Mt. Rainier as seen from our new place in Seattle
Last week, C and I packed up all of our important belongings (including Molly dog of course), into our small Subaru (with a roof cargo rack) and began a six day transit up to the Pacific Northwest to begin our academic sabbatical year. Both of us work closely with collaborators at the University of Washington, and so we have been invited to serve as affiliate faculty for the year. While we are both excited about focusing on our respective research goals, we are also thrilled to be excused from any teaching duties for the year. We've only been in our new place in Seattle for a week, and it already feels like a massive burden has been lifted.
As part of this new experience, we also decided to take the scenic route along the drive, and visited a collection of really fascinating and extraordinary places along the way. We spent the first day in Zion National Park, biking up the primary road up to the Sinawava Temple in the early morning before the park got busy. It felt like we had the entire road to ourselves. The next day we drove up over 10,000 feet to the upper bowl of Wheeler Peak in the heart of Nevada's Great Basin National Park. The road to the summit was beautiful and the fall leaves had already started changing near the top. We spent two hours hiking up to the ancient bristlecone pine grove in the high alpine zone (site of the infamous and ill-fated Prometheus Tree - google it). The next morning, we spent a few hours roaming around on the Bonneville Salt Flats before heading north up into Idaho to spend an evening touring the Craters of the Moon Monument in Idaho. Somewhere in between, in remote northern Nevada, our Yakima roof rack blew apart, ejecting several of our bags onto the highway. We recovered everything safely, but we then had to stuff all of our belongings into an already overstuffed car. We made it work.
The next day we spent the entire morning hiking up and around the Borah Peak wilderness. Ideally a hike to the summit would have been incredible (a state high point I still have yet to tag), but we opted to keep things chill and hike more casually around the base of the mountain. We also spent about an hour exploring around one of the best and most well-preserved earthquake fault scarps in the US (from the 1983 Borah Peak Earthquake). That night stayed in Missoula, which has now cemented itself as one of my favorite small towns in the US.
On our last two days, we made our way along I-90 westward across Washington, traversing over the barren channeled scablands (a region I had just experienced a few months back during my RATS48 ride). When we finally reached the pacific crest at Snoqualmie Pass, we stopped for a fun hike up the Pacific Crest Trail. It brought back a LOT of memories from my 2010 thru-hike. The trails were soft and shrouded in damp foliage. I could feel the moisture in the air and it was truly wonderful. I have become so used to the sterile soil and dry air of Flagstaff, that I had almost forgotten what it feels like to be on real soil, stepping over mud puddles and roots, and dodging low-hanging leaves.
We finally arrived in the Seattle neighborhood of Bryant, and to our small apartment that we'll call home for the Fall and it just felt like it was where we were supposed to be. In just two days, we've all settled in, I've been out for multiple runs around the neighborhood, and I can feel a world of stress melting away. I have my new office arranged at UW, and have already biked the two miles into campus multiple times. Every morning when I wake up, the skies are grey and cool, and I couldn't be more excited. This weather suits me and I eagerly look forward to the coming months.
