Snoqualmie hiking book published by Mountaineers
March 19, 2008
By Ryan Piersol
Fall City resident Alan Bauer sets up a photo of himself during one of his hikes. The professional photographer contributed photos to a recently released day hiking book about the Snoqualmie region. Contributed by Alan Bauer
Since he was a teenager, Alan Bauer has loved the outdoors enough to spend days hiking up the side of a mountain.
That doesn’t, however, mean he wouldn’t like to get it done in just one day.
The Fall City photographer has found a few places where he can do that in the Snoqualmie Valley region - about 125 of them. They’re all in a new book published by Mountaineers Books called, “Day Hiking: Snoqualmie Region.”
Bauer, a former software developer, took all the photos for the book. The author is Dan Nelson, an outdoor recreation feature writer and columnist for the Seattle Times who lives in Puyallup.
“This book will allow people to have the most recent information about hikes in that area, which is really valuable with so many roads having been washed out,” Bauer said. “Some of the older books are so out of date that it can become complicated. And there are a lot of new areas of territory in the book that were never really put with hiking books before.”
This is the fourth in a series of day-hiking books Bauer has contributed to and his fifth overall contribution for Mountaineer Books.
The Oregon State University graduate first got involved in photography when he was in high school. His computer science degree took his career away from photography, as he was employed at Microsoft as a software tester and developer. But he continued to take photos for publications on the side and eventually sold enough that he was able to do it full time in 2000.
For Bauer, the day-hiking book series was simply a natural progression.
“I’ve always been so fond of the outdoors in general that it became a way for me to share the beautiful and artistic things that I would see in nature,” he said. “I’ve always looked for what was right in the world around me. I’ve always looked for the positive in things.”
Bauer has taken the photos for day-hiking books in Mount Rainier, the South Cascades and the Olympic Peninsula. He also did the photos for a book on the best desert hikes in Washington and the best hikes with dogs in the inland Northwest. Bauer hikes with his border collie, Mittens.
“About the only part of the state of Washington I haven’t done much hiking in is out at Olympic National Park. That will be fun to do at some point,” Bauer said. “Most of the state of Washington I’ve seen, as well as the Idaho panhandle and in Oregon a little bit. I’ve seen a lot of fun places.”
The new book focusing on the Snoqualmie region includes hikes up and down the I-90 corridor, along the Issaquah Alps, in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness and Norse Peaks Wilderness, among others.
There are 125 hikes in all, ranging from one to 14 miles. All are meant to be done in one day, but the book includes information for those who want to extend the hike even further.
“What I really liked about the area is its diversity. It really stands out in that way,” Bauer said. “It has the wet sides of the Cascades, but then parts where it doesn’t rain so much, which makes it really neat.
And there are just a large quantity of lakes that are involved. There are a lot of people who are peak-baggers, but there are also a lot of people who are lake-baggers.
“A lot of people don’t want to spend a lot of time going places. And the vast amount of the hikes in this book are within two hours of Seattle.”
Included in the book are maps, driving directions to trail heads, options for nearby camping and ratings of the trail difficulty.
To purchase the book, go to www.mountaineersbooks.org.
Ryan Piersol can be reached at rpiersol@snovalleystar.com or 392-6434.Comments
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