Mount Si + Lake Serene

My dad is my outdoors inspiration. When I was younger, he'd take me and my siblings on camping trips and hiking trips and beach trips. I'm honestly not sure if he knows what a hotel is. Whenever we'd travel somewhere far away enough to need overnight lodging, we always pitched a tent. In a camp ground, in the middle of freaking nowhere. Whatever. If there was a patch of dirt big enough for our tent, we would pitch it. My mom constantly bemoaned, "Why do we drive miles to sleep on rocky ground when we have perfectly comfortable accommodations back home?"

Why, indeed. My mother raised me to be a fashion-savvy, modern, capable-in-the-home city gal. My father raised me as a rugged, mountain-climbing, tent-pitching, outdoorsy tomboy. Typical. My mother was born and raised in a modest town with comfortable amenities in Vietnam, whereas my father was born and raised among rice paddies.

In anycase, this is the first time since I graduated from high school where I've had enough time at home to really get back in touch with my more rustic roots. In DC, mommy's influence easily won. Here in the Pacific NW, daddy definitely takes the cake.

I've been on two incredible hikes since returning.
1. Mount Si:

2. Lake Serene:

It really doesn't get better than this.

Mount Si is a hike I know rather intimately. It's about a 25 minute drive east of Bellevue, and my daddy took me and my siblings up this mountain many times in the past. I even went up it once with my best friend and hiking partner-in-crime, Kayla. Every time I've been it's been very crowded, which can be a little annoying when you run into rude hikers. According to the WTA, land managers estimate that Si draws between thirty thousand and fifty thousand visitors a year, making it the most heavily used trail in the state.  It's a long, totally uphill hike, with not much to see or do until you get to the very top. But the top is so worth the 2 hours of trees and trail. There are views of the Upper Snoqualmie Valley, the Puget Sound basin, and far beyond. The WTA cautions not to try to climb the haystack for obvious safety reasons, but my baby sister is a nimble little adventurer and forced me to climb climb climb. Well worth it in the end.

Lake Serene is new to me. Kayla found it on the Washington Trails Association (www.wta.org). We hiked it on a Thursday morning, so the hikers we ran into were few and far between. The hike to Bridal Veils Falls was comfortable enough, and well worth the work. The falls were absolutely deafening and incredibly beautiful. But they were nothing compared to Lake Serene, nestled in a deep basin beneath the spires of Mount Index. Jeez. I could've built a house and lived the rest of my years up there. It was awe inspiring, majestic, beautiful.

Up there, I couldn't imagine living my life comfortable in some city and be content in never venturing out into the natural wilderness that is so available to us. It's funny how living and loving DC almost tricked me into forgetting how much more formidable and magical God-created landscapes are than man-made ones.

So maybe I'm not traveling thousands of miles away from home this summer to scale the walls of Angkor Wat or run my feet through the blinding white-sand in Pattaya. There's beauty everywhere. You just gotta remember to look.