Girls Gone Wildwood

Mt Rainier from Goat Lake John and I had planned our last backpacking adventure for the summer in  The Enchantments  in Washington after getting a spot in the lottery earlier in the summer, but like many of our plans this summer we had to come up with a plan b because the trails were closed due to forest fires. We decided on Goat Rocks in Washington as our plan b, since neither of us had been there in years.  Our plan was to head up to Goat Rocks after I was done running and hike in and camp. Well, it snowed at Goat Rocks a few days before we had planned to leave. Instead of snow camping or coming up with plan c, we decided to camp in the Sprinter at the trailhead and hike the 13 mile loop in one day, snow permitting.   Making coffee before our hike The lows at the trailhead were suppose to be in the high 30s, I was concerned about how cold it would be in van, since our new heater was in but not attached to the diesel line yet....

Glacier Lake from Glacier Pass Normally John and I spend the end of August and beginning of September hiking in  Europe , but because I spent part of June in  Italy  and we are planning to spend Christmas in Europe, we stayed home and decided to explore our own " Oregon Alps ". The Wallowa Mountains are in northeastern Oregon, about a 6 hour drive from Portland and even though I have lived in Oregon for 17 years, I had never been. We decided to combine 2 of the hikes from William Sullivan's 100 Hikes in Eastern Oregon book,  Ice Lake  and  Horseshoe and Glacier Lake ; a very similar route is also described in Douglas Lorain's   One Night Wilderness: Portland .  After researching the route a little more, it is the classic route to do in the Eagle Cap Wilderness section of the Wallowas and can get crowded, and considering we were going on Labor Day weekend it would probably be even more crowded. Knowing that information we decided to lea...

Our new Sprinter - She needs a name I ordered Sprinter 144 4x4 cargo van a year ago and just received it last week. I wanted a camper van to give Susan and me more freedom with our adventure runs and likewise my husband and I have a lot more freedom for all our hiking or weekend adventures. We are not planning quitting our jobs and living in the van, but we want to build it out as if we were. I plan on documenting the build out process on our blog, but I promise this is still a trail running blog. When I first ordered the van I thought I would have Outside Van  do the conversion, but the quote they gave me was way over my budget, so we started googling "Sprinter Van Conversions". After reading a lot of blogs and watching numerous youtube videos my husband John and I figured we could do most of the work ourselves. He built a brewery at our house, how much harder can converting a Sprinter be (heh)? I also thought I would have the van 6 months ago and have a lot of the bui...