Mt Baker and Olympic National Park ( 5/27 - 6/5, 2011 )

Rob organized a climbing trip to Baker and Rainier, Kim and I signed up as soon as we heard about the plan. After months of training, the day finally came. A group of 8 of us, Rob, Jen, Jeff, Hanna, Pa, Lei, Kim and I landed on SeaTac Friday night.

The plan was to climb Baker first, and then Rainier afterward. However, the record snow fall this year in WA made us modified our plan. The climb to Baker proved to be a lot harder than usual, hot weather and thick snowfield made a bad climbing conditions. Our crampons were balling up and post-hole the mussy snows most of the way up and down the mountain. By the time we done with Baker, we pretty much decided Rainier was not going to happen on this trip.

With wet forecast in the next few days in a row, and extra road walk to trailhead due to road was still covered with snow, our outdoor adventure plan didn't look good. Most of us changed their flight and headed home to save their vacation days for future endeavor, Kim and I decided to screw it, we're already here, we would find something touristy to do. We decided to take a roadtrip to Olympic National Park. Doug recommended Third Beach for tide pools and sea stacks, upon more research, we made it into a 2 days backpacking trip, and it turned out to be a pretty amazing trip.

Here is the summary of the whole trip:

May 27, Friday: All members arrived at Seatac area.
May 28, Saturday: Drove to Baker trailhead, and hiked in,
May 29, Sunday: Summit Day.
May 30, Monday: Hiked out, drove around a strip mall parking lot in Bellingham a couple of times, after eating good in the neighborhood, we drove back to SeaTac area
May 31, Tuesday: I was sick slept through the day in my motel room while others paid pilgrimage to REI in Seattle.
June 1, Wednesday: Most flew home, Kim and I took ferry to Olympic peninsula.
June 2, Thursday: Drove to Cape Flattery, and Sol Duc hotspring in the evening.
June 3, Friday: Backpacked into Scott Creek campsite, south of Third Beach
June 4, Saturday: Took a thousand pictures of the million of sea stars that littered the beach, hiked out, drove up to Hurricane Ridge, drove around the peninsula looking for fresh dungeness crabs for dinner, ended up going to Antony's at Gig harbour for Mahi Mahi.
June 5, Sunday: Flew home. :(