Five months into the pandemic: Sunny weekends can be measured on fingers in the PNW. Had this been any other year, we would have planned a road trip (my wife drives and I sleep mostly 😜) or fly somewhere and explore. But this has been a special year. My wife and I both enjoy outdoors, but most of the hikes are overly crowded lately. We have been doing some fringe unpopular hikes, kayaking on lakes with the fear of drowning (mostly me, my wife is a hardcore swimmer), or car camping somewhere, if we are lucky.
We have been watching a ton of backpacking Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) videos, mediocre amateur (they are neither mediocre nor amateur) videos on YouTube. Me being me, I told me wife that we should do PCT someday. My wife jumped on the thought and we started exploring the typical stuff about PCT online. After few hours, the reality kicked in. One, we are not prepared and two, taking may months off during this crazy economy didn't sound like a great idea.
Instead, we decided on doing some portions of the PCT when we get a chance. To do through hikes, you should be skilled at backpacking. We have done a few backpacking trips before. In fact, me and my wife fell in love on a backpacking trip. That was in 2014. We hiked to the Carbon Glacier on Mt. Rainier through the beautiful meadows, back breaking switch backs (you see what I did there 😉), took a dip in ice cold glacier water... Apologies for digressing. If I continue blogging, I will write a post about it some day soon. Please note that since it will be a love story, there will be a ton of my wife's influence on the post (who am I kidding).
Anyways, I started exploring simple backpacking trips so that we can ease back into the habit. I restricted my search to a radius of 4 hours drive from our house. Like I mentioned before, I prefer sleeping as my wife drives. So didn't want to burden her too much with super long drives to get to the trail heads. There were plenty of options, but most of them required some navigation skills hiking through snow. Then we found this gem - "Ancient Lakes." It's just 5 miles up and down with less than 1000 feet elevation gain. Once you camp, there are a plethora of options to hike many trails based on your expertise and fitness level. I felt like we hit the jackpot. This backpacking adventure met all of our requirements and was a good get-away for the weekend. More on this to come in a different post in the spirit of keeping my posts short.
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| One of the many ancient lakes |
