Elevation Gain: Approximately 3000 ft
Time: 9:00 am - 5:30 pm
Weather: Sunny and warm, perfect weekend in the PNW, yet again!
Crazy weeks back at school, and my blogging takes the biggest hit. This weekend was bookended with lots of great things happening at my work. With the school year now in full swing, this might be the last weekend that I could go hiking both Saturday and Sunday. And true to form, this September has been the PNW summer that the people of the Puget Sound region have complained about not having this year.
The plan for week 54 was to get the Outdoor Club out on a hike early in the school year, so we had a day hike planned for either Saturday or Sunday. An active student member of the club told me he had never had a wild blueberry. Shocked, I wanted to get him out to a place with good berries, but also a doable first club hike. The place I thought of was Blanka Lake, a hike I did on week 4 but did not really blog about. The picture for the blog was also not my picture. It was Creighton's photo. The student, who needed to eat wild berries, was busy on Saturday, so we chose to plan the club hike on Sunday. At the beginning of last week a colleague of mine mentioned how he wanted to hike the loop around the Seven Lakes Basin as a day hike. I did that hike over 5 days with students in week 3 last year and did not really blog about it either. Plus, I remembered meeting a hiker on the fourth day of that trip who was hiking the same loop. I thought to myself, "wow, I wish I could do that." Hearing the mileage now after a year of hiking, I felt like I would be fine. But my feet would probably hurt.
We wanted to get an early start, so I was up at 4:30 am on Saturday. I went to pick up Creighton, and we drove to Gig Harbor to meet our colleague who suggested the route. We were at the trailhead by 8:45 am. We were walking at 9 am. It's hard now almost a week later to finish this post, so I am only going to talk about what I remember.
We walked quickly the 0.8 mile to the Sol Duc Falls. This is where the loop begins and ends. I took the lead on the next 3 mile stretch to Deer Lake. We were there by 10:30. We then began heading up to the High Divide. I remembered a lot of the scenes from the year before. The the little pond of a lake you skirt by on your way to a meadow with a few to west that goes on to the ocean. This was were I saw my first bear in the woods a year before on Outdoor Ed. The climb up the divide and continuing on to Bogachiel Peak was filled with brilliant views and gorgeous weather. The view of Olympus was the kind of view that makes you want to climb a mountain.
We continued on to Heart Lake. As we dropped down, we were coming up on 10 miles and it was around 1:30 pm. We took an hour break, where we ate, swam, dried in the sun, and I changed into a new pair of socks. We took off down to Sol Duc Park and just kept walking to the group site at 7-mile camp. We took a short break here, where we calculated the mileage back to the car. It was about 5.6 miles, and it was about 3:45pm. I thought it would be cool to be done by 5:30. It would mean it took me 8 and a half hours to walk about 19 miles with some pretty decent elevation gain, and that included an hour break with swimming and relaxing.
At 5:16 pm, we were coming back to Sol Duc Falls with only 0.8 miles left to go. I wanted to finish and took off for the trailhead at a brisk pace. I even found myself, slightly jogging to ensure I got back by 5:30. I was at the car at 5:28.
Orchid: Swimming, or the Olympus view.
Onion: Too long ago to remember the onion…
Picture:
Google Map
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