Paddy-Go-Easy Pass

Most of you know that our little family is visiting America right now (Washington state). We're visiting my family and friends and getting my partner visa granted - which happened yesterday!! Yey! - We've had a great time so far, Brett has to leave Friday to head home for work, we've been extremely busy but managed to get a hike in yesterday. I've really been wanting to take Brett on some hikes around the mountains here because the landscape is so different from Queensland but I guess I'm not in hiking shape anymore because holy cow it was a rough day. We did Paddy-Go-Easy Pass just outside of Cle Elum. We're still not quite sure how we made it to the top because as we came down the mountain it seemed an incredible feat.

Our day started out a little more slowly than we'd hoped, we didn't leave the house until almost 9 and I was hoping to be at the trail head around 9 but meh, life happens. We finally got to the trail head at noon after a grueling drive on a terrible road - about 11 miles in one hour - the hike started off well enough, hiking through the trees and small amounts of mud but about 40 minutes in we were all feeling pretty tired. (The hike is 3.5 miles up while gaining 2700 feet in elevation) We decided to keep going because we figured we had to be about half way up and didn't want to turn back then. Well, it turns out that we were only about a quarter of the way up at that point because we FINALLY reached the summit at 3 pm which means it took us 3 hours to reach the summit. Towards the end of the hike I nearly threw in the towel because I'd been to the top before and I was really struggling with Chucky on my back but Brett pushed me on and we did reach the top. At the top is a beautiful alpine lake called Sprite Lake, we only stayed at the lake's edge for about 40 minutes because the mosquitoes were so terrible (this morning Chuck has 9 bites on her head, one of which is right under her eye, poor thing). We then made the decent which seemed to take forever, 2 hours in reality. After getting off the terrible dirt road and onto I-90 we ran into road work and were stopped for nearly an hour while they did blasting. Even though our adventure totaled about 13 hours and we're completely exhausted today we had a good day in the mountains. Today we're relaxing because we'll be spending Brett's last day here in Seattle tomorrow.

some views from the hike

taking a break

at Sprite Lake

Beautiful Sprite Lake

Snow at the summit 

Hike down

on I-90 waiting in traffic

Chucky's been good, growing like a pretty little weed. She's recently been making a cute new face and just yesterday - on her 7 month birth anniversary - she started clapping like crazy. She's moving around a lot but not quite crawling yet.

Brett and I have been enjoying our time here and are looking forward to rest today.