Two Parks: Two Decades

Richard Haag, University of Washington Professor of Landscape Architecture, once told me that humans are rootless weeds. He said it in a class I took from him nearly 25 years ago, and I remember it often, especially as I wander. Yet, I frequently wander close to home, to better know the place I'm in. After all, I consider myself a place-based educator and since his class, I've made the Pacific Northwest my home. His quote, serving almost as a challenge, came to mind again as my boots walked the trail past, not weeds, but wildflowers on my recent adventure on The Wonderland Trail.

I've been wandering further away from the PNW for the last few summers, and thus, committed this summer, to stick around, and explore more here. After last summer along the tarmac of Canada, cycling from Seattle to Halifax, I longed specifically for more dirt and wildflowers. I planned to take the expedition style of my cross county adventure to the mountains, to a long trail near home. The Wonderland Trail was a nature choice.

While hiking, a fellow hikers asked if I'd done any other long trips. It didn't take me long to remember an amazing experience, exactly 20 years ago where I traversed Olympic National Park as part of my NOLS Outdoor Educator Course in August 1998 for 18 days from Deer Park, into the Bailey Range, up and over Mt. Olympus from the Humes Glacier and out the Hoh.

Back then, I walked out of the Washington NOLS branch the only person at 50% of body weight. That was a 60 pound pack! Day one, we hiked 7.5 miles to from Deer Park to Grand Lake nearly 2000 feet down to Grand Creek and back up 700 feet to the lake again. I have all these details recorded in a journal/field notebook that also includes sketches of tadpoles and copepods, illustrations of an anatomy of a glacier, notes about hazard management and Leave No Trace, and my own lesson plans for instructing about belaying and climbing.

Two weeks on The Wonderland Trail, twenty years later, my pack was a twenty pounds lighter, my notes confined to a small pen and paper notebook plus a phone app. It's the lessons about being home, and being rooted in place, that seem wiser than ever.