First Steps

After that initial stage of wanting to try hiking, we had a few orders of business to take care of before we could actually go out and do it. First, I checked out a LOT of library books about day hikes. I'm not exaggerating here, either...after 8 years, my husband has long become used to the towers of library books in piles around our house whenever a new topic strikes my interest. My favorite book turned out to also be the shortest (go figure!):

This book doesn't offer so many hikes that the options get overwhelming, so it's easy to pick and choose. I'm such an anal planning junkie that I proceeded to rank the hikes by level of difficulty and how far of a drive they are from our house.

Next, I ordered my new hiking shoes. I'm not a fan of high-top shoes, so even though I knew that ankle support is important for hiking (yeah, that's my mom's voice ringing in my ears), I decided that if this hiking thing actually sticks I can always upgrade to a better quality shoe later. Luckily, I chose well - they're super comfy and don't show the trail dirt too much when I trip repeatedly over all of those forest roots.

Last order of business was the park use permit. We almost drove all the way out there without noticing the fine print about needing a permit. I guess national parks often require some sort of pass (duh!), but if you haven't ever gone to one before how are you supposed to know this? Of course, this all being spur of the moment and all, we were trying to go hiking on a Saturday and the only forest service office remotely close to where we live is only open Mon-Fri. Joe is ex-military and is eligible for a free pass, but I guess we'll just have to lug all of his paperwork over there next summer when we have a weekday off from work. Luckily, our local outfitter store sells day passes for $5 so we picked up one of those. Observe its glory...

How much more ready could we be? At this point, there was no excuse we could make not to get our butts out hiking soon. [Not after spending so much money anyways!] Who knew that hiking was so expensive??

Beginnings

So...here's the basic story of why this blog exists. My husband and I have had a few friends pick up hiking recently and their adventure stories made us want to give it a try. After taking a bajillion photos on the first hike I realized that I would need a place to record our attempts both for my faulty memory and as an easy way to look back at where we've gone.

Going even further back (once upon a time...), my parents are avid hikers and raised me to be the same. With them, I have trekked over much of Washington state and parts of Oregon. These were mostly day hikes, but we did go on one 3-day backpacking trip to Enchanted Valley in the Olympic Mountains when I was 11 or so. As a kid I was very much gung-ho for these trips, but by my early teens I was a sulking monster who had to be dragged along against my will each weekend. By high school, my parents had all but given up (who can blame them). That rebellious attitude toward the activity seems to have stuck, unfortunately, and I now only go occasionally on a short hike when asked to do so as a "present" for some family birthdays.

My husband and I go car-camping annually, but never really the "roughing-it" type that many consider real camping. And we've hiked the short trails near our house in Kitsap county on rare occasions. There's something really sad, though, about living is such a beautiful area and never seeing any of it beyond the weeds along the highway on the way to work each day. This site will hopefully motivate me to move beyond that and better appreciate what a wonderful place I get to live in.