If you ever get the chance to visit, we’ll probably go on an adventure that goes something like this: you are being pushed outside of your comfort zone, you start to understand the joy that I find in being outside in moderate to high risk situations. Once I see you make the realization, I will have a huge grin on my face and say something along the lines of, “I live here!” or “I don’t know if you know this about me, but I like being outside.” and then you should expect to hear that about 20 more times. So…. let me know when you want to come and visit.
Recently, I had a great, “I live here!” experience. You see, the North and the South Sister of the Twin Sister Mountain Range are just visible from town, sticking their peaks up just above some of the closer foothills and beckoning me to come and climb them. These mountains are only 30 miles from town. Being conditioned as a child to believe that riding my just-took-off-the-training-wheels bike, 5 miles, one way, for an ice cream cone was a normal thing, the natural next thought would be, “let’s ride our bikes there!” And that’s not the crazy thing, the crazy thing is I found two more friends who wanted to join (don’t worry, we gave ourselves a few days to complete it)!
After riding out to the trail head and spending the night under the stars (because tents are for squares), we decided maybe we should just summit the North Sister. We live here after all, we could come back and do the South sister some other time. It only took us about 5 hours to get to the summit, and we only ran out of water once on an 80 deg day above tree line (meaning no shade). Thankfully, there was some snow near the peak, and we did not contract giardia from drinking the untreated runoff.
As we sat at the knife edge summit, we tried not to think about the exposed class 3 scramble descent followed by a 30 mile bike ride back into town that night. It was pretty easy to put these thoughts out of our mind, as we looked out at Mt. Rainier, Mt. Baker, the Olympics, the Canadian Cascades (aka the Coastal Mountains), the San Juan Islands nestled into the Puget Sound, and the city we biked from. We all could not help but say, “We live here!”
We made it back to base camp and were able to head back to town by 8 pm. We played the, “let’s be thankful” game (shout out to my mom friend Leah E.) the entire way home to ensure high stoke levels. Biking really fast down back roads with stars looming over your head yelling, “woohoo!!” with friends who have suffered with you all day, is a magically experience.
And yes, we did put in a order on the way home for pizza to meet us there.
for my friends who are moms 