Last month Anna-Lisa and I spent a week up in the Olympic Peninsula region of Washington State. While we didn’t hike every single day of the trip, there was no way we were leaving without checking out one of the most beautiful, classic loops in Olympic Nation Park – the Seven Lakes High Divide Loop.
Most often done as a backpack, the 20-mile loop boasts ~4,800 feet of elevation gain and traces out a big circle around the Seven Lakes Plateau. The route starts and ends at the Sul Doc Trailhead, about an hour’s drive east of Forks. We chose to do the loop in the counterclockwise direction, first climbing up to Deer Lake. This gets the elevation gain over with earlier in the day and leaves the long, gradual descent down the Sol Duc Valley for the end. The first miles up to Deer Lake are steep but the forest is spectacular. We climbed up through a layer of fog as the sun’s rays were just cresting a nearby ridgeline. Keep Reading….
Leadville’s Silver Rush 50 is a run and bike race series that was first held in 2008. The races act as a qualifier for the Leadville 100 and seems to become more and more popular every year.
Several years ago I completed the Silver Rush 50 Run and I’d always wanted to head back and try the MTB version someday. This year wound up being the year, as Parker pitched the idea to me over the winter that we should both sign up.
Parker and I are usually pretty evenly matched on bikes so we were able to stick together for nearly the entire race. With a significant portion of the field on lightweight XC bikes and hard tails, we knew neither of us were going to be breaking any speed records. The main goal was to finish the race, not crash, and enjoy the day. One of the reasons I had interest in this particular race on the bike is that nearly all of it entails fire roads. This makes it much easier to pass people, and perhaps much more pertinently, be passed. Keep Reading….
Residing deep in the Rio Grande National Forest east of Piedra Pass, South River Peak is known as one of the peskier Colorado 13ers not by it’s technical rating or loose rock, but the length of its approach from any trailhead. There are essentially 2 options – a shorter, steeper route from the north involving some bushwhacking below tree line, or a longer, more gradual route from the south that passes by a natural hot spring along the way. Keep Reading…
When we pulled off of state highway 60 in Northwest Iowa to visit Hawkeye Point, I remarked to Katie that I should write a “trip report” about what were going to experience. I had every intention of doing so as a funny way to mock the high point of the state of Iowa. But as I sit now on the other side of our visit, I actually found tremendous value in the stop. This little “summit” illustrated for me a few very simple, but very important life lessons about expectations, what makes a place special, and how there are still some genuinely good things left in the world. Keep Reading…
