The Churchill Family (Seattle extension) is going to dedicate as many of their summer weekends as possible to the yurt tour. What's a yurt you ask? Good question. It's a rustic cabin of sorts. They vary in their rusticity. Some could probably be called cabins (sush, they're yurts) and other are like fancy tents.
Here are the yurts that exist in Washington State Parks. The goal of the Churchill family is to visit them all. It's kind of like a pub crawl. Except you stay in a yurt instead of going to pubs. And you go hiking and stuff instead of just getting sloppy drunk.
Stop #1: Wallace Falls
This was a few weekends ago. Wallace Falls is about an hour north east of Seattle, which made it a pretty quick trip for us. Although it turned out to be a great weekend, the weather didn't quite cooperate with us. We arrived early afternoon on Saturday to rain. We got settled into our yurt and decided to try to do a bit of hiking on the Wallace Falls trail in spite of the rain. It was a pretty light rain, we had rain jackets, and figured we'd be in the woods most of the time. We weren't the only one's giving it a go, either, as we met several people on the trail. But. Then it started to really rain about 15 minutes into our hike. We looked at each other and I think we both realized we were a lot wetter than we thought. Drenched, in fact. So, we decided to turn around and try again the next day. It was a good thing we did, too, because it turned into a full downpour, with a pretty chilly wind, and we were soaked by the time we got back to our yurt. We hung up all our wet things, crossed our fingers our essentials would be dry by Sunday (Kevin realized he'd only brought one pair of pants. Typical...), and spent the rest of the daylight hours warming up and reading in the yurt. It continued to rain all night, but our yurt had a little covered porch where we could sit and make dinner on our little propane grill. It was too wet or a campfire, but we had a candle. It was actually quite cozy to be in warm sweaters on the cool porch listening to the rain. Also, there was Prosecco, because what's better than a bottle of sparkly when you're on a yurt tour? Dinner was grilled brussel sprouts (favorite veg ever!!!) and salmon with Girl Scout cookies for dessert.
Sunday, we woke up early to more rain. Poo. But, what did we have to loose? We decided to hope for the best, and if we got soaked, we could just jump into our warm car and head home. So, we set out with dry clothes (don't worry, Kevin's things dried and he didn't have to go pants-less after all) on the trail to the lower, middle, and upper falls. The rain wasn't coming down too hard when we started and when we got in the woods it was very manageable. The trail was probably one of the most beautiful we have done yet. It followed the Wallace River most of the time, which was just rushing from winter rains and the start of the snow melt from up above. The forest in this part of the state was also very lush. Green and mossy and emerald colored wherever you looked.
Then, as we continued up the trail, we got a real treat. Snow.
At first just little bits on the ground in the shadowy parts of the forest. Then, as we hiked up from the middle falls to the upper falls the rain we had at the bottom turned into a full on snowfall. It was absolutely beautiful! There were a few inches on the trail at that point and it covered the treetops. Although I love the climate in Seattle, I do miss the Wisconsin snow a little bit sometimes. There's just something so magical about big, fluffy flakes of white filling your vision and building up wherever they fall. In addition to the snow, the falls themselves were also spectacular. Much bigger than we were expecting them to be and so powerful with the high water levels. Yes. Stop number one on the Churchill family yurt tour was a success.
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