From Sea to Summit

Hi. Today was beautiful. The sun was shining, the temperature just right, and not a cloud in the sky. You gotta love those perfect autumn days! I know, I know I've been terrible at keeping up with my weekend adventures. Here I'll catch you up on the past two weekends!

Oh the Pacific Ocean..

Two weekends ago, I convinced Aaron he wanted to do a mini backpacking trip with me in Olympic National Park. I had been jonesing to get out to the coast and do some hiking for some reason. So Friday after work, we packed the truck, made sure we had our rain gear (100% chance of rain on Saturday). We took a ferry to Bainbridge Island and drove to a Walmart in Port Angeles to stay the night. We bought a few groceries and we finally stumbled across a great way to make curtains for the truck! Aaron got the curtains set up in such a way the truck is totally dark and we can easily slide the curtains to the side in the morning. In the morning, we went to Chestnut Cottage for breakfast and got served the biggest piece of coffee cake in the the world. We then continued our drive to Ozette.

The baby seal was stranded :(

Low tide leaves bad smelling seaweed.

It was raining the whole drive there but when we got out of the truck to start unloading and figuring out our gear, Mother Nature decided it was a great time to pour and be windy. We put our rain gear on and stuck through it. Right as we finished assembling our gear, the rain stopped. We stuffed our packs and started hiking towards the coast. As we were hiking, it drizzled a little bit but nothing too serious. We made it to Cape Alava and then started hiking on the beach. The tide was on it's way out and there was piles of seaweed and other unknown smelly things all over. It wasn't the easiest walk ever although we were on flat ground. We made it to Sand Point and it started to rain a bit and we decided to set up camp. So we found the best camping spot available and set up camp. The rain had stopped so we took a little walk along the shore. We scrambled up some rock to get a cool lookout over the Pacific Ocean. We were standing up there, the sun was shining for a bit, and then it wasn't. We were on our way off the rock and it rained. Like rain rain rain. We walked back to camp, started a campfire, and boiled water for dinner. We had a tarp set up to block the rain and we enjoyed our freeze-dried dinners at the campfire. We eventually made our way into the tent and played some cards before falling asleep.

Amanita

Sunday, we woke up, tore down camp and made our way back to Seattle. It was a great mini backpacking trip :)

Proof it was in fact sunny for a few moments.

Now, I'm finally on what happened two weekends ago! On Friday, we went to Lee's birthday party and some drinks with a bunch of cool people who are super into mountaineering and rock climbing. Saturday morning, we woke up and made our way to Leavenworth. It is Oktober-fest so you can imagine the people! We did two trad climbs: Poison Ivy Crack (5.9) and Existential Exit (5.10a) and I got my butt handed to me. We then went to The Pocket. I was crushing it and got to a new high point!! I won't go into much detail but enjoy the pictures!!

Aaron and I happy we didn't experience Tidepocylapse this time!

Sooo close! This project just needs to be sent!