Wild Orchid Hunting

We have been seeing reports of wild orchids in the Glen Haven area so we decided to go hunt for them ourselves. Glen Haven only has a handful of hikes, so we picked the main one - hiking to the summit of Crosier Mountain. For an area with so little trails, this summit odly has 3 different trailheads. We chose to hike this from the second most difficult trail, the one from the Gravel Pit trailhead.

The hike to Crosier was challenging, but there were lots of wildflowers which made it very exciting. We've only ever hiked this in late June (when all the wildflowers would have been mostly dead) and in December (when all the wildflowers would have been long dead). So it was nice to have seen this area filled with nearly perfectly peak wildflowers.

We found 2 areas that had Orchids. The first was a singular orchid about a half mile into the hike right off the side of the trail. It was very exciting to find the thing we went out there for so early in the hike. Around 2.5 miles in, after the junction with one of the other trails, we found a handful more patches, all within about 200ft from one another also right next to the trail. We successfully went hunting for wild orchids and found them!

The weather over the weekend wasn't great. It was forecasted to be rainy all weekend, but Saturday morning had a bit of relief. We had no rain and it wasn't muddy on the hike which was great. At the summit, I decided to eat lunch first and take photos later, but that was a mistake because the fog rolled in and we couldn't see much by the time I started taking photos. But even before the fog, the views were not that clear from all the moisture in the air. Even though the summit views weren't the best, we weren't disappointed. After all, the summit wasn't the reason for doing this hike.

I had some new gear for this hike, a new Osprey Pack. It's a little bigger than my older pack but in the winter my pack was often stuffed to the brim. Using this in the summer will be a little overkill (size-wise), but it'll be worth it to have some more space in the winter. REI was having a Memorial day sale so I was able to snag it for $160. I'm mostly including this information in the post because I frequently want to know when I bought certain gear. I think I got my last pack in 2018 (ish) so I expect this new pack to last a good 5+. My old pack had a few broken plastic buckles on it and there were some elastic spots no longer acting elastic. So it was time for a new pack.