hiking | veronimama

We finally got our chance this weekend to go explore the Olympic Mountains! We’ve been dying to hike the Olympics since we move here, so we met up with some friends and drove out (up) to Hurricane Ridge.

The temperature dropped about 20 degrees as we drove up the mountain, so our hike was a chilly 45 degrees at elev. 5200. Our ears were popping like crazy on the way up, and we could definitely tell that the air was thinner at the top.

IT WAS AMAZING.

The clouds were still low when we first started our hike, so we literally hiked through the clouds for awhile. It was totally crazy how thick they were. We were walking along the ridge of the mountain, with drop offs on each side, but all we could see was a solid white wall.

Right when we were getting to the top, all the clouds started to burn off and we could see the enormous mountains we’d been climbing through! The views were absolutely insane.

On our way back down, the clouds had cleared so we could see what was at the bottom of the cliffs we’d been walking along. We could hear waterfalls in the distance from all of the snow melt, but couldn’t see many.

Margaret came to visit this weekend, so Brian and I asked around our offices to see what our coworkers recommended for cool day trips. Everyone had their own favorite places to go, but we decided on Deception Pass since it was semi-close, not closed from snow or a landslide, and didn’t involve an hour long ferry ride. The weather was sunny and bright in Seattle, but turned super rainy after we got half an hour outside Seattle.

We stopped at Shrimp Shack for lunch… BEST IDEA EVER. We had our doubts pulling up, but I’m so glad we stopped in, because we all LOVED our lunches. We’ll definitely be back.

Just a couple minutes down the road, we saw these fisherman floating around in tiny little blow-up single person raft/boats and pulled over to get a closer look. There was a sign to go down to a waterfront, so naturally we followed the road and ended up at an awesome park. We wandered around the beach, and then climbed up to one of the trails nearby. It was absolutely beautiful.