Last Weekend's Crazy Luck

Sunrise at Goat Rocks Wilderness
Originally uploaded by apete.

Well, last weekend I went on my first outdoor adventure. My friend, GJG, and I met up half way between Portland and Seattle in the Goat Rocks National Wilderness. We took a trail that we used using the nifty Northwest Hiker site. We selected the Shoe Lake Trail because it looked fun, it had water, and it was on the Pacific Crest Trail.

It really didn't have much in the way of water except for a few springs at the beginning of the hike and a lake at the end...oh well. We all survived. Another interesting feature was trying to find flat camping ground along the trail to camp on. We weren't allowed to camp in the basin that the lake was in so we had to hike back and with a few scrambles down a few ridges with no luck, we finally found a place that worked just fine.

The coolest thing about the hike was that we inadvertently found a friend of GJG's, Dan, that was a thru-hiker on the PCT. GJG missed meeting him while he was traveling through Portland. He knew that he would be in Washington somewhere and that was about it. We asked the first few thru-hikers about him and after translating that Dan was really Sweatbox on the trail and that he was about 15 miles behind. Armed with the knowledge that Dan=Sweatbox, we asked the next groups of thru-hikers with names such as Nemo, Haiku, and Tree Hugger getting better info. Finally, about 3 miles away from the car as we were leisurely walking back to allow for Sweatbox to catch up, he did. Very cool and lucky. Anyway, he was hiking with Star and Token Civilian. Greg got to catch up and we heard some harrowing stories and then we drove them up to the store for provisions before we took off to watch the exciting end to the 9-6 Seahawks victory over the Lions.