day 29 -- seattle to mazama, WA

midday start for the official turn eastward...keeping up with the brazilians and company meant closing down the pub, after a recurring encounter with a dude who spent the night spouting nonsense and punctuating it with odd tongue wagging. one of the seattle natives suggested that this behavior was indicative of too much time on the boat. and this made sense since the tongue-wagger was clearly a seattle native himself, correctly identifying neighborhood origins for the locals in our crew.

anyway, just before I took off I committed to the far northern across washington and then into glacier. SR20 winds through the north cascades and stays north of spokane, picking up US2 only in sand point, ID. US2 was attractive as well, but remote was more appealing. I headed out of seattle on SR9 as an alternative to more I-5. suburbs stretched on for miles past the standard quick fade-out of the west, a reminder that this climate is rather more forgiving. suburbs to out-of-the-way eateries to outfitters...finally yielding to gritty farming and logging towns. there was a street fair (=big yard sale) in clear lake featuring a chihuahua rescue outfit and kids riding miniature ponies around a ring that was no more than 20 feet across. and suddenly the wild west in sedro-woolley, an old school town with a very 90s hyphenated name. I was still in seattle ethnic/crunchy food mode, but the best I could find was a bacon bleu burger at 'just moe's' at the end of the L-shaped main drag. this was real small-town crowd. little league world series on the TV, some spouse-abandoned late middle-agers alternating beers at a high table and smokes outside, and finally a slightly rougher crowd getting an early start on the saturday. a bald and tattooed but slickly prettyboy-as-convict look with his moon-eyed girlfriend, who remarked to me (or no one in particular) as he strode out for a cigarette that 'there's nothing quite like watching someone you love walk away.' she said that adoringly, not wistfully. interesting take. and another biker couple, this one dressed as if they were on the way to hawaii...she earned two scoldings from the barkeep for language violations. I zipped out before she got the boot. left coast sensibility re-emerged at an organic farm and land conservancy along the skagit river -- and more importantly fresh raspberry ice cream.

all along the skagit I leapfrogged a filipino-american family (mom, dad, teenage son) inexplicably driving an unmarked minibus, like the airport rental car shuttle or a nursing home campus shuttle. and then SR20 turned out of the skagit valley, and I fell in love with the north cascades. the topography isn't all that different from the cascades closer to portland, but there's something about the unbroken forest here that separates it. forested mountain views around every corner, as if this is where artists come to learn how to paint forested mountain views. green spiked hills in the foreground against faded blue slopes in the background, misty clouds, the works. and trails! trailheads left and right in the national park, in the national forest...I resolved on the spot to spend weeks hiking this landscape. conifer forests can get monotonous in the uniformity, but it's hard to imagine tiring of the piny scent, the dripping silence. (which raises a question. do we associate that scent with clean because it's somehow intrinsically clean-smelling? or have lysol and dish detergent reverse-engineered that association?) the road climbed gradually in this glaciated landscape over rainy pass (where it rained, natch) and then to washington pass and dramatic vistas over the glacier-scoured uplands above the wonderfully named early winters creek. rolled down from the pass and turned in at the lone fir campground. the rushing creek sound that I associate with ideal campsites from time spent in the smokies (where it's impossible to find a spot where water isn't gurgling) clashed a bit with the rushing traffic sound from the road in this narrow valley. quiet crunchy campers in hats and fleece...and after dark someone with a flute playing generic 'native american' music. the sort of music that sounds like it's continuing even after the flute has stopped it blends into natural sounds so well. (this was better than hearing a flute at big bend, assuming indian music but realizing it was just a high school kid practicing band music...)