When I think of Adventure Treks, I think of great friends, hilarious instructors, amazing experiences, and ramen extreme. Last summer, I was on the British Columbia 2 trip, with 23 other kids, and 6 “adults.” I say “adults” because they are basically just older kids. Anyways, one of our adventures was a backpack through Well’s Gray National Park. This beautiful place is full of rolling meadows, lush forests, and mosquitos.
A required item for you to bring is a mosquito net. After visiting Well’s Gray, I definitely understand why. It began when we drove up this sketchy dirt road to the trailhead. Getting out of the van, we expected to be swarmed by bloodsucking bugs, but there were only a few buzzing about. All of us thought that this was how bad it was going to get, but we were way wrong. Read more
There’s a funny thing about strangers: they don’t leave when you want them to, especially when you’re stuck with 23 of them for 16 days, with nothing to look forward to except hiking five miles up a snow-covered volcano. As it turns out, Mount St. Helens doesn’t leave when you want it to, either.
“What is hard to endure is sweet to recall.” This French proverb certainly held true during and after my Washington expedition over the summer. The summit of Mount St. Helens wasn’t the only hardship endured on this trip. Rocks, as they did on the mountain, presented a challenge on our four-day backpacking trip along the beaches of the Olympic Peninsula; I slipped multiple times on their slimy saltwater coating, and I soon tired of the sharp angles underfoot. I had never before hiked with a full, heavy, external-frame backpack, which cut into my shoulders and back with every step, leaving visible bruises. The tides, also, were quite an intimidating, unchanging force. We had to time the legs of our journey to make our tide points, but, despite our best efforts, sometimes high water blocked our path.
There were many more hardships to come: next we sea kayaked in the cold Puget Sound waters, which topped out at 48o. The cold and the wet, the main hindrances on this part of the trip, numbed my fingers so that fastening the skirt around the lip of the cockpit was difficult, and left me shivering for long afterwards.
But as we sweated through the hot, dry, desert-like climate of central Washington, rock-climbing and river-rafting, the prior experience seemed like it would be quite welcome. I desperately gripped the sheer rock wall with my hands and feet, but knew that my exceedingly tight-fitting shoes and harness were supporting me. When rafting the Wenatchee River, I faced a new challenge: Read more
