Holy shit I didn't even notice until I was already 20 this time.
Apparently this is my birthday site. I'm old again now. My 19th year was pretty fuckin' rad. Late January '08 I went up to visit my friend from kindergarten and also more recent years: David Golding. He inspired me to do stuff apparently, so March 9th I moved up to Seattle in a 150 square foot room with a bathroom in a building with 6 other rooms and a shared kitchen. It was near the border of the ghetto area of the Captiol Hill area.
Then, at 7:00 AM on March 26th I believe, David, my friends Johnny D and Jacob and myself took off to the northern Washington coast to go backpacking. We left from a town called Ozette with a destination in mind: A landmark called "Hole in the Wall." It was pretty remote. There was only an outhouse next to the blacktop we parked on. We took off down a 3-mile boardwalk through some woods at 3:00 PM. It was pretty slippery and often a couple feet above the ground or swamp. A couple of us fell a couple times, but luckily nobody fell off the boardwalk. We made it to the beach and climbed over a shitload of logs. Then we somehow hiked another two miles I guess because we ended up a good 5 miles into our journey. It was still daylight, so maybe we started walking at noon, then; 3:00 doesn't seem to make sense. Maybe 3:00 is when we got out of the woods or some shit. I dunno.
So after we walked those 5 miles we found a campsite. These campsites were not clearly marked at all. They were basically just clearings off in the brush. We contemplated staying there, but for some reason we decided we wanted to continue marching on with our 35-40 pound backpacks, even though the next campsite on the map wasn't for almost another 4.5 miles.
We hiked on. This wasn't just flat beach, either. Earlier there had been a giant rock face extending into the ocean and blocking our path because the tide was up, and the only way to progress was a tunnel through the rock that somehow conveniently existed. That was cool. But anyway, during the second half of that first day of hiking (really like the 3rd quarter counting all the driving earlier), we had to clamber over a fair amount of pretty damn large rocks. Then we reached a place where the tidepools went straight up to a vertical cliff face that extended off and around a corner, further than we could see. David checked the map and was pretty sure this was a zone that could only be passed at low tide. Dusk was starting to set in, but we'd gone way to far past the last campsite, so we pressed on. We hiked over tidepools covered in crazy seaweed and shell things, leaping from rock to rock as the light dimmed in the evening sky.
Soon our only sources of light were the moon and two shitty flashlights that were only good for seeing what was directly in front of one's self. We began to get worried as we hopped across endless tidepools, occasionally losing our footing and slipping into a pool of water or falling over. Oh, shit, I forgot that we were also carrying two cumbersome barrels of food called "bear canisters." They were made of some sort of hard plastic an were about a foot wide and two feet tall, I'd roughly estimate. Anyway, that was ridiculous to have to deal with on top of no light, being tired as hell, hauling shitloads of weight around.
By this point I think I'd long since fallen into a weird mental state. I think backpacking puts you in one whether you like it or not. When we had been walking through the tidepools for quite some time, Davie suddenly got scared and started suggesting we turn back. It was at this point that I decided we were gonna die. It was nearly pitch black out there, we were on incredibly unsure grounds, tired and carrying lots of weight, the tide backing us up against a giant rock wall. I don't remember exactly what I felt like, but I think I might have accepted my mortality or something. Anyway it was slightly traumatizing. I actually regretted the whole trip for a while afterwards because of it.
We ended up pressing on, realizing after a few minutes that it was way too early as hell to be worrying about the tide. We also ended up getting past the tidepools and onto a narrow beach which lead right up to the rock face again. We were kind of still worried that the ocean was going to come up to us, but that was several hours in the future. We now realized that we had no idea how we were going to find the campsite in this light. The beach continued on forever in the same manner: A narrow strip of sand between the rock wall and the tidepools, with a shitload of outcrops on the beach into the rock wall. Each one we checked out hopefully only to discover it not to be the campsite. It began to get frustrating. The bros were losing morale. We were all tired, worried, confused and lost--although we couldn't have gotten proper lost considering the ocean was at our side the entire time.
Eventually we just pitched tents on the beach, figuring we'd already passed the campsite we were headed to anyway. John and Jacob (and Jingleheimer Schmidt) all went to sleep in Jacob's tent. Davie and I set up Davie's tent, but decided to stay up and keep an eye on the tide. We chilled there eating beans for almost two hours before we decided the tide was getting too close. It was about 2 AM and the tide still had nearly another two hours of rising to do. We woke up Johnny D and Jacob and all four of us found a crazy way up the muddy cliff face into an elevated and super mossy area. Once we got up there I breathed a sigh of relief, rejecting my mortality once more. I even got tired of waiting for the tide and hopped back down onto the beach to throw all of our supplies up on the slanted cliffside, and to then drag both the tents up into the mossy area with us. Jacob's tent fell apart in the process, and a storm rolled in, so all four of us piled into Davie's two-man tent and weathered the storm on top of a muddy cliff face, branches and moss, the tide rolling in to swallow the beach below us.
We woke up a few hours later and the tide had already gone back down to a reasonable place. We hopped down and discovered, based on the water line, that the tide would have indeed reached us. However, it's obvious now that we weren't in any real mortal danger. In fact, we never were. We just didn't know it. That morning some guy walked up from the opposite direction we'd been travelling. He told us he'd just come from the campsite we'd been looking for last night, and that it was like a quarter mile down the beach in the direction we were heading. We laughed, ate some food, and turned to head back to the car.
What we covered in a day on the way in took us three days on the way out. We headed out at about 10 AM, March 27th. We reached a point that was impassable with the tide in its current state, so we ditched our packs and chilled on some huge rocks in the sun like lizards until the tide went out more. That was rad. After that we just went back across the tide pools, which were ridiculously less intimidating in the broad daylight. I'm so glad that second day had nice weather. I'd been prepared for crazy rainstorms the entire trip.
The second night we stayed at the campsite we'd debated staying at the previous afternoon. Apparently there was a shitload of mice outside the tent that night, but I never saw them. The next morning we packed up and took off again, intending to make it back to the car that day. However, during a walk down a long stretch of open beach, we passed two twins heading in the direction we were coming from. They had the same backpacks and covers as myself and David. They pointed to the grassy cliff face perpendicular from us to cliff, indicating a rope going up that we could climb to a hidden campsite. We decided we might as well, since the trip had been pretty cool since that first day had passed. Plus the prospect of immediate relaxation for the rest of the day was basically irresistable.
The rope climb up was epic, nearly vertical and through some bushes, I'd say a good 25-30 foot climb at least. I can't really remember at all. The campsite itself was cool. There were streams nearby on either side, each with a few waterfalls of varying degrees of awesomeness. We ran into a couple of other stoner backpacker dudes and chatted for a bit. Then we ate beans, drank hot chocolate, and slept.
The fourth day we took off at like 4 AM because everyone woke up freezing in a pool of water. We packed up the wet tents in the dark and then took off on a decent amount of sleep, as we'd hit the sack rather early the previous night. We reached all the logs as the sun was just barely leaking over the edge of the Earth. We figured there was no way we'd be able to find the way over the logs and to the boardwalk in this light, so we decided we'd go climb a crazy-looking tiny mountain. I'd say it had to be at least 100 feet tall (keep in mind throughout this article that I am not the best at estimating measurements), and it was pretty steep, but somehow there was like a stairstep pattern up the top. We made it to the top, which was a 10-foot wide grass clearing. It was fuckin' rad up there. We smoked a couple bowls and watched the sun rise over the trees. Then we set off over the logs and found the boardwalk.
As we headed into the woods it began to snow. I was speculating on how this entire adventure had been like a video game, and the boardwalk, though the first thing you have to traverse in your journey, is now the final challenge, becoming quickly coated by a dangerously slipper layer of ice falling from the sky. I came up with a crazy-ass idea for a backpacking video game during that three-mile hike on the boardwalk, which I still maintain would make a decent game. Regardless, we made it to the car, went and ate delicious food, and made it back to Seattle on the afternoon of the 29th of March, only to suddenly go to Canada with Johnny D and his friend that same night. People in Canada are a lot nice than people here.
Anywho, after that I just took a philosophy 100 evening course two nights a week at Seattle Central Community College, ate Trader Joe's a lot, and lived the good life. I went back to my home town a few times to visit my friends. Then, a couple of days after my class ended, it was the night before I was going to take off to Guatemala for two months. GASP! Wut?
~I'll write more of this later. Not like anyone's reading it immediately or ever anyway.~
Back to further enlightenment.