Now that the rainy season is beginning in Costa Rica, Liya and her school cohort are seeing a lot more tarantulas looking for someplace dry. Liya and a friend discover one in the kitchen sink, which they carefully extract and set outside.
A short while later, the tarantula is noticed by one of the ubiquitous lizards on the school grounds. The lizard makes short work of the tarantula.
Jan is reading “Reiko at Choate”, a high school memoir written by Reiko Okazaki, a Japanese girl in Choate’s class of 2002. This book turns out to be just about right for his reading level, and he already knows quite a bit about the places, topics, and traditions covered in the book. At the beginning of the book, Reiko arrives as Choate and is met by juniors and seniors wearing yellow t-shirts with the words, “May I help you?” on them — just like Jan and Evan experienced when they went to Choate.
Jan drops Lyn off at SeaTac for a flight to Bend, Oregon. She’ll visit Chris over the weekend.
Later in the day, Angela also makes a trip to SeaTac to pick up Liya, who’s returning from her semester at the School for Field Studies in Costa Rica.
Liya’s happy to be back at home. Walking around our neighborhood in the morning, she notices a number of differences between Costa Rica and Madison Park. “There are no lizards in sight. If we were at the school in Costa Rica, from here we’d be able to see at least ten lizards.”
Liya’s especially happy to eat foods she’s been missing for the past four months. We have bagels for lunch at Eltana, and Vietnamese food for dinner at Monsoon.
Happy Mother’s Day! Liya and Bree prepare a savory Thai mee krob — crispy noodle dish — for dinner.
After dinner Angela suggests we go to the branch of Fainting Goat Gelato that just opened in Madison Valley.
Bree and her friend Julia celebrate the end of Advanced Placement exams with a picnic in the Arboretum.
Liya, Angela, and Jan make the short day hike to the Rattlesnake Ledge. It’s an overcast weekday with a tiny bit of drizzle, so there’s only a lot of other hikers instead of hordes of other hikers.
There’s a boulder near the trailhead. Liya scrambles up to the top, just as she did on her first trip here after 8th grade and then a few years later with Jan.
Bree and Jan often remark on how awesome our cats are. Bree sees Mojo resting on a chair in the living room and gushes, “Look at him go!”
Jan’s Olympic Coast backpacking trip, Day 1. I’m growing aware that I won’t be able to backpack forever, and if I want to go backpacking with friends, now’s a good time. Two of my friends, Chris and Joe, have gone on guided trips but have little or no experience backpacking on their own, so I’ve invited both of them on a trip. My friend John, who has ample experience and has gone on two previous trips with me, rounds out the group.
Our goal is a thru-hike of the South Coast trail in Olympic National Park. I’ve done the top portion of the trail numerous times with Bree, but have never done the whole 18 mile trail. The trail isn’t long, but is moderately difficult due to some rope-assisted ladders and scrambles over headlands. The trail also has some headlands that must be skirted on rocky beaches only accessible at low tide. We’ll break the trail into three days for a relatively relaxed schedule.
Chris, Joe, and John gather at my house at 7:00 am, a starting time dictated by a tide chokepoint we’ll need to pass by a certain point this afternoon. We’ve lucked out with the weather — the three days we’ve chosen for the trip are in the middle of periods of heavy rain. It’s a beautiful sunny day today, tomorrow should be overcast but dry, and then we expect light rain on the last day.
We pile into Angela’s Toyota Highlander and head towards the coast. Everyone’s up for a coffee break on the way. We arrive at the Kalaloch Lodge in Olympic National Park around 10:45 to get an early lunch — but the restaurant isn’t open yet. We grab lunch from the market instead. As it turns out, I’ve misjudged how much time we’ll have for lunch, so a cold lunch is all we have time for anyway.
We arrive at the Oil City trailhead at the South Coast Trail’s southern terminus, where we’re going to leave the car. We’re met there by Wayne, a driver of a shuttle bus I’ve arranged to drive us north to the trail’s northern terminus at Third Beach. Wayne turns out to be extremely chatty, and keeps up a stream of anecdotes for the hour-long ride.
At the Third Beach trailhead we say goodbye to Wayne, put on our packs, take a group photo, and around 1:15 begin the pleasant forest walk that leads down to Third Beach. There’s a bit of a scramble over some large driftwood logs, and then we begin walking down the sandy beach. We stop to look at the waterfall at the beach’s southern end, then climb up the ladder to being the first inland trail over a headland.
This coast receives an enormous amount of rainfall, so the inland forest is lush and green. After descending down the other side of the headland, we cross a beach and then a second headland to Scott Creek. We clear the tide chokepoint Giant’s Graveyard, and after that point I can relax — we don’t have to worry about tides again until the afternoon of the last day.
We reach Toleak Point by 4:30 and find we have the place mostly to ourselves. We set up in a campsite that I’ve camped in twice before. One perk of the site is its close proximity to the privy toilet, but this year that’s not a benefit — the toilet is full and a new one has yet to be made.
After setting up our tents, we walk up the beach to Toleak Creek to fill up our water bottles. I rinse off a bit in the freezing water. Back at the site, there’s still time until dinner, so we sit on the sand and read or chat. The sunny weather is still holding but the wind is a little chilly.
For dinner tonight I’m trying a risotto-like meal made from oats instead of rice. I’d enjoyed this on a guided trip two years ago, so I’m trying this out for the first time on a trip of my own. Everyone likes the dinner and the rehydrated peach “cobbler” for dessert.
A park ranger named Sarah stops by after we’re done. We’re worried she’ll tell us we can’t have a campfire — this early in the season, I’m pretty sure that no burn ban was in place yet — but she just wanted to check our backcountry camping permit.
We’re all in our tents by 9:30. Sadly, I wake up some time later and discover that my air mattress is deflating; it has a tiny leak somewhere. I refill it and go back to sleep, a process I have to repeat several more times during the night.
Meanwhile, back at home, Angela and Liya get an early start for a trip to the East Coast. Liya is heading back to New Haven for a summer job at a Yale lab. For the next year she’ll be living in a rental apartment. Since it’s Liya’s first time living in an unfurnished apartment, Angela’s coming with Liya to help her shop for some inexpensive furniture, kitchenware, and the other things necessary to outfit a new place.
Jan’s Olympic Coast backpacking trip, Day 2. When the four of us wake up, we’re happily to discover that it’s a sunny day instead of the overcast one we were expecting. We take our time over breakfast and then break camp.
As we round Toleak Point, we take a moment to check out a seal colony Chris discovered on a walk early this morning before everyone else was up. We can see dozens of seals sunning on rocks a short distance from the shore. As we approach the water, some of them are alarmed and flop their way into the water.
We walk south and climb up onto another headland. We reach Falls Creek, where we take off our shoes so we can wade up the sandy creek bed a short distance to reach the waterfall. The clear water is painfully cold. We hang out on a sandbar for a bit, then eventually collect our packs and ford the shallow creek to regain the trail on the southern side.
From this point on, the trail is new to me. The forest is pleasant today, and the trail is fairly easy although it presents occasional challenges like a log bridge or a scramble into a muddy creek and up the other side.
When we descend back down to the beach, we come upon a long driftwood trunk, perhaps 50–60 feet long, whose midpoint sits in the notch of a boulder. We’re stunned that the trunk is actually balanced on this fulcrum. Joe clambers up on one end of the log, and John gets on the other end, and they’re able to go up and down on this massive seesaw. It seems unlikely this arrangement could happen naturally, but we can’t imagine how even a large group of people could have put this together or why they would have bothered.
We reach Mosquito Creek, our camp for tonight. It turns out the campsite isn’t by the river or on the beach but instead on a tall bluff. The huge campsite is spectacular: a great view of ocean, spots for many tents, a fire ring, and even a large tarp that someone’s left behind. After we set up camp, Joe and I try out the fishing net hammock someone’s rigged up. It’s fun to try but quite uncomfortable.
We’ve got plenty of time until dinner, so I take my leaky air mattress and a patch kit back down to the river to see if I can repair it. Chris comes with me to help out. My plan is to inflate the mattress and then submerge it in the river to see if I see air bubbles leaking out. I don’t have much hope this will actually work; I’ve done this at home, and even under the much better conditions indoors it can be extremely difficult to find a leak.
So I’m stunned when I thrust one end of the inflated mattress into the river and immediately spot a steady stream of bubbles from a tiny hole. I’m able to apply a patch to that spot; we’ll see it the patch holds overnight.
Tonight’s dinner is the most complicated but best backpacking meal I make: a rehydrated pasta bolognese and a fast-rising “skillet bread”. Bree and I have enjoyed this meal many times. The cooking process is a little involved, so I’m happy to have Chris and John help me prepare the meal. Joe, meanwhile, focuses his attention on trying to start a campfire. He hasn’t done this much before, so it takes him a couple of tries to get the fire to really get going.
Everyone likes the pasta and bread, and I surprise the group by pulling out two cans of pinot noir I’ve carried all the way to this point to go with this meal. At one point Joe comments how good the backpacker dinner is, and wonders aloud how they managed to make dehydrated pasta. The rest of us all look at each other and then back at him. John says, “Um… all pasta is dehydrated.” Apparently Joe was so busy making the campfire, he’d entirely missed the whole process of boiling the noodles for the dinner, and had assumed the pasta was some special kind that instantly rehydrated. The dark chocolate “cheesecake” for dessert is less successful but still a worthwhile experiment.
It clouds over after dinner. The forecast calls for a bit of rain overnight, so we’re extra-careful to get everything under cover before turning in. I wake up in the night to rainfall, but at least my air mattress is holding tight.