Little Si and Bumbershoot

A few weeks ago, David and I experienced two Seattle classics: the hike to the summit of Little Si and the Bumbershoot music festival at Seattle Center.

Little Si (pronounced "sigh")* is a 1,576-foot peak in the Cascades. It's a very popular hiking destination, because it's less than an hour's drive east from Seattle and because the five-mile round-trip, 1,200-foot climb to the summit isn't too difficult for most hikers. It's so popular in summertime that the trail has been compared by some to a freeway.

Despite that reputation for crowds, we decided to hike Little Si anyway, because it was David's birthday and we had both taken the day off work but hadn't made any other plans. Just as we started rolling in the car, it started to rain. Then we missed the turnoff to go east and had to drive around the neighborhood of Beacon Hill looking for a way to get back on the freeway, the rain getting heavier by the minute. We came this close to giving up, but then it occurred to us that maybe the weather would be different if we went inland.

Sure enough, after we got east of Lake Washington the rain stopped. And all the other Seattleites who had taken the day off to go hiking before summertime slipped away must have given up just as we almost did, so there were only four other cars parked at the trailhead.

As it turned out, the weather was ideal — cool, and only passing showers whose raindrops hardly penetrated the canopy. Such lush green vegetation. How dry California seems by comparison!

Here we are at the summit, with the Snoqualmie River valley in the background.

And from the other direction, the birthday boy, with the adjacent cloud-veiled peaks behind him.

This is not a very flattering picture of me, but it was David's study in green and brown, and I love the way my shirt, skin, and hair dissolve into the mossy background. I could almost be invisible.

As a bonus, on the way home from Little Si we stopped at Snoqualmie Falls, where the world's first completely underground hydroelectric plant was built. The falls are 100 feet higher than Niagara Falls, I found out. (But of course, the area covered by Niagara Falls is much broader.)

Then, the following Saturday, which was Labor Day weekend, we attended the Bumbershoot music and arts festival. If Folklife is the official summer festival opener in Seattle, then Bumbershoot is the official closer. We found Folklife more to our taste, we decided; Bumbershoot is much more oriented to a, ahem, a younger crowd. We did see a few acts we liked: Estelle, an R&B singer from England; Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby (a husband-and-wife duo; he's English, she's American); and Beck, who was the headliner.

We were also glad to see Kazutaka Nomura, aka PWRFL Power, again. He's a wispy Japanese singer-songwriter-guitarist whom we first encountered last fall at Reverb Fest, a showcase of local music held in the Ballard neighborhood. At the time, he was a student in Seattle, but since then he has moved to New York. The Seattle crowd was still glad to show him some love, though. He has these quirky little lyrics sung in a very offhand, low-key way, and they almost lull you into not noticing the fantastic guitar work he's doing. Click this link to go to his MySpace page; the clips you can hear on the page don't really do him justice, but I recommend "CHOPSTIX SONG" to give you a flavor of what his music is like.

*In case you're wondering, there is a big Si, called Mount Si, next door to Little Si. It's 4,167 feet high and much more challenging to hike than Little Si. Maybe next time.