We started 2022 heading into our third year of the COVID-19 pandemic and got introduced to Omicron and all its siblings and children. 2022 also seemed to be the year where the effects of climate change really hit home in the PNW. For all the weirdness though we actually did quite a bit this year and spent a lot of time outdoors truffling, hiking, camping, hunting and fishing.
2020 totally sucked between the Coronavirus pandemic, lockdowns, wildfires and finally Lira injuring her knees so I had hopes 2021 would be a huge improvement. As I write this we are pretty much back in the same place we were in winter of 2020 with the new omicron variant raging in Seattle and the rest of the world and the obvious impacts of climate change hammering us with snow and, for Seattle, extreme cold. The year has been full of pandemic canceled plans but has some bright spots with Lira making a full recovery by summer time and taking on new challenges this fall.
Last week we finally broke out the NOBO and headed over to the Teanaway Forest, one of the closest places to home where campgrounds were now open after COVID related closures followed by a 23-day manhunt for a murderer who was holed up in the area. Turns out I was turkey hunting on a day when the guy who killed another turkey hunter was on the loose and Catherine and I were foraging another day, they just hadn’t announced it and started the closure yet,.
Another year gone by already and what a year it was. I spent a lot of this year dealing with a relapse of SIBO and some other health issues but still managed to get outside every single day, got in a lot of hunting and fishing and had quite a few good trips locally, to the LA area and to British Columbia. So much, in fact, I couldn’t even really get it all in the picture grid.
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2018 was a good year but a tough year in several respects and I’m actually kind of glad this one is over with. Thanks to Lira I hiked close to 2000 miles this year and we managed to get out and do quite a bit of fishing and hunting, logging 108 days total in the water, hills or fields. I also somehow managed to build a boat for the sole purpose of taking her fishing with me since she coludn’t quite work out in a float tube. Catherine and I had a lot of fun spending many days exploring the Middle Fork Valley this year and also camping and hiking on the Oregon coast.
Up until this year Lira and I spent all our time hunting pheasants but this year that changed. Yes, we still hunt a lot of pheasant but we also started hunting frequently in Eastern Washington for other upland birds as well as spending some time in the woods hunting grouse. Trust me hunting is the appropriate word for grouse, we didn’t spend much time killing grouse. So far this season we’ve added four new species of birds to our list.
Chukar have sort of always intrigued me as a game bird ever since reading East of the Mountains by David Guterson. Tough terrain to say the least and they are hard to hit. Early in the year we hunted some planted chukar at Cooke Canyon just to get Lira onto a new bird. While deer hunting in Ellensburg we saw so many chukar that I decided it was time to hunt them for real and have spent several days now along the rimrock and high flats searching for them. We have managed one wild chukar and that is one Lira literally grabbed out of a bush.
My seasons of 2017 – spring lake rainbows, spring turkey season, tenkara trout, summer fly fishing, summer steelhead fishing, pheasant hunting, elk hunting, late deer season, chukar hunting
I can hardly believe that 2017 is drawing to a close already, where did it go? As I sit back and look over the year I realize that I have had one heck of a year with a lot of firsts. For the first year in a while health was just not an issue, as you can tell from my lack of health related blog posts, so it freed me up to get back into fly fishing, to really get into hunting and to finally reach my goal of stocking my freezer by myself. On top of spending almost one-third of my days in the field I was able to get out for daily hikes (and later runs) with Lira and still find time to work all year long.
After our first two successful overnight trips to Mirror Lake and Rachel Lake/Rampart Ridge we decided to take on a bigger challenge and do a 3-day trip. We opted to do the 2015 Ultrapedestrian Wilderness Challenge Chinook Pass loop – a 32 mile long loop that starts at Chinook Pass on Hwy 410, goes south on the Pacific Crest Trail, drops into Mt. Rainier National Park on the Laughingwater Creek Trail then takes the Eastside Trail north through the park back to Chinook Pass. Most people are running this in 8-12 hours but we decided to take the slow approach and do it as an ultralight backpack trip in 3 days and adding in a few extra miles in order to camp and see a few more sights.
Rachel Lake from Rampart Ridge
Second backpack trip in June done! This time we decided to do a shorter but steeper route to Rachel Lakes, Rampart Ridge and Rampart Lakes. There were some early morning thunderstorms happening up at Snoqualmie Pass yesterday so we waited until about 8:30 to leave and drove up I-90 to Exit 60 and finally up along Kachess Lake to Box Canyon Road and the trailhead. We got our packs on and headed to the trailhead.
Skagit Steel, Islamorada ‘Gator’ Trout, Rattlesnake Traverse, Yakima Tenkara
Its that time of year again, time to look back over the past year and see how things stacked up against the initial goals. In 2012 I did pretty well with my 2011 goals but 2013 sure had other plans for me, mostly due to an injury I sustained running early in the year and caused us to change a lot of our activities for the year.