Hike/Climb

Story and photos by Laural Ringler Don’t try this at home,” I felt compelled to tell my teenage son, as we both stuck out our thumbs to hitch a ride from the coast of Vancouver Island near Port Renfrew back to Jordan River. Thus commenced our family hitchhiking competition. My daughter and husband were one team, my son and I …

Story and photos by Laural Ringler Duct tape. I had awakened to small feet clawing through my hair as a critter ascended my head, leapt over my face, and continued across my sleeping bag. I fumbled for my headlamp, its sudden light illuminating a two-inch hole in the foot of our tent, a mouse nose sticking though it. Duct tape …

Story and photographs by Aaron Theisen The Kettle Range is the backbone—and heart—of northeastern Washington. A mosaic of closed-canopy forests and open, sagebrush- and wildflower-filled meadows rapidly rebounding from past wildfires, the Kettle Range features a half-dozen of eastern Washington’s highest peaks, from the summits of which one can gape at distant shimmering vistas of the Cascade and Rocky Mountains. …

by Lisa Toner WHOOSH! Calm skies become turbulent, jarring me out of my climbing-induced reverie. The wind rips loudly over the sharp ridge upon which I stand, with a sound like tearing canvas. Huddling closer to the wall of cold granite, I pay out rope to my climbing partner – who also happens to be my husband. The rope twitches. …

The twin peaks have occupied a spot in my imagination since I first took note of them many, many years ago. Slate blue and stately in the summer, bedecked in a gown of snow in the winter, the peaks, just north of the United States-Canadian border, stand slightly apart from their Garibaldi Range brethren—two “ears” that, on a clear day, you can see anywhere from Vancouver, BC, south to Bellingham, Washington, where I live. I often wondered what the view would be like from atop.