While camping and hiking is always an activity you should take very seriously, the Cascades are much more wild than other places we’ve been; it’s very easy to get lost, stuck in bad weather, or run into an animal looking for a meal. (In case you’re looking for betting tips, in Human vs. Beast fights the safe money is on the Beast.) We’ve been reminded constantly over the year we’ve been in Seattle that people really can die in these mountains - even when they’re headed out for a day hike. With this in mind, we’ve been waiting to go with more experienced hikers because dying in the mountains seems like a worse deal than living in the city.

In a flash of brilliance, Jim suggested a week ago that we go hiking on his and Jess’s back country skiing route near Steven’s Pass and camp at Skyline Lake near the end of the route. This obviously established a “need” for various pieces of equipment, especially anything titanium: cups, spoons, forks, and a French press. Oh, and a stainless steel grill that about doubled the weight of my pack.

Being the compulsive over packers that we are, we brought everything we could think of including 5 different lights, a GPS, enough batteries to last a month, 6 different types of rain-gear, hiking boots for us and the dogs, special sleeping pads for the dogs, flashy lights for the dogs, and bear bells to attach to anything with a pulse. We would have put bells on the actual bears if only we could have found some. At one point Jim turned to me - decked out head to toe in Gore-Tex, headlamp, and technical pack - and said, “I like camping with you, you guys make me feel less like a gearhead.”

We hiked about a mile and a half up a jeep trail which gained around 1,000 feet in that distance. Jim and Jess had been camping with their dog before, but Michelle and I had not been with ours. We were pretty sure that Mack would do fine, but our expectations for Kirki ranged anywhere from her being dragged up the trail to her being carried up the trail. We almost packed a wagon in case things turned out worse than we expected.

Mack did what he always does, which is run at full speed wherever he goes and jump on top of any object big enough to support him. This results in the occasional miscalculation and resulting collision with the ground or a nearby obstacle. Kirki, to our amazement, was incredibly active as well, bravely exploring the camp and surrounding woods.

We set up camp in the middle of a huckleberry patch. They’re incredibly comfortable to sleep on, by the way. Jess became progressively more obsessed with the berries and was sure they should be used in a recipe. The next day on the way back to the car, we picked a bag full of berries which Jess used to make an awesome cake.

The only snag was that, while Jim, Jess, and Bromley peacefully shared their tent at night, our plans to have Kirki and Mack sleep in the vestibule of our tent didn’t work out - due in large part to the fact that it was snowing. So the dogs came into the tent. Both dogs were still pretty cold and since we neglected to bring a jacket for Mack, we ended up spending the night taking cat naps and alternating Kirki’s jacket between the two dogs.

Everything ended well; we had no encounters with beasts of any kind and didn’t get lost or frozen. But Kirki did pay a price for her efforts on the hiking trip: she didn’t get up off her pad all day Monday and whined any time she had to lift her head.