20-Apr-2008 -- During a business trip to the west coast of USA I had some spare time on a Sunday in Seattle, so I took my rental car and drove to the Edmonds terminal, for the ferry to Kingston on the west side of the Puget sound.

Over on the Olympic peninsula I let my GPS guide me west and north, across the Hood canal bridge and on to Blyn. As I got closer to the target, the hills got more and more white: The sprinkles of sleet in Seattle during the night had fallen as 2-6" of wet & heavy snow in this area!

I made the turnoff in Blyn and followed the descriptions of the previous visitors until I got to the power line clearing. I had been able to see the power line inspection road on Google Earth's images of the area, so I knew it started a little bit back along the road. I turned the car around and drove to the closest turnout, got dressed in appropriate clothing which included running tights and metal-studded orienteering shoes.

On all previous confluence visits to points where other people have described long, difficult hikes, my background in orienteering have allowed me to make light work out of any such problems, but not this time!

The power line road was a small creek due to all the melt water coming down, and when I got up to the confluence altitude and started to traverse the hillside, I realized that the previous visitors' description of "more than half the trees have fallen down" was almost certainly accurate.

Today I had the added complication of up to 6 inches of very heavy wet snow covering everything, making the footing very slippery, particularly in all the places where I had to climb over fallen trees! At the same time big lumps of snow were dropping from the treetops all the time, making me very glad that I wore a thick woolen ski hat.

I finally made it to the confluence, and almost immediately got to see the all zero point on my GPS, unfortunately the only readable GPS image was one I took a few meters away. I did download the track log and it verified that I had indeed found the spot.

On my way down I took a slightly lower path, following an area where the hillside was less steep and where somewhat less windfall blocked my way.

According to the track log I had used a total of 42 minutes, of which 12 was used getting up the power line road, 10 minutes just to cover the 325 horizontal meters from the power line to the confluence, 8 minutes at the spot doing the zero dance and taking photos, before using the final 12 minutes for the return trip down the hill.

After getting down to the car, I had to exchange all my wet clothing (i.e. absolutely everything!) before I could start the return trip, where I followed an alternate route via the Bainbridge Island ferry which ends up in downtown Seattle. By now the weather had cleared up very nicely and the view from the front of the ferry was very beautiful.