And so I attempt to write up the Birthday Hike… I am feeling a little bad for taking so long to get this written up. The second part of Beth’s Birthday weekend, err well the second weekend, was a Hike. A few days before the hike I told Beth about the hike because I was having trouble finding time to work on it without feeling like I was ignoring her too much. The original plan was to do the “Esmeralda loop”, http://www.rei.com/guidepost/detail/washington/hiking/esmeralda-loop/2037. A few days before hand I ended up calling the ranger station to verify what passes we needed to get, and found out that there was still a lot of snow on the trail. They said a 6 foot snow slide, whatever that means. So that resulted in needing to find a new trip!
Some quick poking around got me the “Greenwater and Echo Lakes” trail, http://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes/greenwater-lakes. The forecast looked like it was going to maybe rain a little the first day as we head out, but that it was supposed to clear up and be nice for the most part. That wasn’t quite what happened but I am getting ahead of myself.
On the trip down to the trail head we hit some rain, but when we got there it looked fairly nice. There was a small lot that was completely full except for one spot (yay!). But it didn’t look like there were many spaces. And so we headed out.
The hike out started in some nice covered areas and as we continues on we met up with the river. The river looked like was really flowing. There were a lot of bridges that cut back and forth over the river. The water was very clear and the sound of the rushing river was awesome.
We passed more people than I had expected, but still it was only a dozen or so people. A few miles before out camp site it started to drizzle a little harder, so we pulled out our ponchos and continued. Shortly before our camp site there was a large stream that had gone over the trail. It looked like some people had tried to add some stepping stones, but it looks like the stream widened a little making it kind of hard to cross. We ended up crossing over up a ways where there were some fallen trees. After crossing we got to some old camp sites, so we grabbed one and setup the tent so that we would have a place to keep things dry.
Echo Lake was beautiful. I wish it was a little clearer (and warmer it would have been fun to go swimming!)
We pull out our dinner and started cooking. The burrito type thingies and Cheesy Pasta was awesome, or at least we were so hungry it just tasked awesome. (Note for next time, when it calls for 1 ½ cups, go on the extra side, the pasta was a little crunchy.)
After we finished dinner and cleaned up it started raining some more, so we called it a night and climbed in the tent. It was fun getting to play some games like Pirate Farkle and Go FIsh! It then started raining kind of hard and basically rained all through the night. In the morning we were dry or at least mostly dry. My side of the tent had a puddle in it, and the fabric of the tent was holding water. We got up and made out breakfast, but neither of us slept great and we didn’t feel like spending a lot of time making food, so we made a quick breakfast and were on our way. This is the river that we had to cross over the previous night.
Oh and Beth won. I really didn’t think that there would be ANY snow on the trail. But there was. It was kind of cool seeing the snow patches off in the ravine nearby.
The hike back was good, it was mostly dry, but there were still muddy patches and water that would occasionally drip down from the wet trees. The river and birds were just awesome to listen to. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see much wild life.
All in all I hope Beth enjoyed her trip.