We left whistler around lunchtime and cruised down towards Vancouver, making a few stops for food breaks and petrol and so on. Arriving at Andreas’s we decided we would have dinner with him and his wife Chris and then head on to cross the US border when there was little traffic.

Andreas had picked up a block of hard foam for my new surfboard so we went to his garage and measured it out and cut it so that it would slide over the fins and create a protecting guard in case the fins were hit while travelling.

We ate dinner at a bar called The Hurricane Grill, well priced and delicious. And after chilling out with them until about 10pm it was finally time for us to leave Canada! We were tired but excited about getting on with our journey.

I plugged in the Garmin Nuvi 350 navigation system and followed its directions through Vancouver towards the US border. At the border we were inspected briefly by one officer who came on board and poked around a bit but nothing major. We had to go into the office area and get our passports stamped etc. The two officers looked like they were on drugs, and spoke like they were asleep. But we made it through safe and sound and were officially out of Canada!

We parked at a highway rest stop that night and realized just how noisy they are! Trucks that keep their rumbling engines going and others that pull up and release a massive HISS when they stop. But we plugged our earplugs in and managed to get a decent night sleep.

The following day we were headed for the Big 4 Ice Caves, East of Seattle in the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest. We had spotted these on the map and read a little online, they looked pretty interesting.

Our drive took us south on the I-5 towards Seattle and then we turned east through Arlington and Granite Falls. It was a lovely scenic drive, the changing colours of autumn displayed all around us through the forest. As we got nearer to where we figured the Ice caves would be, we noticed all the campgrounds were closed due to the lateness of the season. We arrived at Big 4 Ice Caves trailhead to discover that this road was also closed! But we parked the RV in front of the closed gate and went to see if we could still hike up to the caves.

We soon found an information board that informed us of the 1.6 km walk up to the caves, there was also a sign stating that the bridge had collapsed?

So we headed on! We passed a couple of government workers in bright orange vests, doing something random and they told us that to get to the ice caves we would have to cross the river as the bridge had collapsed. Ah, the sign made sense!

We decided we had come this far, to hell with it, we may as well continue. So we got to the river and scoped out the best place to cross. There were a couple of deep sections, easily above our waist, but we managed to find a spot where the water barely came above our knees. Holy crap was it ever cold! We pulled up our jeans, took off our shoes and socks and ventured out into the freezing waters, by the time we reached the other side out feet were completely numb.

Then we had to bushwhack our way back to where the bridge had collapsed and join the original trail up to the caves. It was a beautiful walk, lush green forest and the yellow hues of the changing season dancing all around us. We started to notice broken trees and then lots of cut up trees and at first thought that they had been cut down for some reason? We later realized from looking at the landscape closer, that a massive avalanche must have barreled down from the steep mountainside where the Ice Caves are, and wiped out a large amount of the vegetation. The trees that we saw cut up would have been simply to clear the path from the fallen trees blocking it. It must have been an incredible amount of force to snap large trees like twigs and uproot even larger ones. Walking through this scene was a little surreal as the immensity of the natural force was hard to fathom.

And then we made it to the Ice caves!