Day 124 - 4th October, Easton - Snoqualmie Pass - Riverbend, 45.2 miles

Day with big D. Everything was so perfect, peaceful, amazing ... Foggy in the morning, though. And cold as usually. Still continuing on the Iron Horse Trail. Slowly, gently getting higher and higher. Suddenly in one moment, fog disappeared and we saw huge Cascade Mountains, snowy white, right in front of us. Snow and blue sky and dark rocks. We met two bikers, they gave us some interesting information about government shat down and also about Mexico, good news. Than we met two hikers, they came through Pacific Crest Trail, hiked more than 2400 miles from Mexico border. They were forced to go down from mountains because of snow, now they headed to the Hwy #97 and to hitchhike to Canada. Than we got to the Keechelus Lake, with nice views to the Cascades. After Hyak there is the longest tunnel in whole USA for the non-motorized vehicles, 2.3 miles long, and you can literally see the light on the end of the tunnel :-) When we went out, we were already on the west side of Cascades, after dry, east side with desert, this was something absolutely different. Everything was green, trees covered by moss, water everywhere. And the best were trees, huge and so tall. And judged by old trunks which remains here after the old forests, they were just very small, tiny... How amazing was this country before somebody started to cut down all trees...
Downhill ride was very nice, with many bridges, views to the valley and on the mountains. Only disturbing thing was highway, roaring down on the bottom of valley like one huge airport. Iron Horse Trail ended by Cedar Falls (near Rattlesnake Lake without rattlesnakes, they never lived here). Here we changed for Snoqualmie Valley Trail and even we hadn't enough water we successfully camp before absolute dark. Other thing which changed was that here was much warmer than on the east side. So it's unbelievable but we are nearly in Seattle, tomorrow we are heading nearly to downtown to meet Alyssa, Stacey's daughter (Stacey is director of CVEEC, were we worked). She moved to Seattle just recently so we are very lucky that we can meet with her. Universe still works.