Off Trail in the Mountains

Off trail in the high country but not the fragile alpine country.  One of my secret spots, so I have no details to give.

1,000 people move to Seattle every week and twice as many people are hiking in the PNW as were just ten years ago.   This information came from NPR.  

 This is starting to be a problem for  our fragile high country and this fragile local hiker.  I think the Olympic trials are getting more and more crowded as folks from Seattle come to the Olympics to try to get away from the crowds over there.  In Seattle you have to get to some trailheads at 7am just to find a parking spot!

I don’t enjoy hiking in crowds.  I like to be alone in nature without input from anyone else.  People interrupt my flow of thought and people can cause problems that leave me more stressed out at the end of a hike than I was before I started.  Mean dogs, loud people with music, litter bugs, bad drivers, they all ruin the trip for me.

I found a great place to get away from people in the winter.  The Hood Canal State forest with its wildlife gate. I was loving that place for the last two years.  My own private low country winter hiking ground with lakes and hills and views.  What fun it was!  I never posted exactly where I was when I blogged my hikes there, I did not want half of Seattle hiking there with me. 

Last winter the wildlife sign was removed and the gate was left open.  With the gate open all year that hiking oasis is now gone.  Cars go up and down the roads and that does  not feel safe to me.  I also don’t like breathing in exhaust fumes when I hike.  It feels silly to hike 11 miles on a road that I could have just driven on too.  So that wonderful spot is no more.

 This winter I had to expand my range to look for other places to hike.  I had some good ideas but those ideas were stopped by logging.  The logging should be done now though, so perhaps I can check out my new ideas next winter.

Mount Rose has been absolutely destroyed by the publicity and I think that Douglas Scott constantly adversting it has not helped at all.

I took one of my favorite and most secret off trail hikes today.  I guard this secret since it is so close to some really crowded hikes that I fear overflow from those areas could come at any time.  I respect this place so much that I fell out with several people  when they decided to brag about it or place freaking geocaches at it.  What fucking assholes!

At the same time one of the people who built it is also mad at me for talking about back when I thought it was a public area.  So I just can’t win.  All the politics have kind of ruined this spot but I was happy to see that probably no one has been back there since I was, so perhaps the spot will be safe.

It is not a pretty spot, so maybe it will never be popular with the crowds.  The only thing it has to offer is solitude.