Nick's Blog

Earlier in the winter, I enrolled in The Mountaineers Alpine Scrambling course which consists of a few workshops at the clubhouse and then several skill-building field trips in various conditions.  Along with the core portions of this class are co-requisites of Mountaineering First Aid, which took up four 8hr Saturdays and Navigation, which took one particularly miserable rainy and cold Saturday in March.  This past Saturday was the "Rock Field Trip" in Leavenworth, WA.  Having a bit of rock climbing experience, most of this was trivial but it was a great reason to get out to Leavenworth for the first time, since I had heard a lot of good things about the area.  Jenny, highly unamused at the prospect of sharing yet another weekend with The Mountaineers, entered her protest and we came up with a diabolical plan to smuggle her in on the trip and then have Sunday to ourselves up there to enjoy the area further.  So Friday night we packed up everything we coul...

I've heard of Mount Ellinor from locals.  I've read about it on SummitPost .  I've seen it poking out at the south end of the Olympics.  Needless to say, we have been wanting to do this since we knew about it.  So with a beautiful forecast, Jenny and I readied our packs and headed to the Olympic Peninsula.  We took the Fauntleroy-Southworth Ferry for a quick ride across Puget Sound and then headed directly for Hoodsport on US101.  From there, a meandering road through the hills and we found ourselves skirting beautiful Lake Cushman.  Eventually we turned onto the gravel Forest Service Road 24 and began winding our way steeply up to the trailhead, peering over the steep edges of this narrow road - only minutes before, we had passed a tow-truck with a 'victim' of the terrain in tow.  A dodge pickup had tried to turn around in a bad place or had been going too fast.  Either way, the evidence of rollover was clear.  Hearing the gravel crunc...