Category: Hiking

Yes I was back to the Mountain Loop Highway to show off one of our stunning PNW lakes to a friend visiting from Los Angeles. This was my first time on the Goat Lake trail, the trailhead is pretty far down the Mountain Loop Highway, about three miles past where the road turns to gravel if you’re coming from the Granite Falls side. The parking is not far from the highway, and the trail is steady and mostly flat.

This summer I took my son on our first overnight backpacking trip. He is nine years old so I searched for hikes that were shorter so that the focus could be on the camping and not the hiking. While I had originally booked a permit to camp by the ocean in Olympic National park, a day before our planned hike a weather pattern brought a ton of rain to the coast right on the historically driest day of the year in Western Washington.

Making the most of a rare, sunny spring weekend in Seattle, I dedicated most of my Saturday to taking care of household chores and yard work. As a little treat for myself after all that effort, I decided to plan a Sunday morning hike. Even though my kids usually loath morning hikes (or any hikes for that matter), they surprised me this time by being real troopers.

For our big summer trip with the Scamp we headed to the Continental Divide to see Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone and hike to Taggart Lake. What an incredible trip, these are two magnificent national parks that we highly recommend visiting!