[Old Guy Hiking]

Anne, inspired by John’s description of his Hurricane Hill hike a few weeks ago, talked us into trying Hurricane Hill last Saturday. Putting this trip together was logistically challenging because my wife and son needed both our cars and Paul was going to be on the peninsula already. We decided that we’d try to save a few bucks by taking Anne's car to the ferry and park it in Edmonds. Paul would pick all of us up in Kingston and then drive to the ridge. Anne called in sick at 9:30 Friday night and the scramble was on. I ended up getting picked up at my house and driven to the Ravenna Park and Ride (where we had planned to meet) and then talking one of the other folks into driving. He’d been up half the night, so I ended up doing the driving in his car. We caught the 7:55 AM boat from Edmonds and enjoyed a leisurely drive to the ridge. They got the road open by about 9:30. We got to the visitor’s center by 10 something and finally hit the trail around 11. I was having trouble with G things. I forgot my glasses and my gaiters. I bought some cheap sunglasses at the visitor’s center guaranteed to provide 100% UV protection. They fogged up all the time, so I didn’t use them much. I ended up doing lots of squinting. We ran into a friendly group of Seattle Mountaineers. We passed each other a few times on the trail and shared the summit for a while. Even starting that late, we were at the tail end of the first group up the hill. It apparently snowed over a foot earlier in the week, about 4 inches on Friday and traces of new on Saturday. We broke trail through at least 1.5 feet of fresh snow until we came to the final ridge. Much of the snow had been blown off, so it was faster going. The weather was good. We had a little of everything except rain. It was windy and calm. It was cloudy and clear. It was beautiful All this and home before 8:00 PM. We'll have to go back so Anne can enjoy this too. One of our party took about 1.5 gigabytes of pictures on his digital SLR. Some are posted on his blog at http://mehal.blogspot.com/. I've attached a Topo of our route.

[summithound]

I was set on going up there on Saturday also, however, plans changed last minute and unfortunately things didn't work out. How were the road conditions leading to the lodge? Looking foward to seeing some pictures.

[Old Guy Hiking]

The road was fine. Slippery in a few spots, but Paul's 4 Runner had no problems.