Went out hiking this afternoon off of Highway 12 with a friend I’ve hiked with a couple of other times out here. We tried to go in a different direction by fording this river (Tieton River I think) which ended up being a bit of a dicey proposition, particularly in bare feet, though I was able to snap the self portrait you see below while thigh deep in rapids. Unfortunately after another ten minutes of hiking we hit barbed wire and private property signs and, after a bit more lateral movement, were forced to retrace our steps.

So we headed up the rock in the other direction and ended up having a really fun afternoon of scrambling around on crumbly slopes in a gorgeous area. I always look at my pictures after getting home and they never quite do justice to the scenery. It was a very vertical area, lots of places to feel precarious, rock spires, rock stairways, even found a couple of holes to crawl through (you should be able to see one behind me in the bottom left picture).