It’s Larch Madness, the Larch March, and I’m up here for the third time since September. This time with my good friends; Sophie, Joey and Lawrence. Sophie and Larence made a last minute rendezvous with Joey and I at the North Bend Safeway. The parking lot was full at 10:30am and we parked about 3/4 mile down the road. It was sunny with a slight overcast, and it was about 60 degrees. We had lost all our layers by mile 2, and were up over the ridge by 12pm. A Ranger was guarding the entrance to the National Park and was advising folks to sign a National Park permit so that they knew how many people were using the trail (essential to garnering funds). The larches made their appearance right as we crested the ridge.
We had to decide on whether to go the high route or low route. We ultimately decided to take the high road to the lake and low route back. We’d later find out that while the high route is striking, the low route ultimately won our hearts. The high route has more sparsely populated trees, while with the low route you’re in the thicket- you’re walking through red meadows and are actually among the larches.
Interesting conversation abounded at the lake, specifically about diet and sugar. Turns out Sophie is a bit of an enemy of sugar. So we munched on peanut M&Ms while we talked about the it’s adverse health effects.
Allow Joey to draw your gaze towards this incredible view of Mt. Stewart. I’d like to climb that peak someday!
On the way down, I had some random thoughts about how my thought process has matured over the years. Previously, I’d stay up late into the night kind of maniacally working on some project thinking there’d be a pot of gold delivered to me that night if I somehow succeeded. I think I overvalued short term win, over long term progress. Now I don’t particularly care about the short term outcomes of things, as long as I know how it fits within the long term objective. For instance, you might make 10 sales calls in a day. If 9 of them don’t pan out, you might be a bit melancholy that you missed 90%. But with a more long-term orientation, you might say, well ‘hey’, 1 success a day might be 200 throughout the year. And if 1% of those 200 follow through with a big sale, then that could be a very successful year.
We did find this incredible pup on the way back down. His owners appeared to be a couple of deaf guys. I think I accidentally said something I didn’t mean when I tried to motion Thank You.
Sophie loves wild mushrooms. Especially when they’re a mystery!
We got off the trail around 4:30pm and made our way to a very decent Thai restaurant in Cle Elum called Ploy Thai. It was Sophie’s recommendation, and I generally trust her recommendations because she’s got a lot of wisdom, especially when it comes to cuisine. We order a number of dishes family style. We got back to Seattle around 7pm. Joey and I would end up hitting the town, and meeting up with Irfan and JACK!!
Parking lot trailhead was basically totally packed at 10:30am when we got there. But not to be a deterrent, plenty of forest road to park along!
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