I had a pretty smooth trip back to Seattle last Friday night, arriving about midnight. I had a window seat on the right side of the plane, and we took my favorite approach to SeaTac, from the north. The night was almost cloudless. On this approach, we're descending from east to west, and bank south on final pretty much directly above my house. From there, we cross above Lake Union, catch the Space Needle and then over the downtown core, with ferries floating on the velvet blackness of Elliott Bay.
It was about 2:30 by the time I wound down and hit the rack. My wife and friends had planned a Saturday morning trip into the Cascades to rock climb. I was tempted to just wallow around "recovering" from my week on the road, but decided it was just too nice a day to pass up, and rode up with them to do some hiking while they spidered around on rock walls.
It turned out to be a great call. The hike up Mt. Washington is about 4 miles, with 3,200 feet of elevation gain, a nice aerobic challenge. Once at the top, the trail opened into some meadows and old logging roads, and afforded some terrific views of the Snoqualmie valley, the Cedar River watershed and Mt. Rainier. I snapped a lot of pictures, with you guys in mind, of course. In all, I got about 9 - 10 miles of up-and-down hiking.
The day turned sour when we arrived home and I discovered that my Canon S300 camera was missing. I called all the participants and asked them to check amongst their gear, receiving only regrets. In addition, when I turned my Creative Zen Xtra mp3 player on to try some soothing tunes during dinner, the display was blank. I ascertained that the hard disk was intact, so my collection of tunes was not lost, but I was sort of bummed by the prospect of $600 of electronic equipment wiped out in a day's hike.
The mp3 problem was "solved", however temporarily, later that evening. The player is out of warranty, so I had nothing to lose by disassembling it to see if I could discover some loose connection. Once apart, I didn't see anything obvious, so I reassembled it and resigned myself to backing up all the music and looking for another player somewhere. However, after I'd finished tightening the last screw, I turned it on and it worked. Sort of a mystery, but it's worked fine so far.
The camera issue was less encouraging. I put a "lost & found" ad on craigslist, and we drove back up to Exit 38 Sunday morning to scour the parking lot and trail up to the last place I remembered taking a picture. No luck, so we posted a sign at the trailhead. Since we were up there anyway, we decided to take another hike, the 2 miles from the Mt. Washington trailhead down to the Twin Falls overlook, where there is a series of picturesque cataracts plunging into picturesque pools. The pictures will have to remain "esque", of course, because I didn't have my damn camera. Nice day hike, though, and I rationalized that lots of people would have paid at least the cost of my camera to have spent the weekend as I had (minus the anxiety).
I hung around all day Monday hoping for a call, but my phone was all about stony silence. I started to prepare for my drive to the Tri-Cities in eastern Washington, and my wife arranged to do some gym climbing with her buddy from Saturday. Her ride arrived, and we said our goodbyes. A minute later, she was back on the porch knocking on the door. When I answered the door, instead of looking around for some piece of gear she had forgotten, she handed me my camera. She had found it lodged in the luggage rack of her friend's car - it had ridden back from the mountains and around the pothole-ridden streets of Seattle for 2 days.
All my photos from the hike were intact, and, because I so love the world, or at least the blogosphere, I'm gonna post a bunch of them.
Hiking/climbing companions Enzo Ferarri and Martha (neither one ours). Enzo's very young, and has yet to develop a realistic sense of...proportion.
I love digitalis. They were growing in clumps at the top of the trail.
Mount Rainier peeks out from clouds, above the Cedar River reservoir.
Cedar River Reservoir, source of Seattle's drinking water.
3:35:22 PM 
|
|
Perils of Caffeine in the Evening
