3 girls, 3 days, 31 miles (and 1 dog)

Thanks to only having to work a half day on Friday and Susan's mother-in-law baby sitting, we were able to get our long run in for the week before I took off on my backpacking trip. We did ~11.25 miles in Forest Park. We started out at the Leif Erikson trail head, ran to ~4.25 mile to where Leif connects with Maple. We took a left on Maple and ran to Wildwood, which puts you at mile marker 12.75. We ran Wildwood to Wild Cherry which is between mile maker 8 and 7.75. We headed down on Wild Cherry to connect back with Leif and back to the car. We celebrated with very late lunch at our favorite food cart, Kitchen Dances.
Saturday morning Karrla and I headed out towards Bull of the Woods wilderness for our first backpacking trip of the summer. We weren't quite sure which trail we wanted to do, but we were pretty sure we wanted to end up at Twin Lakes. We had originally thought we were going to start at the Whetstone tail head then after some debating we decided that we wanted to see the look out tower. We started out at the Bull of the Woods trail head, hiked a few miles in the snow with a gradual up hill to the look out tower. We were rewarded with a 360 degree view of the cascades: Mt Hood, Mt Adams, Mt St Helens, Mt Rainier, Mt Jefferson, and I am sure I am forgetting a few. It was breath taking. We continued down hill for 6 miles to the lake, the whole time I was trying not to think about the fact that I was going to have to walk back up this huge hill in the morning.
The lower twin lake is absolutely beautiful, still clear waters. Someone even hiked in with a raft and was floating around the lake. Somehow we lucked out and got one of the last camp sites next to the lake and we had the added bonus of a creek next to the site as well. As soon as we got there Karrla and I went and sat on a log next to the lake and drank wine (that we made Oscar hike in), it was really nice to sit with our boots off and rest. We hung out and chatted with our neighbors for a bit, ate a late dinner and passed out. I also have to add I didn't get stung by one mosquito that night at the lake, it was different story on the actual hike.
I wouldn't say the hike out was as epic as I thought it was going to be since the inclines were broken into 2 different segments, but they were difficult and I was glad when each one of them were done. We hiked back to the tail head via Pansy Lake, which was nice, wooded and blocked the sun for the most part, it didn't offer the view we had the day before though. I think we estimated 20 miles and 3500-4000 feet of elevation gain over 2 days. Not bad.