Three-Wheeling in Seattle

Okay I'm skipping from North Dakota to Olympia, WA. I've been staying here with Brock for just about 3 weeks now, sleeping on his floor and eating his food and drinking his liquor. And sometimes, I mooch off his girlfriend too. As some of you know, and others of you deny, Brock has a lovely lady named Katy, who works as a TA at UW up in Seattle.
So, on a few occasions Brock and I have traveled up there to visit, and I play third wheel and we do fun stuff. First, a few days after I arrived in Washington, we went up for the 4th of July.


That's me and Brock. If you look real close at the water, you can see a reflection of Katy taking the picture. Behind us is Jerry's boat, where we hung out with some bus drivers Brock works with, and watched the fireworks. One of the bus drivers, Roy, and his wife Sue, raise livestock somewhere around here. Brock and I each ate a burger shaped piece of George the cow.
Then, after a 6 mile, hour long bus ride, we got a good night's sleep at Katy's in preparation for a bikeride around Seattle the next day. Katy planned out the trip, which consisted of ~45 miles of biking, and 3 ferry rides.

Here we are on the other side of that water from the other picture. If you look closely at the water, you're wasting your time. This is only about 10 miles into the ride, and before the first ferry.

This is us on the way to the second ferry. That orange mess on Brock's bike are his walking shoes tied to his handlebars. We pissed him off pretty good when he was rigging it up, giving advice and insulting his methods, but it worked out in the end. He got pretty pissed later too, when we learned the second ferry doesn't run on weekends.
When we found that out, we were about 30 miles into our loop. I suggested we turn back, Katy suggested hitchhiking, and Brock suggested we use a lot of swear words. But - just after we enacted Brock's plan, and before we tried mine or Katy's, we found out from some locals that this was the commuter ferry, and there is another ferry just down the road that runs for free 7 days a week. Whew.

There's Katy on the final ferry back into Seattle. When we reached those buildings, we got back on our bikes and rode the final 6 miles back to Katy's place. It went a lot faster than the bus ride the previous night.


Our second trip to Seattle (1 week ago) was brief - we picked up Katy, and headed northeast our of the city, to Mount Pilchuck. We drove seven miles up the mountain, then began a 3 mile hike to the summit. Brock and Katy had hiked it before, so we expected a steep, but fairly easy trip up to the top. However, when we found large amounts of snow covering the trail half a mile in, Katy got more demerits for bad planning. Brock was displeased again, but I was psyched about this development. We carried on, following others' footsteps where there was snow, and following the dirt or rocky trail otherwise.

On your right is the first scenic overlook, about a mile into the hike. This also marks about where the hike became ALL snow-covered. We started to see a lot of people with ski poles and protect-your-ankles-from-snow thingies. We asked some of these people if they thought we would make it to the top without such gear. They said "Yea, there's a steep part coming up around the bend, but after that it's not so bad. You'll be fine." Steep was an understatement. When I got around the bend, I looked up at a white, 45 degree slope, and if I hadn't known that other people were hiking this "trail," I'd have never thought it possible. Seriously, I would have said no way, and turned around. Thankfully, other people had been hiking it, and their boots had made some steps for us. We still slipped a lot, but we made it up eventually.
Here's Brock, trudging up one of the big hills. He was kind of sick, and was kind of hating this hike. Poor guy.
But I was invigorated. This was the most amazing, beautiful, tiring, and satisfying hike I've ever done.

After 2 1/2 hours, we summited -- well, I did -- Brock was a little freaked out by the sheer drops all around, and opted not to come up to the old fire lookout station atop the mountain. He stayed about 50 meters below, where Katy sat with him awhile before joining me at the top.

She snapped this sweet picture of me breakdancing on a precipice:

We spent some more time up here, just taking it in. It was too much for me to really appreciate-- it was 360 degrees of views like the one above, with a totally unobstructed view of mountains and lakes and rivers and barely visible towns in the distance.

The descent was fun. Even Brock and his headcold enjoyed it. We walked, hopped, slid, fell, and luged our way down.

Yea, it was real fun. Best hike ever.

We've got plans to go back to Seattle once more maybe, and do touristy stuff in the city. I'll keep you posted.