North Cascades Jaunt

Gnarly fall weather moved into the Seattle area, nixing the backpack in the Olympics we had planned for Kelsey's visit. Instead, we opted for a couple of days over in the Methow Valley ... for some day hiking and mountain biking.

A hike that had been on our list for some time, Maple Pass Loop, just happened to be on the way ... so we took advantage of the not-quite-as-gnarly weather to explore it. And what a fantastic hike! Not too strenuous, constantly changing huge views of peaks and several valleys, and clouds moving in and out. The first fall snow had hit in the previous few days, but only a couple of inches at the deepest. It posed no big problem for hiking, but put a really nice frosty look on things. Some fall colors were around, but the larches were just barely starting to turn. Oh well, I guess we'll have to do it again sometime.

During her visit, Kelsey was training for a marathon in late October. She needed to run (which we can't do anymore) so we left her to her running, and went for a mountain bike ride. We're pretty used to driving on logging roads, but the one we met on the way to the trailhead was hair raising. Rough, rocky, rutted, narrow, and steep. Neither of us were very comfortable there for a while! We had hoped/planned to do a 12 mile loop, but only made it about 3 or 4 miles before we had to turn around ... a combination of fatigue (from the altitude?) and running smack dab into a prescribed burn. It ends up that the Ponderosa Pine forests generally don't have any underbrush, since fires naturally occur and burn it up. In this case, the Forest Service must have decided that this area had too much underbrush (perhaps from fire suppression policies), and lit a fire. It wasn't burning hard, but you could see some flames here and there, and lots of smoke over probably 10 or 20 acres. As we watched for a while, the flames would die out in one spot and pop up in others. And nobody was around to keep an eye on it or anything. Pretty interesting.

Our final day, we hoped to get in a dayhike in the North Cascades, but the weather was socked in and drizzly (even over on the east side of the mountains), so we just packed it up and headed home. Not quite as great of a trip as we had hoped, but still pretty good ... and relaxing!