Xmas 2011
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Greetings Friends, Family, and whatever the rest of you go by.
Another glorious year for the Wing Family. And maybe it was just me, but it was really on the cold side up in the Pac Northwest this last annum. We set rain and low temp records, and the snow in the mountains lingered an extra couple of months. I even just spent last weekend de-mossing the roof AND raking leaves! There are still some hangers up in the trees even. I have NEVER raked leaves in December – it’s just plain wrong. The world has gone crazy. I gave Al Gore a call to see if he would be interested in doing another one of those environmental slide shows about global this or that, but haven’t heard back. I figure at the very least he should give Obama a little competition for the Nobel Prize next time around.
We have been on National Park themed family trips for the last couple of years, and this summer we did the concrete (and marble, limestone, granite, etc.) jungle: Washington DC. The timing of this one put us there around the 4th of July and we stretched the outing into a second week to join in a family reunion on Nancy’s side in Rhode Island. DC I found out is just plain HOT in the summer time. It was built in a swamp too.
Most of our week the temps pushed mid/upper 90’s, only to be exceeded by the humidity%% (I was amazed to see how many people were out jogging in that stuff, in the noonday sun even). Given all of the history and museums, we have been holding off this trip until the kids would actually understand just a little of what they were looking at.
Staying just outside of the city in Old Town Alexandria, we made extensive use of the second busiest mass transit system in the country. Worked like a charm, and in the course of a week I’m comfortable to say we saw the city by a-rail and afoot. I’m pretty much a history guy who likes to walk around and read things, so this place was made for me. Arlington was incredible – it gives a true sense of what it costs to be an American. Strolling around the National Mall are great memories as well. Standing in the Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson Memorials made me feel like Mr. Peabody and the way-back machine. Although the iconic reflection pond I was really looking forward to was drained and full of bulldozers (never saw any work the week we were there – government spending in action). And don’t start me on the Smithsonian(s). We visited several of them, with my favorite being Flight and Space. Five hours slipped away like nothing.
Not to mention the Botanical Garden, Bureau of Engraving, the Spy Museum, and a tour of the Capitol courtesy of our Senator’s summer interns. We even went to the Old Soldier’s Home and Lincoln’s Cottage, where Abe shaped the future of our great county (and per the Xmas card pie, I got to display my ‘Something About Mary’ hair with a life-size bronze of the man AND the horse he rode in on. Wish I had that hat…..). Then came Rhode Island. We learned why most people take the train from the DC to surrounding metro areas. It was about 400 miles, 12 hours, and about a hundred bucks in tolls.
Not to mention I always seemed to be in the wrong lane. We stayed in Narragansett, which I’m sure must have a limerick named after it somewhere, and when we weren’t visiting with friends and family had a peaceful view of the water in the full swing of summer. A big showing at the family reunion, with a great picnic with ample beer and lively conversation which leads to ‘good time had by all’. Too bad it’s just so far away.
I’m still working for Liberty Mutual/Safeco. Hard to believe it is coming up on eighteen years. That’s almost a career. When you consider I’m seen as a SME in my occupation, work from home in a tent office (45 second commute) with nothing but the falling leaves and squirrels to bother me, I’m pretty sure I must be at my professional peak. Either that or I’m just a shopping cart and a bag of cans away from homeless. The two are surprising similar, especially when I forget to shave for a week or two. The tent has been holding up great. Last year was the wettest and coldest on record, and some speculate if we even HAD a summer. So much for my crazy hippie dreams of zipping down all of the windows on soft summer days and changing my work space to a screen porch in the middle of the forest. In spite of all of the rain, wind, and cold, with the help of a propane heater I was cozy and dry as could be. No critters or insect infestation either (only a few stray spiders, for whom I kept the dust buster handy). Base on the perfection of my creation, I expect a tree to fall on it any day now, putting an end to my own private Walden Pond.
Meanwhile, I also got an official governmental notice thingy in the mail and realized it’s been three years since I got my collectors firearms license. How time flies when you are a part of the solution and not the problem. That little scrap of paper added some cool words to my vocabulary: Mauser, Mosin Nagant, Madsen, Steyr (as well as a bunch of those little green heavy steel cans in the crawlspace). I figured there are worse things I could do with 30 bucks (and none of them would last for three years). That was an easy check to write. This time around I’m learning how to correctly pronounce things like Tokarev, Makarov, and Modelo Super Largo.
The UPS guy isn’t quite sure what to think of me with the heavy boxes that come from time to time or the small ones that must be signed for (by an adult, which I somehow quality as). I’m sure he assumes our house is actually just a cover for a local militia. But at least I’m paying taxes and not writing a manifesto. Although I did go to my first gun show this year, and I can say without a doubt there are a LOT more people out there you need to worry about way before me. But I did see a lot of cool t-shirts (‘Proud to be an Infidel’ is popular these days, along with a ‘I Love Guns and Coffee’ sweat hoodies done in a Starbucks logo and colors).
Mitch is still pretty much a string bean. He eats ten times a day and I can see his ribs. During those childhood checkups they run the future height math and come up with a guess on how tall a kid might be. The likelihood of the boy cresting six feet are looking really good, which would make him one of the taller Wings to sprout off our branch of the family tree in quite a while. So it looks like the clock is running on getting enough parental fear into him to last thru the teen years and get him out of the house before he finds out I’m just all talk. In the meantime, he continues to be a Lego fanatic. I finally made him list out all of the sets he has and the number of individual pieces they came with so he could quantify what ‘a lot’ is. The count is just a little over 10,000 bits of colored plastic (excluding those which have been sucked up in the vacuum, eaten [and passed] by the dog, and pulled out of the soles of my shoes).
I’m pretty sure I haven’t ever owned 10,000 of anything, so after this holiday season Santa will be put on notice I’ve place a moratorium building blocks of ‘fun’. In the meantime Mitch gave soccer another try this year, and the sports gene just hasn’t come to the surface yet. He still hasn’t learned that a little pain is just a part of life, and every time he got a good kick in the shin guard or a jammed finger, the tears would flow and the team would take a knee. Of course, when this happens a dozen times in the first half, sympathies fade quickly. I’m thinking he might be more of a field and track kind of guy. He seems to really push himself and becomes fiercely competitive at individual things, and I can see him totally getting crazy with a javelin. Meanwhile he continues to do well in school and still thinks it’s cool to go camping with me (provided I make huge camp conflagration and let him burn any and all things in a ten foot perimeter).
Looks like Jaclyn is all grown up now. This is, if you call sleeping in until noon, always hiding behind a closed bedroom door with earphones in, spending two hours in the bathroom with the water running the whole time, and throwing around attitude like a Shriner does with candy at a 4th of July parade. She is about as tall as me and can almost wear my hiking boots. She also makes it pretty clear she is a high schooler with both verbal and physical jabs (the latter of which result in a retaliatory bruise on the limb of MY choice, which I make sure to mix in with all of the soccer contusions in case she ever learns about Child Protective Services).
Ah yes, it’s still all about soccer. She is playing on a premier team, which means (other and a big check at the start of the season) a couple practices a week, generally games every weekend, and better outdoor clothing than I have in my hiking closet. She made the high school JV soccer team this fall as well and played both programs at the same time. I don’t recall seeing all that much for a couple of months, but I know there was never a car that had over E in the gas tank and the Change Oil light was always coming on. Of course, some of that may be the high school commute.
Jac isn’t going to the local high school, but applied and was accepted by one called Aviation High School. It’s a public school that partnered with the aerospace industry (i.e. MONEY) that focuses on science, technology, engineering and math. In other words, Nerd High. They only take 100 students per grade and you must come in as a freshman with the expectation of staying the entire four years. AHS is currently in a temporary school (a beautifully asbestos tile and lead paint adorned 1950’s vintage facility surplused by the school district after the famed Boeing Bust of the 1970’s) which is a good little drive for us. But ground has been broken for their permanent site on Boeing Field (across from the Museum of Flight no less). Given it’s costing almost fifty million of private funding, I’m thinking it should be pretty cool. So between soccer and piles of homework, she tends to stay out of trouble. Of course, we are getting closer to driving age…..
What about Nancy, you might ask. During the family reunion in Rhode Island, I got some feedback on the X-mas letter from recipients in the Eastern states. It was unanimous: there just isn’t enough stuff about Nancy (and maybe a smidge too much on hiking – but most people read this in the bathroom anyway…..). I’ve gave it some thought, and they are right. So this season we are expanding our reading options to include what will be dubbed ‘The Hazel Holiday Times’ (which seems to be a name she goes by back there). I can’t promise Nancy will fill up a page front and back with no margins in eight point font, but rest assured, you can relive the life and times of Hazel and she recounts her annual antics and going-ans. I hope to make this an annual tradition.
Best wishes for this holiday Season.
Dave, Nancy, Jaclyn, and Mitchell
The Mountain Man Review
The theme for this year of hiking was SNOW. Lots of it. It just never left. If you see a mastodon or a crazy squirrel with the last acorn heading south, better follow because the ice age is a coming.
The spring hike this year was in JULY, and we returned to the heart of the Olympics. A couple years back Mike and I did a crazy fifty miles blitz in barely over two days during a retrace of the famous 1889 Press Expedition (sponsored by the Seattle Press – newspaper at the time). It was the first crossing of what is now Olympic National Park. The idea this time was to bring the usual hiking crew, take five days, and add another 20 or so miles by looping in a high route that would get us out of the endless rainforest valleys and some rugged views. Instead, when picking up the permit we were informed there was still 6-8 feet of snow on our high route (should be snow free this time of year). So we stuck to the basic fifty miles in four days, which made for a nice pace and kept it easy on the feet. When we could keep them dry, that is. The river crossings were anywhere from nasty to downright terrifying. We had hit/miss weather, and with the big melt-off everything was running fast and high. We used as many log and debris crossings as possible to keep from wading, and some of them were pretty hairy. Nothing makes you take stock of your life as when you are straddling a log five feet above a raging river and feeling your muscles start to give out with 20 feet to go. Or spotting three bears in less than a mile that were unsuccessfully foraging on slopes that till recently were snow covered. Even our highest pass at only 3200′ was still a winter wonderland (fun route finding). Everything got wet and stayed that way. In other words, good times had by all. The stories were big and the fires bigger.
The first kid hike this year was on the flanks of majestic Mt. Rainier, at a nice little spot a mile off the road called Snow Lake. The ranger tried to talk us out of it, because, well, it was still (unseasonably) snowed in. Obviously he didn’t know what kind of fathers he was dealing with. We crammed the tents on a nice rock outcropping above lake and watched the kids making snowmen in the warm (relatively) thin summer air. Morning was pretty cold, and the light on the tiny iceberg clad lake was almost spiritual. The second kid hike was set for the Foss Lake chain, but again when getting permits we find there is a high stream crossing (unseasonable) and no bridge. Too dicey for kids. Plan B was made on the spot and we found our group heading for Glacier Lake just down the road. Realized that I haven’t hike with a ‘big’ group for a very long time. We had six kids and four adults, and trying to keep everyone moving was like herding cats. Not that I’m against stopping to throw a couple of rocks in the river, but these kids saw EVERY rock as one that needed to get wet. The campsites were excellent, terraced along the lake side.
Added plus was a huge flat topped boulder extending into the lake that hikers both big and small could climb and play all day. We spent many hours on that rock. And given we were on a lake, the kids spent many hours in the cold water under the warm sun. Sometimes you need to just remove the electronic leashes and walk away from all the noise and static of the world for a couple of days. It’s amazing how without the usual distraction kids re-defined ‘fun’ as who could swim out to a lake log the fastest (without getting covered in icky green stuff that smells like bad cheese). If Mitch can still remember these days in twenty years, I’ll have done my job (especially since he currently he can’t remember if he fed the dog in the last half hour).
Lot of camping this year – as usual. We did the annual big family campout (KFC) in Kelso. Weather was good, and it’s always nice to get the tent trailer out and up. We’ve been dragging that thing around since Jae was born – how the years fly. I also did a Cub Scout camping trip with Mitch in August. Sometime back when I was first getting into backpacking, I had thrown a set of earplugs in my standard kit bag and never used them. Guess I have a phobia of snorers. I found out this trip when you get a couple dozen boys ages 8-10 in a car camping environment, it’s like the perfect storm for noise. Picture Lord of the Flies, only with glow sticks and all of kids running around until midnight telling each other how to cheat at video games. Truly freakish. And I’m proud to say I was the only parent who got any sleep that weekend (thanks to a fifteen year old pair of earplugs). There were also quite a few trips out to Fort Ebey State Park. I love this place and have been camping there for years. An old coastal cannon emplacement right smack in the middle of Whidbey Island, it faces west into the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Every ship from the Pacific sailing to a Puget Sound port comes in thru this passage. We’ve seen everything from tug pulled barges to Coast Guard cutters to towering container ships to nuclear subs (which look a little like the Loch Ness monster). Early in the year we bought a memorial bench in the family name (why wait for someone to die?). Kind of a neat program, where you pay the state for a cool heavy duty commercial bench and the install, then they maintain it and thank you. They did leave me pick the site placement (high on a bluff looking toward the ocean). Of course it took eight months to approve instead of the standard three weeks, and they had to sign off on the verbiage on the bronze plaque (guess they weren’t use to John Muir quotes), but it got done last August and we now like to sit on it every chance we get. I think I chose the location well, because during most visits there are always a couple keeping the boards warm. Everyone knows I’m all about functionality and use.
The fall hike was also the last of the 40’s in the group. A 40 Hike is when a guy turns 40, and he’s generally given enough trekking leash for a five day trip (which equates to about 50+ miles – yes, I know, I know, why isn’t it 40 miles? What happens on a 50 hike? Is it 100 miles? We shall see.
As kids grew and life became busier, taking a week in the summer wasn’t practical so these outings were generally regulated to take the place of the annual fall hike on the years they occurred. This time the 40 Hike was to be a circumnavigation Mt Hood. Basically taking the entire Timberline Trail in one juicy bite (which is about 40 miles. Hmmmm….). Sure enough, a week before a hike which had been planned a year in advance, large segments of the trail were closed due to raging forest fires. After a flurry of email, a spectacular Plan 8 emerged: 40+ miles in the Eagle Cap Wilderness of Northeast Oregon. It had been ten long years since I had been there (mainly because it is the eight hour drive one way), and I was dying to get back. I absolutely love The Cap. It has it all, and is the best backpacking you will never hear about. Big sweeping glacial valleys, 9k peaks everywhere, open cliffs and blocky outcrops of solid granite, too many lofty alpine lakes to count, and good old fashion scrambling to almost any highpoint you have the legs and desire to reach. And the weather window almost too perfect; clear sunny skies, full moon, freezing nights and days in the 70’s. Sure, we got the quick rain or passing hail storm, but that’s to be expected that high and mid-September. I’ve been on many hikes where we hit a full moon (especially in the climbing days), but I found out this trip that with a single wall tent it’s like a prison guard shining a spotlight on you ALL NIGHT LONG (or at least I assume that’s what it would be like……). Sleeping was a little rough. But classic high alpine views were had on all trails. One spectacular pass gave us well earned vistas only after thousands of feet of vertical and several hours of Zen like switchbacks (early morning -the rising sun, terra incognita, and mental being was perfection). At the end of the day, when I look back at all of the great
nuances of this trip, it reminded me an awful lot of my early days in Glacier Park where I first cutmy teeth on backpacking. Everything about it was characteristic, from the campsites to the company to the rum punch in the hot fall sun (again unseasonable – finally to our advantage) while trail weary feet soaked in a biting cold mountain lake. This trip is truly the epitome of why I do what I do (and most likely why I’m not very good at very much else).
Enough said.
And what will next year bring??? Maybe a hike down the famous Na Pali coast trail onthe Island of Kauai? A drive thru Zion? Bryce? Arches?A second Nobel Prize for ‘B’ (do they give a Nobel Prize for balancing a budget?). Looking forward to another year walking around planet Earth.
