Washington and the Mop Up Tour

Heading across the Bridge of the Gods over the Columbia River and into Washington.

Picking (and eating) Huckleberries...they were everywhere for awhile!


Crossing a glacial creek around Mt. Adams.

Walking the Knife's Edge in Goat Rocks Wilderness. The drop on either side of the ridge is a couple thousand feet!

Mt. Rainier

Just north of Snoqualmie Pass.

Amazing View.

Cruisin', Boomer, Flippy, JZ, AntFarm, Swiffer, and Eric in front of the Dinsmore's home in Skykomish, WA. The Dinsmore's are trail angels. This was saying goodbye to JZ and Boomer, who we'd hiked with for a long time. They had to jump ahead to finish in Canada and make their flights.

We saw 1 bear on the whole trip. Then we hit Glacier Peak Wilderness and saw 4 in one day! This is one of them!

Glacier Peak

Climbing under one of the many blowdowns in the Glacier Peak Wilderness. Floods and storms in Nov 03 messed up the trail. They had instituted a reroute, and this was the first year most hikers were walking the real PCT route. There was a section of about 2-3 miles where the blowdowns were huge and abundant.

Another blowdown tangle we had to navigate.

Crossing the Suiattle River via log. The bridge was washed out in the Nov 03 floods. This was the crossing that made us most nervous since the Suiattle isn't really something you can ford, but it ended up not being as scary as we thought it might be, and we made it across safe and sound.

Stehekin is the last trail town before the border. It is also only accessable by hiking in or taking a 55 mile ferry up Lake Chelan from the town of Chelan.

another great view.

Our last camp at Woody Pass, the night before we hit the border. Also where the bear came nosing around Flippy's tent at 3am. Luckily Mark and Flippy scared him away easily.

Hopkins Lake.

At the Monument and end of the trail! Notice the clearcut of the US/Canadian border behind us.

Another monument picture.

Manning Park Lodge. After you end the trail, you have to hike 8 more miles into Canada to get to civilization of some kind. Here you can catch a Greyhound to Vancouver and then back to the US.

This guy lives in Etna, CA, and he had fun showing off his bikes to us. He built these himself from several bike frames. He has several different bikes like this, and rides around town on them. We were back in town here to hike the 24 miles we had missed earlier in the hike due to a fire.

The skies around Etna the first night were ominous. Luckily it only sprinkled on us a bit.

On our second leg of the Mop Up Tour, we hiked out of Sierra City, CA and up around Sierra Butte. Very pretty.

Ironically, we found this post at the end of our trip. It says, "PCT Midpoint," and Mark spent a few minutes reading the other few entries and writing our own, last, journal entry.

This is the last picture we took on our camera before it broke on us :). We are at Hwy 36, where we just reconnected our steps and finished the last fire section. Woohoo!