ups are of site 15!  LOL





Once set up we go to the Wild berry Himalayan restaurant.  They have Yak and Water Buffalo burgers, not to sure about that so I played it save and got the Sherpa stew and Joe go some kind of Himalayan beef dumpling,  Both were very good. What made the stew different was the spices they use.  They also had american food, but we have never tried Himalayan before so it was a good experience.  I topped it off with a hot fudge brownie alamode. It really hit the spot.
Next we drive into the park to talk to the rangers about hiking trails.

First look at Mt Rainier

Got a lot of information, enough to keeps us hiking for weeks, but we only have three days.  Tomorrow we will start on the Wonderland trail for a ways then join into the Rampart Ridge trail which you can make a loop out of.  Not sure what the mileage is but it looks like fun!!!!!

Trip to the Port Townsend Ferry (6/29)

Sunday the KOA is having a pancake breakfast or you can get biscuits and gravy.  We both got the pancakes, they were very good.  They came with sausage, coffee, juice or milk, all for $4.  Breakfast is out of the way now what to do? It is still cloudy but at least it is not raining.
We needed to check out the Port Townsend Ferry as we will be taking it on July 28th.  It is a really nice drive up through Anacortes then down to Coupeville.  We were able to get the fairs and confirm that we could take our fifth wheel on the ferry.  In another week we will be in the Ho Rain Forest in the Olympics.  From there we will be going to Canada.  Instead of taking the very long way around we will put the fifth wheel and us on the Port Townsend Ferry and cross to Coupeville.  This will cut about 100 miles off our day.  From there we get on the 5 all the way to Canada.  We got our reservations and are ready to go.

On the way back from Coupeville we stopped at Deception Pass Park.  It is a really nice park, with camping hiking and picnicking.  It is right on a small bay, with several islands.  Most of the towns on this stretch of road are islands, they have water on both sides.  We took a nice walk on the beach over to the east shore then took the trail trough the woods back to north shore.  It was sunny with blue skies here so it was glorious.  It felt good to get out and stretch our legs.  The bridge from Deception Pass to the next island is quite interesting.  It goes across to a small island in the middle, then again across to the next island.











 Driving back to Burlington you can see clouds building again, but by the time we got to the KOA the sun was out.  We went for a walk in the woods behind the KOA.  Slugs everywhere and they are big and slimy. There were trails everywhere but leading to no where.  It was a nice walk anyway. This was our first opportunity to walk around the KOA and check out the other campsites.  We are in the best place, all the other areas have big groups that were loud and liked to party.  Back at the fifth wheel we tried to get a campfire going but no luck.  We didn't have any small wood and the ground was to wet, we couldn't get it started so we went in to watch a movie.

Do nothing day (6/28)

Saturday, of course it is raining again, still~the races at Skagit were canceled last night.  They are suppose to run Friday nights race at 11 today and then run the scheduled Saturday race at 7 tonight.  I am wishing them luck.  We went to breakfast at the Hottie Totties Deli.  Very good breakfast, I had a scramble which consisted of eggs, ham, sausage, red and green peppers and onion, smothered in pepper jack cheese.  Yummy!!!!!  Joe had a huge plated of biscuits and gravy, more than he could eat!

By the time we finished eating it was race time.  It still looked pretty bad out so I decided not to go.  Joe went and ended watching the kids race on a little track next to the main on.  He said they were very aggressive even flipping and kart wheeling their little 1/4 sprints. In the mean time, two hours later, they are still trying to pack the track for the afternoon race.  Of course it starts to rain again and the race was canceled.

I didn't go to the night race either, knowing it was going to rain again before the night was over.  I regretted not going.  I was getting depressed and bored with nothing to do.  The heat races and some of the mains went off without a hitch.  But the track messed around for to long, so by the time they started the feature race the weather was getting iffy.  So 25 laps into the feature it started pouring and the race was called. Joe hurried to the truck and luckily the to vehicles in front of him had already left, he had to put it in four wheel drive to get out of the mud.  Many cars were stuck and having a hard time getting out.   Don't think we will be coming back to this track.  Don't like the way they do things, and from what we understand this is business as usual you just deal with it.

Tomorrows another day, hopefully it will be better!!!!!