Jan’s backpacking trip to the Hoh Rainforest. My friend Marc invites me on a 3-day trip up the Hoh River valley in Olympic National Park. I’ve been to the visitor center there a couple of times, but have never actually hiked up the river.
On the way there, we take a break from driving to have lunch on a nameless beach on the wild Olympic Coast. While entering the park, we drive past some elk.
We start hiking in the early afternoon, and have an easy 5 mile hike to a camping area called “Happy Four”. (We later learn the area was named years ago for a four-persona forest crew that grew to dislike each other so much they wouldn’t talk to each other.) There are enormous, old-growth trees everywhere. Overhead we can see bald eagles soaring.
We set up a short distance from the Hoh River, then gather a great deal of wood for a campfire. Our dinner is a rehydrated chicken pho that Marc brought; I augment this with the fresh veggies that usually accompany pho: basil, bean sprouts, and a jalapeño. Because we’re camping, we feel obligated to finish the jalapeño, making the pho far spicier than we need.
During the afternoon and evening, a grouse keeps visiting us. [Google later suggests this might have been a ruffed grouse.] He walks very, very slowly, but doesn’t seem all that afraid of us. Periodically he disappears somewhere, and then we’ll hear him doing a kind of drumming by beating his wings hard.
At dusk, I walk across the camping area to go to hang our food from bear wires set up by the park service. When I hang my food, I typically use my own cord, and have never used one of these wires before. There’s a cable high up between two trees, with several cables hanging down from that. Those cables are on pulleys, and there some hooks on them. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to use them — when I pull the food up, there’s nothing to keep it from coming right back down. Meanwhile, it’s getting dark. I feel like this is some kind of backpacker intelligence test and I’m failing it. I end up having to use a long thick branch to hold down the cable to keep the food in the air.
Jan’s Hoh Rainforest trip, day 2. Marc and I have a leisurely breakfast before breaking camp. On the way out, we stop by the bear wires to see if it’s easier to figure them out in the daylight. “Ah!” Marc spots a bit of cable with a loop on it that’s down near the ground. By hoisting the food up and clipping the cable to the loop, the food stays high in the air. So that’s how they work.
Despite the “rainforest” name, the valley has quite good weather today, including some sun breaks. The trail is a really nice one: easy to follow, gentle ups and downs, with carpets of moss on either side. The valley is surrounded on either side by high ridges that still have plenty of snow on them.
We hike about 7 miles to Lewis Meadow, where we cross the meadow and set up camp close to the river. We can see several elk walking nearby. After lunch, we make a short day hike further up the river before returning to camp. As we reach Lewis Meadow, Marc spots a black bear at the edge of the meadow. The bear, likely spooked by our voices, turns and runs his rotund bear butt away into the forest.
We’re a little concerned that the strong wind blowing up the valley will make for a cold night, but as soon as the sun sets, the wind dies down completely. Now that we know how to use the bear wires, it’s easier to hang our food high up away from the reach of Mr. Bear.
Jan’s Hoh Rainforest trip, day 3. The rainforest finally lives up to its name and graces us with a drizzle. Packing away wet tents isn’t particularly fun, but it’s our last day, so it doesn’t matter much.
We start the 12-mile trip back to the trailhead. The rain lets up after a while, and we eventually stop for lunch at a point where a nice wooden bridge crosses a stream that feeds into the Hoh River. We’re back at the car just after 2:30.
It’s a long drive back to Seattle, so we quick stops for coffee and, later, for a fast-food dinner at McDonald’s. A restaurant employee brings the food out to our car. We ask him how his day is going and he beams, “I’m living the McDream!”
Happy Easter! Bree has invited 3 friends over to hang out, so Angela arranges an easter egg hunt for the girls in our backyard. It’s still a fun activity, although at 13 years of age, the girls make quick work of it.
Jan cooks an Easter dinner that includes little cheese soufflés. They come out nicely.
With Anya away in Taiwan, Angela remakes the cardstock “chore wheel” on our kitchen wall so that it allocates the chores to 3 people (instead of 4): Liya, Bree, and whichever parent isn’t cooking that evening. We decide to combine the recycling/compost chore with the pets chore. It’s hard to come up with a succinct name for the new, combined chore, until Liya hits upon, “Things That Go Outside”.
Jan and Angela’s RV trip to eastern Washington. We rent a 2021 Winnebago Solis from its owner in Renton for 9 days. Jan will travel with Angela to eastern Washington for a 4-night trip, come back home, then head out the next day with Liya and Bree on a 3-night trip in western Washington.
We pick up the RV without issues, then drive it back home so we can load it up. Last year we’d rented a tiny RV camper trailer; this time we thought we’d try a bigger sprinter van. Like the trailer, the sprinter van has a bed, bathroom, kitchen, and a place to sit/eat inside. In its favor, the van has more headroom than the trailer, and is also easier to maneuver.
The van loses points by being made by an American manufacturer that’s not particularly strong at design or quality. There are a number of badly-designed things in the van that bump into each other if they’re not opened/closed in the right order. The van is not even a year old and already showing some problems. The latch on the silverware drawer doesn’t always catch, so when the van goes around a curve, the drawer slides out with a “Bang!” Another drawback of this particular van is that the owner doesn’t use it much themselves, so it’s not well-stocked. The owner’s tried to mark up where various things go. We puzzle over a hatch in the floor labeled, “EMERGENCY EQUIPMENT — ALUMINIUM SPORK”.
By late morning, we’re ready to head east. We make our way up towards Snoqualmie Pass, but around North Bend we start seeing signs saying the highway is closed ahead. Angela checks her phone, and it seems that a freak late-season snowstorm has brought bad road conditions to the pass. Chains or 4x4 are required, neither of which the van has. We check the conditions at Stevens Pass, but they’re just as bad. We retreat to Issaquah to eat lunch at Dough Zone while we come up with a new plan.
We decide to head south all the way to the Columbia River gorge, then travel up the river to Eastern WA. We won’t be able to spend the night at Riverside State Park as planned, but it looks like there are spots at Maryhill State Park along the Columbia. We’ll be on the road longer than we’d planned, but at least we can salvage the rest of our trip.
The driving down I-5 is no more exciting than usual, but the drive up the Columbia River is gorgeous. We’ve got good weather, and the forecast for the rest of the week looks perfect.
Maryhill State Park is a fine but not particularly interesting park. All of the sites with RV hookups are full, but as we pull into a tent site, we see the camp hosts drive by and flag them down. They say they have a nice RV spot (spot 25) they keep in reserve that they can let us use. The spot has a bit of space around it.
We grill dinner outside over a fire, but when the sun sets behind a ridge, it gets too cold to eat outside, so we eat in the van. At dusk we make a walk around the park by the river. The campground is full of RVs of all sizes, each with a group hanging out around a campfire.
The weather forecast calls for low temperatures in the 20s overnight, so we turn on the van’s little propane furnace to keep the van at a reasonable temperature while we sleep.
Jan/Angela Eastern WA RV trip, day 2. We have lots more driving to do today, so we’re up and out of the campground by 9:00 am. We stop in Boardman for coffee at the Jumping Java drive-through, then head to Lyons Ferry State Park for lunch at a picnic table by the Palouse River.
Our plan is to hike from here to a nice spot Jan and Liya discovered a few years ago where it’s possible to forage for a wild green called miner’s lettuce. Sadly, the road into that area is closed to the public. It would take too long to hike there, so that idea will have to wait for another day.
We drive up to look at the amazing waterfall at Palouse Falls State Park. These days, Jan’s lost his tolerance for heights, so he stands well back from the cliff edge — its hundreds of feet to the river below. Angela has no such trouble checking things out from the top of the cliff. We walk around toward another viewpoint, stopping to enjoy shave ice sold from a food truck. When we walk up to the viewpoint, the sun is right behind us, so there’s a big rainbow across the falls.
We drive on to Sun Lakes Park Resort, an RV park in lower Grand Coulee. The RV park has tightly-packed spots, but this early in the season, we’re happy to get plenty of space around us. Once again, we grill dinner on the fire but eat it inside.
After dinner, we walk by the shore of Park Lake. There’s a wetland there with cedar waxwings calling to each other from perches on the reeds.
Back at our campsite, we toast marshmallows for dessert.
Jan/Angela Eastern WA RV trip, day 3. We have a full breakfast of eggs, bacon, and toast. We grill the toast on a burner on this primitive stove-top toaster gadget we have. This means we have three different things to cook at the same time on a 2-burner propane stove.
We make the very short drive from the RV park to Sun Lakes – Dry Falls State Park to go for a morning hike around the long ridge of Umatilla Rock. We make a short detour to see Delany Spring, a wet oasis in the desert climate. As we pass by a patch of reeds, two large birds (partridges? quails? turkeys?) explode up into the air with a frantic beating of wings.
The day has warmed up by the time we make it back to the van. We drive into nearby Coulee City for lunch, but the “city” is tiny and offers few restaurant options. We settle for the Banks Lake Brew and Bistro (and Gas Station). The woman who owns it seems nice, although she’s also a science-denying anti-mask and anti-vaccine advocate. We’re in solid Trump country at this point, and none of the cafe’s patrons are wearing masks. Good coffee, though!
We head back to Sun Lakes Park Resort, stopping at the Dry Falls viewpoint to gawp at the scenery and get a milkshake from the snack stand.
When we’re hooking the van back up to the water, electricity, and the sewer connections, Jan goes to retrieve the van’s gray water hose from its storage tube under the van. The tube is empty — the hose is gone. It looks like the tube is missing a cap on the back end to keep the hose from falling out. When we stowed the hose in the tube this morning, then went driving around, there was nothing to keep the hose in the tube. It’s probably sitting on the side of a road somewhere now. The littering is bad enough, but the more immediate problem is that we now have no way of emptying the van’s gray water tank, so will eventually be unable to use the sink and shower. As luck would have it, the RV resort’s tiny camp store is open, and they happen to have exactly one replacement hose left on the shelf.
We sit outside in the afternoon. Eventually, the wind picks up to the point where it’s too cold to read outside, and we relocate to the van’s sitting/dining area.
Jan/Angela Eastern WA RV trip, day 4. We drive up to Steamboat Rock State Park, stopping for coffee along the way at the same cafe with the anti-vax owner who makes good coffee. We continue on to the Northrup Canyon trailhead, and start a morning hike up the canyon. It’s a beautiful morning for a walk along the canyon bottom through forests of ponderosa pines.
The trail comes to an abandoned farmstead, then begins to climb a bit as it makes its way toward Canyon Lake at the head of the canyon. Arriving at the lake, we find a place to sit down and eat a picnic lunch. There are plenty of waterfowl swimming on the small lake. It’s a bit windy, so as soon as we’re done eating, we begin the walk back down the canyon.
We make the short drive to the campground at the base of Steamboat Rock, a large mesa that’s now mostly surrounded by man-made Banks Lake. We have all the van’s windows and doors open for light and air. Angela reads while Jan putters around the van’s little kitchen preparing dinner.
This evening is a little warmer than in previous nights, so instead of sleeping on the fold-down bed in the back of the van, we pop up the tent-like top of the van to try out the bed up there. That bed turns out to be a roomier and comfier than the main bed.
Jan/Angela Eastern RV trip, day 5. We make a morning hike from the campground to the top of Steamboat Rock. The mesa’s sides are 800-foot basalt cliffs, but there’s one point where rockfalls and erosion have opened a path to the top. There are a few points where the trail up is a bit steep or loose, but after a bit of work we’re at the top.
We make a small loop of the north end of Steamboat Rock, stopping at one point to have a snack while looking out over the cool archipelago of small, rocky islands scattered across the north end of Banks Lake. On the way back across the mesa’s interior, we spot a herd of grazing deer. Later, we see some marmots on a rock outcropping up ahead. Jan blows on his day pack’s emergency whistle. Marmots whistle to each other as a danger signal, so one of the marmots stands up as tall as it can to see what’s going on.
Back at the campground, the weather’s so nice that we decide to eat a picnic lunch at our site rather than grab food from someplace on the road. After lunch, we make the long drive back south to I-90. By now, all the snow from earlier in the week has melted out, and our trip back to Seattle goes by without issue.
Jan/Liya/Bree Western WA RV trip, day 1. Jan and Liya go food shopping in the morning, then Jan spends the rest of the morning repacking the RV for the next trip. Jan, Liya, and Bree will be going to two different state parks in western Washington.
Our first campground is Rasar State Park on the Skagit River, just a 1½ hours from our home. Along the way, Liya picks a playlist of road trip songs. We also talk about Liya’s upcoming college decision — she’s now heard back from all the colleges, and has a couple of weeks left in which to make a choice.
As soon as we arrive in camp, we pop up the camper’s top. Liya and Bree immediately climb up and set up the area where they’ll be sleeping. Much giggling ensues. After setting up, the two climb around on the fallen trees near our site.
We make a short walk down to the Skagit River. The air is warm, but we all dip our feet in the river and it’s freezing. The water was probably snow this morning.
If there were a bridge over the river, we’d play Pooh Sticks as described by A.A. Milne: drop sticks on the upstream side of a bridge, then run to the downstream side and see whose stick emerges first. As a close approximation, the three of us pick different bits of wood from the sandy shore and toss them in the river, competing to see whose bit of wood travels downstream the fastest. Liya’s stick wins.
Meanwhile, Angela heads out for her own 3-night retreat near Mount Si with her cohort of people pursuing a certificate in Spiritual Direction. It’s the first time the group has been able to meet in person.
Jan/Liya/Bree Western WA RV trip, day 2. We’re heading to Whidbey Island today. Our route takes us near the town of Mount Vernon, and we make a detour to check out their annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival.
All the tulip gardens have sold out of tickets online, but we find a working farm with huge fields of colorful tulips where people can park and walk around the fields. There are swathes of orange tulips, red tulips, purple tulips, white tulips, and bright, bright pink tulips. There are also big fields of yellow daffodils.
We have lunch in Anacortes on the patio of Bob’s Chowder Bar, then go for a walk on the Tommy Trestle across Fidalgo Bay. While we’re sitting on a bench, a large osprey hangs in the air nearby as it fishes for lunch.
We continue on to Deception Pass State Park and find our site. The campground is on a hillside, and nearly every site has a bit of an inline to it, so it takes a while to find a relatively level position for the van. We eventually put some firewood under the front tires to level things out more.
After everything’s set up, we go for a walk along a trail that parallels Cranberry Lake and heads to the beach on Puget Sound. We see a sign for a place called the “Lake Store” that sells ice cream, but we can’t find the store anywhere. We end up walking south along the beach for a bit, then back along a trail.
As we walk, Liya practices making sounds by cupping her hands together, leaving a small hole, and blowing into her hands. When she does it right, it sounds a little like an ocarina. Bree and Jan join in. The three of us walk along, mostly puffing, but occasionally emitting a series of off-key notes.
Back at the campground, we stop at a tiny shack that doesn’t seem to be the Lake Store, but is at least selling ice cream.
Jan/Liya/Bree Western WA RV trip, day 3. We go for a morning hike from the campground to Lighthouse Point, crossing over the high bridges that span Deception Pass. We joke that it’s too bad that one side of the bridge is closed to pedestrian traffic, or else we could have played an epic game of Pooh Sticks.
The trail eventually leads down to the water on the north side of the passage. We scramble up some rocks to a small headland, where we find a perfect little lawn on top that has a great view of the pass, the bridges, the opposite shore, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We sit down and snack for a bit before heading back. From the bridge, we can see several seals frolicking in the fast-moving water far below.
We hang around the site in the afternoon, reading and napping. We’ve noticed that ferns have only recently started to come up, so Liya and Jan walk around the campground foraging for edible fern fiddleheads (unfurled shoots). Jan and Angela have had fiddleheads before, and they were quite good. The only edible fiddleheads Liya and Jan can find are Bracken Fern fiddleheads. Jan blanches these and fries them in garlic butter as a side dish. The taste, sadly, is not great — as one forager saying would put it, the result is “edible, not incredible”.
Angela gets her second COVID vaccine shot.
Jan/Liya/Bree Western WA RV trip, day 4. We pack up the van and make the relatively short drive back home. After cleaning out the van, Jan drives back to Renton, with Liya following in a car so Jan has a way to get home. It’s great to have another driver in the house these days!
Overall, both RV trips were a lot of fun. The sprinter van was a good choice, although next time we might see if we can find something that’s a little better designed and built.
Jan gets his first COVID vaccine shot.
Liya’s cross-country team posed for photos a while back. We thought it was funny that they made the athletes do a variety of poses and suggested various backgrounds. We couldn’t resist this photo of smokin’ Liya.
A photo of the Liya we all know.
Following the end of the cross-country season, Liya’s continued by running with the school’s track team, focusing on the long distance events.
Moxie has been doing a lot of his daytime naps on this octopus.
Liya picks Yale University.
By early April, Liya had been accepted by a number of the schools she’d applied to. She eventually whittled down the list to two: Yale and NYU Abu Dhabi. NYU Abu Dhabi is a new school (established 2010) with a lot going for it: an interesting location in the United Arab Emirates, a shiny new campus, and a really diverse and engaged student body. Liya began giving the school strong consideration following a virtual “Acceptance Day” video session with current students and some follow-up one-on-one calls. Yale seemed great, but NYU Abu Dhabi seemed like a more exciting choice.
Liya spent the last week or so going back and forth between those two schools. Each day, or sometimes at different points during the day, a different school would be the top pick.
In the end, Yale’s larger academic offerings won the decision. Liya’s looking forward to being able to try out more subjects before committing to a course of study, and Yale has plenty to offer. She’s still very interested in studying abroad, and hopes to be able to do that before, during, or after her time at Yale.
On that note, Liya’s been wait-listed for the NSLI-Y language gap year program in Taiwan (the same one Anya is doing now). It might be a little while before she gets a definitive answer from them, so for now it’s up in the air whether she’d start Yale this September or defer starting to September 2021.