We've been down to Dog Mountain twice since the annual Frostbite Fly-in. C.J. has been feeling that she hasn't flown her Falcon much this year. I lucked out and found the launch unusually roomy and was able to take off from beside the ramp either on the left or right. And it was soarable but not booming both times. We even stayed for the night on the 16th and C.J. got another flight on Sunday. Then we headed off to explore - first to the Tacoma Power Taidnapam campground just down the road from Dogpatch and then east through Packwood (where we had tried to take the USFS Skate Creek Road the previous Saturday only to find it still "closed for the winter"). Cayuse Pass had just opened two days ago and we wanted to see what the snowpack looked like, and get in a hike somewhere. The Stevens Canyon entrance to Mt. Rainier NP was still closed (as was nearby Ohanapecosh campground) but you could drive in as far as the Grove of the Patriarchs trail. After rearranging our gear for hiking we took off on the snowy trail and clambered over a mass of blowdown to reach the grove of old-growth fir, hemlock and cedar. The boardwalks, placed to keep the foot traffic from compacting the soil around the trees, were obscured and partly smashed by the smaller fallen trees and we did not try to make the full circuit.
The road over Cayuse Pass was bare and dry but there were still walls of snow along the roadside. SR 410 was barricaded but it had obviously been plowed as far as could be seen. [By next Friday it would be open as well over Chinook Pass.]
On Memorial Day we joined Peter and Naomi Gray and Bob Bunger at Baldy Butte where Peter was doing a HG tandem for the 12-year-old daughter of a family from Ellensburg. Bob and C.J. climbed to 7700 ft, and even I got over 6000 and tried going NW across the river to the next ridge. A call for assistance from Naomi who had landed out in a ravine below the road put me on the ground where Peter joined me to help a shaken but mostly-uninjured Naomi pack up and return to the LZ. After Bob and C.J. landed we returned to the launch to find the wind too strong for us, even if we wanted to fly again. On the way back to E-burg we stopped and hiked along a cliff above a meander of the Yakima River to observe the flocks of feeding and nesting swallows and swifts. We stayed to visit with the Grays and their chickens, and enjoyed a delicious pasta carbonara for dinner. The last hours of the holiday weekend meant some slow traffic on I-90 from Cle Elum to about Easton, some of it due to gaper block around a fender-bender.
I've been looking into getting a lightweight camping trailer, either an Aliner Sport or Chalet LTW. It's been kind of fun to subscribe to the email group and read the posts describing trips, mods and concerns. I installed a Type II trailer hitch on the Outback and hooked up the wiring. Bob is willing to let us try his MyTLite trailer to see if we like it as much as the concept, and provided me with a brake controller which I haven't installed yet.
Otherwise, the garden has been keeping C.J. busy, and when she's worn out from working there, there's still lots of physical and virtual scrapbooking to be done - you can look back at the blog posts for March and April to see her scrapbook pages online. I've had four substitute jobs this month which is just about as many as I've had any month previously this year. Unfortunately that's not going to provide even a down payment on a trailer. So if we want to do a road trip to Alaska late this summer, we'lll have to figure something else out.
