First on Friday I went to the Marley Concert. Stephen Marley featuring Damian 'Jr. Gong' Marley. It was good stuff. Starting it off was DJ sets by the almighty Kid Hops. I finally got the to watch Kid Hops work. The opener was a Jamaican Hip-Hop/Spoken word band. Ya try following some Jamaican spoken word. Kid Hops came back and did another DJ set until Stephen came out. Stephen played about half his songs and half his dad's. Damian came out for about the last half and they mixed it up. When Jr did his 'Welcome to Jamrock' the band did a little versioning of the song and the crowd didn't like it at all. The crowd started to moan their way to a boo before the band mixed it back to the normal and back.
Saturday I went up to the Tulip Festival up in the Skagit Valley. Never seen so many Tulips in person before, but I had never seen industrial flower growing on this scale before either. Too many people milling around and too much crap in the background to get good landscape shots. It was still a learning experience so it was still good. From there I drove on up to Maple Falls to visit Cassia, Ian and Ziggby.
Sunday morning we wet out to breakfast and then drove out to were we were going hiking. Back up the Skagit Valley we drove. Turn left at Baker Lake / Concrete. Take note of the sign that says road out. We drove up the road until Cassia wanted me to take a some pictures of the 'Stump Lake'. I have seen stump lakes like this before but never been out among the stumps. They weren't any stumps, they were OLD growth Ceder stumps.
From there we got back in the cars and headed up the road more. And then around a corner we see the road blocked. Well the road was out at the 23 mile marker. Seems that the culvert got blocked this winter and washed the whole road out. That would have been a sight to see as the creak bed was at least 20 feet below the road with a good bowl and ravine on the upstream side. Well our fearless leader Cassia decided that we should march from here. Er... Cassia had the good idea of starting our Hike from there. Not bad idea as the trail head is only 3 miles down the road. We rested at the trail head and then hiked on. Wow. Once we got past the trail head we were into old growth Ceder forest. There was one cool steel/wood suspension bridge that was horse rated, but had nice bounce in the middle. It looked kinda like some of the bridges I have designed in the Bridge-It game. :) There were also some cool little caves amount the boulders. Most of them were small and looked like something had spent the night in them at least once.
Well the trail was washed out and we had to cross a creak. Shortly there after we decided to pause and nibble on some food. Then while debating if we should head back it started to rain. Well you know how that decision went. The funny part is that once we started heading back the rain stoped. But I used the early return to hike up a washout we had crossed before to go take pictures of a waterfall that we could see below.
Well about 10 miles of hiking and then a 4 hour trip home made for a really tired Mike when I got home, but I am extremely glad I went.
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| From Baker River Hike |
