Friday, May 28, 2004
Seattle, WA
As I looked out at the rain on Friday from work I never thought twice about my plan to go running in the Olympic mountains with a bunch of crazy trail runners (redundancy?). You pick a date and it’s “go”... I was ready for a good time no matter what. As it turns out, the rain was barely a factor. Sometimes it even felt good in a sweat-cooling way. It may have kept a lot of people from crowding into the campgrounds, too: good in the case of nonrunners maybe but too bad for the runners who missed out on what turned out to be a tremendous experience.
I got a ride up with Craig Ralstin and as we hit Sequim we noticed there was a hole in the clouds and the sun was shining only on this funny little town with its elderly sitting at tables in the QFC and its facially-pierced teenagers wandering the grocery aisles on a Friday night. Just to the south the peaks of the Olympics were mostly shrouded in rain, and light puffy clouds were over Vancouver Island. This seemed like a good omen. We got into the campground just outside of Port Angeles and there was John Pearch and James Varner, who had arrived a day earlier and done some valuable staking out of the areas where the runs had been planned (see http://www.capitolpeakultras.com/memorialmain.htm ). But I have to back up one moment: when we got past the entrance booth at the northern boundary of the park I immediately rolled down the window, stuck my head out, and gasped. “Oh my God! Look at the color of that RIVER! Look at that grass! Look at these trees! Look at those peaks! Where’s the tops of them?” until Craig had the bright idea of pulling over so I could jump out and run, in blue jeans, my first 50 yards in the park that has called to me from across Puget Sound for several years now. And the air was just different, like I knew it would be. It was like breathing the very ideal of air: air’s most wildly ambitious dream of itself. I was running down the first 100 yards of pavement in a 632,000 acre park and I decided it was heaven.
That night the rain fell and fell but not so much on the tents themselves since the Elwah campground is providently situated under incredibly tall, broad-leafed trees which catch the brunt of the rain and protect us little mortals below.
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Saturday, May 29, 2004
Elwah River Trail to Lost River with option to go on to Mt. Claywood
We awoke to mostly cloudy skies but not without some hopeful light flecks moving across, and drove 5 miles up to the Whiskey Bend trailhead along a winding road that gave us glimpses of turquoise Mills Lake which we promised to return to for a cold soak of the legs. At the trailhead we met a tall older ranger guy with a stick who said his running days were over and he took a picture of us merry few at the trailhead sign. There was also a nice guy named Scott along from Boston who was over this way on a work trip and had lucked into this somehow. Fortunately for me, John, due to an injury, stayed behind with me and Scott for what turned out to be about a 30 mile run, so I felt at ease, not to mention the trails were well marked and this was essentially an out-and-backer anyway. Craig and James ended up with 50 miles added onto their shoes.
The path started out along the valley floor with hemlocks and firs and even maples on either side and trails beckoning off down to various points along the Elwah River. We took one spur up the Lillian River drainage and hit some open slopes sporting tiny little wildflowers. The rain kicked down a few drops now and then but none of us felt the need to dig out the rain gear. I kept smelling this sweet blend of plants and damp earth that had me feeling like a wine critic, noting the “leather, berry, and sandalwood undertones.” James and Craig kept following this spur but my group turned around after awhile and we headed through the Lillian River campground back on the main trail. We were ticking off a few miles but it wasn’t nearly in proportion to the (very typical) reactions of weighted down backpackers who looked at us with a mixture of disbelief and what I decided I’d call admiration though it may have been a conviction that while their own senses were still in tact ours clearly were not. After crossing the Lillian on a nice broad bridge, the trail just did a friendly, rolling, curving cadence that allowed me to get into one of those elastic kind of running rhythms, and the path was clutter-free enough so that I could look up and around, something I sometimes forget to do. The valley that cradles the Elwah River started breathing alongside the left of us, opening up my mind with its vast, still presence. Across it was a long green mountainside which was thick with trees and I imagined looked just like the mountainside I was on. I thought of a mirror world: an alternate Kendra on the other side looking back at my mountain and wondering if another Kendra was looking back at her. The skies were constantly changing and we actually were treated to some moments of sunshine that instantly made everything light up in emerald greens of every conceivable shade. In fact I think the reason it wasn’t more sunny is that my heart couldn’t have quite adjusted to such beauty that quickly: I had to acclimate gradually just as one does to higher altitude. That’s what I decided, anyway.
We crossed some utterly bucolic meadows which were only missing a few cows or horses to be complete, with old homesteaders’ cabins and an almost bewitching power to make you want to spread out a checkered blanket and spend all day staring at the cottonwoods and eating grapes. But this was a trail run and we were swallowing goo on the go and not stopping and that was pretty awesome too.
John and I turned around at Lost Creek not because we were lost and not because the footbridge had broken and fallen partly into the river and not really because we wanted to but because John had his knee to think about and I had the integrity of my entire skeleton to think about.
On the way back John was going for an all encompassing photograph that would include some snow we’d glimpsed at the top of some peaks, the Elwah River, and of course that omnipresent Olympic green stuff in between. So we did a little tooling around off the beaten path and didn’t see the snowy peaks from that angle and got back on the trail. This serendipitous little ten minute excursion timed us perfectly to meet James and Craig at a creek crossing so that we could get more good water via Craig’s pump filter. They were still headed out, having done their Lillian spur and would go well beyond Lost River all the way to the flanks of Mt. Claywood. See ya, guys.
Somewhere along the line John expressed it all in one word which had been echoing around inside my own head for miles: Wow. Just wow, wow, wow. Then he said hey! That’s what we’ll call this: WOW: the Wonderful Olympic Weekend. And so it was. And this had only been Day One.
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Sunday, May 30, 2004
Hurricane Hill/Ridge, down Wolf Creek trail (with the option of doing it again the other way!)
On this day we were joined by several folks from the Seattle Running Company whom Scott McCoubrey had driven over in his van as part of the Sunday morning regular trail runs that they do (see http://www.seattlerunningcompany.com/ ), as well as some other friendly runner folks. We drove a few miles to where the Hurricane Hill path begins and I got started on legs that miraculously didn’t feel as painful as I thought they would have been: could it have been the combined 9.2 seconds I had managed to keep them in cold Lake Mills after the run yesterday? I decided it was. Ah, the power of the mind.
This trail didn’t mess around: it headed straight uphill without a single shred of sympathy for whining legs, much like a demanding coach or tough love. I had gotten about an hour, cumulatively, of sleep, thanks to America’s Loudest Family who had set up camp in my neck of the woods and proceeded to invade the air space after nightfall via a continuous chainsaw serenade of some of the loudest snoring I have ever cursed in the wee small hours of the night. It was either loud snoring or the air there is so quiet that it just seemed loud. No excuses, though, and I was still loving every minute of this. I noticed that the steepness didn’t prevent most of the guys from somehow disappearing into thin air up ahead. Funny how that happens.
After zigzagging through a friendly forest we reached a huge subalpine meadow that already had deep purple larkspur and a few paintbrush dotting its slopes. Here we once again uttered the name of our newly christened series: wow. Maybe even wowee: wonderful Olympic weekend eternally excellent. The ever changing clouds opened up a moving pattern of sunlight that sailed across the peaks around us and swept up our grassy slope to the snowline above, giving me a distinct Switzerlandy feeling, I decided. John had made the possible error, unintentionally of course, not knowing my powers of imagination and weakness for bad food (fair warning, purists! ugliness ahead) of mentioning the lodge at the top of Hurricane Ridge, accessible by road to regular human beings (a minus), which offered a snack bar including heated food of the hotdog and hamburger variety (a guilty plus!) and restrooms with hot water coming out of the sink faucets (plus! plus! screamed my iceberg hands). So, superimposed on the raw and rugged beauty of the jagged snow topped peaks and the streamlined trees and the gray leftover snow fields hanging on in the shadowy side of the ridge, and the jewel-like fingernail sized flowers hugging the ground where the snow had just melted, was this warm and fuzzy expectation of a little glimpse of creature comfort up top. John Pearch, “Boston Scott” and Jimmy from Olympia and I all stopped at the lodge and I had a hotdog with kraut, mayo, mustard and ketchup. I told you it was going to get ugly! I warned you! And a hotdog never tasted so good, I’m afraid to say. Nor did hot water ever feel so good. Note to self: with a name like Hurricane Ridge you might want to wear the polypro gloves next time.
Next came what can only be described as gentleness incarnate. A wagon road wound down with those kind of inviting curves that pretty much have a siren’s strength to draw you into a run, and I, exhibiting further heedlessness to augment the hotdog incident, broke into a sort of shuffling gait that I decided was called running but that the innocent bystander might have called something else entirely. I really could have walked this with just as much, if not more, benefit to my muscles and joints, but this was a training wheels weekend for me. I mean a training run. All I know is the Wolf Creek wagon road down from the ridge just might have registered the highest on my happiness monitor for some reason: it was the downhill grade, no doubt, combined with the tender green grass and trees on either side, and the sudden presence of sun here and there that almost happened like a thought more than reality, and the glimpses into the valley at the hairpin turns, and just knowing I had all the rest of today and all of tomorrow still to soak up this ultra rich atmosphere. It was like a big huge selfish gift without remorse. It was good stuff.
When I was about 3 miles from the Whiskey Bend trailhead where a car had been thoughtfully positioned to ferry us back to camp, I encountered the smiling face of James Varner coming back up the trail to basically retrace the route backwards and double the distance and elevation. You go, James. Was it those drugs the doctor and physical therapist moonlighting as rangers gave you and Craig in the old Elkhorn meadow cabin on yesterday’s run? JUST kidding!
Back at camp we gathered around a fire and John went and got some fresh salmon and there were lots of good ultra war stories bandied about and then James showed up and we hailed him and gave him due praise and I decided for sure I had made the right decision about what to do on a Memorial Monday that I didn’t’ officially have off from work. It was the deathbed question: would I remember that I diligently showed up for a day of work when most other people weren’t even at work, or would I remember defying gravity along a river named long long ago for elk, under ghostly clouds that only seemed to rain for real at night and left the world all sharp and spicy in the morning? You decide what I decided. I think you know.
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Monday, May 31, 2004
Elwah River trails (with option to cross and do Dodger Point)
I woke up with a little bit of sadness knowing this was the final day of a triad I would not soon let go of. We did the short and lovely little drive back up to the Whiskey Bend trailhead and were amused to see the boyscouts (?) we had seen days before emerging from the woods into the parking lot relatively unharmed looking with their four-wheeled wagon of booty in tow, I kid you not. We had had our worries when we saw them start out, lugging a cardboard box of god knows what by its edges, at the daisy fresh hour of 5:30 PM, but here they were, back safe and sound and with some good memories, I’m betting, just like us.
This day’s run saw more of the valley bottom (which still has some nice steeps to work the calves and Achilles’ tendons) along the Elwah River. As John put it afterwards, you could really run this every day and not get tired of it. I’m sure I would notice something different every time: a creature, a flower, a funny shaped tree, a slew of stones, a broken off fern in the path. After the 20 or so miler yesterday, which was mostly hiking, it felt good to be actually running again and we did some gratifying striding out on the downhills that I decided made me feel nothing short of magnificent despite what I might look like. Did I mention the Elwah Campground had modern plumbing toilets and sinks with hot water and a warm air blower to dry your hands and that this was pretty darn nice? It was pretty darn nice.
James ended up doing pretty much the exact things he mentioned as options on the Olympia Trail Running Group website. When we stood on the large, inviting, handsome bridge over the Elwah just past Humes Ranch, watching the violent water swirling below us and wondering if it was jumpable, James announced he would go on and do some uphill zigzagging to Dodger Point and the rest of us just wound our happy way up the Elwah on the main path. It’s testimony to a great weekend of solid miles and distracting beauty when 17 miles goes by like it’s maybe 6, and three to four hours like maybe one and a half. Before I knew it we had hammered it into the parking lot like horses drawn to the barn and it was tough to realize it was over.
Ironically, John’s car’s battery had died, something I (and he) didn’t find out until after Craig and I left (sorry, John!). I thought there was irony in this somehow. His legs and his bum knee held out for nearly 70 miles while the car said, something about that just makes me want to lay down and not start. Thank goodness for ranger stations, huh?
Thanks so much to John Pearch and James Varner for coordinating and planning and just plain envisioning such a memorable, satisfying, and all out beneficial Memorial Day Weekend run fest. I hope it happens again soon, because an annual WOW might not be enough.
Kendra Borgmann