This past weekend, Mike and I made our first trip to the peninsula to go on a hike in Olympic National Park. Our friend from college, Rich, and his girlfriend Zena, who both live in southern California, flew up to go with us.

We drove about an hour on Saturday morning to pick up Rich and Zena from the train station in Tacoma. Once we had eaten lunch, purchased all our food for the trip from a supermarket, driven 2.5 more hours to get to the park, and hit up the ranger station for maps and permits, it was pretty late in the afternoon. We start our hike a little before 5PM. Luckily, the days are already insanely long in Washington, so we had about 4 hours of daylight left in which to hike the 3600 feet of elevation gain (over four miles) that lay between us and our campsite for the night.

Unfortunately, we overshot the campsite and ended up hiking an extra 20 minutes or so up the mountain before we realized what we had done.





Mike and Rich, realizing our error. We were all pretty hungry at this point, so no-one was very happy with our mistake. Luckily, there were some awesome views from where we were.

After figuring our that we had hiked by the campsite, we quickly retreated down the mountain and set up our tents and made some dinner.



I believe that we had already eaten at this point (I mean, look how Mike is smiling! I'm sure he wouldn't look so happy without some food in his belly). At first I thought Rich was opening up that can, but I think he is actually using his finger to scrape out any last bits of food. Yum!

After dinner, we hung a bear bag and hit the hay.

The next morning, after breaking up camp and eating a breakfast of yogurt and homemade banana bread, we hit the trail. One of the things I love the most about backpacking are the mornings. You wake up effortlessly at an early hour and you're already out in this beautiful place. Everything seems a lot more peaceful in the morning, even in the wilderness. Sometimes I wonder, though, if it just seems more peaceful because my brain isn't fully functioning until at least 10am.

Anyhow, we hiked back up the mountain to where we were the night before and got silly taking pictures.



Rich and Zena were talking about something with each other, so Mike and I decided to take pictures of Mike eating Zena's head. Good times!



Then we took turns posing with the awesome view. We took about 15 pictures up here, but I'll just post this one.

Once we were done with our picture break, we headed down a very steep talus slope. The rocks/dirt were all very loose, so we more slid down the mountain than hiked it. From what I've read since doing the hike, the whole next portion of our hike was on trails deemed "unmaintainable" because of the steep and narrow nature of the trail. The park ranger who gave us our permits told us there was a decent chance that part of this trail would still be snowed over and that we may find it impassable and have to turn back.



Me, Zena, and Rich heading down the trail. Steep!



A closeup of Rich encouraging Zena as she slid down the slope. Zena grew up in Texas and now lives in LA, so, unlike all of us who were used to navigating slippery snow and ice and being out of control of our body weight, she wasn't very comfortable with these parts of the hike.

After our initial steep descent, the trail leveled out some and we found ourselves hiking a ridge of sorts. The trail here was narrow and there were steep drops to our right. There were also awesome views of the clouds covering the ocean.



Check it out. We were up over 5000 feet at this point, so we were actually ABOVE the clouds that people at sea level were experiencing! It was awesome to see. All of that white in the picture is a blanket of clouds. We were so glad we had decided not to hike on the coast!

After hiking on and off through snow, we eventually made our way to the top of a saddle. There was another pair of hikers up there, so we took pictures of each other. There were views in almost every direction at this point, so while the other hikers set of down the trail, we hung out to eat our morning energy bars.



Chillin' on the saddle.

The trail we continued on was once again a very, very steep descent down a talus slope. Later in the day when we saw it from far away we were shocked to see how unhikeably steep it looked from a distance.

After a bit, we were able to see the other hikers ahead of us in the distance. The trail was no longer losing elevation, but there were a very steep drop to the left of the trail. A few minutes later I looked ahead again and noticed I could only see one of them. I said to the others, "Hey - where's the other one?". As we hiked some more, it became evident that something was up. At first we thought that one of them was hiking off the trail to take a shit and we were amused because we could totally see him. Then we realized that the orange item in his hand was not a trowel (for poop hole diggin'), but a rope. His friend has slipped on some snow and fallen off the trail and down the mountain!

She was about 150' off the trail, bracing herself on her hands and knees in an attempt to keep herself from falling down any further. She hadn't fallen off a cliff or anything, but the slope was steep enough and the terrain loose enough that she couldn't climb back up to the trail unassisted. Luckily, Rich had a long length of rope in his pack, so we were able to help her back up to the trail.



In this picture, I'm standing on the trail, and Rich has descending to the most level piece of ground he could find. As you can see, she had fallen quite a bit.



This second picture shows Rich tying his rope around his waist. Rich then gave the other end of the rope to the guy trying to help his hiking partner, who then threw his rope down to her. They formed a daisy chain of sorts and we able to give her the security and leverage she needed to climb back up.



Here's a zoomed in shot of her climbing her way out.

It was a decently scary situation, so I'm really glad we were there at the right time and we prepared to help them out. She wasn't hurt beyond some scrapes and scratches on her hands, and she and her hiking partner had a first aid kit and insisted they would be fine, so we continues on our hike. Zena and I felt a lot of empathy for her - we both agreed we would have been very frightened were we to find ourselves in a similar situation.

There was snow obscuring much of the trail at this point and we had to more or less forge our own way up to the next ridge.



Mike and Zena hiking their way through the snow.

By the time we got up to the next ridge it was almost 1pm. So we stopped to soak up the amazing views and eat our lunch.



Mike and Rich on the ridge.

We then hiked for quite a ways along the ridge. The views were utterly amazing, but you'll have to take my word for it. The panaromas were just so huge that there was no way I would be able to do them justice with my little camera, so I chose to just enjoy them while I was there.



Here's Mike on a snow mound pretending that he's just scaled some giant mountain. We were actually pretty high up though - around 6400 feet or so, I think.



And here is a shot of the slope I mentioned earlier that looked unhikeable from a distance. You see that dip between the two rocky peaks? That was the saddle we were standing on when the other hikers took our group picture. And that slope is what we descended. Badass.

The hike went on for quite some time after this point, but were were descending from the ridge down to Lake Angeles and then down a bunch more to where we had parked at the trailhead, so there weren't many more views.



Here's a shot of Lake Angeles from above. This was the last picture I took.

The descent from the ridge to the parking lot was more than 4000 feet, and we had also been going up and down the ridges all morning long, so in all were definitely descended more than 5000 feet on the day. That's enough descending to hobble even strong hikers, and we were all definitely feeling it the next day.

What an amazing hike though. It still blows my mind that I can see things like this on just a little weekend journey.