Before he got off in Montana I snapped a pic of Danny with his hitchhiking sign. He’s used this exact sign to hitchhike over 30,000 miles and was, in fact, not a weirdo.
Although the Empire Builder (Amtrak’s name for this route) passes right through glacier national park, that section of the route is done almost entirely at night unfortunately. When I woke up I walked to the back of the train and took this shot of the sunrise in eastern Washington.
In Spokane the Empire Builder usually splits in half, with the back half of the train (including the observation car & cafe) heading down to Portland and the front half heading to Seattle.
At some point in the night, however, a freight train had been blown over en route to Spokane from Portland, and the derailment meant that the entire Empire Builder would go to Seattle. Folks who were headed to Portland would be re-routed on a Seattle to Portland train.
The upshot of all this is that I got the rare opportunity to see the columbia river gorge and the north cascades through the huge windows of the observation car.
We took this really tight curve and had a pretty incredible view of the front of the train from the back.
Entering day 4 of being on the train I was starting to get pretty tired. Even still, it was hard to not appreciate these views of the columbia river.
On the final stretch into Seattle along the puget sound.
We got some fun train reflections pulling into town.
Made it to Seattle!
I spent the weekend in Seattle visiting some good friends from college including Duffy, pictured here with Tony.
And Henk and Anna, who just got engaged!
And Lindsay, who met up with us for a long day ride.
We also did some hiking to a scenic alpine lake…
…which involved some mild snow traversal that I had not really packed for.
After closing out a lovely weekend, I met up with another college friend, Linus, and we embarked on an overnight bikepacking trip in…
…Mt. Rainier National Park! This view of the mountain towering over everything really never got old, and also never felt normal. It always seemed like this surreal presence on the horizon.
Many threatening signs made it seem like we should definitely not go over this bridge which had been deemed structurally unstable.
So instead we scrambled down under the bridge to a trail which ended up being quite rough. The next day we ran into a ranger who told us (in an unofficial capacity) that we should have just gone over the bridge.
We made our way up river towards our chosen campground, but on the way learned that the road to the campground had washed out in multiple places…
…and that we’d be better off camping at this abandoned ranger station. This ended up being a real blessing because it was already getting pretty late by the time we got here.
That ranger station was right next to the Carbon river, which we spent the next morning biking back down.
We must have passed half a dozen skate parks during these two days out on our bikes. This one was definitely the most creative though.
After a very scenic ride long lush rail trails Linus and I parted ways and I biked to the Tacoma Amtrak station to catch a train down to Portland (Oregon).
Portland’s beautiful 130 year old union station fortunately survived the downturn of passenger rail in the US in the 70s, and is among the busiest Amtrak stations in the system.
Fun fact: The house I live in in Portland (Maine) is 20 years older than this building!
