2023 February Hikes

Adulting sucks. You know I’m right. When we’re young, we dream of being old enough to make our own decisions and not have to listen to what other people tell us to do. Spoilers: the work world doesn’t lend itself to this so good luck reaching this level of achievement.

When you’re an adult you do get to make all or at least most of the decisions around your personal life and, unfortunately, that often means prioritizing. Prioritizing as in sacrificing one thing you really want for another thing you may need or want more. As we “grow up”, we come to realize there are only so many hours in a day, only so much energy in our tanks, and only so much risk we’re willing to take. It sucks but that’s life.

All this to say that adulthood kicked our February hiking plans to the curb. Snesha is selling her house so she had tons of prep to do around that. It snowed in the mountains so Chris and I bailed on our big hiking plans because we didn’t feel like we had the right skill set to hike Mailbox in those conditions. I injured myself at the gym and while I was foolish and pushed myself for a few days, I quickly made the injury worse so wisely listened to the wisdom of Chris (this might be a first for both of us 🤪) and took it easy for a few days. It bears repeating, adulting sucks.

I love this trail. It’s a fun challenge with great views. A ton of hikers use it as a training hike for climbing bigger badder mountains and/or longer backpacking journeys. You’ll always see a bunch of people loaded down with huge packs practicing carrying extra weight.

No joke at the top today I saw people dumping out the extra gallons (plural!) of water they carried to the top and another woman was talking about the 20 lb bag of rice she’s hauling around for practice. She’s determined that she can’t possibly eat it after all this bonding (okay she didn’t say bonding but whatever this is my story) and so when she’s done training, she’s going to feed it to the birds. Chris fact-checked me on this when I told him the story because I mistakenly believed the stupid rumor about birds dying after eating rice.

There are 2 main summits for this one. There’s the regular one we’ve done a few times and then there’s this extra rock scramble known as the Haystack. Climbing the Haystack is one of my 3 must-do hikes for this year. It wasn’t safe to do so today because of the snow so you’ll be seeing this trail again in a future update.

This was the third time I’ve climbed Mount Si but weirdly, it’s the first time I’ve blogged about it. The weather has been shit each time. The first time we went we had the classic Seattle mist so the views weren’t anything to write home about. The second time was super sunny but triple-digit heat. This time, it was snow.

It was a good hike with some great views.

Once again, I returned home as an ice cube and camped out on the couch with my fuzy blanket. Pippa was also a trooper and helped me in my quest to get warm again.