I spent the week over in the Okanagan area with my family doing a little hiking and a little fishing, and spending lots of time around the campfire. Matt and I have a little travel trailer that we take out on a couple of camping trips each summer. I still love to backpack and camp in a tent, but after a really cold fall trip to Yellowstone a few years ago where we were scraping ice off of our sleeping bags in the tent, I just love being able to turn on the heater from the bed in the trailer on a cold morning. It makes getting out of bed early to go hiking a little easier.
Part of our vacation fun was spent scouting trailheads in the Pasayten Wilderness. This is where you have a map showing both forest service roads and trails and you drive to all of the trailheads you can find. If the trailhead looks promising once you get there, you get out and hike for a few miles and see what the trail is like. In this case, my backpacking friends and I are thinking of doing a backpack trip up to Horseshoe Basin in the Pasayten, so my trail scouting had an ulterior motive—I wanted to see where the snowline currently was so we could decide if a 4th of July backpack trip in the area would be feasible.
If you haven’t been in the Pasayten Wilderness before, I would highly recommend it. It’s the largest wilderness in the U.S. and is not highly travelled. There are a lot of trails and several loop hikes are possible. The snow also melts out earlier than on the west side of the Cascades. The only downside is that it’s really not close enough for a day hike when you live in the Puget Sound area. Guess that means you’ll just have to travel a bit to go to someplace cool that you probably haven’t been before.
That’s true of many of the hikes that we’re offering in July and later on this summer. Some of them are a bit of a drive, but well worth it. I hope you are able to see some sights you haven’t seen before and develop an interest in checking out more hikes in the same areas.
Happy hiking!
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