So it turns out that there are some good things about going to a private, religious school. First and foremost is that we get quite a few extra days off around holidays (who knew that Easter was so important?). I took the opportunity and dragged Virginia along with me for a three day hike along Lake Chelan. Once you get away from all the condos and stuff down at the south end of the lake, you just have a bunch of mountains and trees and lake. It's nice.

We decided on the Lakeshore trail, which is a 17 mile hike from the town of Stehekin to Prince Creek (which is pretty much nowhere). A ferry drops you off at Prince Creek, and off you go. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here, because hiking is hiking and I really don't feel like writing too much about it. Look at the pictures if you're interested.

One point of interest was that when getting off the boat at Prince Creek, there were two other hikers who were just there to explore for the day, and would catch the boat home that afternoon.  I spoke one of the other hikers, who after a minute or two of talking, somehow recognized me.  He removed his sunglasses and it turned out to be Dan Munro (a guy I was good friends with in elementary school).  Hadn't seen him since high school, and definitely did not expect to run into him out in the middle of nowhere.  Back at Shorecrest, Dan put glue in his hair and had it spiked straight up for a good majority of our four years in high school.  He was now sans spikes, and had a bit of an Elijah Wood look going on.  In any case, unexpected, but good to see him.

Anyway, the hike was fairly uneventful, except for our brief encounter with a rattlesnake. It was not even an hour into the hike, when I saw something jump off the rock ahead of Virginia and fall to the trail about two feet in front of her. I heard the telltale hiss and rattle and I remained calm. Virginia may tell you that I bolted. That's not true. I simply moved back down the trail very quickly and left Virginia to fend for herself. In any case, seeing a rattlesnake was one of my goals, so I was happy.

The rest of the hike was nice, and I take back anything bad I ever said about Lake Chelan. It's a real nice lake. My only complaint was the number of trees down across the trail. We were warned multiple times about how the trail hadn't been completely cleared, but we weren't really prepared for 283 trees blocking our path.. If you do the math, that's 16.65 trees per mile, or one downed tree every 317.1 feet if you prefer. It slowed us down considerably, but we made it through.

Not much more to report other than that. I promise my next entry will be a bit more exciting.