Jess and I have had a beautiful beginning to the trip. We first traveled to Whistler to do some mountain biking and hiking (and in Jess' case ziptreking). As luck would have it, we happened to be visiting during a mountain biking festival, called Crankworx, and were able to watch some of the most hard core types throwing themselves off ramps the size of ski jumps. We began our downhill mountain biking experience a bit more humbly on the green and blue trails. For those of you who are not familiar with downhill mountain biking, this actually involves taking your 45 pound tank of a bike (think dirt bike without an engine) up the ski lift and riding it down trails that are built on ski runs - or between ski runs, weaving through trees, down rocks and over narrow wooden bridges. As it turns out, rocks are harder than snow and Jess came away with some gnarly rock-shaped bruises, as featured in our photos.
On Wednesday, we took the gondola up to the top of the Whistler peak to do some hiking. Our chosen trail boasted a fabulous sign -- "Danger: beware of avalanches, crevasses, rock slides, and unmarked terrain. Have a nice hike!" It involved some beautiful mountain views, waterfalls and snowy slopes that we tried not to slide down. Apparently the warning was sufficiently scary as we had the trail all to ourselves. It was altogether a fabulous hike--except that Jess somehow contracted a case of poison oak.
Thursday we rented some cruiser bikes and spent the day in the fabulous city of Vancouver munching seafood and envying it's car-free bike lanes. By the end of the day, however, Jess was working on a nasty cold.
On Friday Jess' parents drove us down to Seattle where we've spent some time visiting with family and hiking on the Olympic Peninsula. We took a small hike through the moss-covered trees of the Hoh Rainforest (small due to seriously itchy poison oak rash acting up) and then headed straight to the coast where we did some hiking, tidepooling, and sunset watching (tip for anyone with poison oak rash: the ocean heals all). On this rare portion of our trip Jess avoided obtaining any new injuries or illnesses.
The next leg of our journey involves flying back to NYC on the 5th and on to Buenos Aires on the 7th. We'll keep you all posted from there!
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3 comments:
Sounds like Jess is causing nothing but trouble -- bruises, poison oak, cold. Maybe she should come back. ;-)
Your trip to Olympic National Park definitely sparked tons of wonderful memories of my trip there a few years ago. The amazing biocapacity of those tidepools just blew me away.
I had never seen anything like Second Beach before. We camped there a few days, even spotting a bald eagle fly over us with a big fish!
I've really enjoyed the photos! Please keep them coming with as many descriptions and tags as you can handle. :-)
Safe travels!
Oh boy! I want to go ziptreking. Can't wait to hear all about it!!
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