What an awesome send-off before we venture down to California! We spent this past Saturday night in the Park Butte lookout tower on the South-West side of Mt. Baker and the mountain was an amazing sight! Our last training hike ended up being one of the better ones, thanks to a few different factors.

I have a confession to make. I am somewhat of a control freak, a “Type-A,” a perfectionist. This condition has worsened over
the years. Most recently it has transformed into the angry beast of anxiety accompanied by the dark monster of depression. This terrible duo has severely affected my life this past year, to the point that I’ve had to be on medical leave from my career as an elementary school teacher.

We’re getting down to the wire, which means down to the nitty-gritty bits of preparation. My biggest focus these past couple weeks has been on our resupply package. This is my first long trail, which means my first time using a resupply system. A few months back, as we were figuring out our itinerary, we made the decision of how best to resupply ourselves. Being Canadian, we’re struggling with the problem of our dollar being rather low.

A couple weekends ago we had an amazing trip to Mount Rainier National Park with the friends that will be joining us for a section of our JMT hike. Our goal was to hike up to Camp Muir, on the South-East shoulder of the mountain. The hike climbs nearly 5,000 feet in 4 miles, travelling over the Muir Snowfield.

This year we knew we had to get our packs on and do a “shake down.” Thankfully we are lucky enough to have an amazing National Park right in our back yard. North Cascades National Park is about a 2 hour drive from where we live and has a huge variety of backcountry trails. We studied our map and some trip reports and finally decided to hike alongside Ross Lake on the East Bank Trail.

We’re now under 2 months until we leave on our trip! ​This past week we’ve been gathering and weighing our…