hiking

I was completely oblivious of our nearest national park until only a couple years ago. Now that I’ve had the chance to explore it, I consider it one of my favourite parks, and one of the best places to venture for a weekend of hiking.

​Sunrise is a truly beautiful area of Mount Rainier to explore. We were lucky enough to get a taste of much of it, spending a couple nights at backcountry sites, a couple nights at a front country campground, hiking low, hiking high, seeing sunsets and sunrises.

The day after our aborted backpacking trip in the north-east corner of Mount Rainier National Park was grey and dreary, though a bit less rainy. After some discussion and perusal of our map, we decided to head to Glacier Basin, a trail that conveniently started about 50 feet from our campsite.

The John Muir Trail is a 220-mile trail starting in Yosemite Valley of Yosemite National Park, passing through Inyo National…

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.

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.

For our second training hike of the season we decided to stay a bit more local Eagle Bluffs is a relatively easy, very rewarding and popular summertime hike on Vancouver’s North Shore. A couple summer’s ago we were able to do the “normal” approach, from Cypress Provincial Park. On that approach you climb the ski-hill, wander through a ridge-top forest and then drop down to the rocky bluffs.

At first I really didn’t feel like blogging about our hike from last weekend as there isn’t a whole lot to…