Saturday marks the fifth anniversary of my hiking obsession! Thanks to Tom and Amy‘s willingness to shepherd a couple of couch potatoes into the wild, JK and I found ourselves celebrating Tom’s birthday on beautiful Shi Shi Beach in Olympic National Park.

I remember eating baked beans straight out of the can, spending the whole trip soggy and cold in my cotton clothing, and limping around the mud in ridiculous shoes. I also remember loving every minute of it.

Five years on and I’m still in love, even when my feet hurt like the dickens, when I’m roasting in the sun on a never-ending hill, or when evil biting flies gnaw on my face (all of which happened during the last week, by the way).

Here’s a short but timely interview I did for The Wilderness Society – it may sound hokey to say that hiking saved my life, but I honestly don’t know where I would be today without trails in my life.

…this blog is more hiking than scrapbooking these days. The reason is simply that a couple of months ago I lost all interested in anything pertaining to paper, glue or brads. So I just stopped. I did other stuff. And now it’s back! I want to make stuff again! I’ve been doing assignments these last couple of weeks and after a bit of a rough, Reverse Midas-Syndrome start, I’m happy with the results. Huzzah!

I’m also going to take Cathy Zielske’s class over at Big Picture Scrapbooking. I’m really excited about this, which means I actually did the pre-class assignment early. For anyone who knows me and my procrastinating ways, you’ll understand how amazing this is. Anyway, here it is:

There, I mentioned scrapbooking. Now on to the hiking! I just want to do a quick little thing about the trips we’ve been on this summer.

Marmot Pass & Buckhorn Mountain:

To be honest, this one kind of sucked for me. I was really dragging ass after our vacation in Norway (where I basically lived on chocolate and soy dogs), and by the time we reached the pass I was really tired. Amy and I stayed there while Ellie, Brendan, JK and Tom hopped on up to the summit of Buckhorn Mountain. After a very good night’s sleep in the tent, I woke up feeling much much better, so I wish we could have gone up to Buckhorn then instead. Oh well. Photo stolen from Brendan:

Spider Meadow:

The weekend after we went on my favorite trip so far this summer. This time we took our neighbors along, and they are basically the perfect hiking partners. We need to do it again! Anyway, after 4 miles or so of forest, we arrived at the sweetest alpine meadow I have ever seen:

We dropped our packs and set up camp in the meadow, then hiked on to climb up to Spider Gap. Looking at it from the meadow it seemed next to impossible, but it really wasn’t that bad (ask me again after I’ve done it with a full pack). After following a steep miner’s path up the mountain, we reached what is left of the Spider Glacier:

Our original plan was to drop down to Upper Lyman Lakes from the gap to get a better look at the Lyman Glacier, but since we had gotten a late start there just wasn’t enough time. At least we could see them from Spider Gap:

Noble Knob:

The next weekend we attended Andre & Ellie’s absolutely beautiful wedding (huzzah!!):

We took some of the guests on an easy hike to Noble Knob. It is pretty much the perfect hike for out-of-town visitors as you get amazing views for next to no effort:

Ingalls Lake:

This past weekend we beat the heat at Ingalls Lake. I have never been so happy to see cold water before, seriously. Gorgeous, gorgeous place.

We also got a close look at the wildfire burning in the area:

For this weekend we’re planning another trip into the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, and I am ridiculously excited about it. It’s relatively ambitious for my fitness level (= bad), so we’ll see how it goes. Wish me luck!

Ok, sleep now.

Things have been really busy here for once – lots of little things to do for SOY, page calls for Creating Keepsakes (it’s so cool to communicate with the different editors!), and some other Norwegian things I’ve been working on. So I’m a wee bit behind. Ok, I’m always behind. Anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, Tom and Amy invited us to go camping with them to Shi Shi for Tom’s birthday. Shi Shi is a gorgeous beach in the Olympic National Park on the coast. It is quite a drive from Redmond (especially with the insane ferry lines), so we stopped in Port Townsend on the way and spent our first night in a Victorian bed and breakfast. The next morning we headed for the beach, stopping only for a couple cans of beans and veggie dogs (best campfire food ever!) and to get our permits at the Makah Indian Reservation. After a quick hike (I think it’s about two miles and an easy walk – except for the *cliff* you have to walk down to get to the beach…) we reached the most gorgeous beach I have ever seen. It is absolutely amazing! I am not a good enough photographer to capture the feeling you get on this beach, but this guy is.

JK, being JK

Shi Shi by night

We got up at dawn the next day – the tide was so low that we could walk all the way up to the arches

The raccoons were up early too :D

Tom and JK (I borrowed Tom’s wide-angle lens and took several big-nosed shots of JK :D)

JK and I, tired beyond belief, waiting for the ferry on our way home

I love how happy we look (in spite of the humongous bags under our eyes); it looks just like I felt all weekend. We’ve been talking about going camping and hiking for years, but we just never get around to doing it. We’re both huge procrastinators. We even bought this cheezy self-help book about procrastination, but – you guessed it – we haven’t read it yet.. So to finally be out there, sleeping on the beach and, well, drinking by the campfire, felt amazing. I have officially been bit by the hiking bug!

The rest of our Shi Shi photos can be found here.

Oh – guess who is this month’s Honorary Garden Girl? Whee! Here are some of my pages, the rest of them and the GG’s lifts of me are on TwoPeas.

Lift of Jen Lessinger:

My lift of Anne Langpap:

Lift of Keisha Campbell: