outdoor recreation

View of Deception Pass bridge in the far distance, looking across the water from near Deception Pass Marina

3-day Car-free Vacations Around Washington state

I’m away this week so I’m scheduling a few quick posts sharing some of the car-free content I’ve found around the web in my research for The Transit Trekker Manual.

Here’s an old post from The Sightline Institute asking for car-free vacation ideas, with a bunch of comments offering up suggestions and experiences. Not surprisingly, the San Juan Islands and Port Townsend make a lot of appearances.

All of my vacations are car-free because I don’t have a driver’s license (fun, random fact: for some reason the WADOL styles this “driver license.”). But it’s interesting to see the interest even 15 years ago for car-free recreation options….

The photo above is from my March 2021 transit trek to Deception Pass on Whidbey Island.

Bike leaning in front of a picnic table in front of a rustic Adirondack camping structure.

DC Region Transit Trekking

I’m away this week so I’m scheduling a few posts to share some of the car-free recreation info I’ve found around the web.

This 2016 Greater Greater Washington post from Payton Chung has a bunch of ideas for the DC area. The comments contain more suggestions. UPDATE: Chung revised this post a couple years back with new info.

The post features the C&O Canal, which I rode on what I think of as my first official transit trek, from NYC to DC and the C&O and then on to Pittsburg via the Great Allegheny Passage, about a decade ago. We even stayed in a lockhouse like the one featured in the post. More on that in a later post. As many 300+ -mile bike tour can be, it was quite the adventure. 

The photo above is NOT from the C&O trip, as I don’t have those at hand. It’s from one of my many trips to Tolt-MacDonald Park, which is adjacent the Snoqualmie Valley Trail, which connects to the hundreds-miles long Palouse to Cascades Trail — a rough Washington state analog to C&O and Great Allegheny Passage trails. 

Two New (kinda) Bus Options for Winter Recreation at Snoqualmie Pass

One reason I know demand for transit-based recreation is underestimated is that an older friend of mine took up skiing a few years ago, and he always chose to use the shuttle to Snoqualmie Pass that was available at that time over his personal vehicle. I’m not entirely certain, but I think that the shuttle went away during the pandemic.

But it looks like it is back via the To The Mountain Shuttle. I’m guessing the prices are higher than what you’d expect from public transit. Oh, and also per Twitter as seen in the embed above, Flix Bus is resuming service to the pass in January.

I never learned to ski, and it’s not high on my list of things to learn to do, but I know tons of folks who do ski would prefer, like my friend, to use a bus instead of their car to enjoy the snow. If there’s demand for winter shuttles, there must be a ton of unmet demand for transit to the extremely popular summer hikes along the Snoqualmie Pass/I-90 corridor. Which raises the question —why don’t we have year-round transit service to Snoqualmie Pass?