My friends Will and Karina have a baby daughter who is just a little over the age of 1. They also have another baby who is due to be born soon. Needless to say Will doesn’t get out much. Being childless myself, it’s kind of hard to fathom how that hinders a persons activities. But I have enough friends with kids to know that I’d better get as much stuff done now as possible because once we have kids my life will change radically.
A couple of weeks ago the weather forecast was calling for perfect weekend weather. In Seattle when the weatherman says Saturday is going to be sunny you can’t mess around so Will and I started talking about a hike. Of course there was the problem of the baby and the pregnant wife to be worked around. What could we do? I had a plan. We would leave my house at 5:00 am and do a short hike. When I mentioned to a few other people that we were leaving the city at 5:00 to hike to the Kendall Katwalk I got the same response everytime: “you know it’s not that far, right?”.
Of course I knew that it is only 10.5 miles roundtrip but the hike reinforced something else that I already knew: “the early bird gets the worm”. I’m not saying that the other hikers that day didn’t have a good time but we had the trail all to ourselves and that made the alpine start worth every minute of lost sleep.
Naima, the reason for the early start. I guess I can understand why Will wanted to get home early.
Ollie didn’t mind leaving town early
The fog in the Valley was impressive.
Will pondering the inevitable.
Mt. Rainier in the distance.
