An awesome guy's weekend in the Olympic Mountains

As I've blogged about in the past, each year I try to organize a "guy's weekend" (sometimes also known as "dude's weekend" or "bro-fest" or "guy-a-palooza") where a group of my closest friends all meet up for a long weekend to hang out. This was much easier to accomplish when we all lived in the general Portland vicinity and were younger (i.e., not as many family and work obligations). Now we are spread out over a much broader geographic area and we have more wives, kids, and demanding jobs among us. So, it takes a lot more effort to find a weekend that actually works for everyone. But, all of recognize how important it is to connect at least once a year, so we try to do whatever we can to make it. Among other things, in the past this "guy's weekend" has included a climb of Mt. Adams and a weekend at the Oregon Coast playing poker, fishing, and racing down sand dunes. Without even the slightest hint of exaggeration, the "guy's weekend" is always one of the highlights of my year.

This year we decided to try to go backpacking in Olympic National Park. I had heard so many good things about this area, and I looked out at the Olympics from my office window every day, so I knew I needed to get over there sooner rather than later. We were fortunate that we were able to find a weekend that worked for everyone, and we lucked out with some great weather. We ended up hiking the High Divide Loop, which wound up being about 23 miles of hiking over about 3 days. If I provided a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of everything that we experienced, it would probably run about 5,000 words and would take me the next several hours to type up. Suffice it to say that it was an amazing weekend of beautiful scenery (including several bear sightings), lots of laughter, and great conversations to catch up with each other. Here are some photos from the weekend:






















This last photo was taken at about 10:30PM so the flash was blinding everyone. It was our last group shot together as Adam and I had to wake up at 1:30AM and start hiking out to make it to Sea-Tac airport by 10:00AM. That's a crazy story for another time.

A gem of the Internet

The Internet has quite a bit of good, useful information, quite a bit of trash, and tons of just meaningless, irrelevant information (no comment on where this blog fits among those categories). But every now and then you manage to come across an Internet site that is absolutely amazing. And thanks to a link posted on Facebook by my friend Harvey, I am now able to share such a site with my loyal blog readers (both of you). Prepare yourself to be blown away, and then go check out Awkward Family Pet Photos. If you cruise to that site, you will be able to see awesomeness like: