My first weekend in the area, I drove south to Colorado Springs to visit the Garden of the Gods park, known for its rock formations.

^ You’ve got a ways to go, bud.

A few weeks later I went skiing in Loveland. Just a few miles from arriving at the slopes that morning, traffic on I-70 halted to accommodate two bighorned sheep unhurriedly making their way across the interstate. I hadn’t realized how big they are.

The next weekend took me to Rocky Mountain National Park, northwest of Denver.

I went back the next Saturday to take advantage of the seven-day park entry pass, and drove to the top peak in the park to hike as far as I could without snowshoes. The weather was decidedly worse and the winding drive back down the mountain claimed at least one other car that had slid into a ditch. I saw more elk.

This Friday I took the day off to ski at Loveland, this time without fighting weekend crowds on the trip from Denver. Weather.com showed the winds in nearby Georgetown at 30 mph with gusts up to 50, and it was worse on the mountain. They’d received seven inches in the two days before, but the wind had blasted away accumulation from any exposed areas. The obvious choice, then, was to ski between the trees, which was well and good until my shoulder was intercepted by the trunk of the titular pine.

On January 4th, my east coast holiday adventure ended and I flew back to Los Angeles with little thought as to the subsequent step of my road trip. This turned out to be quite fortunate, because Delta lost my bag. I luckily had a friend in Santa Monica who allowed me to sleep for two nights on his couch, waiting for the misplaced luggage, until I finally drove back to the airport and walked among the many rows of Samsonites and TravelProcs and located my own. The Delta representative checked the tag against my dog-eared ticket stub and smiled apologetically. “There’s only two of us. We can only work so fast.”

At least my ATL-to-LAX flight was graced by the presence of the mom from Home Alone, registering the first celebrity sighting of my trip. Scintillating.

Having retrieved the wayward bag, my maps told me I was 700 miles from Salt Lake City and 1,000 from Denver, the two skiing cities on my short list of possible destinations. The road to both ran through Las Vegas, so I decided to stop and spend a night there. Or four.

Most of Nevada is dusty and dry and brown and uninhabited. The 4.5 hour drive was through desolate country that would make excellent zoning for munitions testing or the exile of immoral hedge fund managers. I’d left my camera’s memory card in South Carolina so you can simply insert into your mind’s eye the landscape of every Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon every made. The infreqent mountain ranges were eroded and soft, like if you crumpled a sheet of butcher’s paper and poured water over it.

I neared Sin City. Priceline.com got me into Sam’s Town Hotel & Casino (all hotels in Vegas are casinos, and vice-versa), but driving up to it, I didn’t expect the size.

The hotel was built around a giant ten-story atrium resembling a tropical rainforest. The complex housed a 56-lane bowling center, an 18-screen movie theater, and about a jillion slot machines. It also had table games. (Fun fact: people in Sam’s Town Casino are better poker players than I.)

On Thursday I went to the Las Vegas strip and was blown away by the sheer opulence of the properties there. It actually does look the pictures I’d seen, which is no small feat.

I saw the Bellagio, Bally’s, the Trump hotel, the Palazzo, the Venetian, and Caesars Palace (which is planning a $1 billion renovation.) I spent Thursday and Friday night on the strip, playing poker and people-watching. (Fun fact #2: free beers at casinos are the most expensive beers you’ll ever drink.) I attempted to make my money back in cocktail shrimp and prime rib at the Harrah’s buffet, and turned in an admirable performance.

I carved time out of this exercise in excess to see the Hoover Dam. Whatever word you’d get if you divided “impressive” in half, that would be the Hoover Dam. The most entertaining part was overhearing the tourist grade-schoolers say “Where are the DAM bathrooms?” and “Look at this DAM shirt!”, while helpless parents rolled their eyes.

^ Front of the dam. The water levels were rather low.

^Back of the dam, looking down.

Saturday morning I grabbed my keys and my now-lighter wallet and drive north. Short-term accomodations in Salt Lake City were booked for the Sundance Film Festival in late January, so I set my sights on Denver, 750 miles away.

^ Northern Nevada

^ Moon rising over Utah

Saturday night I spent in Green River, Utah, in a $34.99 motel. I wanted a hot shower after my day’s drive, but quickly abandoned that plan after peeking into the bathroom.

^ Utah, Sunday morning

Denver was only 350 miles away but it took me 7.5 hours to drive it on Sunday after getting caught in a snowstorm near Vail.

The road was icy and wet. I only had trouble once, while driving through a tunnel of all places. I was cruising at 55 mph, taking up half of each lane in the light traffic, when I suddenly found myself moving at the same speed, in the same direction, but pointed at a 45^o angle to the white road lines. The concrete walls of the tunnel sat about a foot from the lane’s boundaries, not leaving much room for error. A series of carefully decreasing S-curves allowed me to correct the slide, you’ll be happy to know, without damaging the walls of the tunnel.

I’m now in an extended-stay hotel in Aurora until Friday, at which point I will attempt to find further accommodations in the area. It snowed three inches my first night here.

^ My course so far. I inadvertently did pretty well at hitting most of the western states.

I left San Francisco on a rainy Saturday morning two weeks ago, and decided to follow the winding Pacific Coast Highway all the way down to Los Angeles, even if it took me all weekend.

It did.

The steady rain and low visibility blocked most of the ocean views and turned the 25 mph curves into 10 mph ones. An interminable time later, the craggy coast flattened out and the road sped up. I spent Saturday night in the scenic college town of San Luis Obispo, and headed out early on Sunday. Highway 1 doesn’t hug the ocean through this whole area, and inland southern California is dusty and mountainous and dry.

I drove through small farming communities with roadside stands advertising cherries and garlic, the combination of which would make an interesting pie. It was sunny and warm. The road wound through the mountains and I wondered again at the point of “Rock Slide Area” signs. It doesn’t change my driving, and if I see a Frank Caliendo-sized boulder hurtling down the mountain towards my open window, I don’t need a road sign to tell me to get out of its way.

^ I also saw my first “Wild Boar Crossing” sign, which at 75 mph looks like a Triceratops taking a poop.

^ Santa Barbara, I think

I’ve been in San Pedro, a waterfront community of Los Angeles, since November 2nd. You may have seen it in about a billion movies, and it’s also home to the impressively large Port of Los Angeles. I’ll be here until November 24th, which is a huge relief after only spending a week in each city since Seattle and traveling on the weekends. It feels great to be able to relax on a Saturday and watch college football instead of having to jot down highway directions from Google Maps and fill up my gas tank.

So, yesterday, I jotted down highway directions from Google Maps and filled up my gas tank. I decided to drive up to Big Bear and do some hiking. The Los Angeles area has been battling heavy wildfires since mid-week, leading to evacuations, road closures, and a state of emergency declared for the area. My route out, Highway 91, took me through some of it.

I drove up into the mountains, entering San Bernandino National Forest.

^ You can see a plume of smoke from L.A. in the center.

I chose a relatively uneventful seven mile round-trip hike with a decent view of Big Bear Lake from the top.

Solo hikers move faster than groups, so I’ve become accustomed to the etiquette of passing people on the trails. I’ll try to make some noise as I come up behind them, coughing or kicking a rock or two, so they can notice me and move to the side. Near the end of my long walk on Saturday, I neared a family of five chattering and moving slowly in front of me. Bringing up the rear was the bearded, heavyset dad with Robin Williams arms and a red baseball cap. His three grade-school kids noticed me and moved to the right, but he drifted to the left of the trail as I neared him. I walked up behind his left side and said “Excuse me”, which came out lower and gruffer than I’d intended.

The phrase “he jumped out of his skin” had never made sense to me, until now.

He yelled “WHOOOOAAAAAAA!!!” and actually left the ground, moving to his right and very nearly toppling the little girl in the pink blouse who was affixed to his right hand. His reaction was so over the top that I at first thought he’d heard me coming and was hamming it up for his kids, but it quickly became apparent that wasn’t the case. The family stopped. The children stood agape. “You don’t sound like my kids,” he muttered sheepishly (if ever the term “sheepishly” should be used, it is here). “I should hope not”, I replied, hands instinctively raised and palms out in the universal “calm down, I won’t hurt you” signal. His kids were already giggling but I managed to make it around the next turn before I burst out laughing. For a while.

I actually had a similar experience in Eureka. I was in my hotel room one mid-morning, working by the glow of my laptop - with the lights off, like programmers do - when the cleaning lady knocked on my door. “Come in.” She didn’t hear me and knocked again. I got up and had almost reached the door when she let herself in.

From her point of view, she walked into a darkened and ostensibly uninhabited room and immediately ran into a motionless guy in a black T-shirt. She was very vocal in her surprise. The humorous part was how she immediately recovered, as though it didn’t happen. “AYYYYE-YIP! Do you need clean towels?” For the remainder of my stay, she was extremely careful before entering my room.

Back in Big Bear, after three tiring hours of hiking, I climbed in my truck and left the trailhead at 3:45. The radio informed me of road closures due to the fires, including Highway 91 - my route. The only road open towards L.A. was I-10 West. In between Taylor Swift and Kenny Chesney, the radio admonished, “If you are at home thinking about going somewhere tonight, please reconsider. Every open road is at a standstill.” The drive back was 120 miles, 60 of it on I-10. I got home at 9:15.

When I walked outside this morning, my eyes watered from the acrid air and a cloud of brown smoke covered a quarter of the sky. My truck was covered in a thin layer of ash. Southern California during fire season.

Side note: yes, this website has been up and down this week. Don’t ever use Zone.net.

On Friday afternoon I checked out of my Eureka motel. Having done some fortunate research, I realized that I should get off onto Highway 1 to follow the coast instead of taking 101 like I’d presumed. At the junction of 1 and 101 there were signs announcing, “Drive through a redwood.” So this was the famous road through a tree. I envisioned an enormous redwood with a paved two-lane tunnel running through it and I’d have to turn my headlights on. Honking my horn would produce a resounding echo and bats would roost high above my windshield. Unfortunately the reality wasn’t quite as impressive.

I followed a small gravel road onto private property and before I knew it, I was handing $5 to the slack-jawed attendant at a wooden entry gate. I rounded the corner.

The tree was big, but no bigger than I’d seen in the forest. I followed the minivan in front of me and edged my truck up to the opening. Both side-view mirrors on my truck began to flex back, pushed by the inner edges of the tunnel. I quickly shifted into reverse and backed out. Of all the ways to spend a sunny California Friday afternoon, wedged in my truck inside of a tree was fairly low on the list.

I briefly considered asking for my money back. I paid fi’ dolla to drive my truck through the tree and I wanted to drive my truck through a tree, dammit.

Highway 1 took me down the coast.

^ I want that house

The road hugs the coast as close as possible and I rarely hit 45 miles per hour. One 100-mile stretch took me three hours.

I wasn’t planning on making it all the way down to San Francisco on Friday, but there are very few towns with four-digit populations on Highway 1. The sun began to set and still I saw no Best Westerns or Days Inns. This route wasn’t as much fun to drive in the dark. I rounded the ten-thousandth curve and screeched to a halt. A small doe stood in my lane, motionless, staring at my truck like a…well, you know. My bumper was less than a foot from her hindquarters. A few miles away I hit my brakes again when my lights caught another doe a few feet off of the right shoulder, and a third time just down the road when a large buck stood in the empty oncoming lane.

I spent the night in a Travelodge just north of the Golden Gate bridge and crossed it on Saturday morning.

^ When I neared the Golden Gate bridge the first time on Saturday morning, I reached for my camera. Fifteen minutes later I retrieved it from the motel room where I’d just checked out.

Mark Twain allegedly stated, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” but it was sunny and very warm as I drove around the city on Saturday. After a short walk on the beach I continued south to Redwood City, where I’d found an extended-stay hotel on Craigslist.

Less than 50 feet from the hotel, on the last turn of my trip after traveling 350 miles from Eureka, I saw flashing lights in my mirror while sitting at the stoplight. I pulled over. I wasn’t approached by Erik Estrada but rather a sunglassed officer with a knife slit for a mouth. “I pulled you over because you ignored the sign and stopped right on the train tracks…what happened to your mirror?”

I did receive a ticket for stopping on the tracks, which wasn’t a moving violation because, as the officer helpfully explained, once I stopped, I “wasn’t moving.”

I checked into my hotel and watched college football and Mexican professional wrestling, which I’d highly recommend for its sheer entertainment value and amazingly garish costumes.

Around noon I pulled into Myrtle Creek, a small tourist town, and confirmed what Shelby had told me earlier - there’s no self-serve gasoline in Oregon. It’s actually against the law to get out and pump your own gas. I told the young girl who approached me to fill my tank with regular and asked her why the law existed. “I dunno, maybe to create jobs?”

^Myrtle Creek

Further south, I exited I-5 to head towards the Oregon coast. The land dried out and deciduous trees turned to pine. I entered California. I met up with Highway 101, the famous Pacific Coast Highway that skirts the western side of the state all the way down to Mexico. I passed through the mountains and at times had to slow to 20 for hairpin turns; it was becoming clear that this route would be much slower than the taking the interstate.

It was extremely foggy on the other side of the mountains and I could only catch glimpses of the Pacific Ocean from the road.

The towns in northern California are poor. Most are small conglomerations of trailers and gas stations, with hand-lettered plywood signs by the street that advertise used tires and homemade redwood furniture. I spent this week in Eureka, a semi-touristy coastal town of 30,000 people where the median household income is less than $26,000. Portland residents ride bikes to save the environment, Eureka residents ride bikes because they can’t afford cars. Picture a mixture of Key West, Mayberry, and Dodge City, with two heaping scoops of economic downturn stirred in.

The town does have some cool old Victorian houses, but I can’t forgive it for producing Brendan Fraser.

^ The Carson Mansion

After more than two months in large cities, it was good to hear people use phrases like “ain’t gonna” and “howdy”. Every other radio station plays country, which I appreciate. People in Seattle and Portland have no accent or local dialect - their speech is generic, like that of a national news anchor. At the Widmer Brewery in Portland the waitress gave me a small sample of a seasonal beer when I was seated. I liked it and asked for a pint, and when she brought it she said, “Here’s your burr, honey.” I thought she had a southern accent until I looked at the menu and saw that the name of the brew was “Brrr Red Ale.”

While I’m on the topic, a few blocks from my Eureka hotel is the Lost Coast brewery, where I ate supper on Wednesday night. I ordered the Pastrami Burger and was served a giant hamburger made of grass-fed beef topped with ample slices of grilled pastrami (yes, pastrami), swiss cheese, and Thousand Island dressing. It came with fries with a parmesan and mustard seed seasoning. Lost Coast also offered a beer sampler, which is several ounces each of ten of their beers, along with a flyer describing each one. I sipped them all and thought about how cool it would be to tour microbreweries around the world and write about them. Maybe that’s 2009.

Today, I quit working a few hours early and drove back north on Highway 101 to see the redwoods. It turns out they are really really ridiculously massive. This particular species is Coast Redwood.

^ To convey a sense of scale I took off my shirt and hung it on the tree bark. It’s a Large.

^ A placard introduced this specimen as simply “The Big Tree.” Several people took turns posing for photographs.

^ The Big Tree. I’d guess that it’s 18 feet in diameter, or more than 55 feet around, which probably makes it hard to find jeans for it at J.C. Penney.

A ragged one-story motel on Highway 101 with 8 or 10 rooms has a sign proclaiming that it was built from a single redwood tree. I’d believe it.

There are many road signs in the area warning of elk crossings. On the way back, I finally saw some wild ones in a large fire-swept clearing.

^ Deer are skittish and moose are shy, but these elk acted like dairy cows. I was thirty yards from them and they didn’t pay any attention to me or my truck’s noisy dual exhaust.

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll leave Eureka and see how far I make it. When driving west and south on US roads, the mile markers and exit numbers count down, telling you how many miles you are from the edge of the state. I’m at 711. I’ve got a ways to go.

Seattle seemed to exude the “I want to be different, just like everyone else” adage that is so commonly used in reference to teenagers. There’s only so many combinations of square black-rimmed glasses, carefully scuffed tight jeans, ironic berets, and thin brown leather jackets that a person can wear. It wasn’t a bad vibe but it felt a little forced, like everyone trying a bit too hard to be cool at a dinner party with people they don’t know very well. Wicked coffee, though.

Coworking in Seattle did have one disadvantage, and that was fighting I-5 rush hour traffic every day. Even my Seattle escape attempt on Friday night felt like swimming through molasses. I left at 4:00 pm and crept south on the interstate through Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia - it was a full 70 miles before I could lean back and flick on the cruise control. I rolled into Portland a few hours later.

That Saturday I drove around the town and later spent a few hours at a local bar watching college football. Sunday I went to the movies and saw “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” and “Body of Lies”. My high school buddy Shelby had kindly offered me a futon in his house a few miles from downtown Portland and I spent Sunday through Friday there.

Portland’s unofficial motto is “Keep Portland Weird” and the city definitely included an eclectic group of people. It also bills itself as the microbrew capital of the world and I went to the Widmer Brewery restaurant for lunch on Wednesday to try their Widmer Hefeweizen, winner of its category the 2008 World Beer Cup. I paired it with bratwurst, sauerkraut, and sourdough bread, and returned for the same meal on Friday.

Portland felt much smaller than Seattle, and had an excellent bus system while still being both walkable and drivable. The city is bisected north-south by the Columbia River and again by Burnside Steet running east-west; the resulting parts form the four quadrants used to give directions within the city. One highlight of downtown was Powell’s City of Books, one of the largest bookstores in the world with three stories and more than 68,000 square feet of retail space. The store really is a small city - it hosts 40,000 visitors per day.

On Saturday morning I shook off the repercussions of the previous night’s activities and cranked up my truck. Then I shut it back off, retrieved my phone charger from Shelby’s house, and drove south for California.

The park stretches 150 miles along the I-5 corridor, almost to the Canadian border, and I chose a random entry point on the southern end. At the visitor’s center I reviewed some maps and elected to try the Mt. Pilchuck Lookout Trail - three miles of rocky trail, gaining 2,200 feet of altitude and promising a great view from the top. It was in the mid-50’s at the bottom of the trail, which I accessed by driving 7 miles up a rutted and steep gravel road. The landscape was almost temperate rainforest, which turned into pines and rocks higher on up.

Bottom of the trail, 3,100 feet.

^ A few hundred yards into the trail, it got, shall we say, rocky

^ A dense fog obscured most of the view on the way up

^ About a mile into the hike, I passed the snowline. It got chillier.

^ By now the trail consisted of rocks, slush, and rocks covered in slush

^ My destination

^ This was the view from the top when I got there. Too foggy to see anything at all. 5,324 feet.

^ When the guidebook labels a trail as “strenuous”, you might want to pay attention to that.

^ Turns out this guy was born in Spartenburg, SC. We talked about The Beacon, a local restaurant that will keep you up all night if you eat supper there.

^ After ten minutes and a sandwich, the view cleared a little…

^ …then closed again

^ A side of the small wooden lookout structure, looking down. Apparently this used to be a heli-skiing area.

^ It was windy and in the 30’s (if that) at the top.

^ I’m walking back down, now

^ Where I just was

^ This is an accurate portrayal of most of the trail. It was like walking through a small creek, stepping on rocks the whole way. I had gone to REI the day before and bought a great day-trip backpack, which had chest and waist straps and sat high and tight and moved with me, as opposed to my high school backpack which bounced around like an amateur cowboy on a mechanical bull. But all the hiking boots I tried on, even the wide versions, were too narrow, so I was relegated to wearing old tennis shoes. Everyone else at the top was sporting very expensive-looking hiking boots, which no doubt kept their feet dry, while I had to step on the jagged rock points jutting out of the water.

^ I’ve seen waterfalls, and I’ve seen snow, but I don’t think I’ve seen them together.

^ Looking back at the top. After this picture my camera batteries gave out, which isn’t surprising after 869 shots.

It began to rain about halfway down, then rained harder. It wasn’t pouring, but it was still about the level of no-interval-delay-on-your-car’s-windshield-wipers. I finally gave up dodging puddles and trudged along in the mud.

At home I took a hot shower and made a supper of homemade granola and green tea. Just kidding, it was three frozen chimichangas and two bottles of beer. I haven’t been in Seattle that long.

At any rate, much of the last two weeks was, to put it mildly, damn terrible. A surfeit of bugs in a client’s website - some of my doing, some not - resulted in multiple testily-written emails waiting for me every morning when I woke up, all of which ended in “right away” or “ASAP”. Stressful. I also was beginning to go crazy sitting all day on a hard wooden chair at the kitchen table of my small apartment near the interstate. I’m a very solitary individual but when I started talking to myself at the supermarket I decided I had to change something.

I’d seen the term coworking while researching my trip but I did some further research this week and found Office Nomads, in downtown Seattle. For a 15-minute drive and $25 a day I’d get a real computer chair and desk and work among other free-lancers and small business owners. On Thursday, I went in.

It occupies the top floor of an old brick building in a mixed commercial and residential neighborhood, and has a few rooms with different vibes: a large main room with assorted tables and desks and the receptionist/owner’s desk, a few private conference rooms, a space with plush sofas and coffee tables covered in magazines, and “The Cave”, a darkened area lit solely by computer monitors that only a programmer could love. When I walked in I was half-expecting to see one big square white-drywalled room with card tables and folding chairs, but I was pleasantly surprised. It was about a third-full of an eclectic group of people in their 20s and 30s wearing t-shirts and jeans and talking about wireless protocols, DNS servers, and web advertising revenue models. Sure beats the kitchen table.

It took a while to get used to the ambient noise of other people working, but, seeing as I’d been drifting into the dangerous habit of quitting work earlier and earlier to take a nap or read, it was good to have an impetus to stay at my computer until 5:00. However, at 3:00 on Friday afternoon two guys passed around a hat and then disappeared, returning shortly with a few six-packs of Pete’s Wicked Ale; everyone’s work output diminished noticeably after that.

Friday night I figured I’d take advantage of my location and play some poker. There are dozens of casinos in the area but I still had to wait a half-hour to get a seat at a $3/$6 Texas Hold ‘Em table. I threw down five twenties and started playing. I’d never played at a casino before so it took a while to get used to the fast pace of the game, but I managed to hit a few big hands, and then some more, and had around $450 by 2:00 a.m. At this point all the intoxicated and the amateurs left to eat and sleep, and my competition got much tougher. I found myself playing against four or five others who showed a lot of experience at the table. Two of them were actually dealers who’d worked earlier and were now playing on their time off. I knew I was in trouble but I was having fun, and my stack dwindled until I lost the last of it when I kept betting my full house against a new guy who’d just joined us and pulled 4 10’s on his first hand. It was light when I walked outside and I did a double take when I checked the time. 8:00 a.m.

My lesson from that night is that I’m better at poker than drunk players, but worse than people who actually work at the casino. To be fair, that’s a relatively wide category.

Needless to say I didn’t get much done on Saturday. Napping and college football. In a striking contrast, on Sunday my agenda included napping and pro football. And buying some jeans at the mall.

So, no pictures of lions or tigers or bears or mountains this time. But I’m actually not dreading Monday morning. Which counts for a lot.

My apartment is in Tukwila, Washington, a few miles from downtown Seattle. Unfortunately it’s also just a few miles from the SeaTac (Seattle-Tacoma) International Airport, and arrivals and departures are faintly audible all day long. I couldn’t find an affordable place to stay elsewhere in Seattle - short-term housing has been by far the biggest pain-in-the-ass on this road trip - and this particular landlord had a 12-night open window between tenants, which she kindly provided to me at the prorated $1495 monthly rate. I will be checking out of here on Sunday the 21st.

After an uneventful week I drove to Mt. Rainier on Saturday to get away from the airport and two major interstates that are located within walking distance of my apartment.

The landscape quickly turned into mile after mile cow pastures and pine trees, except for a quick passage through the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation, which was plastered with neon signs inviting passersby into a thousand-car parking lot sitting at the feet of a huge casino. The road wove on through small Enumclaw, Washington, which instantly made me feel at home for the first time on this trip.

The eye-wateringly strong smell of many animals packed into a small place hit me as I passed by an enormous red barn advertising “Livestock Auction Today.” Main Street was partially closed off for a car show and I could see rows of angle-parked cars with their hoods raised like stacked dominoes, revealing mirror-polished cams. A plastic Budweiser sign in the convenience store where I bought my coffee proudly proclaimed that Enumclaw was the hometown of NASCAR star Kasey Kahne. The town reminded me of Liberty, SC or Lannet, AL or any of a hundred small southern towns.

The Evergreen State is impressively treed in this area. Although it was nearly noon and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, several times I had to remove my sunglasses and turn on my headlights while driving through a canopy of pine trees that blacked out the road beneath it. There were almost no signs of civilization within 50 miles of the park entrance, and I could only pick up one radio station. The Allman Brothers sang “Ramblin’ Man.”

And every time there was a break in the trees, I could glimpse the mountain. Mt. Rainier dominates the landscape of northwest Washington - it is visible from almost everywhere. It’s not the tallest peak in a series of peaks, it’s the peak.

I paid $15 at the park’s entrance and studied a hiking trail map. I decided to drive up to Sunrise, elevation 6400′. I stopped at a few scenic overlooks on the way.

I parked at Sunrise and hiked up to First Borroughs, elevation 7000′. I was above the treeline now.

I hiked up to Second Burroughs, elevation 7400′.

Even several miles of rocky trail from the parking lot, there were many hikers up here. Usually they thin out considerably after a few hundred yards of hiking, but I could always see about a dozen people on the trail ahead or behind me.

One shaggy-haired, barrel-bellied man of about 35 was slowly making his way up the mountain when I passed him from behind. “How’s it going man? This is my day off from the kids, I gotta make the most of it.”

“It’s a beautiful day,” I agreed, looking back.

“So what do you do for a living, man?”

“Web developer.”

“Yeah,” he continued, not hearing my answer, “I’ve got family that are bounty hunters.”

Not knowing the proper response to this unsolicited information, I nodded my head.

“Hey man, you know this guy?” He stopped and stood up straight, stretching his black tee shirt down towards his belt buckle. It almost made it.

The shirt was emblazoned with a large picture of Dog the Bounty Hunter. “That’s my uncle, man. The Dog. He’s great, man, me and him go way back. Got the same mullet and everything.” He removed his dirty baseball cap so that I could indeed confirm his statement.

“That’s cool,” I said. “Well, see ya.” Luckily, he wasn’t a very fast hiker. I didn’t see him again.

The final peak, Third Burroughs, was accessed through an unmarked but well-traveled trail and involved losing 400 hard-earned feet of altitude, then hiking across an expansive rocky ridgeline.

One of the best parts about this hike was that it was almost completely above the treeline, so that I always knew exactly where I was in relation to my starting point and eventual destination. That was a drawback at times, though, when I looked back and could clearly see people camped out eating lunch at a spot I passed a tough hour ago.

Also, because of the unchecked exposure, I am at the moment sporting an impressive sunburn.

Third Burroughs, elevation 7828′. The view from the top was, like most things in nature worthy of a photograph, wholly incapable of being photographed.

On the way back down, I took a different trail which was literally cut out of the steep side of the mountain, looking down at the valley below.

The entire trek was about nine miles and took me five hours.

The coup-de-grace came as I was driving back down the mountain while the sun was beginning to set. I rounded a hairpin turn in my truck and came upon a series of cars parked on the middle of the road, people hanging out of the open windows. I grabbed my camera. Anywhere else it would have been for a fender-bender, here I knew it was for wildlife.

In Yellowstone the sight that caused traffic to stop was buffalo and coyotes. Here it was…SASQUATCH!

Just kidding, it was a bear.

^ I can now profess to have seen a bear in the wild. If I were old enough to have a bucket list, that would have been on it.

I had was wearing several layers and had packed a sweatshirt in case of inclement weather, but it was very warm when I pulled into Whistler, and the sidewalks were clogged with strolling couples in flip-flops and shorts. Whistler is less a ski resort than a small town - it’s not the lodge-and-rental-shop cluster of buildings that I’m used to. The main village covers a huge area and looks like a Tanger Outlet Center. If you ever find yourself skiing and decide you need to pick up some lotion at L’Occitane and sunglasses at Tommy Hilfiger, you’re covered. There were definitely more shoppers than those intent on participating in outdoor activities.

There was very little snow on any of the runs, and none at all over by the lifts. Crowds of mountain bikers waited in line for the gondola and a chance to ride down the dirt paths which, in a few months, will be crisscrossed by skiers and snowboarders.

I had planned on riding to the top of the mountain and hiking around up there, but that would have involved me cramming into the gondola with bikes and bikers after shelling out $40 to ride for just one round-trip. There were trails all around the base of the park so I set out on them.

They turned out to be a little too civilized. Much of it was was groomed gravel - or, ugh, paved - and meandered past million-dollar houses and impeccable golf courses. I can’t in good conscience call what I’m doing “hiking” if I round a turn and see a man wearing an Izod shirt pushing a baby stroller and talking on a cell phone. I finally found some dirt paths and wandered down to a secluded lake. I might add that this took place after passing a first, not-so-secluded lake, whose beaches featured a whole host of very white and very naked people. Some of the men were doing the lay-on-your-side-propped-on-your-elbow-with-one-knee-up pose which is reminiscent of a bad 70’s family portrait in front of a fireplace. Imagine squinting your eyes and opening a can of Vienna sausages.

^ Not that bad, but close. And naked.

Anyway, the lake.

I was pretty hot by this point so I contemplated taking a swim. I removed my shoes and socks and stuck my toes in the water. It was about the temperature you’d expect from a lake at the foot of a Canadian ski resort, that is to say, my skin immediately went numb on contact and halted any thoughts of submersing my entire body in it. But it was pretty.

^ It was weird seeing even the topmost runs devoid of snow. I figured they would keep at least a slushy base around all year.

^ On the way home, I stopped at a scenic overlook above a deep valley.

^ There were a few people on the right side of the road watching this rock with binoculars. I don’t know if there was anyone rock-climbing the face of this thing, but that would’ve been pretty impressive.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Seattle. I found a place to stay and will be there until October 9th.