The weekend before July 4th we decided to take advantage of having a few days off and head to the Olympics. I planned this hike and didn’t tell Blair where we were going because I wanted it to be a surprise. I knew he would get a kick out of seeing the plane crash from the 50s. It’s also a throwback to our first backpacking trip where we camped at a plane crash in the Talladega National Forest.
One facet of hiking in the PNW is that often, the really great hikes require a long time driving on fire roads. This one was no exception and after leaving the main road you still have at least an hour of driving along narrow gravel roads to get to the trailhead. I bought a Northwest Forest pass just in case, but apparently the Tubal Cain trailhead does not require a pass. The trails in this area travel through an amalgamation of various public lands, including the National Park, the National Forest, state-owned and privately owned land.
We left home after a lazy morning, taking the ferry to Port Townsend and driving from there. We probably got to the trailhead around 3:00 PM and set off with all our gear. I was surprised at how much more difficult the hiking was with a full pack, but the trail was slightly uphill and it had been a while since I’ve hiked with a heavy pack. After around 3 miles we reached the junction with the offshoot trail that led to the plane crash. Back in the 1950s, a B-17 crashed here while flying to McChord in bad weather. I had read that there were multiple campsites in the area, however I am always nervous about first-come, first-serve sites being taken. We actually ended up being the only ones camped out by the plane crash! Perhaps because it’s a very steep 1 mile climb up to the crash site.
The crash itself was really interesting and it’s surprising how much is still there after so many years. Parts of the wreckage have definitely been dragged around by people, but most of it is still in a flat section near a small pool of water. Unfortunately the still water meant that during he evening there were quite a few bugs and mosquitos. We built a fire and that kept most of them away until we got in the tent. In the middle of the night I definitely heard some sort of animal investigating our campsite, and of course since it’s night time I immediately thought the worst, that it could be a mountain lion. I was very glad that I insisted we hang all our food in a bear bag because I at least knew we had no food in the tent. I’m pretty certain it was actually a deer but it’s impossible to know for certain. Anyways, whatever it was it never bothered us and left us alone.
The next day I wanted to check out the mine, which was about a quarter of a mile further up the trail. There’s actually a rather confusing network of trails and campsites in that area but we did eventually find the path up the steep scree-covered hillside to find the mine. There’s a stream flowing through the tunnel into the mine and it was filled with spiders and bugs so we didn’t do more than look inside. It’s always interesting to see signs of human activity from long ago and imagine what life was like for the people who built and worked on this mine.
We returned back to the trailhead after that and honestly both of us were pretty tired from the trip. I hadn’t gotten great sleep, but that always makes me appreciate my own bed that much more! I would definitely recommend this trail; although it doesn’t lead to panoramic vistas, it does have some interesting sights.
I am a bit of a personal finance nerd and I love reading PF blogs. I will sheepishly admit that I’ve drunk the Mr. Money Mustache FI/RE (Financial Independence/ Early Retirement) kool-aid and am a complete convert. If you don’t know what I am talking about, hereare a few links to illuminate you. I know this is mainly a blog about fitness and hiking, but since it is my blog I would like to include some financial goals as well. I know this idea is hard to swallow for a mainstream audience, the first argument being that it’s impossible and delusional. However, a cursory web search reveals multiple people who have been doing this for quite a while. The most relevant to our situation is Doug Nordman, who completely retired (along with his wife) after 20 years of military service over 15 years ago and is still going strong!
The reality is that it’s simply a balance of where your values lie and what you’re willing to sacrifice to get what you want. Most people who want to retire early are in one of two camps: they either hate their jobs, or they have other goals/ life pursuits that do not earn enough or even any money to support themselves. I am firmly in the latter group. A short summary of my life goals include:
My first taste of wanderlust as a teen came after watching this video. I looked up all the locations in that video (and the sequels) and made my own mental list of all the places I needed to visit in my lifetime. This included summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro; seeing the salt flats in Bolivia; hiking to Everest Base Camp; going on an expedition to find gorillas is Uganda; Angkor Wat; Torres del Pain in Argentina; hiking through the Swiss Alps; and on and on. I did manage to visit Zanzibar and Angkor Wat in college (pictured above) and the experience was every bit as amazing as I thought it would be.
I want to do an Ironman someday. I have done several Olympic triathlons in the past , so this is an achievable goal with the proper commitment and dedication to training.
I want to complete a 50k, 50 mile, and perhaps someday even… a 100 miler.
Completing a triple crown: Pacific Crest Trail, Appalachian Trail, and Continental Divide Trail. All three American iconic long-distance trails.
Obviously since I love backpacking and hiking, there are shorter trails and hikes I’d love to do: Mt. St Helens, Wonderland Trail, John Muir Trail, Wind River High Route, the Sierra High Route, summiting Mt. Rainier, etc.
Having time to visit close and extended family; it’s become so common for Americans to move for their jobs that I now have family in Florida, Ohio, Alabama, Louisiana, Virginia, and California, and with the meager vacation time offered to most employees seeing everyone is difficult if not impossible.
Living in an RV for a summer (or perhaps longer) and road-tripping to all the National Parks
And potentially endless additional outdoor recreational pursuits, including long-distance cycling, various marathons, downhill skiing, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, sea kayaking, white water kayaking, canoe-camping, mountaineering, climbing, bouldering, and the list goes on.
Are you tired yet? Obviously quite a few of these are absolutely incompatible with a standard 9-5 job and most of them are at least inconvenienced by it. These experiences mean more to me than any fancy house, nice clothes, dinners out, or expensive car. Therefore it makes sense that I’m willing to sacrifice those things in order to afford the experiences that I really desire. And honestly, I don’t really care what other people think of my choices and I definitely do not believe that having nice things is a requirement to have a happy life.
This is why I max out my TSP and Roth IRA every year and save as much as possible on top of that. It’s not uncommon among the personal finance world but I believe it’s very rare to do these things at a young age in the “real world”.
I could go on and offer counter-arguments to the most common protestations against this idea, such as not living up to your potential, not contributing to society, etc. but this blog post is long enough already. If you’ve read the 7 Habits of Effective People then you know that Habit #2 is Begin With the End in Mind. The End that I desire is not to be some corporate executive or even a high-ranking government employee, because those achievements are empty of true fulfillment. What I desire is to lead a full and satisfying life full of adventure and meaningful time spent with friends and family. And this is by far the best way I’ve found to achieve that.
By the way, being financially independent doesn’t mean you have to quit working; it can also give you the freedom to take a more satisfying albeit lower-paying job or start your own business. I’m not sure exactly what I will do when I reach that point, but I have a long time to figure it out!
I’ve wanted to do a Ragnar event for years and I finally got the chance last weekend! I used to read a lot of running/triathlon blogs in high school and college, and they all made relay events sound like a blast. The Ragnar Northwest Passage race starts at the US/Canada border and goes 196 miles down to Langley on Whidbey Island.
When someone at work mentioned that they had open spots on their team, I jumped at the opportunity. One woman on our team ended up with a swollen ankle the week before and had to drop out, so I volunteered my husband. We’ve been running quite a bit lately so I knew he’d be fine, although it was his first actual race!
We were both in van #2, which meant we could sleep in on Friday. Our van #1 started at 6:00 AM (we were not a fast team so we had the earliest start time). Blair had to work on Friday so we planned on splitting his leg between those of us with shorter first legs.
The first van exchange is at Bellingham high school, which is also where they have the expo and where van #2 signs in. Luckily we got there early, around 10:00 AM, so we had plenty of time to register, watch the safety video, and buy some Ragnar gear. I was the first runner in our van so I got ready to head out.
One of my least favorite parts of a relay is the anticipation of waiting for the previous runner to come in. I was all amped up to start running but I had at least 30 minutes of waiting, not knowing exactly when she was going to arrive. Finally I saw her (I’d never met her before but we all wear the same bib number) and I was off!
My first leg was through downtown Bellingham and along the bike path, so it was an awesome run! Unfortunately I didn’t take a lot of pictures so I don’t have many good ones to share here.
My plan had been to run a bit faster than normal since my first leg was only 3.7 miles. I was fine for the first few miles but towards the end it was unexpectedly uphill, which in addition to the heat made for a miserable last 0.5 mile. Normally I wouldn’t consider low 80s with low humidity to be “hot”, but when you’re used to running in 60s/70s weather it’s tough!
The next two legs (runner 8 & 9) were around 6 miles each and our teammates thought that they would be fine without water, but they both definitely underestimated the heat. Looking back we should have stopped halfway along the route to give them water. Ragnar races definitely expect teams to support their own runners so they don’t provide water stops, plus they went “cup free” this year so you had to have your own bottle anyways.
Amber was runner #10 and she had a 4 mile leg; after that was the 6.8 mile leg that we had to cover for Blair. I started off for the first half, which was downhill for a mile and then completely flat. I settled into an easy pace and I felt so great that I just wanted to keep going! Amber took over for me at 4.3 miles in to finish the rest of the leg, which was probably for the best since we still had a long ways to go until the finish. Then the last runner had about 4 miles until the exchange at Burlington’s local high school.
After passing off back to van 1, we went to Panera for dinner and then headed to the next van exchange at La Conner high school. I’ve never been to this small town before but I was pleasantly surprised at how beautiful it is! My husband was able to meet us here and we tried to get some sleep before our next leg that would involve running through the night.
Around 11:00 PM the runner from van 1 was approaching and I got ready for my 10.5 mile leg. This was my first time running with a headlamp! I’ve run in the dark plenty of times, but always where there were streetlights. I had thought that this would be the most difficult leg, but it actually flew by! Wearing headlamp in the dark seemed to create a tunnel-vision effect for me and the miles flew by.
I ate a caramel macchiato gu around mile 5 and that was seriously magical! I felt great after that until the giant hill at mile 9, which felt cruel but once at the top it was all downhill to the finish. I knew the exchange was at the casino and it was encouraging to see it from a mile away! However, once I stopped running, my body woke up to the abuse I was putting it through and my legs were not happy with me. I had done 18.5 miles so far and still had 6 more to do!
The next leg went past the refinery and across the pedestrian bridge, and then the two following were short legs through Anacortes. Those all went by quickly; then my husband, B, took off for his 9.8 miles heading south and across Deception Pass bridge. It’s unfortunate that most people cross the bride at night because it’s definitely the best part of the whole race!
While we were driving to find a spot to pull over to give B water we encountered a few vans that had stopped in the road. We quickly saw why they had stopped – there was a man dressed in all black walking along the road. It was super creepy because why on earth would someone be walking along a rural road dressed in a black costume at 3 AM? When he realized he was being trailed he stopped for a minute and then ran off into the woods! We reported it to the race officials via the app and needless to say, we were glad B was running this leg and not one of the girls.
Anyways, since this was B’s first run of the race he took off and pushed himself hard; we barely made it out with the next runner in time! He also got a special medal for completing this leg since it was so tough. Anastasia was the next runner up and we were all a bit worried for her since it was 9 miles and she seemed very tired. She proved us all wrong though and did fantastic, however we misinterpreted her request for water as a request to have someone pick up the last few miles for her.
So B took over the last 3 miles of her leg and it was rough for him since he’d blown himself out with less than an hour of rest. Funnily enough the last section of this run is a route that we run all the time and the exchange was very close to our house!
Finally we exchanged with van 1, realizing that although they had to wake up early Friday morning, they were able to sleep through the worst part of the night (our van ran from around 11:30 PM to 6:00 AM). To add insult to injury, van 1’s last section is also really short, meaning we had about 3 hours of a break until we had to meet up again. Luckily we are local to the area so we went home to take a shower and nap.
I wasn’t really able to sleep much but it was nice to just lay down for a few hours. Pretty soon we met back up and drove to the next exchange. I think I misinterpreted the messages van 1 was sending us and I underestimated the time the next runner would arrive by about 40 minutes.
Besides the lack of sleep, my least favorite part of a Ragnar race is waiting for your runner to arrive and having to be ready to run at a moment’s notice. My next leg was a really beautiful section through Ebey’s Landing historic area. I was fine for the first few miles, but during the last 2 I was ready to be done. 6.3 miles later and I finally handed off to the next runner! I had run over 24 miles in just about 24 hours!
Being the first runner in the van is nice because you get your section over with quickly and can relax the rest of the time. We had another few 7ish mile legs, then a few 4ish mile legs until the finish. By that time it was around 5:00 PM and we were all exhausted and ready to be done.
At the end the whole team is supposed to run in with the last runner, which is cool but also like… I didn’t want to run another step! They also had gear for sale at the finish and probably other activities that I was too tired to notice. They give each team 2 pizzas (which are cold by the time you get them), and they had some other typical post-race food. The entire race is very well-run, though, especially considering the magnitude of organizing a 196-mile route with 36 exchange points along the way!
I am also super proud of B for completing his first race and running 9.8 miles straight, the farthest he’s ever gone! Maybe we will be back next year….
The medals we each get all fit together to form this message!
