Northwest Hike #4: Poo Poo Point

The hike to Poo Poo Point (let’s just get this out of the way now – hahahahahaha.  Hahah.  Ha.  Oooh haha.  There.)  via the Chirico Trail is part of the Tiger Mountain trail system.  Unlike my previous hike up Tiger Mountain, this one comes with a well-marked trailhead complete with unmistakable parking lot.  You’re driving up the road and then on the left (as you’re headed away from I 90, it’s your left) there is a big field with a big parking lot.  The field is a landing strip for para-gliders so there is some signage for the para-gliding company marking the spot (and warning you to watch your head lest you get landed upon).  The lot is big but on the weekends often full (hiker beware).  There's also Honey Bucket in case you need one per- or post-hike (further warning: when we hiked this trail, no one had emptied the ‘honey’ out of the ‘bucket’ in quite a while, so maybe try to use the loo elsewhere before you arrive).

There’s an archway on the parking lot side of the field that points you directly across to where the path disappears into the forest, which is hard to miss.  The first part of the hike is partially-paved with rugged stones in the path and forming some stairs, giving the mossy, dappled forest trail a very Lothlorien feel.  

As you go up (and up and up – this trail is quite steep and at a near-constant incline) the rocks taper off into a more standard path.  There are lots of switchbacks and small viewpoints over the valley, and one of a small picturesque waterfall.  

Very near the top the path splits off into lots of little paths that appear to all lead to the first overlook.  This offers a wonderful view of the valley below and Mount Rainer in the distance (if you’re lucky and its not covered by clouds like it is in the picture below).  

But if you keep going, across the field and back into the woods and further up the mountain, you can get to the real top, which not only offers an even more spectacular view of the valley below (including the city of Issaquah), but also serves as weather tower station and the jumping off point for the para-gliders, which is an additional fun thing to watch.  If you were wondering why some hikers were carrying enormous packs up the trail, it's because they contain the glider and seat which the person can use to fly off the mountain top. It’s exciting to see them take off into the wind and begin their decent into the valley below. 

There are not always gliders waiting at the tip top, but a few minutes after this photo was taken there were about 15 queued up to jump off this very spot, so hang out and rest and wait a little bit and you might see one or two.  Talk to some gliders hiking up the path near you along the way if you want – most were amenable to answering questions I had of them, which also offered both of us a chance to rest and catch our breath (how long do you glide? Where do you land?  Why do you hike up here instead of taking the bus that magically appeared at the top? Do you own your own equipment?  etc.). 

The hike down is much quicker and easier.  At the bottom you might have to make a dash across the field to get to your car and not get landed upon by the gliders who are still slowly descending.  Turn back and look to the top and you might see a sky dotted with a rainbow of gliders.  

This is a popular path for hikers with dogs, most of whom were off-leash (the dogs and the hikers).  I think mine and one other was on leash out of 40 or so that were on the trail – all of whom were well behaved, leashed or not.    Also the trail is doubly popular for humans due to its dual hiking and paragliding potentials, so prepare to get to meet a lot of people along the way, with and without dogs and packs.  With the beauty and excitement, and being only 30 minutes from Seattle, it’s easy to see why.

Northwest Hike #3: Twin Falls

Twin Falls Trail is about 30 minutes from Seattle.  It's easy to find and has a big parking lot at the trail head with a kind of outhouse thingie - a 'toilet' over a hole in the ground with a shack around it, I forget what they're called.  You need a Discover Pass to park here, which you can buy at Fred Meyer or elsewhere in town to avoid having to find the ranger station when you arrive, or pay the day rate (which is reasonable if you rarely hike, but if you hike a few times a year the Discover Pass is nice to have).  The big parking lot is because it's popular, so if you want a close hike with a well-worn path and dogs (who are allowed here on a leash - please be courteous and keep yours on its leash, which seems obvious, but not everyone does) and toddlers (leashes not required) to pat as they pass, this is it.  Not so much with the silence of nature and the stillness of solitude. 

This hike was considered 'easy' in my Moon hiking guide, but I would say it's definitely medium difficulty.  For example, I would not bring my mom and dad, even though they are in reasonable shape.  My dog had a great time.  There are lots of places to pull over and have a snack and a sit if you want to refuel, picnic, nap or catch your breath.

The trail leads up some sometimes-steep inclines through old-growth forests to two views of a large waterfall, with a smaller waterfall above it.  Near the end of the trail you can walk down a wooden bridge/path to two small overlook decks, which should be a mandatory part of the hike because they gave the best, closest views of the bigger of the waterfalls

Note: when you get to the second waterfall, you are pretty much done with this trail so you can head back.  If you want to keep going, the trail goes on and connects with another trail.  We went on a bit thinking we might see something more spectacular, but then just turned back after some time.  If you are interested in a much longer hike, this would be recommended (see the map above), if you can get close enough of a peek at it.

Pacific Northwest Float Tour: Where Eagles Fly!

Christmas gifts can be so boring and confusing.  Socks.  Meh.  Or yay? But this color is not right.  Is this watch too expensive of a gift?  Or too cheap?  Gift cards are the ultimate zzzzz, even though it lessens the risk they’ll hate your gift (because it’s overly safe).

I like to give experiences - usually ones that involve me spending time with the recipient, so it’s also a fancied up way of giving the gift of time.  Hopefully no one I’d actually get a gift for hates the gift of hanging out with me, so the risk seems low.  For Christmas 2012, I got Joel the gift of taking a raft down the Skagit River to see a bunch of majestic eagles hanging out in their natural habitat.  As we are not from the Northwest, neither of us have overcome the excitement of watching an enormous avian symbol of our country swoop down to catch a wild salmon, so it promised to be at least a marginally good time.

And, it was!  The raft trip was a simple float down a mostly calm river, albeit in the cold rain.  Eagles like the cold rain, what can I say?  We had to go to them.  We saw about 20-25 birds on our two-hour tour.  Most were pretty high up in trees, and another couple in the boat let us share their binoculars so we could get a good look.  Some flew around, alone or in pairs, but sadly none swooped for a fish (apparently they eat early in the day, so if you’re going to do this go early).  Still, it’s hard to complain.

 It was totally freezing, though, so when we were done we went to the gift shop/interpretation center for some 50 cent hot chocolate.  There you can see a ‘small’ nest close up.  Here’s Joel with the nest, so you can see the scale.  The ‘little’ nest is huge.  Imagine the normal sized nest!  It’d be like a king sized bed, but made of sticks and full of eggs.

 If you are into this kind of mild adventure, the company we used was Pacific NW Float Tours.  They are very funny, knowledgeable guides who have been floating the Skagit, and other rivers, for years.  Our guide had 20+ years experience (he remembers when the Skagit followed a different path!).  The company does more exciting adventures too, including white water raft and canoe and kayak tours when the weather is not totally freezing.  Until then, I’ll enjoy the scenery as dryly as possible.

A Food Memory: Church Potlucks

Sometime in December, before Christmas, the First Presbyterian Church of Shadyside had a potluck supper. 

Shadyside, having a population of approximately 3500 souls, had about nine churches of varying sizes.  Assuming some souls worshiped no god, others worshipped Him outside of city limits, roughly 1/3 were Catholic, and another 1/3 were too busy, tired or uninterested to attend any sort of potluck at all, that meant that about 50-80 people (including children) would come back to church on a freezing Sunday night, after having already come for services on a freezing Sunday morning, with casserole dishes in hot-pad covered hands, to eat together.

This was a positively magical night for me.  I’ve had a lot of fancier meals since, at homes and restaurants - but to this day there is little that delights my stomach more than the glimpse of a wide buffet.  I’ll take one bite of a hundred things over a big bowl of any one thing, no matter how good it is (this predilection, no doubt, mixed with a more refined palette, explains why I also adore a tasting menu).   What was even more delightful were all of the church ladies bustling around the tiny kitchen in their calico dresses and gray-white buns, trying ever so hard to coordinate food into an appropriate buffet flow with a few dozen children underfoot, and a few dozen men who clearly needed to be told what to do, lest they stand there drinking percolated coffee mumbling about their yards.  Among the ladies: both of my grandmothers (granny and grandma), my mom, and my aunts; among the men: both of my grandfathers (pap pap and grandpa), my dad, and an uncle.  Among the children: my brother and I.  Often in attendance: yet another aunt and uncle and their kids.  We filled a table.

Despite my current musings about religion and science, I have no personal anxiety about or dislike of religion like some people who may have been raised with guilt or anger, which I owe to all of these people for being respectful and reserved, and not bashing anyone over the head with fears of hell or guilt, or lambasting science.  Also for an artistic person I have a remarkably loving and functional family who support me completely.   I remember with total nostalgic contentment how much I loved having everyone at one table, eating.  A few grandparents and an uncle were particularly adept at telling jokes, too, most of which have passed on and who I miss greatly.

I did weird child things like make a fort out of the coats, try to hide in the kitchen cupboards, and play hide-and-seek in the empty, dark church classrooms with the other kids.  We made paper ornaments to hang on the tree in the hall to the tune of our garbled carols after the eating.  But, like anything else, much of this was really about the eating.      

The food now sounds so dated, such a remnant of mid-century’s celebration of technological convenience mixed with a depression-survivor mentality – cans, gelatin, bleached flour, crocks of stuff suspended in tinned cream of something, topped with factory-crisped onions.  Ham with pineapple.  Parmesan crusted chicken breasts, as tan and dry as a desert.   Pot roast a’ sea in beef broth.  Creamed corn, creamed spinach, creamed green beans (I’m sure no one considered a vegetable not baked in cream).  Billowy, buttery mashed potatoes.  Pure, sweet white parker house rolls.  But lord, to a child, such a bastion of fat and youth-palatable flavors seemed to never end - until it did, at a table that inevitably held one fruit-filled Jell-O with whipped cream topping, one pie filled with fruit in a viscous jelly, and a gigantic soft white sheet cake under an icing of as much sugar as the requisite amount of butter could hold without disintegrating under its own crystalline weight.

This was a time where we were encouraged to eat as much of this bounty as it took to stuff us to our ears (we didn’t worry about health or weight, and no one doubt any child would run it off climbing tress or playing sports in the street), then sit around sipping coffee for an hour or so, digesting.  No one had a phone or a computer or anywhere else to be, so people talked – mostly about people, their yards, local sports, what the kids were doing, what the people who had left town were doing.  People were already leaving town, but it wasn’t yet as prevalent as it would get in later years.  This was after the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, but where you could still get away from it – and perhaps more importantly, where you could still want to get away from it and not be accused of being a luddite. If you all wanted to know who was in a movie or what the periodic symbol for Argon was, you had to think about it. 

The most wonderful thing was that people wanted to come, and didn’t have to take great pains to clear their schedule to do so.  Odds are that I just remember it differently because I was just a child and my schedule was governed by my parents.  But since I was around ten, everything got so much smaller.  Many people have died, plenty more have left town or the church, and the few who remained got Busy.  My family got smaller.  I left town.  I don’t even know if they do it anymore.  I cannot imagine that, should I be so inclined to recreate them, many of the recipes would taste good to me today, but do not doubt for a second how delicious my memory of the food-mosaic of a plate remains.

Northwest Hike #2: Tiger Mountain Trail

Last weekend I went hiking at Tiger Mountain Trail.  Tiger Mountain is about 30 minutes from Seattle, and the whole Tiger Mountain Trail is around 16 miles and has a few offshoots, trail heads, and other un- or poorly-marked paths.  I followed the directions on the Washington Trails Association website but be warned - if you look at two different sets of directions, or you look at Tiger Mountain, Tiger Mountain North and/or Tiger Mountain South, you can get conflicting directions.  The ones I finally settled on included the notion that there was a well marked trail head and parking lot, which was not the case.  I ended up parking on a wide shoulder of Tiger Mountain Road and finding the index-card-sized trail marker stapled to a tree.  Apparently there are better directions, but if you end on Tiger Mountain Road, beware that it's not super clear where the trail begins.  Also, Tiger Mountain Road is just a loop off of another main road, and that the distance from the trailhead to the main road will depend which turn you take onto Tiger Mountain Road.  That said, the trailhead was also supposed to be around a mile from the turn, but it was actually far more than a mile from one turn on to Tiger Mountain Road and far less than a mile from the other turn.

The Trails Association website also promised a waterfall about two miles in, which seemed a good turn around point, but we never did see a waterfall and I went decently past the two mile mark.  Turns out, you have to be really, really careful which site you read and which trail head you are at, because you could just see nothing.  Which is not to say that it is an unpleasant hike - it's a lovely fall hike.  From where I started it was uphill at the start and flattens out, and it's nicely forested.  The trail is for hikers and horseback riders, so you might happen upon some people on horseback like I did.  Just don't expect to see anything spectacular unless you're planning to go for closer to at least five miles.  Or possibly two miles just from another trail head.  I guess either be flexible, be in for a medium to long hike, or be careful.

Yoga Lesson: Awareness

I just finished a month of yoga (almost) every day.  I was going to write thoughts at the end of each week and I did at the end of week one, but then I felt like I didn't have any revelations each week.  Now that it's done, there's been enough time that more thoughts have bubbled up to the surface of my consciousness.

~ When class starts, often I feel like my muscles and bones and skin are tight, and even within the hour they open up.  It seems like often, if I don't head to yoga, a lot of time could pass before I even realized this restriction existed.  Yoga is mindfulness of the body, after all, which most jobs and pastimes don't integrate.

~I found two teachers I really like, who have quite different styles.  If I had not done the 30 days, I doubt I would have explored so many teachers - either because I would just pick a convenient time and stick with that and so simply not find them, or because I'd find one I like and stick with that.  I also found out that I quite like restorative yoga mixed in with vinyasa, which, admittedly I previously would have expected to be a little too, well, wimpy, where in reality it fits a different bill (see the point above).

~ There is a stunning amount of fine-tuning.  The more you're aware, the more you're aware of being aware of.  Something like that. 

~ If you relax your throat and mouth and focus on that, you can have ease even in the midst of stress and intense experience. 

~ The more you learn about one thing, the more those lessons apply to everything.

Preserving

I made my first ever batch of preserves today!  I made Ginger Pear Preserves from the Ball Canning recipe collection.  It was much simpler than I expected!

I've been wanting to do some canning for a while now, but I hesitated because it seems a little intimidating.  You need to sterilize things, have equipment you get from a hardware store, and deal with some light chemistry (pectin?  fruit fresh?  pH levels?).   So, I took a one-hour canning class from Seattle Can Can to learn the basic techniques.  Vic, the teacher, has over 35 years of experience preserving foods using the water bath process, and she could not have simplified it more.  A few supplies, basically explained, one recipe demoed, and voila.  I went home and made this.  Well, to be fair I did stop at City Hardware, a local hardware store that has a big canning section, to get some supplies.  And I went to the farmers' market to get pears - because why not use the local ones if I'm going to all the trouble to make jam myself?  This led me into a great conversation with the woman at the booth, who is the only one of her five siblings to carry on the canning tradition of their family, about preserves, some tips she had, some pear type recommendations - all kinds of stuff which was both useful and a good reminder to talk to the people at the farmers market. 

I won't presume to write anything about canning, lest I send someone on the path to mistakes, but I would say to give it a go and talk to someone who does know what they're doing if you have questions.  It makes me happy to think about how this one thing got me to meeting a local teacher, local farmer, and local hardware store.