Staircase Hike

First off....Yes, Lisa is blogging! Never thought I would. I decided to create this one because we LOVE going on road trips.

This time we started out pretty late. Didn't leave the house until noon. Then there's going to the store, getting food for the day, getting gas. These are the 'chores' of the road that I don't enjoy.

We had a couple of places in mind, but we wanted to go somewhere new. We just jumped in the car and blew where ever the wind took us. We headed over the Narrows Bridge. That's mostly the direction we seem to go.

At the end of Hwy 16 we were stuck with the choice...north? or south? We always go north, so this time we headed south. Drove along the Hood Canal. Jeanette remembered a hike she once went on while in Young Women's. We drove through Hoodsport, then up to Staircase. (I think it's a state park!?) My poor car.I didn't know we were going to drive about 10 miles on a dirt road with a MILLION potholes. There's one thing I hate, driving 25 miles an hour for long distances. It was beautiful up by the lake though! It even hailed. Uh Oh!

Once we got there it was perfect. Dry trail and no rain. After reading the bulletin board, we found that all the hikes were all less than 3 miles. Bummer. At the trail head was a sign. Something like 'The foot bridge crossing the river was washed out in a recent storm. Crossing can be dangerous, use extreme caution.' We thought we would decide what to do once we surveyed the damage. The trail was only a 1.9 mile loop. No biggey. It was such a beautiful, easy hike.

Then we got to the river. Yep...that bridge was a goner. I took a look down and thought 'darn. well..ok, lets turn back.' But what did us three Benedicts do? We climbed down to the river bed. There were a couple of ways over. None of them looked easier than the other, so walked upstream a ways and decided to cross there. I really didn't want to take my socks and boots off.

I didn't have a place to put them, my pack was too small, and I needed my hands for balance. So we all de

cided to roll up our pant legs, and get our boots wet. It was pretty amazing. Each time I lifted my foot it felt like the river was going to take it away. The water was only just up to my knee. We got to the middle of the river, which was an island of small rocks, then had to cross on top of some small unsteady rocks. On either side of that were pretty deep pools of water. I think that was the most scary part. I probably could have stood in water up to my shoulders. Once that was over we had to figure out how in the world were we going to get up the other side of the bank. The way up to the trail was covered with branches. We literally had to take it one step at a time.

Whewww! We were up! What an adventure. Each step after that we had water shooting from our feet. Boots FULL of water. I wanted to get back asap and take those bad boys off!

We were steadily walking up an incline when the trail suddenly ended and we found that the rest of it was way down in the river below. CRAP! I did NOT want to go back. We turned, climbed the rock and roots to our left 'til we found the continuation of the trail. In less than 5 minutes we were back a the car. Sheesh!

Thing is...I would totally do it again! So fun.