What's that mountain goat during up here in these clouds?

2005-06-26 - 9:15 p.m.

This weekend has really been a fantastic one. So I'm going to share it with you, including pictures. Yay!

Yesterday morning I got up at 4am to go for a hike. I drove up to Snoqualmie Pass where I picked up the Pacific Crest Trail and headed north. By the time I got there it was around 6am. It had actually been raining a bit in the city when I left, but I decided that unless it was really pouring, rain wasn't going to stop me. Luckily, when I got there, it wasn't raining. In fact, it seemed as though I drove up the mountain until I got just into the cloud level and then I got out and started hiking. So I had no rain, but I also I had no visibility. Much of the trail for the first few hours looked something like this:

While I was somewhat disappointed at not being able to see out at the beautiful views I knew must be surrounding me, I thought the fog was beautiful in itself and I enjoyed the eerie effect it had. The trail, however, was all uphill, and eventually I began to climb up above the clouds and I could see bits of distant scenery peaking through like this:

The stated goal of my hike was a place called Kendall's Katwalk. This is basically a place where the trail cuts across a bare cliff face. Bits of the cliff have been blasted away to make a ledge wide enough for the trail and so the trail is narrow and has a very abrupt drop-off on one side. By the time I got here (it was 5.5 miles uphill), the clouds had cleared enough that I could see out quite some distance. Honestly, this Katwalk was pretty, but not much more so than everything else I'd seen and it just felt wrong to turn around there. So I continued on an extra two miles to a lake called Ridge Lake. As far as lakes go it wasn't overly impressive either, but it felt more like a natural stopping point to me. It's so hard to turn around when I can see the trail stretching out before me, but I had plans with Duke for later that evening, so managed it. This is a picture I took looking down the trail at the point where I turned around--it's just begging me to go back and explore it further:

I ate a snack on the edge of the lake and then headed back down the trail to my car. It was about 10:45 at that point. On my way up the trail I had seen a total of four other hikers, all of them by themselves. On my way back down the trail, there were hikers everywhere and most of them were either in twos or big mobs. That's one of the reasons I like to go early--to avoid the crowds.

One of the good things about having hiked up the mountain shrowded in fog was that when things cleared up later, it made the hike back be completely different from the hike out. Sometimes I could hardly even recognize that I'd been in a particular place before. Once I walked around a corner only to be completely surprised to find a decent sized waterfall mere yards from the trail. I hadn't a clue that it was there on my way up!

Later that evening I went to the Fremont Outdoor Cinema with Duke. This is actually a parking lot where you can bring a chair and watch a movie projected onto a white rectangle painted onto the brick wall of an adjacent building. That sounds really unglamorous, but it was actually quite a bit of fun. Duke didn't have a folding chair of any sort so we stopped by Fred Meyer on the way there and bought one for $6.99. While we were at Fred Meyer we discovered that they sell Magic cards so we bought some. Yeah, we're nerds, so what? We also had Cuban food before the show, which was awesome. We got there just before the gates opened at 7:30 and there was already a line around the block. We got a decent space, though, and spread out my accidentally stolen U-Haul blanket to play Magic while we waited for dusk to come so the movie could start. The movie was Napoleon Dynamite, which I hadn't seen before and am highly unlikely to see again. It was definitely a fun time, though. Here's a picture of how it looked about 15 minutes after the gates opened:

This afternoon Duke came over and we went down to the ACT Theatre to see Mike Daisey perform one of his monologues. It was fun, but I didn't like it as much as I hoped to. Yes, I laughed quite a bit, but mostly it was just at his physical antics as he was talking--I found his stories to be a bit boring frankly, and more crass than I expected. I'm not sure what Duke thought of it, he was definitely laughing too, but we didn't discuss it afterwards. Does that seem weird? Well, at one point Mr. Daisey was poking fun at how after a show people will gather around in small groups and come to a consensus as to how they felt about it. He did a very good job of it, really, so after his show it just felt stupid to do something that had just been so adeptly put down.

After the show we stopped by a Chinese restaurant I'd never been to before and bought some take-out. We brought it to my place where we ate and played some more Magic. Weee, what fun!