The first official CHS hike was the Bullitt Fireplace Loop on Squak Mountain. It’s east of my prior two hikes: The route is similar to a reverse of this loop: Cougar-Squak corridor to the Fireplace, direct to the microwave towers, then Old Griz to Eastside Traverse and back down. Although this hike was labeled “easy,” the last 0.4 miles up to the fireplace was steep enough that I needed to pause a few times. ...
My daughter, who’s home for her last spring break ever, wanted to go on a hike before heading back to school. I’d scoped out a lot of interesting hikes, but several were in weather-affected areas, because I forget 50s here does not equate to “melted snow” east of the pass. We ultimately settled on something closer to home: Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park. Cougar has well-maintained trails and a selection of waterfalls, marshes, and mining artifacts. It’s a really nice area that I forget because it’s so close. For today’s hike, we’d do a 6.5 mile loop from the Sky Country trailhead, covering several lookouts and the waterfalls. ...
To help remotivate myself to get outdoors again and, hopefully, lose some of the “Covid 19”, I’ve signed up for the Conditioning Hiking Series with the Mountaineers. This involves two hikes from April to August, a “graduation” hike of >15 miles in September, and a stewardship project. Map from GaiaGPS based on my track with the parking lot to trailhead portions removed. There are two tracks: CHS 1 — pace of less than 2mph CHS 2 — Pace of more than 2mph. Cool. A few questions: how does one calculate pace? Is it total moving average? Moving time over flat terrain? Distance divided by total time with breaks? No one was able to articulate this in a way that I could nod agreeably in understanding. I was leaning towards the faster group, but unsure about my current couch potato-ness. ...
After 3 3/4 years, I finally completed the 50k elevation challenge (for geocaching) in October with my friend Jes. Spoiler alert: Victory! I logged far more than than 50k of elevation over the period, but the challenge had so many rules that many of my hikes didn’t count. In fact, for a while I had kind of given up even tracking gain. I was tantalizingly close after a huge boost in July from Cycle Canada but resigned to completing the official challenge in 2015. In September, Jes mentioned that she wanted to go to Mailbox Peak, and let me tag along. The elevation gain (>4000′) put us both over the cutoff. On that trip, we schemed on how we might finish it off while not completely incurring the wrath of our respective spouses. ...