On December 31, 2020, we'd hoped to put all that was 2020 behind us. Hindsight as it were. But no. It just kept going and going so we just kept adventuring and adventuring.
Mostly we spent our time on the lands of the Snoqualmie and Wenatchi peoples, but we also made a few trips into Makah, Puyallup, and Yakama lands, too. (If you're wondering what the heck I'm talking about, check out Why It Matters on Native Land Digital.)
January started with my annual let's-get-those-pesky-deductibles-out-of-the-way event. As a sign of my increasing age, this time it was hip surgery. No, not a replacement (yet), but an outpatient procedure to remove extra bone. Not fun. After that, it was a lot of really, really slow rehab. (On the trails, of course.)
Along the way, we ran a contest with Deuter that was all about poop. Well, poop bags. The Poop Fairy Challenge. Participants picked up almost 700 poop bags (and their equivalent in non-poop trash) from local trails!
A big part of my rehab was choosing short, easier trails over the ones I would have been doing previously. It wasn't until May that I was cleared to start training.
I had four big goals for the year tied fixing the hip.
- Returning to the Alpine Lakes Wilderness before the snow was gone
- Nacho Peak Loop for Father's Day
- Be able to climb 4,000 feet in a day
- Overnight adventures with the kids
In addition to all that, I knocked off a multi-year project to connect trails from Snoqualmie Pass to home, worked on the boy's outdoorsmanliness (it's a word), and leveraged the mountains to convince a cousin to move to Seattle. And we fished. And we rode bikes. And we raced. And we celebrated the end of 2021 and looked forward to 2022 in spite of the fact you can pronounce it, "2020, too." (If there was any question about how 2022 was going to go... I broke my wrist on January 10 so here we go again.)
And of course, the stats:
I had 180 days of adventure in 2021. (+9 days over 2020.) That's right, I was adventuring just shy of every other day. I guess that's what happens when you transition to 100% remote working and no longer lose four hours a day to the commute. (And living in the mountains with a trail out the backdoor probably helps, too.) More days didn't equate to more miles, though. I was down 29 miles to 675 compared to 2020 and 18,284 feet to 140,782. My most important metric remains the percentage of days with one or more of the kids. That hit a whopping 47.22%, the highest since 2016! And what about Tink? She missed out only 16 days of adventure. Don't feel too sorry for her.
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