Otter Falls is stunning. Truly breathtaking. A place which must be seen in person to be truly appreciated. Photos and flowery descriptions do very little for this place. As we scrambled over the short, steep ridge separating the falls from the main trail, all we could say was, "Wow." Two years ago, we tried to find Otter Falls, but we were thwarted! We'd read about the hike in Dan A. Nelson's book, Best Hikes with......

Want to get away from the craziness that is Seattle during the Fourth of July? Try the San Juan Islands. This Seattlest will be packing her camping gear and kayak to explore the beautiful (and likely rainy, WTF?) San Juan Islands. If a tent and campfire are not up your alley, the islands offer a few inns and B&B’s that cater to every need from luxury spa service to private airplane tours. How do......

This weekend marks the first time the Mountain Loop Highway will be opened in it’s entirety since 2003. Ravaged by floods and heavy snowfall in years past, the roadway’s long-awaited opening provides access to some of the most scenic day hikes in the Seattle vicinity. Barlow Pass is the headwaters for an assortment of great trails rising above the historic mining town of Monte Cristo. A four mile walk along the Sauk River and......

Hey wow, holy shit it is hot outside and it's only 11am. With this weekend's forecast, people will be freaking everywhere outside. We're planning a mountain bike ride near Roslyn on Saturday, other friends are going camping, and another crew is ski touring around Rainier. But lest you forgot your high school chemistry classes, the effect of heat on frozen substances is to cause them to melt. In this case, very suddenly and there's still......

Or sunburns, more likely. We doubt any of of you have actually thought to pack sunscreen on your person, given the state of our weather lately. KOMO says it's only fifty-five degrees out there, and maybe it is, but it feels awesome outside. It's Friday afternoon, people. Just get up, walk to the elevator, and be on your way. No one will even notice. Go on now. You know you want to. You know you......

Dammit, neither were we. For opening day, Mr. Seattlest got up in the wee hours and was in lot 2 about 30 minutes before the lift opened, ending up about 20th in line. The guys waiting for first chair up front were drinking PBR tall boys and said (and acted like) they'd been there since about 7am. With a base of about 51", it was an excellent start. Snow was a bit heavy, and chair......

The snow is here, and people are already missing on Crystal Mountain. They apparently hit the backcountry (seems way to early to be doing that, we think), and by all accounts were properly equipped, including avalanche beacons. But shit can go sideways in the backcountry, and "properly equipped" is most relevant if you really know how to use that stuff. We're hoping those lost folks do, and are found any second now. Should you be......

Ski season is, thankfully, here and Seattlest couldn't be more excited. In fact, even though our friends are completely lame and won't go with us, we're off to Crystal tomorrow to take advantage of cheap lift-ticket prices (and cause we're jonesing). For a variety of reasons though, we don't own any of our own equipment and are not yet ready to buy our own stuff. So before heading out to catch some early-season slope action,......

Opening today, people. Base is 50 inches.......

The snow is falling, our dear Seattle friends, it simply isn't falling here. Whistler just announced it is open for business, bagging the ultimate ski resort coup of cutting powder before we cut the turkey. Of course you want to go, but in fondly recalling the days of 1998 when the US-CA exchange rate swung wildly the other way, you fear you can really only afford to stay home and play Ski Resort Extreme Halo......

On our way to Vios for dinner last night (try the white bean soup!) we were walking down Aloha and spotted a lawn being colonized by a huge mushroom. The owners seem to be already under its nefarious sway, as they have laboriously scrawled on cardboard signs the instructions to leave the mushrooms alone so that they can be "seen." If you want to "see" them (and potentially have your brain sucked out by an......

A friend just emailed Seattlest, gushing with glee that our season's passes to the Summit (Alpental, really) grant us 5 free days of skiing at Crystal Mountain. We'd already written about how the ownership of the Summit by Boyne Mountain (who also owns Crystal Mt.) might be a good thing for mountain bikers. So it sounded like it was already working out for those of us that go mostly to Alpental (due to sheer proximity,......

Foul weather holds off until Sunday afternoon, leaving plenty of time under cool gray skies for Seattlest & friends to launch a Flexcar and sail out to the farm. Once we get past Redmond, the familiar trappings fall off: shopping malls, housing developments, the last Whole Foods, the last gas station & mini-mart. We ford the Tolt River at Carnation and sail into a vast theme park called Remlinger Farms. Indoors, a country market......

Yippee!!!! Snow is expected over the Cascade Range from central Oregon to the Canadian border by Wednesday night. The weather service warns that the snow is likely to come in quick bursts, causing near-whiteout conditions for brief periods. A snow advisory has been issued for all the passes in Washington state except for Snoqualmie Pass. The weather service is predicting 2 to 5 inches over most of the Washington Cascades by Thursday morning, but the......

The operative word, of course, is "considering," because by no means is a bike park at Stevens Pass a done deal. But the plans are surprisingly detailed and specific, which gives Seattlest hope. The local biking community is all a-twitter about the prospects. Each year we trek up to Whistler repeatedly for our downhill biking fix (that's a friend pictured on a black diamond Whistler trail at the right), and we'd much rather spend less......

Two UW marching band saxophonists know their bulky instrument cases can get in the way as they walk to school down the Burke-Gilman Trail. They don't want to be obstacles to the notoriously chippy bicyclists. So one, "Geekybandbabe", asks Seattle's Live Journal community for advice:Is there a certain undesignated place where we should be walking on the trail so as to ensure that we, and all other trail patrons emerge unscathed? Let it go on......

The Seattle Times has a quickie little snippet about some ski resort ownership swapping, namely that Boyne USA has bought the Summit at Snoqualmie from Booth Creek. At first we were a little concerned, namely because Booth Creek has a great track record from a customer service perspective, especially when they extended our season's pass for free after the disastrous winter of 05-06. But after a little more research, we're very excited because this is......

Our postings have been light (OK, nonexistent) this summer as we gallivanted about the western US and Canada teaching people how to ride mountain bikes. We were most excited about a trip in late August to Blue River, BC, the spot of legendary Mike Wiegele's heli-skiing outfit. The plan was to get dropped at 9,000 feet via helicopter and escort about 40 people back down through fields of granite rock slabs and unending alpine......

Police forces from the Snohomish County Sheriff's department and the Sultan Police department swarmed on the semi-annual Fantagraphics Shoot-out party on Saturday, shutting down the festivities after only a measly two hours of shooting, which wasn't nearly enough time to shoot all the tvs, computer monitors and lawn mowers hauled out to be shot (see our coverage of the 2005 party here). Apparently, according to these cops, it's somehow "illegal" to dump a lot......

Late summer is berry season, which means it is also bear season. A 51 year-old man mountain biking in Banner Forest (near Port Orchard on the Kitsap Peninsula) was attacked by a male black bear last week. His dogs were running ahead of him, and he heard them barking. He turned a corner, and was face-to-face with the bear, which then attacked him. Attacks by black bears are remarkably rare, which makes the situation all......

Friday night, as planned, we drove up to Bellingham for the 6th Annual Subdued Stringband Jamboree--something we've never experienced before, and about which we were somewhat excited. Having spent last weekend revelling in the Americana down in Portland, maybe our expectations were a little high. To be fair, the Jamboree itself wasn't bad. By the time we cut through the traffic and filled our bellies, we managed to see three artists, and two of......

Today is "BC Day" in Canada, commemorating the moment of victory when Canadians finally liberated themselves from the Indians. Because of this unfair "three day weekend" tactical advantage, Canadian surfer and skateboard punks swarmed Westport to such a degree that the Seattle contingent was pitifully outnumbered and forced to surrender their beaches like Germans on D-Day. Some important Canadian factoids learned on this trip: *Canadians from Vancouver look down on Canadians from Surrey, not unlike......

Seattlest grew up in a tiny town you've never heard of in Central Florida, where a real sandy ocean beach (on which you could drive) was 20 minutes in one direction, and a crystalline gulf beach was an hour and a half in the other. Now that we live in the Land of the Rain, we wait all year for weeks like these, when the sun is high and hot, the breeze is soft and......

Last weekend, after twenty years in Seattle, we visited the Japanese Garden in the Arboretum. We're not sure why it took so long -- maybe because there's so much free outdoors stuff and there's a $5 admission. Maybe because we don't visit the Arboretum [maps!] that often, either. But we bought a bike again recently and now we're a huge cyclist, sometimes going on rides that last more than fifteen minutes each way! Plus, we......

We wouldn't yet call ourselves bicycle "enthusiasts," but we're getting there. We've started riding from work (downtown) to home (Shoreline) about three days a week and we're loving it. We're getting exercise, doing something we enjoy and the majority of the ride, along the Burke-Gilman Trail, is just gorgeous. Now, most days, our ride through the UW campus is an uneventful pleasantry. We glide along, casually admiring young co-eds as they jog by in......

Last week we made it out to our first Duck Dodge sailboat race of the year -- there was no theme, but it was hot, the upper-80s, and there was a good breeze which made for an actual race as opposed to beer drinking and chip munching punctuated by the occasional slow-motion tack. Notes on the race from Duck Dodge HQ mention that "Shoot the Moon had a kayak that just couldn't stay away from......

We’ve been on a mountain bike clinic road trip smörgåsbord, starting in Bellingham a few weeks ago and then cruising through Hood River and ending up this past weekend near our hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah. This past weekend we coached a camp up in Park City, where it was a breezy 92 degrees for our afternoon rides—a temperature that is ridiculous in its own right yet still a respite from the record-setting spree......

It's Shakespeare, so you can't complain. That's just "Shakespearean language." Here it is, Act III, Scene 1 from The Merchant of Venice:If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? Anyway, in Seattle we've got outdoor theatre options, and most of them are in Volunteer Park this weekend, July 14 & 15, for the Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival. There are......

There's a kind of folktale Polish wedding tradition that Seattlest has always thought was cool. It says that when your daughter is born you fire up the still and produce a barrel of vodka which you then bury somewhere on your farm. Twelve years later when that daughter is getting married you dig up the barrel and drink it at the wedding, the vodka having been infused with the flavors, and, more ephemerally, the spirit......

We packed up the car and drove east of the Pass this weekend to settle, live in, and finally deconstruct our own little suburb out in the woods. Camping. We love it. Salmon La Sac, near Cle Elum, was our target when we rolled out of Seattle, although we didn't have a spot reserved and there was some question about whether the campground was even in operation. Some of the big storms from this......